Business Writing

PREFACE

THE RATIONALE: DANGERS OF POOR WRITING AND OPPORTUNITIES OF GOOD

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. Samuel Johnson

Communications is an inherent part of business. Yet successful communication can be difficult. Poor communication can cause problems. This may involve a momentary hiatus as two people try to sort out exactly what is meant. Or it may cause a major misunderstanding that causes a project of some sort to be stopped in its tracks. Why is this? There are many reasons, but one is certainly an assumption that what is being done is not difficult, coupled with a subsequent unwillingness to check out the principles on which success might be based. Perhaps that is actually two reasons already, and more are investigated later.

Furthermore some kinds of communication are inherently more difficult than others. The intentions of communication may vary. It may need to inform, explain, motivate, challenge, prompt a debate or more; and such intentions are not mutually exclusive, one communication may need to do several of these things at once. Communications designed with a specific purpose, say to be persuasive, adds another layer and putting something in writing can add further complications. I once stayed in a hotel with a sign inside the bedroom door saying: In the interests of security please ensure your bedroom door is firmly shut before entering or leaving the room. It would be a good trick if you can do it. And that is just one sentence – someone wrote it, printed it and posted it around the hotel and still no one noticed it was rubbish!

On paper

There is a further problem, and that is that most people are better at communicating face to face than in other ways. Other methods all have their disadvantages. The telephone is good, immediate, maybe quick and easy, but try describing to someone over the telephone how to, say, tie a shoelace. Think about it for a second. You know how to do it, you could easily show someone else – but using only your voice, it is somehow more of a problem.

One method that seems consistently to render people less articulate is when they have to put something in writing. Your manager wants a note about something, the Board need a report or proposal, and my editor wants a book (and there are still many thousands of words to go). Business writing almost seems to hinder good communication. People who can talk about something and usually get their message over successfully, find themselves descending into a muddle of business-speak and gobbledegook, writing something over formal, over long and – at worst – forgetting somewhere along the way exactly what their objectives were in the first place.

Of course, putting something into written form can be a chore, and its being so can extend the task as agonising over the best form of words to make permanent takes time. Hence this book: the intention here is clear. It is to assist the process of communicating successfully when it must be done in writing. This may mean a letter (or e-mail), or it may mean a report or a proposal and various kinds of letter and document in between. It might also mean copy for a brochure or a newsletter. A message may be sent internally: to a group of staff or an individual member of your team – or upwards, perhaps to your manager. It may be sent externally: to a supplier, a customer or to many customers (this latter may include direct mail letters). The circumstances can vary. But the intention is always the same: to make things clear and achieve your objectives to inform, persuade or whatever.

Whatever your circumstances, this book is designed to help you see more clearly how to go about writing clearly and powerfully. There is no one magic formula, as so often what makes a business technique work is, though it may be based on certain fundamental approaches, a matter of attention to a number of details. Certainly that is the case here.

It is, however, possible. You can write with clarity if you go about it in the right way and, if you do that, you will also begin to do it faster as well. In a busy life that is something worthwhile too. In the coming pages we will see how all this can be done, starting with a look at some of the difficulties of communication and how to avoid them.