“Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind.”
—William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well
How not to write
I recently re-read an email I sent my team and was appalled at how impersonal my writing was:
“Our strategic initiatives in Q1-21 are aligned to addressing some of the challenges we’ve seen with customer documentation, implementation efficacy, onboarding rigor, and CSM job skills. As you know, each initiative has a people lead, a process lead, and an impact lead. These individuals we be driving progress in their respective focus areas. This structure will ensure we maintain traction against these key strategic initiatives and pre-empt the tyranny of the urgent.”
I wrote this email and still fail to grasp the point. Furthermore, I’m unclear what, if anything, the recipients are supposed to do upon reading this email. Regrettable.
Now, more than ever, good writing is at a premium. Gone are the days of in-person meetings, and Zoom fatigue is rampant. Writing remains the most effective means of business communication. Leaders can differentiate themselves by writing with more clarity and humanity.
4 tips for improved business writing
Make one point: avoid the temptation to pork-barrel your message. Less is more, especially in flooded email inboxes. No one is clamoring for longer emails with myriad points.
Tell a story: embrace the limbic power of narrative. When in doubt, tell a story. Readers identify with other people, not abstract words like profitability, operationalize, and implementation engagement.
Use short words: they are just as effective as ponderous, multisyllabic words yet easier on the eyes. Short words (and paragraphs) have oxygen around them. Lincoln’s 2nd inaugural address, a paragon of clarity, 90% of the 701 total words written are two syllables or less.
Read it out loud: don’t write what you wouldn’t comfortably say in a meeting. This helps business writing maintain a warm, clear conversational tone that people want to read. A good litmus test is to read your email out loud. Does it sound like you, or has overly-professional you hijacked the keyboard?
There’s an app for that
Not willing to endure the painstaking work of editing your stuff? Rest assured, there’s an app for that: Hemingway. Simply copy & paste your text and have this writing algorithm grade your work (with the exception of word length which has yet to be incorporated).
Business writing mindset
When we email or text our friends and loved ones, our writing is warm and clear (and, most likely, emoji-laden).
But the second we start writing for business, a strange malaise comes over us. Our words grow longer. Our sentences run on. We use bloated nouns, and fewer verbs. We chose abstractions over the concrete. We embellish instead of distill.
And, most tragically, we remove the pillars of good storytelling: people in places doing stuff.
What the heck did I mean when I wrote “aligned to addressing,” or “ensure we maintain traction against”? These bloated phrases reek of self-importance. They are neither clear, nor effective.
Good writing in business is about removing the “business person” who’s doing the writing.
“You only have to remember that readers identify with people, not with abstractions like “profitability,” or with Latinate nouns like “utilization” and “implementation,” or with inert constructions in which nobody can be visualized doing something: “pre-feasibility studies are in the paperwork stage.”
Take a deep breath, exhale the anxiety associated with business writing. Write like yourself. What’s more, you’ll sound like a real person, and more people will want to follow you. Zinsser said it best: “Banality is the enemy of good writing; the challenge is to not write like everybody else.”
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