Читать книгу Business Writing For Dummies - Natalie Canavor - Страница 6

Faced with a blank page and something to accomplish, many people freeze at the first question: Where do I start? The answer? Start with the three components of strategic writing. You already know them:

❯❯ Your subject: What you’re writing about

❯❯ Your audience: Whom you’re writing to

❯❯ Your goal: What you specifically want to accomplish

To create a good message and get the result you want from your reader, you need to think about all of these things more systematically than you ordinarily might.

You must “read” your audience in an organized way – I show you how. And you benefit from visualizing your goal in a broad way. Consider that for almost every message you write, you actually have a whole set of goals beyond the immediate: communicating your own professional image, for example. When you combine your knowledge of the audience with your set of goals, it becomes easy to translate what you know about the subject into content that supports your message.

For example, suppose you want to ask your supervisor for a plum assignment you see on the horizon. You can simply write:

Jane, I’d like to present myself as a candidate for the lead role on the Crystal Project. You know my work and qualifications. I’ll really appreciate the opportunity, and I’ll do a great job. Thanks, Jake

This is maybe okay insofar as it’s clear and contains no obvious errors. But it’s definitely not compelling. All Jane learns from the message is that Jake wants the opportunity and thinks he’s qualified.

Jake would fare better if he first looked at his own goals more in depth. Perhaps he wants a chance to:

Exercise more responsibility

Show off his capabilities and be noticed

Expand his know-how in regard to the project’s subject

Add a management credential to his résumé

But he also has the longer term to consider. Jake almost certainly will find it useful to:

Strengthen his position for future special assignments

Remind his boss of his good track record

Build his image as a capable, reliable, resourceful leader

Build toward a promotion or higher-level job in his current organization or elsewhere

From this vantage point, Jake can see the pitch itself as a building block for his overall career ambitions, which calls for a better message than the perfunctory one he dashed off. He must think through the actual assignment demands and how his skills match up. Then there’s Jane – his audience – to consider. What qualifications does she, the decision-maker, most value? What does she care about?

After some thought, Jake may come up with a list like this:

Job requires: Planning skills; ability to meet deadlines; knowledge of XYZ systems; experience in intra-departmental coordination; good judgment under pressure

Jane values: Collaborative teaming; people skills; department reputation; effective presentation. She is weak in systems planning and insecure with new technology.

This bit of brainstorming helps Jake produce a blueprint for persuasive content. His email can briefly cite his proven track record in terms of the job requirements, his ability to deliver results as a team leader, his awareness that success will enhance the department’s reputation, and that he’ll use his excellent presentation skills to ensure this result.

The weaknesses he pinpoints for Jane give Jake another avenue for presenting himself as the best choice. He can suggest a planning system he’ll use to make the most of staff resources and/or a specific way to incorporate new easy-to-use technology. These aspects of his message are likely to catch Jane’s attention.

All Jake’s points must be true, needless to say. I don’t suggest ever making up qualifications, but rather, that you take the trouble to communicate the best of what is real and what matters in a particular situation.

Further, never assume people understand your capabilities or remember your achievements, even if they’re colleagues who know you well. Other people don’t have time to put you in perspective. They’re thinking about themselves. That’s why doing it yourself has such power.

Even if Jake doesn’t get the assignment, writing a good email contributes to his longer-range goals of presenting himself as ready, willing, and able to take on new challenges and to be seen as more valuable.

What Jake’s message illustrates is how to use a simple structure for everything you write. My shorthand for this is simply Goal + Audience = Content. When you define what you want to accomplish with a specific message, and think about the specific person you’re writing to, content decisions help make themselves.

When you use this structured thinking to plan your messages, whether they’re email messages or proposals or anything in between, you move far toward the real heart of good writing – real and relevant substance. Writing is not a system for manipulating words, and don’t ever expect it to camouflage a lack of thought, knowledge, or understanding. Good writing is good thinking presented clearly, concisely, and transparently in ways that make sense to your readers.

I make you a rash promise: For every fraction you improve your writing, you’ll improve your thinking along with it. Plus, you will improve your ability to understand other people, which will help you build better relationships and achieve what you want more often.

Chapter 2 gives you an in-depth demonstration of this planning structure and shows you how to translate it into successful messages. While you may pick and choose which sections of the book to read and draw upon them at need, I encourage you to invest in Chapter 2. It gives you the entire foundation for deciding what to say in any circumstance. Remember that the ideas apply equally to communications that appear to be dominated by visuals or spoken language.

The other essential groundwork for successful writing is how to say what you want. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 demonstrate common-sense techniques that professionals use to spot problems and fix them with the least effort.

Try This: To quickly upgrade anything you write, use the say-it-aloud diagnosis. When you read your own copy aloud (or whisper it to yourself if you’re not alone), you get immediate signals that something isn’t working or can work better. You may be forcing your sentences into a sing-song cadence that denotes awkward construction, unnecessary words, and overly long sentences. You may hear repetitive sounds or inappropriate pauses created by poor punctuation. You can easily fix all these problems, and many more, once you identify them this way. Many professional writers use this approach. It works beautifully for business writing, because when well done, your writing sounds conversational.

Chapters 3 through 5 give you a host of down-to-earth strategies for monitoring your own work and improving it. These include computer resources like Microsoft Word’s easy-to-use Readability Index, which provides helpful clues for making your writing clear.

No matter where you now see yourself on the writing spectrum, I guarantee there’s room for improvement. Most journalists, corporate communicators, bloggers, and public relations specialists are obsessive about discovering better ways to write and build their skills. They want to create material that’s ever more interesting, persuasive, informative, and engaging.

For people inhabiting any part of the business, nonprofit, or government worlds, the rewards of better writing are often immediate. Your email and letters get the results you want much more often. Your proposals are more seriously considered and your reports are more valued. You are perceived as more authoritative, credible, and capable. People accord you more respect, often without knowing exactly why. And you move toward your goals faster.

You also find yourself actively building relationships that benefit you over the long run. If a negative relationship hampers you at work, the structured thinking I show you in Chapter 2 even provides a tool for turning that relationship around.

WHY LEARNING TO WRITE BETTER MAKES SENSE

If good writing is a skill that can be developed – and based on teaching hundreds of adults, I know it can – you may wonder why you don’t currently write as well as you’d like. You already learned to write in school, correct?

Actually, few people did. Unless you were lucky and ran across an unusual teacher, the people who taught you to write never worked on practical writing themselves. Unlike the business world, the academic system is not geared to getting things done, but rather to thinking about them. Writing for school mostly aims to demonstrate your understanding of what you learned, or contribute to the store of human knowledge. Academia traditionally rewards dense, complicated, convoluted writing full of expensive words. This is changing, but not very fast.

Business writing, on the other hand, invariably has a goal and is geared toward action. And whatever the goal, it is always best accomplished by being accessible, direct, clear, concrete, and simple. What you write should be conversational as well as engaging and persuasive.

Imitating nineteenth-century writing traditions in your work makes little sense, and striving to produce empty, cliché-ridden twenty-first-century blog posts is just a recipe for boring your readers. However, even though no one wants to read such messages, they surround us. (Why this is true remains a mystery to me.) Therefore, learning to write well gives you a major competitive advantage, and helps set you apart from the crowd.