Читать книгу Business Writing For Dummies - Natalie Canavor - Страница 7

You may have felt challenged at times to write differently for so many forms of communication, or may even have avoided using new or unfamiliar media. Here’s the best encouragement I can give you to experiment and venture forth: The strategizing process is the same for all media, present and future. Planning a brief effective email is very much the same as planning a proposal or blog post, presentation, or resume. The Goal + Audience = Content structure will never fail you, no matter how hard the writing challenge seems.

For this reason, I begin with “small” messages like email. Once you absorb the thinking process for this everyday workhorse, you’re well prepared to tackle more formal business documents and strategize your digital presence and face-to-face communication.

Succeeding with email, letters, and business documents

Email remains the dominant everyday communication medium at work for most people. In many ways, email is also the most basic, so it’s a natural starting point for improving your writing. Even if you don’t use email much, it makes a good demonstration medium. So, read the examples knowing the ideas apply to most other writing tasks.

Don’t underestimate the importance or overall impact of email! This workhorse offers a hard-to-beat chance to build your reputation and image, incrementally. You can actually decide how you want to be perceived: Confident? Creative? Inventive? Responsible? Steady? A source of ideas? A problem-solver? Make up your own list and write everything from inside this persona!

Understanding your audience pays off hugely with email. Analyzing the person who reads your message shows you how to ask for what you want, whether you’re requesting an opportunity, inviting someone to a meeting, or pitching something. Further, knowing your audience in-depth enables you to anticipate your reader’s response and build in answers to objections he’s apt to raise.

Framing the right content at the intersection of goal and audience works equally well for a wide range of business materials (as you find in Chapter 7). You may be surprised to see how the same principles also give you the foundation for long-form materials that often feel like make-or-break opportunities: proposals, reports, and executive summaries. They also equip you to create effective marketing messages and write media releases.

Writing for the spoken word

From a 20-second “elevator speech” to introduce yourself to hosting a webinar, the best system is: plan, write, rehearse, then deliver. Chapter 8 shows you how to strategize, write, and prepare for an oral presentation whether formal or less so. Learn how to guide yourself with talking points, an essential technique that enables politicians and CEOs to speak effectively and respond to challenges on their feet. It can work wonders for your own preparation and confidence.

You’ll find that writing for speech purposes relies on the same structure as writing email, letters, and other business documents – Goal + Audience = Content – but the medium suggests tighter technical guidelines than print. You need to aim for simple, clear language based on short, everyday words in natural speaking patterns. Simplicity takes thought!

The basic planning process applies to scripting your own videos and visual-style social media as well. In most cases, ideas must first be shaped in words, even if the core idea is expressed in a single sentence. And even if words end up playing a minor role on screen.

For business purposes, never leave your meaning to people’s imagination. Ambiguity invites the audience to make up what they don’t understand. Use language to plan, provide context, and connect your visuals, as covered in Chapter 8, along with more traditional scripting techniques.

Writing online: From websites to blogs to tweets

People often assume that when it comes to online content, they can toss all the old writing rules out the virtual window. Big mistake! Digital media with its lightning delivery speed and infinite reach does upend many traditional ideas about communication – top-down thinking, most notably, whereby authoritative figures issue “the word.” Today anyone can market a business, entertain the world, and become a journalist or author. But this democratization makes the need to write well more imperative than ever.

There are simply too many websites, blogs, tweets, and all the rest to compete against if you don’t provide first-rate material people want. The wide-open pioneering days of social media are in some ways over, even though new platforms keep emerging. Any digital guru will tell you that only the very best “content” gains an audience anymore. Translated to concrete terms, that means content that is well-planned, well-worded, and well-edited. Write blogs and posts marred by poor thinking, grammar, or spelling, and you lose credibility and readers. Fail to plan your website from the audience’s perspective, and the site won’t contribute to your goals. Use Twitter or LinkedIn or Pinterest or Instagram without a business strategy, and you might damage your cause (and reputation) rather than advance it. Chapters 11 and 12 give you the writing know-how you need to communicate in today’s digital world and integrate your chosen media into a unified program.

The online world is the great leveler. Never before has there been so much opportunity for individuals, or small enterprises, to make an impact. Equip yourself to use it effectively and the possibilities are boundless. Practice crystallizing your ideas and information into concise, zingy copy. And of course, digital media introduce new demands for interactivity – you want people to respond and share, which demands inventive thinking.

As you read this, I’m sure new technologies are emerging to dazzle and intrigue us. But the newest technology is basically one more delivery system for your messages. You will need clear thinking and good writing to succeed. The techniques presented in this book will not go out of date! But adapt them with imagination.

Special purpose writing

You may or may not remember, depending on your age, the days when a career job meant a nearly lifetime commitment for both employer and employee. That’s far from the norm now. In fact, the U.S. government estimates that someone entering the workplace now will hold ten different jobs by the age of 40. People in general stay in jobs an average of 4.4 years. So, for most of us, applying for jobs is an ongoing fact of life. This is especially true if you’re part of the Millennial generation, under the age of 35, and share with your cohorts a quick-exit tendency when a job doesn’t satisfy you.

Therefore, you need be an outstanding job applicant. I devote a full chapter (Chapter 10) to writing not just résumés and cover letters, but also successful networking messages. You’ll also find a special section on how to define and explain your own value and equip yourself for interviews.

If you ultimately hope to take a management role, I’ve got you covered in Chapter 14. Learn to establish trust, communicate with staff, share your vision, and write inspiring messages. Great leaders often have a particular skill – storytelling. Using stories as well as anecdotes, examples, and testimonials are within your reach, too. Chapter 9 shows you how to find your own story and shape it to your business needs.

Taking the global perspective

This book is based on American business writing style and practice. North Americans are singularly lucky in that their English has become the international language of business, reflecting the United States’ economic dominance of the past century. But if you run a cross-national business or work for one, it’s a mistake to assume that your audiences in other cultures will read your writing in the way you wish.

Someone who learned English as a second, third, or fourth language may not find your email, letters, and websites easy to understand. Spoken language skills are much easier to acquire than written ones. Further, cultural differences may be much bigger than you think.

It’s often remarkably hard to realize that everyone is not on the same wavelength. Every country and culture has distinct values and perspectives. For writing, this means taking into account factors that include preferred degree of formality, attitude toward business relationships, priorities such as courtesy versus efficiency, specific ways of opening a conversation, and an expectation of directness versus indirectness. In some countries, saying yes may mean no!

Even if cross-border communication doesn’t concern you, most workplaces are increasingly diverse. People don’t leave their cultural perspective at home when they come to the office. Your coworkers, partners, and customers may have grown up anywhere in the world.

As with all writing, the challenge should be met on the technical level: How can you write in ways that works for other people, in this case those with limited English-speaking skills? The second aspect is psychological: How can you communicate well with someone whose goals, values, background, and experience are unlike your own, though invisible?

This question relates to the most basic premise of this book. So often we overlook how different people are from each other. You feel that you are unique – and you are. So is everyone else. We each see the world through our own filters, unconsciously constructed of innate characteristics, personal experience, cultural values, and everything we grow up with and that happens to us.

Taking the trouble to see through other people’s filters is what enables you to communicate powerfully and at the same time, understand yourself better. We take for granted how we see things until we notice contrasts, whether cultural, personal, or situational. Your supervisor, for example, has different goals and priorities than yours, as well as different values and problems. Taking this into account helps you communicate authentically and productively.

Really good business writing is not about formulas, smart responses, and clever manipulation of other people. It is best based on understanding individual people and seeing the world within each one’s framework. What does he or she care about? Hope for? Worry about? Writing this way is especially challenging when you communicate with people you’ve never met and with large unseen audiences, such as through a website or blog.

The syntax of writing – the arrangement of words, phrases, and sentences – is a tool for delivering your messages. Like all tools, it must be used well. But the message is what matters. Understanding your own goals and practicing empathy enables you to build meeting points for true communication and relationships.

Improving your writing will open up your perceptions and sharpen your thinking. There’s an aphorism that says, “How do I know what I think until I write it?” In my view, writing is the best imaginable way to grow your understanding of other people, foster your business relationships, and work toward becoming your best and most successful self.

What could be more rewarding or interesting?

You now know why improving your writing will benefit you and have already begun building the foundation to do it. The next chapter shows you exactly how to strategize every message to accomplish your goals.