Quick & Painless Business Writing: An Essential Guide to Clear and Powerful Communication

Quick & Painless Business Writing: An Essential Guide to Clear and Powerful Communication
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Want to send an E-mail your boss will open right away? Need a knock-out proposal to seal a deal? Want to create a Web site that no customer can resist? Quick & Painless Business Writing will show you how. Yes, you can improve your writing without memorizing endless rules, perusing checklists of do’s and don’ts, or revisiting the lessons of high school. Quick & Painless Business Writing reveals secrets that will eliminate business-writing phobias and faux pas and help you create outstanding documents that get optimal results. First, you’ll learn that grammar is not a collection of stagnant rules you’d better follow (or else), but an ever-changing set of principles with plenty of choices. Then you’ll discover secrets about writing your English teachers never told you: the secret power of nouns, the destructive force of innocent-seeming verbs, and the way sentence structure can elicit certain responses. You’ll happily replace what you learned about «structure» with an altogether new understanding of how to open, develop, and close your messages. Even better, you’ll learn how to build a cohesive message quickly, with little need for rewriting. But business writing cannot live on words alone. That’s why this book explores the review process – whether your reviewer is an in-house editor, a client, a boss, or even a spouse – and help you learn strategic ways to approach and manage them. With this information, you’ll do more than write well. You’ll be able to craft strategic messages that get the right response from your reader, whether you want a colleague to send important information now or a customer to say «yes» to your proposal. Have to address a difficult situation? Confront a co-worker? Defend yourself to your boss? Give a bad employee bad news? This book will show you how to do that and more…quickly and painlessly. Хотите отправить грамотное письмо по электронной почте с плохими новостями вашему боссу? Нужно одним сообщением убедить клиента заключить с вами сделку? Хотите узнать секрет неотразимого для посетителей веб-сайта? Книга расскажет вам, как это сделать. Да, именно здесь вы можете научиться улучшать свои деловые сообщения без запоминания бесконечных правил, просмотра контрольных списков и уроков, подобных тем, что дают в школе. Автор раскрывает секреты по ликвидации страха перед написанием писем и бестактности в сообщении и помогает вам научиться создавать документы, достигающие оптимальных результатов в короткие сроки. Вы узнаете, что грамматика – не коллекция устоявшихся правил, которым необходимо следовать, а постоянно меняющийся набор принципов, где каждый подходит для конкретного случая. Вы откроете для себя секретный потенциал существительных, разрушительную силу глаголов, украшающее текст изящество прилагательных. Вы также узнаете, насколько сильно зависит впечатление, производимое текстом, от структуры предложений, содержащихся в нем. Вы поймёте, как можно быстро и легко построить грамотное сообщение, которое потом не придется переписывать по 10 раз. Однако единого правила на любой случай жизни не существует. Именно поэтому в книге рассмотрены самые разнообразные вариации сообщений: для вашего клиента, для босса, для редактора… и даже для вашей второй половинки. Обладая этой информацией, вы будете не просто хорошо писать тексты, вы сможете вырабатывать стратегию сообщений, способную получить согласие практически от любого вашего читателя. Нужно решить трудную ситуацию? Противостоять коллеге? Защитить себя перед начальством? Сообщить сотрудникам плохую новости. Книга покажет вам, как это сделать.

Оглавление

Susan F. Benjamin. Quick & Painless Business Writing: An Essential Guide to Clear and Powerful Communication

Dedication

Acknowledgments

The Quick, Painless, and Indispensable

Section I. Why Quick? Why Painless? Why Not?

Chapter 1. Five No-Worry Reality Checks

Reality Check #1: The Response

Reality Check #2: Your Reader: A Surprise Profile

Reality Check #3: Your Education

Reality Check #4: Who Needs Grammar Rules?

Reality Check #5: Let Logic Prevail

Section II. Word Use – No Pain, All Gain

Chapter 2. Ouchless Nouns

When Do We Diagram Sentences? A Flashback

Nouns: All About Them

The Question You’re Dying to Ask!

The Passive Voice

Noun Nuggets: To Do and Not To Do

Noun Uppers

Acronyms: The Naked Nouns

A Quick Q&P Acronym Q&A

More Noun Nuggets: The Secrets

Genderless-ness: Language Battles in Action

But Wait! There’s More!

Genderless Action Plan

Chapter 3. Noun Accomplices: Articles, Pronouns, and Adjectives

Articles

Another Quick Q&P Q&A…This Time About Articles

Pronouns: The Rule Breakers

I-phobia

Me-phobia

The Myself and I Syndrome

Your (a) Gold Star

The Its-It’s Conundrum

And Ever More Pronouns…

The Great Who/Whom Debate

Adjectives

Chapter 4. Verbs: The Power Words

Action Verbs

Harnessing Verb Power: A Quick and Painless Approach

The Good Guy Verbs – A Reminder

Tense About Tense?

The Noun-Verb Marriage: A Brief Interlude

Tense Agreement: A Quick and Painless Approach

The Top 10 Agreement Hang-Ups

A Brief Outburst Plus the Author’s Response

Metaphor: The Powermonger

Linking Verbs

So What About Them?

To Be – But for How Long?

Helping Verbs

Adverbs: Too Much, Too Often

Chapter 5. Glue Words

The Review

Conjunctions: The Review

The Case of Then and Than

Never Use Three Where One Will Do

Prepositions: The Review Two

Preposition Problems?

Glue Words Controversy #1: Conjunction Consumption

Glue Words Controversy #2

Last Word: Preposition Past

Chapter 6. Sentence Savvy

But First! An Answer to the Eternal Sentence Question

The Assembly: Sentence Types

And Now…The Exceptions

The Compound Sentence: Siamese Twins

The Complex Sentence

Compound-Complex Sentences

Sentence Bits and Pieces for the Maximum Effect

Phrases

Misplaced Modifiers

Don’t Forget These Strategies:

Section III. Quick, Painless, and Plain: Almost All You Need to Know About Style

Chapter 7. Plain Language Primer: So What Are the Big Guys Afraid Of?

Top Reasons You, Your Boss, Your Employees, Your Friends, and Yes, Even Your Attorneys, Should Use Plain Language at Work

So Do You Use Plain Language?

Plain Language: The Sordid Details

Your Tax Dollars and Plain Language: The Mix

Chapter 8. Why the Active Voice Isn’t, and a Few Words About Being Concise

Cousin It

And the Prize Goes to…

Passive-Active Q&A

And Now…A Few Words on Being Concise

As for Cloning…

The Style-Content Connection

Chapter 9. Reader-Focus: Bowing to the King and Queen of the Universe

There’s No Writing but Marketing Writing

Case Study

On the Couch

The “Show, Don’t Count” Phenomenon

A “Show, Don’t Tell” How-To

Hold On! What Do I Do Instead?

Wait – We Weren’t Done! Back to the Couch

When Your Point of View Counts

Chapter 10. The Truth About Tone, Damn It!

All About Jargon!

Category 1: Jargon

Category 2: Industry Terminology

On Closer Inspection: The Jargon-Industry Terminology Distinction

The Industry Terminology-Jargon Trail

Tone – The Big Three (Plus One Cousin)

The Audience Factor

Tone Reminder

Other Tones Too

In Closing…Web Thoughts

Section IV. Cohesive Structure: Keeping It Together

Chapter 11. Seducing, Spinning, and Sedating: All About Structure

Structure: The Great Unnatural Act

Listing: The Anti-ramble

Reading Reality Check

Repeat Structure Repeats

Closing Big Picture Question: A Personal Question to the Author

Chapter 12. The Paragraph: On Closer Inspection

Paragraph Myth and Reality: A Jet Back in Time

The Paragraph-Brick Connection

In the Beginning…The Pre-paragraph

First (Introductory) Paragraphs

Opening Paragraph Possibilities – In Closing

Beyond the Beginning: Imposing Order

The Inverted Pyramid

Analysis and Support

Paragraph Length: How to Tell…

Final Word on the Final Word: Why Paragraph Length Matters

The Big Four: Equal Facts, Chronological, Descriptive, Compare and Contrast

Equal Facts: The Bullets

Bullets: The Use and Misuse

Large-to-Small

Most- to Least- or Least- to Most-Noticeable

And Now For a Reality Slice: The Un-paragraph

Mix ’n’ Match Paragraphs: The Examples

Chapter 13. The End

Summaries

Conclusions

Numbers

Letter closings

And…Goodbye

About the Author

Отрывок из книги

Writing a book is never easy. Okay, actually, writing this book was easy, but who wants to start an acknowledgment page that way? So, I want to acknowledge not the people who helped me trudge through the misery of the writing process, but those who made it possible for me to write – and delight in – this book.

First, my agent. Let me tell you, every good writer (and every bad writer for that matter) needs a good agent. And Grace Freedson’s the best. She’s available, interested, and willing to drink a glass of wine with her author even when better judgment tells her not to. More than an agent, she’s a dream-maker and friend.

.....

Of course, fortifying the writer’s life are all the people who say things like: “How’s the book going?” which I take as encouragement, and “Don’t worry, I’ll take your son for the afternoon while you work.” In particular, Kathryn Stellar, Lissa and Garth Jansen, Rose McKee, and at the old home front, Margie Green and Susan Erony for their goodwill and good wishes. And finally, thanks to Kitty Clark, modern dance teacher, for showing me my body can do more than sit in front of a keyboard.

Get help. Lots of help. Professional writers, including New York Times journalists and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, have a squad of professionals giving feedback on all they write. As for me, I have an editor, agent, book coach, proofreader, and assorted content experts full of ample supplies of feedback. Usually, they comment on my genius and offer heaps of praise. I’m kidding; I’ve experienced waves of negatives. When they’re constructive, I wallow in them a while, and then do what they suggest. When they’re uselessly critical, I swim right past them. It’s either that or drown.

.....

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