BUSINESS WRITING AND COMMUNICATION

THE McGRAW-HILL 36-Hour Course

By Kenneth W. Davis

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Kenneth W. Davis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-173826-2

Contents

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Manage Your WritingChapter 1. Find the "We": Manage Your Relationship with Your ReaderChapter 2. Make Holes, Not Drills: Manage with PurposeChapter 3. Get Your Stuff Together: Manage Your InformationChapter 4. Get Your Ducks in a Row: Manage Your StructureChapter 5. Do It Wrong the First Time: Manage Your DraftingChapter 6. Take a Break and Change Hats: Manage Your Internal Writer and
EditorChapter 7. Signal Your Turns: Manage Your ParagraphsChapter 8. Say What You Mean: Manage Your Subjects and VerbsChapter 9. Pay by the Word: Manage Your Sentence EconomyChapter 10. Translate into English: Manage Your Word ChoicesChapter 11. Finish the Job: Manage Your Spelling, Punctuation, and
MechanicsChapter 12. Manage Your Writing: Evaluate Your Writing ProcessAppendix A: Manage Your Online WritingAppendix B: Manage Your Global Writing: The Case of the Belgian FriesAppendix C: Manage Your SpeakingAppendix D: Resources for Managing Your WritingIndex

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

FIND THE "WE"Manage Your Relationship with Your Reader

Speaker Joe Griffith once told a story about the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover: "Ayoung FBI man was put in charge of the FBI's supply department. In an effort tocut cost, he reduced the size of memo paper.

"One of the new memo sheets ended up on J. Edgar Hoover's desk. He disliked itimmediately and wrote on the narrow margin, 'Watch the borders.'

"His message was misinterpreted. For the next six weeks, it was extremelydifficult to enter the United States by road from either Mexico or Canada."

Such misunderstandings happen all the time in organizations large and small.Most result from poor planning. You'll recall that in the Introduction I dividedthe writing process into five stages: managing, planning, drafting, breaking,and revising—and then back to managing again. This chapter begins theplanning stage, a stage that should take perhaps 20 minutes of a typical writinghour.

You may be a one-stage writer, used to starting your writing process byimmediately drafting and revising the first sentence of your document. If so,you may be afraid or suspicious of postponing drafting for as long as 20minutes. You may be saying, "I can't afford to spend a third of my writing timewithout actually writing the thing." As communication consultant LeeClark Johns has commented, "People often say, 'I don't have time to plan.' Butif you want to become a reader-friendly writer, you don't have time notto plan."

I agree absolutely. Remember the old business saying: "To fail to plan is toplan to fail."

As shown in Figure 1-1, you begin the planning stage with the five-minute step I call "Find the 'We.'" This step is about defining the mainrelationship in writing: the relationship between writer(s) and reader(s). Thisrelationship needs to be defined before any other meaningful decisions can bemade. Jay Sidhu, CEO of Sovereign Bank, said it this way: "Communication is inthe mind of the recipient: you're just making noise if the other person doesn'thear you."

Several decades ago, when the United States and the USSR were planning theirfirst joint space mission, planners thought hard about how the language barrierwould be crossed, especially in the kinds of perilous situations that couldoccur in early space flight. Naturally, the American astronauts were taughtRussian, and the Soviet cosmonauts were taught English. But which languageshould be used when and by whom?

The answer may surprise you. After extensive study, NASA announced that the U.S.crew would always speak Russian, and the Soviet crew would always speak English.Why? Because the speaker, who knew what he wanted to say, could most easily dothe work of mental translation. With lives at stake, the listener should nothave to both mentally translate and absorb new information.

This principle applies to everything we write, even to speakers of our ownlanguage. We know what we want to say, so we bear the burden of making ourmessage as easy as possible for our reader to understand.

On his Entrepreneur's Journey blog, Jon Symons wrote, "By far the most importantskill of a writer is the ability to get inside the head of her reader. It is tobe able to march in lockstep with the experience of your readers as they maketheir way through your copy. You are writing for them after all. You can writesolely to express yourself, but if you want to make money in your business youwill need to write for an audience."

A helpful term that has entered the business vocabulary in the last decade ortwo is internal customer. This term is helpful because it reminds usthat we have to treat every reader as a customer. In fact, Tom Petershas argued that everyone in business, even an employee of a large company,should think of herself as a professional service firm, with clients orcustomers. And while the customer may not always be right, it's important totreat customers as if they are. We need to make it as easy and as stress-free aspossible for the customer to do business with us. My friend Oliver E. NelsonJr., account executive at Energy Systems Group, taught me what I've begun tothink of as "Nelson's golden rule": "Write unto others as you would have themwrite unto you."

To follow this rule, we first need to understand our customer—ourreader. As Lee Woods said on his blog Web Content That Sells, "The realtor'scatchphrase has always been 'location, location, location.' For us, as writerswriting to persuade a world of people to sign up, the catchphrase is 'audience,audience, audience.'"

COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNITY

Most of us in business have heard the advice to make our communication notI-centered but you-centered. Most business writing textbooks,including ones that I've written, tell us to focus not on the sender but on thereceiver. They tell us to write not "I will send you a check" but "You willreceive a check."

This advice is good. But it's not good enough. It's based on an incomplete modelof the communication process, a model that can be diagrammed as in Figure1-2.

But this model and the advice based on it ignore the fact that we in businessare never isolated writers or speakers communicating with isolated readers orlisteners. We communicate within organizations—ideally withincommunities. The relationship between sender and receiver always has tobe thought of in a larger context, as shown in Figure 1-3. As PeterDrucker said in his classic book Management, "There can be nocommunication if it is conceived as going from the 'I' to the 'Thou.'Communication works only from one member of 'us' to another."

It's no accident that the words communication and community bothcome from the same Indo-European roots: ko and mei...