Great Writing - An Old Art Form?
Paula Williams
The Opportunity
Good writing is seen as an art of the past. My nine-year-old son argues that he should not have to learn spelling when there are spell-checkers, and he should not have to learn handwriting when most tasks are done on a keyboard nowadays.
With all of the changes in business in the last five years, people worry about what to skills to spend time and money developing to best position themselves to take advantage of new and emerging opportunities. Corporations are spending extraordinary amounts of time and money on training to learn software applications that will be obsolete in six months.
Very little time and attention is devoted to good writing. It shows. Poorly targeted, gadget-filled website”storefronts” eat up the budgets of small companies and sell nothing. Mass advertisements are dropped in the garbage unopened. E-mailboxes are clogged with worthless, outdated or unclear information that takes forever to download, and makes it more difficult to find information you need.
The Solution
Learn to express yourself well in writing.
Although the Web and related technologies offer lots of opportunities to express rich graphic content, graphics are still slower and more expensive to produce, transport and receive than text. Good writing is more important than ever. People expect more information in less time. They expect it to be accurate, professional and easily understandable.
Documents have always served as a way to “freeze” thought for your own use, or to share a thought with others so that they can comment, add to, criticize, or collaborate.
You may need to brush up on the mechanics of spelling, grammar and composition, but in many cases your writing skill can be vastly improved by simple awareness of document basics, and by the appropriate use of different document types. Other than the mechanics of language, writing well is simply a matter of thinking clearly on paper (or in electrons!)
Document Basics
The most common failure point for a document is the author’s failure to define one or both of the two key elements- audience and a purpose. Who are you writing to? What do you want this person to do, know and feel as a result of your document?
Everything you write should be focused around the audience and purpose. The form it takes, the way it’s conveyed, and the content it carries should be solely determined by the audience and purpose. The measure of your document’s success NEVER how long it is, how flowery the language is, how pretty the stationery, how many electronic gadgets it employs (in the case of a web site) or how well it meets a particular set or rules or guidelines.
The sole measure of any document’s success is how well it reaches its audience and how well the audience does, knows or feels what the document intended them to.
Writing for Yourself
- Journals
- Notes
- Scattergrams
Benjamin Franklin is probably the most famous example of a person who wrote for himself. He carried around a small book, in which he kept his schedule and journal and scribbled musings. This can be as informal as you like- from exploring an idea by drawing a “scattergram” on the back of an envelope on a long plane flight, to keeping a formal journal or planner.
Journals
I find that keeping a journal helps me recognize patterns of thought or behavior in myself and my relationships. Being aware of these patterns helps me make decisions better. If I know that I get restless and flighty every year around June, I might plan a vacation or new challenge for myself around then to keep myself interested. If I know that my son gets stomachaches that coincide with spelling tests, I can help him spread out his study habits so that he’s not cramming and building anxiety levels on those days.
Notes
I always take my own notes in meetings, because I generally have a different perspective (and am interested in different information) than the formal minute-taker. I also take notes in classes. Even if I never refer to them again, taking notes or drawing diagrams helps focus my attention on the subject matter and I retain information better.
Scattergrams
I first learned this technique in elementary school, and have seen them described in several books on writing and creativity- have no idea who first coined the term or started the use of these. Scattergrams are a wonderful way of developing an idea. Brainstorm all over a piece of paper. Write down every thought that comes to your mind on a particular topic, in no particular order. Then, once you have exhausted the topic, switch from a creative to a critical mode of thinking and organize the thoughts into categories. I do this by circling related items with a particular color. Then group and order the categories. You now have a rich outline, rather than a vague concept. This is a great way to develop an idea into a letter, presentation or plan
.
Writing for Others
- Expectations, missions, goals and objectives
- Agreements
- Status Reports
- Plans and Strategies
- Letters and notes
- Web Sites, Blogs
- Forums, Discussion Groups
- E-mails
- Instant Messaging
Writing for others is often the best, and sometimes the only, way to share ideas effectively, capture added value from people of different skill sets and experiences, and get agreement on terms. These are powerful tools for when you need more than one brain to accomplish a project.
Expectations, Missions, Goals and Objectives
Writing your expectations of a person or situation is an excellent way to explore common objectives and prevent conflicts. When you enter into a business relationship with another person, writing the expectations of that relationship down in a job description, bill of sale, or contract is often done in a very cursory, legalistic way. Making that process more participatory and informal adds a lot of value. Forming a team to meet an objective is a good example of a time when the process of creating a document is almost more valuable than the document itself. We collaborate on mission, goals and objectives so that each person is involved in and understands them. Then roles and responsibilities are defined to support the goals and objectives, so that each person understands how what they are doing contributes to the whole. Although this is typically done (and extremely effective) in a business setting, Steven Covey suggests doing this as a family, creating a “family mission statement.”
Agreements
Written agreements are very similar in that they can be improved by discussion and collaboration. However, they have a lot value by their very existence. In case of dispute, you can refer to the agreement later and remind both parties of their obligations.
Status Reports
As much as most people hate writing status reports, they are a good opportunity to let people know what you’re doing, to ask for help if you need it, and to create a permanent record of your progress that you can refer to later. Never discount the importance of writing them, or of reading them. This is also an excellent opportunity to report measures- how do you stack up, in black and white, to what was expected?
Plans and Strategies
Plans and strategies come one step closer to reality when they’re written. A written plan is something you can hand to someone when you need them to participate in, by providing resources, work, or even just ideas. They tend to improve the more they are read, discussed, referred to, and passed around.
Letters and Notes
Never miss an opportunity to write a letter or note to someone. As electronic forms of media become more prevalent, it becomes even more powerful to receive a handwritten letter or notecard from someone with that says “thank you” or “congratulations” or “I was just thinking of you.” This is equally effective with everyone you come into contact with- clients, co-workers, employees, customers, friends, and family
Web Sites
A web site is essentially just a document that is delivered by electronic means. It should follow the document basics of audience and purpose. Web sites have the potential use pictures, color, movement, music, and many other elements. Every element or gadget is a liability, rather than an asset, unless it specifically and materially CONTRIBUTES to the audience and purpose. Unless it contributes, it detracts by adding to loading time and/or distracting the viewer’s attention from what you want them to do, know and feel.
Virtual Vinyards, a very successful Internet-based wine and spirits business, attributes the company’s success to the warm, clear writing style of Peter Granoff, the sommelier who writes the content for their web-pages and e-mailed newsletters. Graphics may be fun and interesting, but content conveys information, forms relationships, and gives the customer value that keeps him coming back. Granoff indicates that a disadvantage to the Web is the lack of face-to-face contact with the customer, but the an advantage is that “The site allows us to present the full story, in perfect language, about every product we have. The customer can read the history of a particular winemaker or vineyard, learn about the specific taste, and receive a complete description of the taste. It’s as if I could sit down at every table and spend as much time as our guests would like.”
Discussion Groups and Forums
Discussion groups are “collective documents.” The audience and author become one in the same, and the purpose becomes a collective one. Participants add their input on a topic, voice their opinions, forward their own agendas, and sometimes change the subject altogether. The most successful discussion groups are those that are focused on a topic that is specific enough to attract a particular audience, and broad enough to support a variety of opinions and inputs.
Edward Esber, CEO, Ashton-Tate has said “A computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It makes a good manager better faster and a bad manager worse faster.” I would add that a e-mail makes a good communicator better faster and bad communicator worse much more efficiently. It is now possible to very efficiently deliver thousands of copies of appropriate gems of wisdom and vital information, or to deliver thousands of copies of irrelevant, vague meanderings just as efficiently. In his book Business @ The Speed of Change, Bill Gates recommends that all businesses migrate as much discussion, decision, and business in general as possible to e-mail. This does a number of things- it makes it possible to trace the evolution and threads of discussion, it broadens the conversation to more participants than is practically feasible on paper or in person, and documents why certain decisions and actions took place at certain times.
Instant Messaging
There are a lot of people who are bigger fans of instant messaging than I am , and they should probably be writing these guidelines. personally, I find them useful but they can be very time-consuming, and it’s so much more satisfying to write a complete thought in an email, or to pick up the phone or have a face-to-face conversation.
All I would add is that speed should not make us sloppy in our communications. Be clear and concise.
Document Storage
This leads to another topic, that is beyond the scope of this article, but worth a mention. Keeping documents in electronic format adds storage and retrieval options never before possible on a large, practical, “business” scale. It was impossible five years ago to locate the notes from a conversation or the details of a transaction that was somewhere in a stack of magnetic tape or in an archive box in a storage unit somewhere. Now, it is possible to locate a detail in seconds.
This new art and science is called “data mining” or “knowledge management” or any of a dozen other names. The point is that any document you write today, is very likely to become that much more valuable because it becomes that much more accessible and reusable.
Conclusion
In How to Become CEO, Jeffrey J. Fox includes a chapter on the importance of “speaking and writing in plain English.”
Billions of dollars in advertising is wasted annually. Billions of human hours are spent doing wrong or unnecessary tasks. Billions of pages of reading matter are never read. Business communications must be precise, complete, and totally comprehensible.
Although people tend to associate good writing more with the Shakespearean Age than the Electronic Age, good writing that targets the audience and accomplishes its purpose is more important than ever.
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