Business Writing For Dummies. Natalie Canavor

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to take note and usually, you’re asking her to feel motivated to participate. A “congratulations on your promotion” note asks the lucky person to notice that you’re on her side.

      Try to think of a written communication that doesn’t ask for something. It’s pretty tough. There’s an advantage to seeing every message as a request: Doing so sets you up to frame your message with the right content for the person to whom you’re writing.

Writing to groups and strangers

      Profiling someone you know is relatively easy, but you often write to groups rather than individuals, as well as to people you haven’t met and know nothing about. The same ideas covered in the preceding section apply to groups and strangers, but they demand a little more imagination on your part.

      

Here’s a good tactic for writing messages addressed to groups: Visualize a single individual – and/or a few key individuals – who epitomize that group. The financier Warren Buffet explained that when writing to stockholders, he imagines he’s writing to his two sisters: They are intelligent, but not knowledgeable about finance. He consciously aims to be understood by them. The results are admirably clear financial messages that are well received and influential.

      Like Buffet, you may be able to think of a particular person to represent a larger group. If you’ve invented a new item of ski equipment, for example, think about a skier you know who’d be interested in your product and profile that person. Or create a composite profile of several such people, drawing on what they have in common plus variations. If you’re a business strategy consultant, think of your best clients and use what you know about them to profile your prospects.

Imagining your readers

      Even when an audience is entirely new to you, you can still make good generalizations about what these people are like and even better, their needs. Suppose you’re a dentist who’s taking over a practice and writing to introduce yourself to your predecessor’s patients. Your basic goal is to maintain that clientele. You needn’t know the people to anticipate many of their probable concerns. You can assume, for example, that your news will be unwelcome because long-standing patients probably liked the old dentist and dislike change and inconvenience, just like you probably would yourself.

      You can go further. Anticipate your readers’ questions. Just put yourself in their shoes. The dental patients may wonder:

      ❯❯ Why should I trust you, someone I don’t know?

      ❯❯ Will I feel an interruption in my care? Will there be a learning curve?

      ❯❯ Will I like you and find in you what I value in a medical practitioner – aspects such as kindness, respect for my time, attentiveness, and experience?

      

Plan your content to answer the questions your readers would ask, and you won’t go wrong. You’ll save time, too. How many memos do you send or receive daily, asking for clarification or trying to sort out some kind of confusion? Careless communication is a huge concern for business leaders. One badly written email sent to ten people can waste many hours of collective work just to retrieve the situation. An even bigger worry is the impact of mistakes generated by poor communication. Recently an auto company’s engineers failed to clearly describe a safety problem to upper management, with disastrous consequences. On an everyday basis, minor variations on this theme occur everywhere.

      

Notice that in addition to being “me”-centered, nearly all the questions asked by the dental patients are emotional in nature rather than factual. Few patients are likely to ask about a new doctor’s training and specific knowledge. They take that for granted. They’re more concerned with the kind of person he is and how they’ll be treated. This somewhat counterintuitive truth applies to many situations. Good salesmen don’t pitch themselves – they pitch their ability to make the customer’s life better. Notice also that the questions would be essentially the same for a new accountant or any other service provider.

      When writing, you may need to build a somewhat indirect response to some of the questions you anticipate from readers. Writing something like “I’m a really nice person” to the dental patients is unlikely to convince them, but you can comfortably include any or all of the following statements in your letter:

      I will carefully review all the records so I am personally knowledgeable about your history.

      My staff and I pledge to keep your waiting time to a minimum. We use all the latest techniques to make your visits comfortable and pain-free.

      I look forward to meeting you in person and getting to know you.

      I’m part of your community and participate in its good causes such as …

      

Apply this audience analysis strategy to job applications, business proposals, online media, and other important materials. Ask yourself, whom do I want to reach? Is the person a human resources executive? A CEO? A prospective customer for my product or service? Then jot down a profile covering what that person is probably like and what her concerns and questions may be.

      Everyone has a problem to solve. What’s your reader’s problem? The HR executive must fill open jobs in ways that satisfy other people. The CEO can pretty well be counted on to have one eye on the bottom line and the other on the big picture – that’s her role. If you’re pitching a product, you can base a prospective customer profile on the person for whom you’re producing that product.

      Making People Care

      Sending your words out into today’s message-dense world is not unlike tossing them into the sea in a bottle. Worse, your message is now among a trillion bottles, all of which are trying to reach the same moving and dodging targets. So, your competitive edge is in shaping a better bottle … or rather, message.

      Any message you send must be well crafted and well-aimed, regardless of the medium or format. The challenge is to make people care enough to read your message and act on it in some way. The following sections explore the tools you need to ensure your bottle reaches its target, that the target is moved to take the message out, and that the message makes the impact you desire.

Connecting instantly with your reader

      Only in rare cases do you have the luxury these days of building up to a grand conclusion, one step at a time. Your audience simply won’t stick around.

      

The opening paragraph of anything you write must instantly hook your readers. The best way to do this is to link directly to their central interests and concerns within the framework of your purpose.

      Suppose you’re informing the staff that the office will be closed on Tuesday to install new air conditioning. You can write:

      Subject: About next Tuesday

      Dear Staff:

      As you know, the company is always interested in your comfort and well-being. As part of our company improvement plan this past year, we’ve installed improved lighting in the hallways, and in response to your request that we …

      Stop! No one is reading this! Instead, try this:

      Subject: Office closed Tuesday

      We’re installing new air conditioning! Tuesday is the day, so we’re giving you a holiday.

      I’m

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