often without knowing exactly why. And you move toward your goals faster.
You also find yourself actively building relationships that benefit you over the long run. If a negative relationship hampers you at work, the structured thinking I show you in Chapter 2 even provides a tool for turning that relationship around.
WHY LEARNING TO WRITE BETTER MAKES SENSE
If good writing is a skill that can be developed – and based on teaching hundreds of adults, I know it can – you may wonder why you don’t currently write as well as you’d like. You already learned to write in school, correct?
Actually, few people did. Unless you were lucky and ran across an unusual teacher, the people who taught you to write never worked on practical writing themselves. Unlike the business world, the academic system is not geared to getting things done, but rather to thinking about them. Writing for school mostly aims to demonstrate your understanding of what you learned, or contribute to the store of human knowledge. Academia traditionally rewards dense, complicated, convoluted writing full of expensive words. This is changing, but not very fast.
Business writing, on the other hand, invariably has a goal and is geared toward action. And whatever the goal, it is always best accomplished by being accessible, direct, clear, concrete, and simple. What you write should be conversational as well as engaging and persuasive.
Imitating nineteenth-century writing traditions in your work makes little sense, and striving to produce empty, cliché-ridden twenty-first-century blog posts is just a recipe for boring your readers. However, even though no one wants to read such messages, they surround us. (Why this is true remains a mystery to me.) Therefore, learning to write well gives you a major competitive advantage, and helps set you apart from the crowd.
Applying the Goal-Plus-Audience Strategy to All Business Needs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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