The Secret to Good Writing

Skilful business writing involves getting your message across simply andquickly. This often means writing in a style that is easily read and understoodby a broad audience.

Yet, writing simply is often difficult for most of us.

Why? The answer lies in our school education. We learnt that if we used bigwords and complex sentences, we were more likely to get an ‘A’ by our Englishteacher or University lecturer. The education system taught us that people whouse a broad range of vocabulary are more intelligent that the rest of us.

There is nothing wrong with writing beautifully pieces of prose that featurea stunning range of vocabulary knowledge. However, such writing is unsuitablefor a business market.

No business manager has the time to wade through material that meanders andweaves before a point is made. They are even less likely to have time to grab adictionary to work out what the writer is trying to say.

When I used to work as a market research consultant, I had the impossibletask of trying to write market research reports that seemed interesting. Myimmediate response was to write a report that would make my Universitylecturer’s proud. Sadly, my colleagues all felt the same way.

It wasn’t until we had a business writing consultant come in to train usabout how to write at the level of a Year 8 student that we realized the follyof our ways.

Using my newly found skills of writing a report using simple English, Iproudly produced my ‘easy on the brain’ report to my manager (who missed thewriting class). He told me ‘You write like you talk’. To this day, I stilldon’t know if he was criticizing my talking or writing ability, but I gatheredeither way he wasn’t happy.

However, from a communication point of view, this style of writing isperfect for getting your message across quickly.

Later on in my career, I worked at a company that prided itself on its easyto read reports. While this was true (to some degree), one of the directorsloved to throw in a difficult word in every report he wrote to make themarketing manager reach for his dictionary. He thought this was really cleverand that his clients would be in awe of his knowledge. I’m guessing his clientsthought he was a tossed (interestingly, I met an ex-client years later who toldme that when their company received one of his reports they would quickly scanit to find the unusual word and then erupt into hysterical laughter).

Articles that are written to impress your audience about how clever you are,does nothing more than distance them. No matter how learned your market is,they still prefer to read information that is easy to digest.

A great way to test whether your writing is easy to comprehend is to read itout loud. If someone spoke to you, using those words, could you instantlyunderstand what they were getting at or would you have to reallyconcentrate?

Scripts for marketing videos are no different. In fact, they need to beextremely simple in order to quickly grab the attention of people walking pastat a trade show, for example.

Writing that is heavy on technical terms and jargon can be a real turn off.The beauty of a marketing video is that it uses both pictures and words. Thesaying “A picture tells a thousand words” is a powerful concept with corporatemovies. It means you can actually get away with saying less, but easily getyour message across, because the pictures do all of the talking.

Surprisingly, clear writing can be quite a difficult writing style tomaster, but the effort is well rewarded. And look at the bright side, at leastpeople won’t burst into fits of laughter when they read your masterpiece.