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| ISBN-13: | 9781742240282 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Little Black Book of Business Writing
By Mark Tredinnick, Geoff Whyte
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Mark Tredinnick and Geoff WhyteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-028-2
CHAPTER 1
WRITE AS IF YOU MEAN BUSINESS
The business of writing
In this book business writing includes all kinds of functional writing. By functional writing we mean writing that isn't written as literature. Creative writing may, among other things, inform its readers, but it is art performed with words, and it aims to work the way art (or entertainment) works. What it has to tell us is much less significant than how; in creative writing, the journey's the thing. In functional writing, the point is altogether the point. The function of the writing is to inform someone of something. It won't help to bore or confuse or annoy your reader. The language you want is practical, not artistic. It follows that anything you do with language in a functional setting that doesn't help to make the message clear is a thing you should stop doing.
While business writing appears in the title of this book, and while we use the phrase often in the text, we mean by it all categories of functional writing, every kind of writing in every line of work: in commerce, government, education, research, law, science, health, defence, the media, and so on. Business writing (and work-based writing and functional prose, and all the other synonymous phrases we employ) means the prose you make for work purposes. If you write at work, this book is for you, no matter what your work is.
Saving language from (bad) organisations and organisations from (bad) language
This little black book aims to dignify, democratise, trim and enliven the prose we use to govern ourselves and transact the greater part of our lives. We're writing this book to save language from organisations, and to save organisations (and the rest of us) from the kind of language those organisations, and the people they employ, seem to believe they have to write — language leached, it often seems, of anything much like sense or humanity. As here:
Subsequent to the NAO audit, the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit (JCPAA) undertook an inquiry into the National Health Scheme (NHS) Customer Feedback Systems series of audits. The JCPAA made a further three recommendations relating to complaints handling aimed at improving customer access on the NHS website.
The reorganisation involved a move away from variable State based practices and the expansion of geographically dispersed teams resourced along national business lines.
Value-added writing
Business is fond of pet words, phrases and acronyms, some more replete with meaning than others: KPI, ROI, QA, risk management, project management, value-adding, key drivers, initiatives, maximisation, key learning outcomes, going forward ... Such words and phrases are conventional and seductive — and you'd have to say many writers in business and the wider diaspora of management-speak are, indeed, addicted to them. This addiction — the unreflective conformity with a slim lexicon of business (academic, bureaucratic, professional, management) words and phrases — causes most of the atrocities, fatuities and false economies of functional writing. And the truth is, you can do without all of them, and it will help; some of them, admittedly, are cute, but some are gross or plain silly, and none is compulsory.
But some business turns of phrase have some wisdom to share about business practice, if you stop long enough to let their meaning register. Stakeholder value, return on investment (ROI), productivity, benchmarking, cost–benefit, risk management, project management, sustainability, total quality management, client orientation, Pareto principle, deliverables: all these, as long as you know (and let on) what you mean by them, are handy bits of language.
If they're worth using in business, these measures might be worth applying to writing in business, since writing is a central business process. Why do so few of us run productivity measures on, set key performance indicators for, wonder about the return we and our readers might receive on the investment of time and effort we make in, test the client orientation of, and insist on giving value to our stakeholders from, that key deliverable — business writing? Since we spend so much time doing it, and since so much organisational activity is transacted in words, it would make sense to treat writing as a core activity, a vital business process, and a key product. And it would make sense to audit, analyse, benchmark and workshop our writing, applying to our business communication the concepts that we say we value in other areas of organisational activity.
How efficiently do you write at work and how efficiently does your writing do what it's meant to do? How much meaning do you make, how much business do you do, how clearly, how swiftly, per syllable? How could you lift your game — how many empty, airy polysyllabic bits of jargon could you make redundant, for instance? What kind of return do you get (how often do you win the tender?), and what kind of return do you give (how much sense do you make?), from the valuable time and intellectual resources you invest writing proposals? How could you improve your returns, and the returns your readers get? What kind of value — measured as meaning per syllable, per sentence, per page; measured by the ease with which your stakeholders can fathom from your writing what you are doing and why; measured by how beautifully plain your documents are; measured by how well the writing of your prospectus keeps you out of court while also attracting investors — does your writing return to your enterprise's stakeholders? If you wrote better, would your enterprise do better business, would its stocks rise, would its customers be happier? Do you manage your writing as a project, and do you manage it with the same rigour you use on other projects? And if not, why not? What is your system for assuring the quality of your firm's writing? What does writing quality consist of, and how do you measure it and sustain it? Against what standards and exemplars do you benchmark your writing? The world's clearest? Or some murkier mark? And who is charged with assuring compliance with that standard? Do you pursue best practice at the keyboard — and how does that go again, and how do you roll it out across the organisation? Or is near enough good enough? What risks does your writing run — saying the wrong thing, saying nothing at all and taking a long time to say it, disappointing your readers' expectations that you will tell them something meaningful at a decent clip, for instance — and how are you managing those risks?
These are questions business people should ask of their writing, as they ask them of their other processes and assets. These are questions this book aims to help you answer. There are systems you could put in place. The learning organisation was only the start: you could become a writing organisation — one that places a high value on its writing, not just as outputs and deliverables, but as a way of thinking straighter and doing business with more grace and nous.
The head of human resources of a client of ours, a leading IT consultancy, contacted us recently in alarm. He'd worked out the reason why, despite the wonderful conditions they were in a position to offer, they were having trouble closing the deal with bright young IT graduates they hoped to employ: the length, density and legalistic language of the letter of offer, and the accompanying employment agreement, were frightening people off. The pomp and technicality of the way the letter was written represented the consultancy and its managers as pedantic and overbearing — troubling the prospective employees, who, in their interviews, would have encountered the same personable managers we knew. Apart from the inherent awkwardness and defensiveness of the writing, its tone was so out of keeping with that of the people the prospective recruits had met that many must have wondered if they were dealing with a kind of corporate bipolarity.
Our client had made a common mistake — privileging exactness over humanity, and in the process engendering mistrust. Most of the provisos and recitals and exceptions and references to industrial law made sense, though not all of them belonged in a letter of offer. Under the influence, presumably, of their lawyers, they had let themselves be so discriminating and cautious that they had found no room to sound like the kind of people anyone would actually want to work for. We managed to put the writing back into the humane and careful lingo the firm's people used in person, and in the process trimmed the document to half its length. Then the global financial crisis struck, and we're not in a position to say if our work did them any good. Nonetheless, the original document stands as an example of an investment in writing that did not produce happy returns; as an exercise in risk management that had failed to take account of the chief risk — that the offeree would be frightened off by the writing in which the offer was made.
Use writing to do business — not to sound like you're doing business
If we could offer just one piece of advice to writers, in universities, schools, banks, lawyers' offices, government departments, it would be this: don't use writing to sound like someone doing business (or policy or research or whatever); use writing to do business.
In other words, don't use language to sound like someone who knows what they're talking about; know what you're talking about, and use language to get it said. Let the writing disappear; let the message stand there plain; let the deal be done. The point isn't to sound like a bureaucrat, a business executive, a doctor, an accountant, an academic or a lawyer. The point is to be one and use your writing to get your work done.
Here is what a professor of accounting sounds like, who's less concerned with sounding like a professor of accounting than with making good sense (and perhaps also winning a grant) as a professor of accounting.
This project tackles one of the major financial problems of recent times — how to better measure the risk of bankruptcy.
Here's how a Nobel laureate in economics writes about the global financial crisis in one of the leading intellectual journals in the world.
No one can possibly know how long the current recession will last or how deep it will go.
Here's how a leading organisational theorist introduces a new idea in a classic management textbook.
Let's think about organizations as if they were organisms.
Here's Charles Darwin, father of modern science, scrupulous practitioner of scientific method, writing up some science, way back in the days when we like to imagine writers were terribly stuffy.
But this theory can be tested by experiment. Following the example of Mr Tegetmeier, I separated two combs, and put between them a long, thick, rectangular strip of wax: the bees instantly began to excavate minute circular pits in it.
Here's a politician addressing the incredibly complex and politically fraught issue of emissions trading schemes and the economics of other policy responses to global warming.
So if we rule out an ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) or a tax what are we left with? We could pass regulations to require power stations to clean up their act or use more renewable energy (that is what the Renewable Energy Target does now). This increases the cost of power and so electricity prices go up.
We could pass regulations to make farmers plant more trees and change the way they manage their land. That increases the cost of food and fibre.
Whichever way you look at it, going green is going to cost money and the challenge for any alternative policies to an ETS is to demonstrate that it will deliver lower cost abatement.
Here's a financial bureaucrat making sense and making us feel like she's a pretty cool and intelligent bureaucrat.
With economic prospects improving, people's thoughts naturally turn to the question 'what next for monetary policy?' Financial markets were the first to ask this question. Virtually as soon as the cash rate stopped falling, the pundits started to speculate about the timing of the first increase.
Here's a lawyer finding a way to address her client's needs.
The next step you'll need to take to advance your visa application is to have a health assessment. Your doctor should know what's required, but, just in case, take along the attached form with you. If you take the examination in the next two weeks, it will help us keep your application on track.
Here's an IT consultant making reasonable sense reasonably fast in a report to a prospect.
This document outlines the IT design we developed for Northwest Oil out of the design workshops we ran with you recently.
Even the odd accountant finds a way, now and then, to demystify a complicated bureaucratic process.
You'll need to complete this form and return it to us. As I understand the process, you'll also need to apply for an individual tax identification number (ITIN); you do this by submitting a form W-7, which I have also attached, along with instructions for filling it out.
Finally, here's a software company describing the function of some sensitive software on their entertainment products.
'Family Settings' is built into every Xbox 360. The program appears the first time you turn on your console, and you can access it via a password whenever you like after that. It allows parents to decide the kinds of games and movies family members can play or view.
Tell the story of the facts, and keep the story short. Say what you've found or announce what you're going to do, or pose the question you want to ask and get on with it. Awkwardness is not required. Nor is stiff formality.
The ultimate professionalism is to make sense fast, and to make sense pleasingly. It is to make elegant and economical sense of something your reader knows less about than you do; it is to make the complex beautifully simple; it is to talk intelligently and carry your reader with you to the end of the paragraph, to the end of the document, to a shared understanding, to agreement, to a sale, to whatever you're aiming at.
Taking a long time to make it short
Two things, at least, are true of business prose, and it pays to remember them well at the keyboard.
1. There isn't a person alive who wants to take a second longer than they must to read your email or your letter, your brochure or your report, your tender, your paper or your thesis.
2. There's not a person alive who wants to take a second longer than they must to write a work document.
Though we'd love to help you write faster, we'd rather help you write better. Writing better means helping your reader make sense fast: that's the speed that counts. In fact, most business writers need to learn the art of slowness. Slow down; work out what you're trying to say. Not something like it, but the thing itself in your own words. Now say it, putting all other ideas out of your head, dropping all the usual claptrap. Watch your reader get it fast: there's the speed you need.
The slower you write the thing in the first place, the faster and smoother it goes in the long run. The more care you take saying exactly and very clearly what you mean, without scaring your reader away or throwing them off the scent with unwarranted formality and obfuscation, the fewer bushfires you are likely to have to spend time putting out down the track — outbreaks of confusion and disaffection, not to mention litigation, caused by your initial haste.
This book shows you how to have your reader read your writing once and get it. Even love it. Concentrate on that. The better you learn these forgotten arts, the better you'll end up writing. Maybe even faster in the end.
Okay, so there's no Nobel Prize for business writing
Now, there's something we need to tell you: one of us is a poet. A poet cares for language the way business cares for profits, the way that science cares for methodological rigour, the way that law is said to care for justice. Well, the poet cares for all those things, too, but above all for the virtue and beauty and functionality of words and phrases, clauses and sentences and the music and meaning they make and the imagery they fashion along the way. For the rhythmic and linguistic art you can make with this rough vessel, speech.
And what poetry has to teach a functional writer is care with words. Poets these days tend to be poor; words are close to all they have, and so they like to spend them thriftily. Organisations would do well to treat words with the same kind of respect — as a scarce resource. Like a poet, they'd do well to waste none, to measure how much meaning they make per syllable they spend.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Little Black Book of Business Writing by Mark Tredinnick, Geoff Whyte. Copyright © 2010 Mark Tredinnick and Geoff Whyte. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Thankyous,Prologue: Good writing habits and how to get them,
1 Write as if you mean business,
2 Twelve big ideas,
3 Seven heavenly virtues,
4 The business-writing canon,
5 The help desk,
6 Beauty is truth — leadership, virtue and good prose style,
Note on sources,