The Language of Success

Business Writing That Informs, Persuades, and Gets Results

Author: Tom Sant
Pub Date: 2007
Your Price: $15.00
ISBN: 081447473X
Format: Paperback

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The Language of Success

Chapter 1
Introduction

Where We're Going and Why the Trip Is Worth Taking

This book is about words, about the damage that can be done when they are used ineffectively, and about the power to be gained when they are used well. The purpose of this book is to show you how to write more effectively. It's designed to help you produce the kinds of documents that are likely to be part of your professional life-documents that ask and answer questions, that provide information other people need to do their jobs, that communicate your opinions, or that persuade, instruct, or update. We'll emphasize e-mail as the primary medium for delivering most of these messages for several reasons. First, e-mail has obviously become the dominant mode of communication all over the world. Second, it's different enough from traditional ink-on-paper writing that it poses its own unique set of challenges. Along the way, I'll provide examples of both good and bad writing for you to consider, explaining what works and what doesn't so that you can adapt the ideas quickly to your own use.

So that's where we're going. Admittedly, writing is a skill that most people embrace reluctantly at best. But it's a skill that can make a huge difference in your career. From a practical standpoint, few professional accomplishments will pay off more in terms of your personal success or the success of your company or organization than learning to communicate effectively.

In my experience, most people don't like to write. There are exceptions, of course. I'm one of them. I usually enjoy writing, especially if there's room for creativity or if there's a challenge to the task. Lots of people make their living as writers, in fields like technical writing, marketing communications, journalism, public relations, sales support, proposal writing, speech writing, and so on. You have to figure most of them don't mind writing. Other professions are virtually inseparable from the need to write-higher education, for example, where you must "publish or perish," or the practice of law, where letters, contracts, and other documents are often the deliverable for which the client is paying. All the same, the people who love to write are clearly in the minority. For the vast majority of people in the workforce, writing is a necessary evil. It's something they have to do, but they don't see it as a core part of their professional responsibility. Writing isn't part of their "real" job, they'll tell you.

But, of course, they are wrong.

Over the past fifteen or twenty years, the nature of work has changed dramatically. More valuable than any other raw material or resource, knowledge has become the engine of economic growth and the primary driver of increased productivity. The fact is we have now completed the shift to a knowledge-based workforce, a shift just as significant in its own right as was the shift to an industrial workforce in the late nineteenth century. During the past ten years, for the first time in world history, over half of the gross domestic product of the major Western economies has been directly linked to ­ knowledge-based activities. As a result, businesses, institutions of higher learning, government agencies, and others in this knowledge-based economy now place greater importance than ever before on finding, sharing, and using information as efficiently as possible. Useful, valuable knowledge has become the fundamental source of differentiation for both organizations and individuals.

The concept of useful and valuable knowledge is worth examining. It means doing more than simply sharing information. Facts, details, instructions, and other forms of data may be necessary, but they tend to have less value than informed insight. Think about the money and effort that organizations put into identifying and implementing "best practices." Owners and senior managers don't want some checklist of steps to follow when performing a certain task or a template for organizing certain processes. What they want is deeper insight into business process, insight that will enable them to improve bottom line results. In a knowledge-based economy, progress is measured by such factors as increased innovation, improved productivity, or better financial performance. As a result, implementing best practices is not merely a matter of collecting facts and data, but rather of identifying and disseminating knowledge. And that requires clear, effective, flexible communication.

In a knowledge-based economy, our success and our organization's progress depend on our ability to communicate with our bosses, our subordinates, our colleagues and our customers.

Sometimes people need us to provide factual details and other forms of explicit information that are relatively uncomplicated. Here is the company's current mileage allowance on expense accounts. How to change your password. The new starting time for the budget review meeting. Some unexpected results from our recent lab tests of titanium alloys. Third quarter sales results showed a 2 percent decline in our core markets. In these situations, we are providing others with the information they need to do their jobs. This is an important task and early in our career it's likely to be the kind of writing we do most often.

As we advance, as we acquire more experience and responsibility, people are likely to turn to us to provide deeper insights into the why behind those facts. Why should I change my password? What do you think caused those unexpected results you got from the new titanium alloys? Why did our sales go down in the third quarter? What they want from us now is our opinion, presumably based on our training and experience. By providing facts in combination with our expert opinion about what those facts mean, we have taken on a more complex communication challenge. As we move up in our organization, particularly if we achieve recognition as a technical expert or if we have a management role, we will do a lot more of this kind of writing.

Sometimes we need to write messages that the audience isn't looking for at all. In these instances, we write because we need to ­ motivate employees; we need to persuade customers, convince management, or possibly assure investors. Let's prevent any further data losses by adhering to our information security standards! Three reasons we should change the design specs of our engine housing. The long-term outlook for the housing downturn and our plan to stabilize earnings. In these situations, we may provide facts and offer some opinions, but what matters ultimately is our ability to affect what our readers think, what they feel, or how they act. As you rise higher in an organization, you will find yourself doing a lot more motivating and inspiring than simple information sharing. This is a much more difficult task than simply providing information or even offering an opinion, but it's usually a much more important one, too.

In the next section are two examples of e-mails written and sent out by the heads of major corporations. Both messages are grammatically "correct." Both are pretty clear. Both were apparently intended to motivate the recipients. But by any reasonable standard, both messages failed to communicate. In fact, they failed so badly that they created major problems for the men who wrote them and the companies they led.

Igniting Firestorms

On September 11, 2001, life as we knew it stood still for a moment. The heartbeat of society paused. You probably remember exactly where you were and what you were doing as you watched the twin towers crumble to earth, as you saw a corner of the mighty Pentagon burning.

Millions of people went into shock. Frantically, we wondered: Is it possible someone I know, someone I love, might have been on one of those deadly flights? Who do I know who lives or works in New York? In Washington? Were they safe? No one knew much. Facts were scarce. People huddled together at work and in public spaces, clustering around televisions that endlessly repeated videotape loops of the horror. We drew our family closer to us that night. For days, maybe weeks afterward, we felt emotionally bruised. We tried to be kinder to each other, a little more patient. It was a difficult time, but in our shared grief and fear we sought to comfort one ­ another.

Perhaps that helps explain the reaction of the employees of one large business concern based in the United States when they received a message from the founder and CEO of their company late in the evening on 9/11. Would he have a kind word, they wondered? Perhaps a moment of shared reflection or a personal ­ connection?

When they clicked on the e-mail he had sent them, this is the message they got from their leader, a man we will call "Bob":

Imagine how comforting that message was! About as comforting as pouring rubbing alcohol on an open wound. "Okay, everybody, snap out of it and get back to work! We have a new product that needs to ship on time. Stop your sniveling and get back to what really matters-making money!"

Maybe this e-mail was just an expression of frustration from an executive who saw one more obstacle thrown in his path as he barreled toward status as one of the mega-wealthy. Whatever it was supposed to be, it failed.

A friend of mine worked at this company in September 2001. His immediate reaction to the e-mail was that it was the most insensitive, self-serving, incompetent piece of writing he had seen in thirty years of business experience. From the moment that e-mail arrived, his primary goal was to escape from the business enterprise where he had worked for several years. All he wanted was to find a job somewhere else, a place where the leadership could at least pretend to feel normal human emotions. He left a few months later.

Apparently he wasn't alone in his reaction. He told me that he didn't meet a single person among all his fellow employees who could get past the utter insensitivity of the message. In fact, it provoked a tidal wave of anger and disgust among employees. Morale plummeted. What kind of person is he? they wondered. This is a boss who doesn't care about us as people, they concluded, and he doesn't seem to care about anything that doesn't have a financial value. Not about the thousands of dead and injured, not about our personal security, not even about the fate of the nation. All he cares about is meeting the quarterly numbers to keep the stock price up.

The reaction got ugly very fast, so in an effort toward damage control, the vice president of HR issued a two-page e-mail the next day, taking a completely different tone. He announced that the company would set up a fund for the victims of 9/11 with the company matching all employee donations.

A nice gesture, but it came too late. The mask had slipped. Thanks to a thoughtless message, the CEO's credibility was shot, and employee loyalty was seriously damaged. In spite of all the gestures, my friend's own opinion of the e-mail hasn't changed to this day. He still gets angry just talking about it.

The point of this story is not that a particular business leader demonstrated appalling judgment and displayed a spiritual emptiness of Saharan proportions. Rather, the point is that a single thoughtless message, tossed out upon the e-mail grid, can wreak instant havoc that is virtually impossible to fix. What we write and how we write it matters as never before. Writing well has always mattered in business, of course. What's different now is the unparalleled power and reach of e-mail. Our mistakes are no longer confined to a small group of people who may not have had the highest of expectations for us. Now they are broadcast for the whole world to see.

Screaming in Print

The impact can be devastating. As The Wall Street Journal, the Daily Telegraph of London, and other leading publications reported in April 2001, Cerner Corporation's stock price dropped over 20 percent after a blistering e-mail written by the CEO, attacking his senior management team for laziness and incompetence, was leaked to the press. The CEO, Neal Patterson, threatened to fire managers who didn't shape up and gave them two weeks to whip their employees into shape. His e-mail, which had the subject line "MANAGEMENT DIRECTIVE: Fix it or changes will be made," was sent to all headquarters managers with "high importance."

The e-mail then goes on to list six punitive steps that the CEO is taking, effective immediately (or, effective IMMEDIATELY, as he no doubt would have put it). These enlightened steps include closing the employee center, implementing a time clock system and requiring all employees to punch in and out, freezing all promotions, cutting staff by 5 percent across the board, and so on. Just so his managers understood where they stood in this little Greek tragedy playing out on the windswept prairies of Kansas, he told them, "If you are [part of] the problem, pack your bags."

He went on to say that he knows "the parking lot is not a great measurement for 'effort'" and that results are ultimately what counts. But he doesn't care. "I am through with the debate," he told them. "My measurement will be the parking lot: It should be substantially full at 7:30 AM and 6:30 PM." He orders his management team to call some 7 AM and 6 PM and Saturday morning meetings immediately. It doesn't matter whether there's anything to meet about, apparently. "The pizza man should show up at 7:30 PM to feed the starving teams working late," he writes.

Gosh, I can't imagine why Wall Street reacted so badly to this little love letter when someone posted it anonymously on a Yahoo financial message board, can you? Aside from the aberrant use of capitals to let his managers understand he is SO SERIOUS ABOUT THIS THAT HE HAS TO SCREAM AT THEM, of course. And aside from the manic tone. Oh, and aside from the sheer illogic of demanding that people show up early and hang around late, regardless of what the financial performance of the company suggests. (The company was doing very well at that point, thank you.)

No, perhaps it was simply the core message: Something very bad has apparently happened at this company, the management team is viewed by the CEO as being lazy and/or incompetent, and the person at the top appears to be a little unstable. Stephen Davas of Goldman Sachs was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying, rather tactfully, I think, that this e-mail "raised two real questions for investors. Has anything changed at Cerner to cause such a seemingly violent reaction? And is this a chief executive that investors are comfortable with?" Whatever the cause, investors began selling the stock as fast as they could, and Cerner's share price dropped 22 percent in just three days.

After the sound of his stock tumbling into the basement got his attention, Patterson, the author of the e-mail, undid the caps lock on his computer and apologized to his entire staff. It's all a big misunderstanding, he said. No harm intended. He claimed that he was just trying to motivate his managers. "I did it with a lot of satire, never thinking it would be communicated to my associates or broadcast to the outside," he explained. "But I lit the match. That match has started a firestorm."¹

Well, Neal, I guess it just goes to show that not everybody has the gift for satire. That "tick, tock" thing at the end was pretty clever. Creepy, but clever.

Ah, the beauties of technology. The fact that both of these gaffes were broadcast over e-mail meant they were able to offend many more people much faster. Thanks to the World Wide Web, when we do something boneheaded nowadays, people in Sri Lanka and Uruguay and Wall Street can read it or watch it the next day. And dump our stock as a result.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying e-mail caused the problems with these two "motivational" messages. The CEOs who wrote them caused the problems. They created insensitive, rude, ineffective messages. It's just that e-mail made the bad consequences happen faster and more widely once their messages were sent. And e-mail can do the same for you. Oh, joy.

Living in the Midst of Revolution

As I write this, I'm sitting on a train traveling north from London toward Manchester. All around me, other travelers are passing the time in the usual ways-reading novels, skimming through newspapers, dozing, chatting, eating, and working. None of these activities are much different from what a rail traveler might have done in 1860 or even in 1990.

But there is one activity going on around me that a visitor from years past would find incomprehensible. Everywhere I look, people are working on their e-mail.

Some of them are sending and receiving e-mail over their laptop computers, using a wireless connection to the Internet available to passengers on the train. Others are using cellular connections into a telecommunications carrier to receive and send e-mails from their Blackberries or other handheld devices.

Just before I started typing this, I was among them. While hurtling through the darkness somewhere between London and Manchester, I read and answered an e-mail from my 85-year-old mother who had a question about selling her house. I dealt with another from my business partner, asking if I was available to do three days of consulting in Istanbul at the end of May. And I dealt with a dozen or more other messages from clients, prospects, friends, and other members of my family.

For most of you, the response to all this is probably "ho-hum, what's new?" At most you might have thought, "You can do e-mail on the train in England? Cool!" Otherwise, none of this sounds all that unusual.

But it's actually quite remarkable. Unless you are a teenager, you can remember when such wireless connectivity was impossible. And if you are 35 or older, you remember when there was no such thing as e-mail. Now, Internet access and the use of e-mail as a primary means of communication are virtually universal, ranging from octogenarians like my mother to young children barely able to identify the letters on a keyboard.

The explosive growth of e-mail is mind-boggling, especially considering that Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message in 1982. And what did that first message say? Was it something like, "What hath God wrought" or "Dr. Watson, come here, I need you," or perhaps "One small step for e-mail, one giant inbox for mankind"? No, as far as Tomlinson can remember, it was a message telling everybody else in his work group to use the @ sign to designate the recipient's host computer when sending a message. In other words, the first e-mail message simply announced its own existence. (Rumor has it that Tomlinson received three spam messages approximately fifteen minutes later, including a very attractive financial proposition from the widow of former Foreign Minister Chester Mongaweba of Nigeria.)

E-Mail is the true "killer app" that has made the Internet indispensable. In fact, e-mail has grown so rapidly it now exceeds all other forms of written communication for business and personal use by several orders of magnitude. In 2006, according to some estimates, people sent over 65 billion e-mails to each other. If you factor in the all the spam messages being generated by netbots and regular flesh-and-blood creeps, the volume is exponentially higher: 2 million e-mails a second, 171 billion every day!² Even a former En­ glish major like me can do the math: Using only the number of "real" e-mails created in 2006, we created an average of ten e-mail messages for every man, woman and child on earth. Even when we write other kinds of documents-a project summary, a performance appraisal, a pricing spreadsheet, a proposal-we often deliver them as attachments to an e-mail. E-Mail is easy, it's usually convenient, and it's cheap.

E-Mail is so pervasive and necessary that most people maintain multiple accounts, about three accounts each on average. Nearly everyone has separate business and personal accounts. And it's not just the traditional office worker who depends on e-mail. People in the trades rely on instant messaging and e-mail to communicate with the home office, customers, and suppliers. It's much simpler for both you and the exterminator to exchange e-mails confirming an appointment for next Wednesday morning than to play phone tag. In fact, across the spectrum of work activities, phone calls are no longer as efficient or convenient as sending or receiving an e-mail or a text message.

Other modes of business writing are still important, of course. We need to write proposals to convince other people to adopt our recommendations. We deliver project summaries to keep our clients informed of progress and to alert them to problems. We write letters and other documents to announce new products, special pricing, personnel changes, and other significant events. Our colleagues, suppliers, and customers still ask for our opinions on matters that matter to them and sometimes want us to express those opinions rather formally in a report.

The problem is that e-mail evolved in the Wild Wild West atmosphere of the Internet, where breaking established norms was considered a desirable way to add to your cool factor. As a result, millions of business writers lack reliable guidelines for writing ­ effectively. In fact, in the relentless pursuit of greater efficiency through e-mail, the traditional virtues of business writing- clarity, conciseness, accuracy, and professionalism-have become casualties to progress.

It doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to trade a measure of effectiveness for greater efficiency. We should be able to achieve both. For example, there's no reason people can't get in the habit of writing one way in a business setting and a different way when they are text messaging somebody in their baseball rotisserie league. And there's no reason that otherwise bright, competent people can't learn to follow a few simple principles in letters and e-mail that can help them write more successfully all the time.

Eight Tips for Creating Successful E-Mail

In fact, before we go any further on our journey, I'd like to share some tips that will make your e-mail more effective without making you any less efficient in sending it. These tips may require forming some new habits or resetting some options in your e-mail server, but all of them are simple. Several of these tips are just matters of simple courtesy. Or common sense.

As my friend, Terry Hill, the head of proposal operations at Barclays Bank in London, said (in an e-mail, of course), "The extensive use of e-mails and text messaging has resulted in a generally lazy and poor standard of writing across the world as a whole." Sure seems that way. For some reason, a lot of people just don't try to write clearly, concisely, or correctly when they use e-mail. So here are eight simple tips that can eliminate a boatload of problems.

1. Choose a businesslike e-mail name. Calling yourself ­Redneck Geezer@gmail.com might be fine if you're exchanging messages only with your buddies. It's a poor choice if you're trying to conduct business. If you work for a business or organization, it probably has a protocol for e-mail accounts, including how your name is set up, so this isn't much of an issue. However, if you're self-employed, it's worth thinking about. Will you be taken seriously if your e-mail messages come from fuzzybear@yahoo.com? And getting a domain name that mirrors your business's name isn't too difficult or very expensive. Your Internet service provider can probably help you with the process. It's worth the effort. Your e-mail is much more likely to be recognized and read if it identifies who you are and where you work: george.stallings @adventcorp.com, for example.

2. Use the subject line. It's foolish not to use the subject line. And it seems a little rude, too. When I get a message with nothing in the subject line, even if it's from somebody I recognize, I feel a little irritated. Couldn't they spend five seconds and give me a clue as to why they're writing? Plus, with the huge gush of spam that's gets flushed into our inbox each day, we all need to go through and quickly delete everything that looks suspicious. If I don't immediately recognize your user name, and there's no subject line in your message, there's a very good chance I'll delete it. I'm sure you do the same.

Maybe even more important, the subject line is your first and best chance to help your readers figure out quickly whether they want to read your message. Maybe you think that everyone should read every word of every message you write, but that's just not going to happen, so your second best goal should be to make the reading process as simple and painless as possible and to make your message look relevant and interesting.

A good subject line should be clear, specific, and short. Short is particularly important, because it may get truncated, depending on how your recipients have their e-mail systems configured. They may see only the first half dozen words in the subject line and have to guess from that whether your message is worth reading.

3. Sign your e-mails. Put your name at the end of your message and follow it with your contact information. Your contact information should include your full name if you typically sign your e-mails with a nickname. For example, if you sign them "Meg," you should write "Megan T. O'Brien" afterward. In addition, include your job title, the organization you work for and your telephone number(s) in case the recipient wants or needs to call you. Some people also include their mailing address as part of their signature block.

As you probably know, you can set your e-mail system up to add this information automatically every time you write. Even better, you can set it up to put a different signature block after your messages depending on whether you are authoring a new message or responding to one somebody sent you. In the case of a reply, it seems reasonable to assume that a shorter version of your signature would be adequate-just your name, your organization, and your phone number(s), for example.

4. Avoid writing too informally. One reason e-mails fail is the fact that people tend to write e-mails much more casually and informally than they do business letters or other documents. That informality is possibly a consequence of the T-shirt and flip-flops culture that gave birth to the Internet in the first place, but the fact is it can lead to some embarrassing errors. My guess is that the frequency of misspelled words, grammar mistakes, punctuation errors, and similar goofs is a lot higher in e-mails than it is anywhere else in business communications.

This rule applies to instant messaging and chat systems, too. Many firms now use chat functions at work so employees can ask questions, share ideas, and otherwise communicate with each other. One of my sons, an attorney, regularly uses chat to communicate with other attorneys at his firm, not only in the Los Angeles office, where he works, but across the network with attorneys in New York City. Similarly, his older brother, who is a software architect, lives and works in Boston but is part of a team primarily based in Ohio. As the technology lead for the firm, he has to be available to the other developers all the time, and they use a chat application for that purpose. Chat is likely to be even more informal than e-mails, but when it's too informal it may become distracting or incomprehensible.

Excessive informality leads to another kind of problem, one that affects the tone of our message. When we write too casually, we may sound amateurish or juvenile. For example, I received an e-mail from a woman who was coordinating a Webinar series where I was scheduled to be a presenter in a couple of months. (In case you're not familiar with them, a Webinar is a kind of seminar broadcast over the Internet, where attendees dial in to a toll-free conference bridge or listen via an Internet audio feed and log in to a Web site to watch your slides and listen to you present. Often these sessions are interactive, so attendees can speak or at least write messages to you during your presentation.) Anyway, putting one of these on takes a lot of coordination, which is why the woman was emailing me. Here's her message:

Okay, the message was clear enough. Amber wanted my Power­ Point file by the end of the following week. No problem. And she certainly seemed enthusiastic about the whole project. You have to give her points for that. But by using eight exclamation points in the space of four lines, Amber has fatally undercut her credibility. In fact, I find myself wondering if she's about 13 years old and temporarily helping out at her parents' office. About the only thing she could have done to damage her credibility further was to put a smiley face after her name.

But wait! I spoke too soon. After the Webinar was over, I got the following message from her:

Everybody loves compliments, and I'm certainly no exception. But those smiley faces . . . Ugh.

5. Limit your use of emoticons and acronyms. Smiley faces don't belong in your business e-mails. "Emoticons" is the term applied to the various combinations of punctuation used to express emotion and to the actual icons that show little faces in various states of happiness or distress. For example, : - ) indicates happiness, while : - O is supposed to suggest surprise. Using these things is all right if you're sending an e-mail to a good friend, to a child, or to a message board, such as one where you can anonymously post your feelings about your favorite sports team. If you want to show that the quarterback's performance in last week's game made you feel sick, go ahead and stick in the green, queasy-looking face. But no emoticons in your business e-mails, please. They're inappropriate.

The same goes for cryptic abbreviations and acronyms. Recently a colleague of mine in the U.K. sent me an e-mail in which he wrote,

I let him know which dates in September were open, but I had to ask him what did he mean by "WRT." I felt a little stupid, but I couldn't figure it out. He wrote back:

Okay. Now I felt really dumb. But at least I knew what the acronym meant.

What if I hadn't been a good friend and colleague, but rather a customer. Would I have asked for a definition? Probably not.

What about your business or professional correspondents? Are you certain they all know what LOL means? What about IMHO? Or YMMV? How about FMI? AFAIK?³

If you do a lot of instant messaging or hang out on MySpace, you're probably rolling your eyes at me. These acronyms are the lingua franca of the online world, a staple of the vocabulary of the IM crowd. But I have to confess that for quite a while I thought LOL meant "lots of luck." As a result, I often couldn't quite grasp what the writer was trying to say by using that term. Were they being ironic? Sarcastic? Imagine my surprise to learn it actually means "laugh out loud." Needless to say, I didn't LOL.

(If you're as clueless as I am about most of these acronyms, you can find a helpful list of definitions for Internet acronyms on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFO#W. )

6. Be polite. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the excessive chumminess and breathless excitement that we see in some e-mails, there's the problem of rudeness. Some people are so tone deaf to the sound of their own language that they don't realize their messages sound rude. Other people just don't care. Either way, it's inexcusable.

"Flaming" was a common problem in the early days of the Internet. Flaming is the act of attacking another person, his ideas and opinions, his lineage, his sexual orientation, and anything else you can think of throwing in the mix, often in obscene or foul language. These messages are usually written by cowardly little nerds who would never have the courage to say anything like that to another person's face. However, they seem to have a lot of courage when they can write anonymously on some Web forum. Flaming seems to have died down a lot in recent years. That's good. The World Wide Web needs all the civility we can muster.

The problem with rudeness is subtler than flaming someone. Occasionally people write e-mails in the heat of strong emotion-anger, disgust, fear-and those emotions lurk in the tone of the message. Other people just don't seem to realize they're coming across as obnoxious or arrogant or demanding. Perhaps both of those factors played in to the Cerner Corporation memo that we looked at earlier. Here's a more typical example of the kind of thing we see all the time:

Maybe Dorothy has reached the breaking point on this issue, but regardless, she comes across as petulant and rude. Putting something in print tends to exaggerate the extreme elements of any tone it may have, so when it comes to strong emotions in an e-mail, less is definitely more. If you're angry, upset, or in the grip of some other strong emotion, wait before writing. Then, after you've cooled down a bit, write your message so that you wouldn't mind having it read out loud in front of your mother. Or your boss. Or printed on the front page of the New York Times.

7. Write to be read on the computer. On a flight I was taking a few months ago I noticed the woman across the aisle from me take out a thick sheaf of papers from her briefcase. It was obvious from the formatting that they were e-mails she had printed out. Intrigued, I watched her for a few minutes. She put the stack on the tray table in front of her and attacked them, pen in hand. Most of them she simply skimmed quickly, then drew a line through. On a few she scrawled some comments at the bottom of the page. As she finished each page, she tucked it under the stack and kept on moving.

Her behavior was unusual, but it wasn't hard to figure out why she was doing this. Many people don't enjoy reading text on a computer screen. Screen resolutions are less than perfect, so type is less readable on a screen than it is on paper. Computers are bulkier and harder to handle than a stack of paper. And, most important, documents are harder to skim when they appear on a screen.

Why does this matter? Because most business people prefer to skim the documents they get. In fact, research indicates most people never read an entire document from front to back. Instead, they usually glance at the opening paragraphs, turn to the back of the document to look for a conclusion, summary, next steps, price, or similar information, and then flip back and forth through the rest, absorbing the gist of it by skimming. ­ Obviously, it's much easier to skim text when you can hold actual pages in your hands and let your eyes roam over the entire ­ document.

Another problem that detracts from readability with e-mail is the lack or loss of formatting. For example, with a little forethought you can help the reader grasp your key points quickly by using headings, subheadings, indentations, bullet points, ­ enumeration, and other formatting tricks that make the text on the monitor a little easier to skim. But given the current state of the art, you can't reliably do that in e-mail. Some e-mail servers strip out formatting elements. Even if you create your e-mails in a mark-up language, such as HTML, there's no guarantee your recipient's computer can decode it. Even if you write within the word processor and then paste that message into your e-mail, your recipient may still receive nothing more than stripped-down plain text. In my own experience, this problem seems to happen more often when I am responding to a ­ message that was sent to me by somebody using a handheld ­ device. But it can even occur when you are composing a new ­ message.

I received the following e-mail from a person I had never met or spoken with before. What kind of impression do you think it made on me?

I think there are a lot of things wrong with that e-mail, but the sudden intrusion of broken HTML code definitely made me doubt his skill as a business or technical writer. I've tried to figure out what on earth was going on there, and my best guess is that this was a generic e-mail containing merge codes that he sent out to a lot of people and the process had broken without his realizing it. (By the way, the other problems with this e-mail, in my opinion, are the abrupt salutation from a total stranger ["Tom,"], the lack of focus on what kind of writing I or my company might need [we don't need white papers], the lack of conviction in his claim ["I believe I can provide you. . . "], the odd decision to describe himself as "unique" rather than "experienced," "professional," or "successful," the equally odd way he separates himself from the recommendation by saying he will "provide" a "resource," rather than saying he will do the work himself, and the sudden clipped tone at the end-". . . for a brief conf. call to discuss.")

Bear in mind that if you are composing in HTML or a rich text format (RTF), your message may look wonderful on your screen, only to arrive at your recipient's computer looking even worse than the example above. That will happen if your recipient doesn't have an HTML or RTF compatible system or simply has those functions turned off. Such basic niceties as indentations, fonts, italics, bold face, bullet points, and so forth will all disappear. What my ­ correspondent, quoted above, was trying to do is fairly sophisticated-he was creating some kind of merge document that failed to merge correctly. But what you and I typically try to do in our e-mails, simply writing a coherent message, may also involve using code that won't translate to your recipients' screens. Instead, what they see is an undifferentiated mass of Courier. That's why it's so important in e-mails to get the internal logic of the message right, in case the surface appearance-the formatting-disappears. My recommendation is to write in rich text format (RTF), but to make sure the message is organized so that the ideas flow logically. Also, use verbal cues to structure ("First,. . . " "Second,. . . " "On the other hand,. . . " "Finally,. . . "), because those won't be wiped out if your message gets reduced to plain text.

And while we're on the subject of formatting, may I humbly suggest that you resist the urge to decorate your e-mails by using backgrounds, colors, and fancy typefaces? Some e-mail systems give you the option of choosing a "stationery" style-colors, patterns, grid lines, and so forth. These options invariably make your messages look amateurish and often make them harder to read. I regularly get business e-mails from someone who has chosen to use a blue background that is supposed to suggest a cheerful sky, I guess, and then prints the message in dark blue letters over that. The combination definitely does not enhance the message's readability or the author's professionalism.

8. Check it before you send it. If the message matters, write it and edit it outside your e-mail system. The temptation to write an e-mail inside Outlook or Notes or whatever e-mail system you use is almost irresistible. Usually it doesn't matter. Even though we know that we're more likely to make mistakes and that the editing tools in our e-mail system are only a subset of what we have in our word processor, we opt for convenience rather than caution.

That's fine most of the time. But when your e-mail message really matters, you're better off composing it in your word processor, editing it there, getting it right, and then copying and pasting it into the message space of your e-mail system. You're a little more likely to catch the typos, misspelled words, and other mechanical problems that way.

Moving Beyond the Mechanical

Of course, mechanical errors, misspelled words, grammar mistakes, and typos are actually the least of our worries. If your writing is riddled with those kinds of errors, you'll distract and possibly annoy your reader, and you'll certainly damage your credibility. But these mistakes are not the ones that cause the most costly damage. If you look back at those two disastrous e-mails written by company CEOs, neither one of them had misspelled words and neither one of them contained typos. The grammar was fine, too, even including their use of sentence fragments to create an individual tone. No, the real problems lay much deeper. They failed to accomplish their supposed purposes-inspiring, motivating, setting a vision for the future. And they created much larger problems for their authors and the companies they headed than they were trying to fix.

In this book, we will move beyond the merely mechanical errors-the punctuation mistakes, misspelled words, and grammar goofs that everyone makes from time to time. Rather, our focus will be on writing effectively. The purpose of this book is to provide some guidelines for business writers who want to feel confident that the e-mails, letters, and other documents they write are successful in making a clear point, communicating a credible opinion, effectively motivating others, or even persuading the reader to adopt a particular point of view.

What the book won't do is tell you how to install a spam filter, how to set up multiple e-mail accounts for your office, or how to launch an e-mail marketing campaign. That kind of technical information is beyond my limited domain of expertise. The book also will not attempt to deal with the human resource and legal issues involved in writing a performance appraisal, the contractual issues inherent in a proposal, and so on. Technical tasks and the legal implication of your writing are topics best left to the techies and the lawyers respectively. Instead, my goal is to outline how you can write clearly and effectively. I will show you some simple techniques that will enable you to communicate as professionally as possible. Knowing these techniques will save you and your reader time and effort, will prevent errors and misunderstandings, and will help you create a favorable impression. Sloppy, unclear, incomprehensible writing suggests that the person who produced it is incapable of thinking clearly or producing high quality work. That's not fair-you may believe that your skills as a civil engineer or an investment advisor or a purchasing agent or whatever you do professionally have very little to do with your ability to write well-but nobody ever said life would be fair. The fact is it's in your best interest to learn how to communicate effectively, to learn how to use the language of success.

In the next chapter, The Problem, I'll sketch the typical mistakes people make in writing e-mails, letters, and other documents. Specifically, I'll describe four "languages" people use that simply don't work: Fluff, Guff, Geek, and Weasel. Each of these languages fails in business communications because each makes it difficult for the reader to understand the message. These languages often create the wrong impression, they can undercut rapport between sender and receiver, and they may diminish the writer's professionalism and credibility. The use of these ineffective ­ languages is often a matter of bad habits. By pointing out their characteristics and how to revise them, I hope to make you hypersensitive to these four faulty languages. I will have accomplished my purpose if you cringe a little when you see someone else writing in one of those modes, and if you self-censor to eliminate them from your own work.

Of course, anybody can point out problems. Even if I've managed to define the problem in a way that's different and helpful, the real reason you're interested in this book is that you're hoping to see some answers. I provide those in Chapter 3, The Principles. There I discuss the "language of success," a language characterized by five principles. Effective business writing of any form, from e-mails and letters to complex proposals and manuals, must be clear, concise, precise, suited to its audience, and suited to its purpose. I give you examples of what it takes to write clearly, how to write more concisely, what kinds of precision matter, and what it means for a document to be suited to its audience and its purpose.

To that end, Chapter 4, The Practice, shows how to apply the right structural pattern as determined by document purpose. In that chapter, I'll show you how each of the main reasons we write in a business or organizational setting-to inform, to evaluate, to motivate, and to persuade-requires a unique structural pattern. Then I'll show you how the pattern for each purpose can be adapted to create specific kinds of documents within that category. Although many of the samples I provide are formatted as e-mails, since that's what people write more often than any other kind of document, I also include other types of business writing, providing examples of reports and letters that you may need to write. I hope the samples will be instructive and useful for you, naturally, but ultimately no matter how many samples I put in a book like this, there will never be enough because each writing situation is unique. I firmly believe it's far more important for you to understand how to create your own successful documents. Simply copying somebody else's version of a "complaint letter" doesn't really teach you how to do the next one on your own. In the long run, you'll be a more effective writer if you understand the logic that makes writing work. Then you'll have the power to communicate effectively in your own voice. You'll be fluent in the language of success.

Finally, a quick note on the examples that appear in the book: They are based on real writing that I've collected from a wide variety of sources over the years. I've modified the examples to protect the author and-well, let's be honest here-to protect myself, too, since nobody wants to be told that her e-mails were ugly or incompetent. In a few cases, to illustrate a particular point, I've made up an example, too. In every instance, I have made up names for writers, recipients, companies, organizations, departments, agencies, products, services, and so on. They're all fake. So are the locations, timelines, pricing, specifications, and other details contained in the various examples, good and bad. They're all just little works of fiction. So if you happen to see the name of a person you know or of a company you think you might have heard of, forget about it. It's just an unfortunate coincidence.

¹ Source: Fortune, "Oops," Monday April 16, 2001.

² See Michael Specter, "Damn Spam: The losing war on junk e-mail," The New Yorker (August 6, 2007), pp. 36-41, for a startling account of the problem.

³If you're like me, you'll need to have these defined. IMHO is "in my humble opinion." YMMV means "your mileage may vary." FMI means "for my information" or "for more information" depending on which acronym list you check. And AFAIK stands for "as far as I know." At least AFAIK it does.

© 2008 Tom Sant.
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