Before starting a writing project, write a brief description of your audience. Do not simply write: sales force. Write: “sales force, highly trained, most with college degrees, 50% men/50% women, overachievers, overworked, and feel left out of the loop here at headquarters.” Such a profile will allow you to write your letter or report with their point of view firmly in mind.
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Curb Your Verbs
When editing your work, check for long verb phrases with unnecessary helper verbs and delete them: “The mail room manager is able to sort mail electronically.” The revision: “The mail room manager sorts mail electronically.”
Get Used to Throwing Words Away
Writing is rewriting, and that means writing more words than you will end up using—and throwing away the rest. That’s a tough pill to swallow for those who don’t like to write in the first place, and those who can’t bear to part with words they spent much time, effort, and sweat to produce. But the undeniable fact is that good writers write more words than they need and toss the leftovers. A tough concept to get used to, but a big step to improving one’s writing.
Stop When You’re Finished
When should you stop writing a memo, letter, or email? When you’ve said everything you NEED to say. That sounds obvious, but too many businesspeople feel they must write long memos, letters, and reports or they will appear unintelligent to their readers. Nothing is further from the truth. The moment you start writing simply to add length, is when your document starts to become illogical, off-topic, and wordy. Then you really sound unintelligent. If your message can be conveyed in one sentence, stop there and hit the SEND button. You will be praised for your brevity.
Elegant Emails
No one has time to ask a proofreader to edit each email they write before hitting the SEND button. But the vast majority of typos and errors that appear in emails can be eliminated if everyone took one simple step: reread each email before posting it to cyberspace.
Writing: Psychological Warfare
Earnest Hemingway stopped writing at the end of each day on a positive note. If five o’clock rolled around and he was in the middle of a paragraph that was tough to write, he would work out the problem, and continue to write until he hit an idea that was easy to write about. Only then would he put his pen down. That way, he looked forward to writing the next day. Psychologically—and writing is all about the little mind games we play with ourselves—Hemingway’s ploy helped him get off to a fast start each morning. This works for business writing as well as novels. Next time you’re working on a long writing project, try this trick. It works.