Manage Your Writing

This week: Check your organizational culture

My late friend Kitty Locker, in her book Business and Administrative Communication, wrote:

If you think your boss doesn't want you to write simply, ask him or her. A few bosses do prize flowery language. Most don't.

You may think you work in an organization that favors fancy, pretentious language. But it's worth checking.

This week, look at the e-mail and other writing you get from your boss, and from people at higher levels. If it's concise and clear, look for ways to learn from it. If it's not, look for ways to change your organizational culture--and advance yourself--by becoming the model of a clear, effective writer.

This week: Write without thinking

Don Marquis, American journalist and creator of the characters Archy and Mehitabel, said, "I never think when I write; nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well."

That's a good practice to follow. This week, do your thinking at the planning stage of your writing process, then again at the revising stage. In between, try to draft without "thinking." That is, try to turn off your inner critic (I call him or her the Internal Editor), give yourself permission to be "wrong," and draft as thoughtlessly as you can. Then, and only then, go back and think!

 

Pay attention to subject lines

A participant in a writing workshop I once led taught me something. (That almost always happens.) The hardest thing about writing messages, she said, is "filling in the subject."

"So you just throw something in there," she continued. "When the reader gets it, it's the part he or she reads first. And the subject line may not be what you want them to get out of it."

She was right.

This week, pay attention to Subject lines in the e-mail messages you write. If you've really thought about what you're going to say, and to whom, and for what purpose, go ahead and write the Subject first. It will focus your work on the message itself.

But if you're not sure exactly what you'll be saying in the message, save the Subject line for last.

(Actually, save it for next-to-last; don't fill in the To line untl your message is absolutely ready to send. You'll avoid those terrible premature dispatches.)

 

This week: Don't be afraid

Journalist Gene Fowler once said, "Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead."

What Fowler is describing is, of course, writer's block. We've all had it. And at its root is fear, the fear of not "getting it right."

To overcome writer's block, we need to follow Frank Smith's advice (emphasis mine):

Do not expect the writing to come out right the first time. Do not be afraid of the possibility that what you write will fail to live up to your expectation, or those of the schoolteacher on your shoulder. Anything you write can be changed. Anything you write can be thrown away. You have nothing to lose.

This week: Leave out the parts that readers skip

Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty and other hugely successful books, was once asked why his books were so popular and easy to read. Leonard answered, "Simple. I just leave out the parts that readers skip."

This week, when you start revising, imagine yourself as your reader. What parts of the message would you skip?

Leave them out.

 

This week: Take as many swings as you need

Playwright Neil Simon has written, "In baseball, you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball."

OK, we business writers can't always take as many swings as we want. But we can almost always take more than we think we  can. Isn't that important e-mail message worth another five minutes of your time? If so, don't click "Send" as soon as you've drafted it. Keep it for a few minutes, or a few hours. (One trick is to not fill in the "To" line until after you've revised. That'll keep an unrevised draft from getting away from you.) Then come back and spend five minutes on it. Maybe do that again. Maybe again.

This week, take as many swings as you need to hit the ball out of the park.

 

This week: Be your own writing department

In a cartoon I saw once, a Hollywood producer summons his secretary. “I want to send a memo to the parking-lot attendant,” he bellows. “Get me a couple of writers.”

I sympathize. Writing is not often easy or fun, and those of us in business are usually too busy to give it the time it seems to demand. We’d all like to have staff writers on call, to handle those difficult letters and memos that seem to pile up.

Most of us, however—even in large organizations—have to be our own “writing department.” We have to take personal responsibility for the stream of writing tasks that cross our desks.

That’s probably as it should be. As designer and entrepreneur Richard Saul Wurman, president of Access Press, says, “You shortchange yourself if you think that writing is ‘someone else’s problem.’ . . . Even if your job description says  nothing about writing, by regarding yourself as a writer, even privately, you can take advantage of the discipline of  the craft.”

This week, think of yourself as a writing department. Take responsibility for your writing.

 

This week: Take "the liberty of writing poorly"

Comedy writer Larry Gelbart, best known for his work on the TV series M*A*S*H, wrote,

You have to allow yourself the liberty of writing poorly. You have to get the bulk of it done, and then you start to refine it. You have to put down less than marvelous material just to keep going to whatever you think the end is going to be--which may be something else altogether by the time you get there.

This week, take Gelbart's advice. Don't try to "get it right the first time." Give yourself "the liberty of writing poorly," knowing that you'll have a chance to revise.

If you want an answer, ask a question

Politeness is good. But it can cause us to lose focus.

I've seen many messages--paper and e-mail--that ask for information in an excruciatingly polite way:

I am considering buying 500 of your widgets. Could you please let me know whether there is a volume discount for that number and what it would be?

What the writer wants to know is how much 500 widgets will cost. So why not ask?

How much do 500 of your widgets cost?

This week, when you write asking for information, just ask. You can be polite in the next sentence or two.

 

This week: Write to express, not to impress

Great writers have always known that they are communicating to express, not impress. Ultimately, writers must impress their readers with their ideas, not their vocabulary, and a simple, direct vocabulary gets those ideas across more effectively.

Malcolm Forbes said it well: "Pretense invariably impresses only the pretender."

This week, as you revise your drafts, look for places where you may have chosen fancier words in a conscious or unconscious attempt to impress your reader. Replace those words with words that express your meaning more clearly.