Manage Your Writing

This week: Find the lightning

Our job as business writers is not to use words that mean the right thing to us. Our job is the find the best words to convey our meaning to our readers.

That's one reason why the revision stage of writing--even if it takes only a minute or two--is so important. It frees us from having to settle for the first word that came to our mind as we drafted. It gives us a chance to choose, from a number of possible words, the one word that best does the job.

Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug." This week, don't settle for the lightning bug. Find the lightning!

The enemy of good thinking

"Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking."

--Warren Buffet, quoted by Stephen Zades in HR Innovator, Nov/Dec 2003, p. 4

This week: Know your purpose

Thomas W. Cooper has written that Native American chief, actor, and activist Dan George "never spoke without a reason. . . . What was more important than George's words was that such words were born only of purpose. He had a purpose for silence, and a purpose for speaking."

We can learn from this. We business writers shouldn't write until we have a clear sense of why. My friend Oliver E. Nelson, Jr., of Energy Systems Group, says that "knowing what your purpose is not only makes the document better; it helps remove ego problems--because then you know what your job is, to get something done, not to make yourself look better."

This week, before you write anything, ask yourself, "What do I want my readers to know or do as a result of reading what I've written?"

This week: It's Not Brain Surgery

Novelist Robert Cormer has said, "The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon."

This week, as you write, remember that a draft is a prototype, not the final product. It isn't written for a the reader. It's written for the writer. It's written to test. It's written to see if it does what you planned it to do.

This week: Revise

Good writing depends on good revising.To many of us, this truth comes as a surprise. Because we don't think of writing as a process that can be managed like any other business process, we imaging that good writers produce good writing the first time and therefore don't have to revise.

In fact, some research shows that good writers revise more, not less, than ordinary writers. Such research is backed up by the experience of many professional writers. Historian Paul Fussell once reported, "Crappy work I do twice, good work I do three times." And American novelist John Dos Passos raised the bar even higher when he said, "I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times."

This week, as you write, try to spend more time revising than you usually do. (If you think you don't have the time, steal some from your drafting.) Your writing will be more effective.

This week: Be a great asker

One key to effective business writing is getting your "stuff" together at the planning stage, deciding what you want to say before you say it. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, in their classic book Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge, offer a powerful tool for deciding what you want to say: "Successful leaders, we have found, are great askers."

One "great asker" was Ben Duffy, former head of the ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn. According to businessman Peter Hay, Duffy "landed his largest accounts by putting himself into the client's position." Once when Duffy was preparing for a meeting with American Tobacco Company president Vincent Riggio, he listed the questions he would ask were he in Riggio's shoes, along with the answers Duffy would give in response. According to Hay,

When the time for the interview came, Duffy presented his answers and waited. Riggio reached for a drawer and pulled out a list of questions he had prepared. When he glanced through them he realized that they had all been answered. The two of them went to lunch to celebrate the deal.

This week, work on being a great asker. Before you start to draft a message, ask yourself what questions your reader will want answered. Then make sure you answer them.