Manage Your Writing

This week: Don't throw good money after bad

In poker, I'm told, it's important not to think of any of the money in the pot as your money. If you put $10 in the pot before the draw, you just have to forget that fact. If, after the draw, you keep thinking of that $10, you'll be betting to protect your investment. And you'll make bad decisions. There's even a common phrase expressing that advice: "Don't throw good money after bad."

In writing, the principle is the same. If you think of the time and effort you've invested in a piece of writing, you're bound to be reluctant to change anything. To be an effective business writer, however, you simply have to lose that reluctance. As poet John Berryman said, "One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be."

This week: Ask WIIFM?

Management consultant Bill Jensen wrote in his  book Simplicity, "About 80 percent of your internal communication—meetings, teleconferences, presentations, emails, etc.—consists of

• Sharing information that does not require action, and/or
• Communicating something for which there is no discernible consequence if the recipient ignores it

"In other words, a lot of communication you thought was helpful may be seen as unfocused noise or just 'FYI' junk mail by your teammates."

This week, while you plan each piece of writing, put yourself in your reader's place and ask "WIIFM?—What's In It For Me?" When you can answer that question for your reader, you'll write more effectively.

This week: Do the alphabet shift

This week, each time you've drafted something, go back and choose a word you've written beginning with a letter from the first half of the alphabet. Replace it with a more effective word beginning with a letter from the second half of the alphabet.

OK, there's nothing special about the second half of the alphabet. But the exercise trick will help you learn that you never have to settle for the first word that occurs to you.

This week: Find the "we"

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, wrote, "There can be no communication if it is conceived as going from the 'I' to the 'Thou.' Communication works only from one member of 'us' to another."

This week, as you begin each piece of writing, ask yourself, "To what community do my reader and I both belong?" If you can define this community at the very beginning of your writing process, all kinds of other decisions will fall into place for you.

Difficult pieces of writing will suddenly become easier if instead of focusing on the antagonisms or differences between you and your readers, you focus on the community you're both part of. Even if you're angry at your reader or have a complaint about your reader's performance, you'll find that you can frame your message in the context of what you both want to happen—larger market share, say, or a better work environment.

This week: Create Value by Organizing

In my "Welcome" message, in the left column of this blog, I use the term knowledge economy. I prefer that term to the terms information age and information economy because information by itself has no value. To be valuable, information must be organized and communicated and thus turned into knowledge. As knowledge management guru Thomas A. Stewart wrote, "intelligence becomes an asset when some useful order is created out of free-floating brainpower."

So this week, before you draft each piece of writing, ask yourself, "How can I best organize this information to turn it into knowledge for my reader?" By asking that question, and acting on your answer, you'll be creating value in a knowledge economy

This week: Build a prototype

Once, while training at a manufacturing site of a Fortune 100 company, I had trouble persuading my trainees to stop revising and editing while they were drafting. They insisted, "Here, we work hard to get it right the first time."

I realized that these managers saw me as just a crazy consultant who was clueless about their strong quality-oriented corporate culture. But for once, I knew what to do. The plant where I was working made printers, so I asked the managers to tell me the story of how their company developed and manufactured a new printer model.

They proceeded to describe an elaborate planning process, culminating in the building of a prototype. At this point in their story, I interrupted. "And you make sure to put the company's nameplate on that first printer?" I asked. "And you make sure to have the color of the finish just right? Because you're eventually going to sell it, right?"

The managers laughed. "Of course not," they said. "That printer is a prototype. It's not built to sell; it's built just to test."

"Ah ha!" I gloated. "So you don't do it right the first time. Because you know you won't sell the prototype, it doesn't have to be perfect. Making it perfect--with the right nameplate and paint and all--would be a huge waste of time and would distract you from the more important features that have to be tested."

Please understand; such flashes of insight are rare for me. But that day my trainees had given me a powerful new metaphor. A draft is a prototype. It's not the final product. It's not written for the reader. It's written for the writer. It's "quick and dirty." It's written to test. It's written to see if it does what it was designed to do.

This week, when you write, make sure you build a prototype. By doing so, and by then testing it, you'll be sure of having a better final product.

This week: Respect your customer

Every reader is a customer: an actual external customer, an actual internal customer, or at least a customer of your writing.

This week, as you plan and revise each message, think about treating your reader/customer with the same respect you want when you are a customer. Make reading your message as easy and as stress-free as possible.

My friend Oliver E. Nelson, Jr., account exec at Energy Systems Group, taught me what I've begun to think of as "Nelson's Golden Rule": "Write unto others as you would have them write unto you."

This week: Start a "steal" file

This week, watch for a piece of writing that appeals to you, something that does its job especially well.

Then,

• make a copy of it
• highlight, or note in the margin, what makes it especially effective
• put it in a file folder labeled "steal"

The next time you're stuck planning or revising a piece of your own writing, grab your "steal" file—and be inspired!

This week: Go "which-hunting"

This week, as you revise, follow the advice in Strunk and White's Elements of Style, and go "which-hunting." That is, look for places you have used the words which, who, or that to introduce a subordinate clause, and see if you can eliminate the need for that clause.

For example,

Count the chairs which are in the room

can be revised to

Count the chairs in the room.

Not only have we eliminated two words, we have kept the reader's brain from having to process a whole extra clause.

As Dorothy found out, not all whiches are bad. But watching for them is still a good idea.

This week: Try five W's and an H

This week, before you start drafting each writing job, list six questions on a piece of paper:

• Who?
• What?
• Where?
• When?
• Why?
• How?

Briefly answer each question, even if only in a word or two. You may find that after doing that,  you can draft faster and more effectively.