Most business writing stinks. Why? Because producing pompous, unreadable crap boosts the ego.

I would bet that you’re pretty good at clearing expressing your opinions, telling stories, and having a personality when you’re with your friends. But when you’re at work? If you’re typical, you become a drone. You use jargon, write in circles, use big words when simpler ones would be easier to read and understand.

So, what’s up with that? A sentence like the following must meet some ego need; I can’t imagine any other reason for it: “It is my job to ensure proper process deployment activities take place to support process institutionalization and sustainment. Business process management is the core deliverable of my role, which requires that I identify process competency gaps and fill those gaps.” I guess it must not feel as good to simply write “I’m the training director.”

So, put your ego in check. Cut out the word crap. Show some personality. We’ll all love your more for it.

You may not agree with everything–or even anything–that Peggy Noonan has to say, but she is a role model for the way she says it.

In case you can’t place Noonan, she was Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter and the chief speechwriter for Bush the First’s presidential campaign. “A kinder, gentler nation,” “a thousand points of light,” and “read my lips: no new taxes” all came from her pen.

What we can learn from Noonan, though, is not how to use catchy phrases. It is how to write clearly and concisely. How to say what we mean without artifice or guile.

Take a look at this paragraph from her book On Speaking Well:

The most moving things in a speech is always the logic. It’s never flowery words and flourishes, it’s not sentimental exhortations, it’s never the faux poetry we’re all subjected to these days. It’s the logic, the thinking behind your case. A good case well argued and well said is inherently moving. It shows respect for the brains of the listeners. There is an implicit compliment in it. It shows that you’re a serious person and understand that you are talking to other serious persons.

Substitute “writing” for “speech” and “readers” for “listeners” and you have the essence of great business writing in a single paragraph.

Do you want to know the single thing that keeps people from reading your emails, your reports, or anything else that you write in business? Not getting to the point.

Make your point right up front.

Don’t make your reader wade through your whole thought process. If you need to write to figure out your point, go ahead. But then re-write. Put the point up front. Put the most important thing about the point next. Put the next most important thing after that. That way, even if your reader only reads the first paragraph, she has gotten the point.

Remember that people skim, and few actually read through the end. So, put the important stuff up front and save the nice-to-know stuff for the end.

Do people often misread or misunderstand your writing? You may be obscuring perfectly good ideas in useless words. These three easy tips can help you cut the fat from your writing.

1. In business writing, less is always more.

Business readers are in a hurry. They want the message, and they want it fast. Don’t make them slog through words that don’t add any meaning. Look at this sentence:

If we think in our minds about how this opportunity came about, we will remember some key actions.

Okay, so where else do we think other than in our minds? If we remove that phrase, will the sentence still make sense? Sure. One easy strike against word bloat.

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I am so embarrassed.

I posted a comment on the Dumb Little Man site (one of my favorites, by the way). Here’s why I’m embarrassed. My comment included this sentence: “When I left my job I knew I could know longer just buy whatever I wanted.” Don’t I know the difference between “know” and “no”? Of course I do!

I did what I tell people over and over and over never to do. I did a spell-check and then only did a cursory read-through. Obviously spell-check let “know” go by. My quick glance through didn’t register anything awry. I was in a hurry, so I posted.

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Do you know what your boss wants more than anything? Time. Time to get everything done. Time to think. Time to go to the gym.

Because your boss covets time, she also hates email. Reading it, writing it, forwarding it, replying to it . . . all waste time that she wishes she had.

If you want your boss to love you, don’t waste her time with useless emails. These 5 tips for using email will endear you every day.

1. Make it short and sweet. If you really have something to say, say it. No long drawn-out missives with all the details. Just the facts. If you need to go into details, schedule a meeting and prepare for it thoroughly. Continue reading →

Despite the best efforts of Mrs. Bradbury, my 5th-grade teacher, I can never remember when to use “capital” and when to use “capitol.” Or whether I should “lay” down for a nap or “lie” down. Even with a master’s degree in English, I continually, or maybe it’s continuously, mix up “was” and “were.”

I’m sure that Mrs. Bradbury has long since departed to the land of perfectly diagrammed sentences, but now I have my own Mrs. Bradbury right at my fingertips. By way of LifeHacker, I came across this genius little website called ConfusingWords.com.

Here’s how it works. Type in a word that you constantly confuse with another word. The site shows you that word’s definition along with the definition of its close cousins. It takes about 15 seconds, and you’ll make your own 5th-grade teacher proud, wherever she may be.

Leo Babauta has a great post today– 7 Rules for Communicating Clearly and Concisely in Email–on Web Worker Daily.

His message: if you want to people to read your emails, mercilessly cut the fat. Get straight to the point in as few wordss as possible. Email is not the place to pontificate, entertain, or convey complex messages. Skip the fluff, tell people exactly what you want from them, and take the time to review what you’ve written before hitting the send button.

All simple stuff, actually. But what makes his advice so effective is that it takes you from focusing on your own need to talk and makes you look at what the other person needs to know. Your goal is to get your message across without wasting a single second of their time. Who won’t love you for that?

I went to college in the early 80s. Every business major was required to take Business Communication 485 where we learned how to write memos, reports, and bad news letters. Business Communication 485 didn’t touch on e-mail because none of us could imagine anything beyond the IBM Selectric.

Back in those days, signing off a business letter was easy. My old textbook suggests “Sincerely” as the most appropriate way to say good-bye in a business context. Sincerely worked just as well for people you knew well as for those you had never met.

Now that memos are electronic and for the most part business letters are too, sign-offs have become laden with meaning. The main problem lies with how unclear we tend to be as writers, especially in emails. More than with any other communication, email readers tend to look for hidden clues for the writer’s true meaning.

So, what’s the best way to sign off an email?

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Authentic writing — writing that sounds human, natural, real — is a great way to create rapport with people at work. And yet so many of us have lost the art of sounding human, of writing in a way that sounds like ourselves. It’s been squashed out of us after years of learning how to write for teachers, professors, managers, peers; of writing to fit into a culture where other people talk in tongues, blinding us with long words and jargon — and before long that’s what we find ourselves doing too.

Plain English at work

Plain English is the easiest way to break out of those bad habits and to start sounding like a human being again. Short sentences, everyday words and a conversational style can transform the way that you write — and the impact you make.

Here are 10 simple ways that you can use plain English to sound like yourself at work:

1. Keep your sentences short. This will make your message clear, simple and easy to follow. Aim for an average of 18 words a sentence and break bigger sentences into two (or more). Continue reading →