How to Write Meaningfully and Improve Your Communication
Nothing gets in the way of writing like spreading good ideas over too many words. The importance of keystrokes has only increased as communication and the text that supports it become more and more inseparable.
This post originally appearedon the Help Scout blog .
Many of the tools we use every day – Gmail, Slack, Asana – would be empty shells without words. Since everyone in the company is responsible for good communication, everyone should write well as well. The importance of this multiplies when working in a remote environment.
For essays, updates, announcements, emails, and more, here’s a quick guide to improving your writing with clarity and meaning.
Write to Express, not to impress
Communication is a mixture of vision and speaking. When you spot something interesting, you are now trying to grab the reader’s attention so that he can see it with his own eyes. What you decide to write is intended to be used by someone else. Always choose selflessly.
The bloated prose found in academia and in “legal language” is a reminder of what is at stake. In the book “The sense of style,” Harvard linguist Steven Pinker notes that smart people spoil their thoughts, trying to impress others. They reject simplicity out of a desire to prove that they are not bad scientists, lawyers, or academics — by doing so, they unwittingly prove that they are bad communicators.
Half of the fight against writing is resisting the temptation of the ego. Be straightforward, trust simple language, and don’t use vocabulary to blow up weak ideas.
Brainstorming horizontally, revisiting vertically
What makes a boring novel what makes a boring non-fiction: the story grows horizontally, not vertically.
A letter that is too broad tries to explain everything, but in the end it says nothing. Part of good writing is deciding where one piece ends and another begins. If you don’t hold on to the line, it will drag you along.
Golden mean? Temporarily lower your standards of approach. Because expressing ideas helps shape them, you’ll find that when you sit down to write, it creates perspectives you never knew existed. This is a good thing.
From there, you will have sufficient funds to make difficult but necessary decisions about which points to expand and which to postpone for the next day. Your process will begin to resemble the following:
People mistakenly expect to hit the bull’s-eye on the first pass. Give up the idea that your first sketch should be anything but research.
If you don’t subsequently cut out five, ten, or even 20% of your work for revision, have you really revised anything? Sculptors have marble and writers have ideas; It is best to start with a block of material and move on to what is needed.
Write for one audience
In addition to his investment talents, Warren Buffett is known for his deep respect for clear communication within companies. His own letters to shareholders are so well written that they are often considered the gold standard for the media.
Introducing the SEC’s official guide to plain English , Buffett decided to offer his “unoriginal but helpful advice” to act as if you were talking to the same person.
Buffett usually writes with one of her sisters in mind, noting that while she is very smart, she has little experience with investing. If he sees a passage that confuses her, he knows he wrote it wrong.
Stephen King suggests the same approach in his book On Writing . As he imagined his wife combing every line, he found that he was able to evoke a reaction around him. Where will she get bored, laugh, wonder, or skim until the story is clear? He knew the answer because he knew the reader. John Steinbeck and Kurt Vonnegut also supported this approach.
Writing to please one person whose tastes you understand is practical; writing to appease a faceless audience whose tastes you will never know is impossible.
Nothing to worry about. Choosing the right person and carefully conveying your message will make it fun for many.
Relentlessly returning attention
As you know, David Ogilvy said that by writing a promotional headline, you will spend eighty cents of your dollar. You must open up with enthusiasm. Exciting titles and leads won’t soon lose the ability to move mountains (and millions).
But good writing not only attracts attention; he is constantly earning it again. If you lose people in the middle, you won’t tell the whole story. No matter how great the first impression you make, if it doesn’t last, it counts as a loss.
Here are some ways to catch and keep readers to the last line:
Never bury ice. From the start, make your value proposition clear in everything you write. If your purpose and reader’s interest isn’t evident in the first few paragraphs, rewrite them.
Dress your thoughts well. One of my dad’s favorite expressions: “Exercise improves everything.” It captures the life changes that occurred when he took up bodybuilding. “Workout is useful” imitates brevity, but loses its effectiveness. Often, rethinking is all it takes to make an accurate statement that is timeless.
Avoid circular or repeating dots. “In other words,” you should just use these other words. Discernment is remembered when it can be taken directly – do not add the words “in essence”, “in general” or “in other words”. Use the correct words the first time.
The structure must not be forgotten. The best writing is something that pleases at first sight, but requires careful study in the future. How you structure a piece matters, as do the words that create structure. You made a mistake when you started using subheadings like “Conclusion”. There are much more interesting ways to communicate.
Wandering endings will dilute your message. Better to approach them quickly. Paul Graham handles this gracefully, so I’ll let him bring it home: “Learn to recognize that the ending is coming, and when it comes, grab it.”
In any context, whether you’re writing emails at work or publishing your own blog posts, keep these tips in mind and your readers will appreciate the clarity and content of your email.
How to write with substance | Scout help