Business Writing for Technical People

The most effective ways to get your message across

Carrie Marshall

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781780174457
• eBook ISBN: 9781780174433
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Writing
• Index: Business

Technically-minded people can struggle with business writing and many businesses get it wrong, losing their readers in avalanches of acronyms and jungles of technical jargon. It doesn't have to be that way. In this book you'll discover how to give your communication skills an upgrade, exploring the tips and tricks that will enable you to write effectively and persuasively for any audience. You'll discover how to write for maximum impact and how to make your enthusiasm even more infectious.

1 WHAT IS BUSINESS WRITING?

Business writing is something we all do without necessarily thinking about it. It’s the writing we do as part of our day-to-day work: emails, memos, proposals, reports and anything else we use to communicate with our colleagues, clients or customers.

Good business writing matters. We spend a great deal of our working time reading, so waffly writing is a waste of that time. Vague communications don’t inspire trust from colleagues or clients. Proposals that are not persuasive won’t get the green light. Brochures full of buzzwords will leave potential customers cold.

Unfortunately, a lot of the business writing we all receive isn’t as good as it should be. Our inboxes overflow with jargon-heavy reports, emails that take forever to get to the point and memos that need to be read four times to work out what on Earth the writer is on about.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

WHY BAD WRITING IS BAD NEWS

Bad writing is bad for productivity. When Harvard Business Review surveyed 547 business people about their reading habits, it found that they averaged 25.5 hours per week reading at work. That was mostly email. Eight-one per cent of them said that bad writing was a massive waste of their time, because email was often ‘too long, poorly organised, unclear, filled with jargon and imprecise’ (Bernoff, 2016). The senders might as well have sent pictures of bears wearing top hats. At least that would be funny.

Business writing gets a bad rap because so much of it is awful. Sometimes that’s deliberate, the corporate equivalent of a politician refusing to answer a straight question. But often it’s because people simply haven’t been given the tools to do it properly.

You wouldn’t sit somebody down in front of a PC and expect them to write code without any training or experience, yet every day businesses do just that with business writing. Just because somebody’s an expert in their field doesn’t mean they have been given the tools they need to communicate their expertise and enthusiasm in the best possible way.

That’s what this book is here for.

2 LEARNING TO WRITE WITHOUT FEAR

Some people say that writing is an art, something that requires God-given talent. Those people are professional writers who don’t want anybody to know how easy their job is. The truth is that good writing is a craft. Anybody can do it and, like any craft, the more you do it the better you get.

When you consider how important business writing is to any organisation, the fact that most firms don’t teach it is incredible; especially when the secrets of successful business writing are actually very simple.

In this chapter you will discover how a little bit of preparation and a little bit of reading can help give you the confidence you need to write effectively and without fear.

TAKE YOUR TIME

The most important thing in business writing isn’t talent. It’s time. Time to think about what you are going to write, time to do any research and collate any necessary resources, time to write and then time to edit the writing to make it better.

It’s also important to have time to read. The more you read, the more of other people’s writing you can look at with a critical eye, the better your own writing will become.

Your eyes will begin to glaze over when confronted with something like this:

As the pace of accomplishments continues to accelerate, proof-point has become a necessity. Cross-pollination and market practice digitize our agility resulting in a measured efficiency gain; this is why there can be no productivity improvement until we can achieve a sustained increase in margins.

That’s from a website called the Corporate Bullshit Generator,¹ which automatically generates streams of convincing-sounding nonsense from real buzzwords and phrases. We receive genuine documents and emails exactly like that every day. Beware the added-value solutions provider, the game changer, the establishment of a new paradigm in customer facing solutions leveraging location specific core competencies.

If you have ever been shopping for a new car you’ll know how the cars you’re considering are suddenly everywhere: every second car seems to be a Ford Mondeo, an Audi A5 or a Mercedes E220. It’s the same with meaningless business jargon. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere – and you start to notice if you’re falling into the same traps.

BORROW BRIGHT IDEAS

It’s important to look for good writing as well as bad. Good business writing gets to the point, gets a message across clearly and, if appropriate, has a personality too.

Here is the ‘About Us’ intro from Linn,² maker of high-tech home audio products:

Music makes life better.

It’s the sound of your greatest achievements and happiest moments. It’s the soundtrack to the best of times with the people you love the most. It’s a source of energy and inspiration, of comfort and of joy.

It’s beautiful. Powerful. Magical. And we make it better.

I’ll admit to a bit of bias, because I wrote that one, but hopefully you’ll agree that the writing does its job without going over the top: you immediately know what Linn is all about.

Here is the online project management service, Trello’s,³ board basics:

The Basics

Let’s go over some board basics. A new Trello board is like a clean slate, ready to organise any of your life’s projects.

A board represents a project. Whether you are redesigning a kitchen or launching a new website, a Trello board is the place to organise your tasks on lists and collaborate with your team of friends, family and colleagues.

That’s very good business writing: it’s clear, jargon-free and tells you exactly what you need to know.

And here is Apple,⁴ trying to sell you an iPhone 8:

iPhone 8 introduces an all-new glass design. The world’s most popular camera, now even better. The smartest, most powerful chip ever in an iPhone. Wireless charging that’s truly effortless. And augmented reality experiences never before possible. iPhone 8. A new generation of iPhone.

These are all marketing communications: Linn’s is about communicating a brand identity; Trello’s is explaining how you would use its service; Apple is trying to get you to buy a £800 phone. And you can learn from them because any kind of business writing is a form of selling.

You might be trying to sell an idea rather than a product, but the purpose is usually to persuade the recipient to do, say or agree with something. That doesn’t mean you should make your work emails read like iPhone adverts, but you can make them more effective by learning some of the same tricks the commercial copywriters have used.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Writing is a craft. The more you do it, the better you get.

• Good business writing gets to the point and communicates clearly.

• Give yourself time not just to write, but to read others’ writing.

¹ See https://cbsg.sf.net

² See https://www.linn.co.uk/about

³ See https://trello.com/guide/board-basics.html

⁴ See https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-8/

3 THINK BEFORE YOU INK

There’s an old marketing saying: sell the sizzle, not the sausage. We buy sausages not because of what’s in them – for many of us that’s something we would rather not think about – but because of how we think they will taste. What...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• BCS, THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE FOR IT
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the author
• Preface
• 1. WHAT IS BUSINESS WRITING?
• 2. LEARNING TO WRITE WITHOUT FEAR
• 3. THINK BEFORE YOU INK
• 4. CHOOSE YOUR WEAPONS
• 5. FIGHT THE FLAB
• 6. JUNK THE JARGON
• 7. MAKE YOUR CASE
• 8. WRITING FOR ROBOTS: BUSINESS WRITING FOR THE INTERNET
• 9. BE YOUR OWN AUDIENCE
• 10. COMMUNICATING GOODWILL AND DELIVERING BAD NEWS
• 11. WHAT TO DO WHEN THE WORDS WON’T COME
• 12. THE BUSINESS WRITING HOUSE OF HORRORS
• AFTERWORD
• References
• Index
• Back Cover