Released on: March 11, 2008, 12:34 am

Press Release Author: annaya rana

Industry: Education

Press Release Summary: Skilful business writing involves getting your message across
simply and quickly. This often means writing in a style that is easily read and
understood by a broad audience.

Press Release Body: Skilful business writing involves getting your message across
simply and quickly. This often means writing in a style that is easily read and
understood by a broad audience.
Yet, writing simply is often difficult for most of us.
Why? The answer lies in our school education. We learnt that if we used big words
and complex sentences, we were more likely to get an 'A' by our English teacher or
University lecturer. The education system taught us that people who use a broad
range of vocabulary are more intelligent that the rest of us.
There is nothing wrong with writing beautifully pieces of prose that feature a
stunning range of vocabulary knowledge. However, such writing is unsuitable for a
business market.
No business manager has the time to wade through material that meanders and weaves
before a point is made. They are even less likely to have time to grab a dictionary
to work out what the writer is trying to say.
When I used to work as a market research consultant, I had the impossible task of
trying to write market research reports that seemed interesting. My immediate
response was to write a report that would make my University lecturer's proud.
Sadly, my colleagues all felt the same way.
It wasn't until we had a business writing consultant come in to train us about how
to write at the level of a Year 8 student that we realized the folly of our ways.
Using my newly found skills of writing a report using simple English, I proudly
produced my 'easy on the brain' report to my manager (who missed the writing class).
He told me 'You write like you talk'. To this day, I still don't know if he was
criticizing my talking or writing ability, but I gathered either way he wasn't
happy.
However, from a communication point of view, this style of writing is perfect for
getting your message across quickly.
Later on in my career, I worked at a company that prided itself on its easy to read
reports. While this was true (to some degree), one of the directors loved to throw
in a difficult word in every report he wrote to make the marketing manager reach for
his dictionary. He thought this was really clever and that his clients would be in
awe of his knowledge. I'm guessing his clients thought he was a tossed
(interestingly, I met an ex-client years later who told me that when their company
received one of his reports they would quickly scan it to find the unusual word and
then erupt into hysterical laughter).
Articles that are written to impress your audience about how clever you are, does
nothing more than distance them. No matter how learned your market is, they still
prefer to read information that is easy to digest.
A great way to test whether your writing is easy to comprehend is to read it out
loud. If someone spoke to you, using those words, could you instantly understand
what they were getting at or would you have to really concentrate?
Scripts for marketing videos are no different. In fact, they need to be extremely
simple in order to quickly grab the attention of people walking past at a trade
show, for example.
Writing that is heavy on technical terms and jargon can be a real turn off. The
beauty of a marketing video is that it uses both pictures and words. The saying "A
picture tells a thousand words" is a powerful concept with corporate movies. It
means you can actually get away with saying less, but easily get your message
across, because the pictures do all of the talking.
Surprisingly, clear writing can be quite a difficult writing style to master, but
the effort is well rewarded. And look at the bright side, at least people won't
burst into fits of laughter when they read your masterpiece.


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