Write It Well

Do you remember when we wrote press releases, printed them, stuffed them into envelopes, and mailed them? Now we write them, format them for the screen, and send them electronically. Write It Well’s new release is posted on PR Web where business editors interested in stories about business communications today will find it.

Electronic dissemination means that we can get the news out much faster. That’s good news. The bad news is that members of the press get a lot more news than they used to. How do we get their attention?

Getting their attention is the cornerstone of our writing skills training programs (books, onsite training, online training): always state your main point clearly at the beginning of the message.

Think about the journalistic triangle (an inverted triangle) which is described in our book, E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide, p. 20. Newspaper editors know that people often scan only the headline and first part of an article. They also know that the final paragraph or two might need to be chopped off to save space. That’s why they answer their readers’ most improtant question right at the beginiing. We need to keep that in mind when we’re writing to editors too.

Keep the journalistic triangle in mind when you write. Putting the most important information first gets the main point across right away and gives readers a context for the details that are coming.

We hope that you’ll read our entire press release but if you stop after the first paragraph, we hope you got the most important message!

Notice anything new today? That’s right, we’ve changed our site. New look. New features. Faster. One hundred percent organic. Let us know what you think.

We hope that you aren’t one of those unfortunate people who get out of bed to check their e-mail. Believe me, people do it. We were hired by a global energy company earlier this year because their sales staff was so busy reading and responding to e-mail, they had no time to be with customers. They were also losing sleep! We learned what happens when people receive “too much e-mail.”

First of all, what does “too much e-mail” mean, specifically?

We interviewed sales managers around the world and had the IT department run some numbers. We found, universally, that anyone who received more than 65 e-mail messages each day said that they received “too much e-mail.”

What happens if you receive “too much e-mail?” If you receive “too much e-mail,” you start to miss the important messages. If your organization sell a product or service, sales might suffer. And, if you are conscientious and hard-working, you probably try to answer them all and then check your e-mail in the middle of the night.

So, what can be done about “too much e-mail?”

1. Have the CEO, department head, or manager tell everyone about the negative impact of sending too much e-mail and its affect on sales or profitability or whatever is important to your group.
2. Have your corporation, organization, department, or team develop a set of e-mail guidelines.
3. Ask people to use better judgement when they decide to send each e-mail they send.
4. Ask people to reduce the number of e-mails they send by ten each day.

Keep in mind that it’s not just the quantity of e-mail that is important, it’s also the quality of e-mail. More on that later…

Answer: Because you used PowerPoint to write the presentation. A client we worked for recently said that she and her staff were in “PowerPoint purgatory.” “Everything we do,” she said, “is done in PowerPoint.” Using PowerPoint to support your presentation is a good idea. Using it to draft your content is not, because you are more than likely to end up, as our client did, with too many slides, packed with too much text. We strongly urge you to plan your presentation in Word before building it in PowerPoint. And remember, PowerPoint slides should support your message. Here are some steps to follow to create an effective presentation:
Decide why you are presenting

• Think about your audience’s interests, needs, and concerns
• Focus on your most important message
• Answer your audience’s key questions by providing supporting information
• Create a set of slides that support and reinforce your message

If you keep an eye on the evolving language, you might want to check out the handy guide to current jargon at http://www.tendocom.com/view/jargon-watch.php. Doing that the other day, we noticed the word “grok.” Those of us who spent our formative years immersed in science fiction know this word — it was coined by author Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land and entered common usage for a time during the somewhat hallucinogenic sixties and seventies.

Tendo defines “grok” as Internet slang meaning “to understand something to an almost Zen-like state,” usually used by a subculture, such as techies. The folks at Tendo love the word, because it “…acts as a line in the sand: You get it or you don’t. It’s useful for separating out the nerd elite from the normal people.”

We like the word, too. It’s got a great sound (say it aloud a few times and you’ll see what we mean). But like any made-up word, if you don’t know what it means, you’ll just shake your head: Is it a bird? A plane? A noun? A verb? Like any jargon, its function as a business communication tool is limited to those people who “grok” it.

Happy New Year from the Write It Well team!

If you place a bulk book order through Write It Well (five or more books), we’ll send you an equal number of Just Commas for free. Now there’s no excuse to misuse the comma!