Write It Well

The new software engineer on your team doesn’t need to be a poet, but she does need to have the writing skills to communicate her work clearly and simply. Some tips on evaluating a candidate’s writing skills:

• Is his resume concise? If someone rambles on a document as tightly-formatted as a resume, it’s likely he can’t recognize and communicate the meat of other matters, as well.
• Is there a central idea in each paragraph in her cover letter? Knowing how to group and rank information is a powerful skill in any arena — from organizing a to-do list to writing an annual report.
• Do pay attention to the details of punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Clients and business partners will notice unprofessional mistakes, even if you don’t.

When our texting thumbs grow tired, it’s easy to rely on shorthand to send business text messages more quickly. Unfortunately, dropping long acronyms like “DRIB” (“don’t read if busy”) and and “AFAIC” (“as far as I’m concerned”) can confuse readers. Hewlett-Packard has a convenient list of commonly-texted business terms. Of note: in this context, STD is not quite what you may have feared.

As always, use jargon judiciously. Are the few seconds saved by abbreviating “way to go” really worth confusing your reader?

Tools for Success’ podcast interview with Natasha Terk is available now.  Listen to Natasha talk about e-mail and strategies to use it effectively in business communications.  Natasha covers the following topics in the 15-minute interview with Ken Inlow:

• How to craft clear and concise e-mail messages
• How to get your message across the clutter 
• How to get people to open your message
• How to present a consistent professional image
• How to avoid e-mail risks

E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide just landed on the Columbia Law School reader. The book is a user-friendly handbook to crafting professional, effective e-mail. It covers everything from writing persuasively to inbox housekeeping, plus tips on grammar nitty-grits like misplaced modifiers.

“E-Mail grew up in the lawless frontier of the Internet, without the traditional rules of old-fashioned letter writing, wrote Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “This valuable book provides much needed guidelines for managing the demands and opportunities e-mail has brought to the workplace.”

A brilliant idea is worthless if you can’t explain it to other people effectively. Richard Bell, who runs a venture capital firm in east Africa, said that 90% of the business plans on his desk were too poorly written for him to bother reading. The problem, of course, is that great ideas don’t speak for themselves. Garbled, unclear messages communicate incompetence — and little else. Thank goodness we can all learn new writing skills throughout our lives. To discover simple, relevant ways you can improve your business writing skills, check out Write It Well’s books on business writing.

A Phillies fan asked, “Why can’t us?” on a radio show last Thursday. The Phillies haven’t been to the World Series since 1993, so the wistful, ungrammatical plea was the perfect rallying catchphrase for the team’s fans. Sometimes, “bad” grammar is more effective than “good” grammar. It sounds like blue-collar grit and visits to grandma, which is just fine when we’re talking about good old-fashioned fun like baseball.

We run into problems when we take informal grammar out of context. When people falsely put on blue-collar airs or unnaturally adopt “bad” grammar, they risk sounding incompetent or patronizing.

When I was eight, I asked my brother what ASCII meant. “ASCII is a secret military code. I’ve managed to break it,” he said, “and I read their plans to kidnap you.”

Like many other tech terms, ASCII is an unclear acronym, easily confusing businesspeople and eight-year-olds alike. My brother was partially right — it’s a simple code for representing letters, punctuation marks, and digits as ones and zeroes. It stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and people pronounce it “asky”. It’s far from secret.

“Cloud computing” is a much newer term. It refers to web-based applications like Google Mail, where data and software live in a network somewhere, and not on your hard drive. For definitions of these and other tech terms, check out Hewlett Packard’s list of baffling IT terms.

If you’re unsure about the meaning of a catchy new tech term, chances are good your readers will be uncertain, too. Because technology grows so quickly, it spawns new words at a breathtaking speed. Many of these words are useful, but until they’re widely known it’s helpful to clarify their meanings for your reader.

To really get your idea across, reach for the phone AND your computer. The phone adds urgency and personality to your e-mail, while an e-mail can quickly convey and store detailed or complicated information. Your goal is to keep your correspondents from having to jot down notes on the phone, while letting them know that your message is important enough for a phone call.

The order — phone first or later — depends on your message. It may be most effective to send an e-mail with all the information, adding, “I’ll call you on Thursday to hear your opinion.” Or, you can use your phone call to cover the basics, adding, “I’ll e-mail you with the details of our conversation.”

From poets to public relations writers, we all get stuck in front of a blank screen from time to time. As Gail Godwin writes in her essay, “The Watcher at the Gate,” most of us have inner critics who throttle our ideas. She calls her critic the “Watcher.” “It is amazing the lengths a Watcher will go to keep you from pursuing the flow of your imagination,” she writes. “Watchers are notorious pencil sharpeners, ribbon changers, plant waterers, home repairers and abhorrers of messy rooms or messy pages.”

She’s got it right: when we name our inner critics, they’re much easier to ignore.

“The trainer’s enthusiasm was contagious” wrote one participant at a recent Write It Well workshop, “she was responsive to questions and interactive with the audience.”

“I thought an e-mail seminar would be a waste of time. I ended up wishing it could have lasted longer and gone into more detail,” wrote another participant.

“The content was timed just right, and flowed well,” wrote another.

Write It Well offers customized business writing workshops in the Bay Area and beyond, as well as workshop facilitator kits for delivering your own high-quality writing workshop, seminar, or off-site training.