Write It Well

When sending rapid-fire e-mails back and forth across the office, it’s fine to write one-line messages. Those messages don’t even have to be complete sentences. When you know your audience well, sentence fragments can be efficient and effective. Take a look at these very effective incomplete sentences:

• To consider at today’s meeting: deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.
• Monday, March 6–OK.
• Sure–when we get budget approval.

Just be sure to be quite clear. Sentence fragments can be ambiguous, sound overly blunt, or give your reader the impression that your message isn’t important. Like I wrote in my previous post, sometimes saving space wastes time. Just keep your audience clearly in view.

For more tips on keeping e-mail efficient and effective with sentence fragments, check out chapter four in E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.

I just read a post on Language Log about a big controversy over headlines. Some newspaper headlines try to save space by leaving out verbs and articles: “Man Shot in Street” instead of “A Man Was Shot in the Street.” Condensing your headline to a few succinct words is a great idea; strip away too many words, and you’re likely to confuse readers.

Glance at Craigslist, and you’ll find even tighter headlines, like “lg 3bd, 3bth, cmp rmd, hdwd, pk, best loc in town, pets.” Wow! That headline gives me a lot of information in a very small space — such a small space that I have to sit down and carefully unpack those abbreviations to figure out what’s been said. Oh, nice. It’s a “large three-bedroom, three-bath” apartment. But I’m not sure what “cmp rmd” means. “Complimentary room-dusting”? “Camp remodeling”? If you want to tell me that the flat’s been “completely remodeled” without taking up much headline space, please do so in the body of the advertisement. If I don’t understand your abbreviation within half a second, I’m likely to keep scanning.

Which brings me to another point: when readers scan long lists of headlines and titles — like on Craigslist, or a search engine results page — they’re often looking for particular words and phrases. Their brains skip over all the clutter and lead them to the words they want. When moving so quickly, the brain lumps abbreviations in with the clutter. No matter how much space you save, if I skip it, it’s all wasted.

Here is a before/after example.  Do you see how the use of headings in the “After” example makes the document much easier to read?  Following the examples, you’ll find tips and tools for using headings in your next document.

Before:

Hope you can come to the meeting this summer. The annual presidents’ circle sales meeting will be held at the Hilton in San Francisco and you should bring your updated presentations and spreadsheets.  You can make travel arrangements yourself or Pam can help you. We’ll have one day of learning with workshop leaders including Jamie Hartwell, Linda Lou, and Peter Panino and one day to look internally at our processes with Jack Deiner.  We’re going to Alcatraz. It will be three days long with an optional dinner on Tuesday night. Sally is no longer available to help with travel arrangements. Another agenda will be sent out. You can come on Wednesday morning or Tuesday night but make sure that you’re there till Friday morning. Bring comfortable walking shoes.  If you make the travel arrangements yourself, use billing code 55789.  You don’t need to bring anything else.  You were selected because you did a great job.

After:

Annual Presidents’ Circle Sales Meeting – July 14th – 17th, 2009

Because of the great job you did this year, you’ve been invited to the Presidents’ Circle Sales Meeting in San Francisco this summer. Following is all the information you’ll need to make your travel arrangements. A more detailed agenda will be sent to you by the first of May.

(Heading) Meeting Dates and Location

The meeting will be held in the San Francisco Hilton from Tuesday, July 14th through Friday, July 17th, 2009

(HEADING) Travel Arrangements

The travel process has changed; Sally is no longer available to help. You can make arrangements yourself using your company credit card and billing code 55789 or ask Pam to help.

(HEADING) What to Bring

Please bring your updated spreadsheets and presentations. Also, please bring comfortable walking shoes for an outing to Alacatraz on Friday morning. We’ll provide everything else you need.

(HEADING) Agenda

Tuesday:  meet for dinner at the hotel restaurant at 7pm (optional)

Wednesday: Meetings from 9-5  with Jamie Hartwell, Linda Lou, and Peter Paninofollowed by dinner at Aziza

Thursday: Meetings from 9-5 with Jack Deiner followed by dinner at La Mar Cebicheria

Friday: morning excursion to Alcatraz. Meeting convenes at 1pm.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I’ll send out a detailed agenda by May 1st. Thanks and congratulations!

Headings make your documents easier to read; they provide a road map for your reader. Headings and subheadings are essential if your document is long, complicated, or contains technical information. Here’s why:

An article in the Washington Post quotes a recent Lexus advertisement: “The Lexus loaner turned out to be a GS Hybrid. To say it was an upgrade from the battered Crown Vic I’d driven with the LAPD would be an understatement.” It hardly sounds like an advertisement, does it? In noir page-turner style, the advertisement / serial novel goes on to seamlessly brand a work of fiction.

Facing a younger generation that finds traditional branding rather patronizing and extremely annoying, the world of alternative advertising has blossomed into a $2 billion business. Creative writing skills are more useful than ever — and there’s even less tolerance for inflated jargon and business-speak.

“Most people could cut their email output by ten percent or so and maintain or even increase their productivity,” writes Art Carden. Messages to cut:

• Questions you could answer for yourself. See what Google has to say before you send an e-mail that makes you look silly and wastes time.
• Responses to e-mails that CC you. Often, these e-mails are just informative, and don’t need an answer from you.
• Forwards. Yes, it’s a noble cause. So why don’t you take the time to compose your own personal, thought-provoking e-mail, and send THAT to your friends? They’ll appreciate it much more.

E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide has more great tips on boosting your e-mail effectiveness.

Andrew Ross, San Francisco Chronicle reporter, likes our honesty and willingness to own our own writing mistakes.  He wrote…

We received the following “retraction” from Write It Well, an Oakland company that “improves business communications skills.”    One of your colleagues alerted us to the fact that there are three typos in the press release we sent you earlier. For a company that earns its keep by teaching others to communicate clearly and professionally, this is pretty embarrassing. But as we tell the people we train: Everyone makes mistakes; own them and do better next time.”     A lesson there for all of us.