On
the morning of a second day of a business writing workshop,
one of my participants said, "My wife is an English
teacher. When I told her about the changes in writing
that you taught us yesterday, she got very upset. She
said if I ever start a sentence with the word and or if
I ever write a one sentence paragraph she will slap my
wrist."
The
man-and his wife-hadn't understood. Business writing is
different from the writing you learn in the classroom.
This is because both the readers and the image you want
to project of yourself are different.
In
school the teacher assigns or negotiates a topic with
the students. There is a specific word count involved.
A student may be asked to write a 1,000 word essay comparing
the use of symbolism in George Orwell's book 1984 and
Margaret Atwood's Handmaiden's Tale. Sound familiar?
The student then scrambles to read the books (not having
quite completed the earlier assignment), looks up the
word symbolism and tries to make sense of the assignment.
The
student runs into three problems. First, understanding
the assignment and pulling the information from the texts.
Second, producing the required word count. Students soon
clue into the idea that these two problems can be solved
by writing about the same point several times but using
different words. This hides the fact that the writer isn't
too clear on the topic and brings up the word count.
The
third problem revolves around image. If a student can
make himself sound ten years older and give a pompous
flavour to his paper, he will get top marks. This is difficult
because of the vocabulary level. If you listen to many
teenagers words such as like, rad, yo (now in the dictionary),
duh, dissing are sprinkled throughout their conversations.
None of these will fit into an English assignment. But
the solution lies in the thesaurus.
One
young man I know writes his essays according to his normal
speech patterns and when he is finished uses the thesaurus
to upgrade all the nouns to polysyllables. It changes
an easy-to-read document into a more complicated one and
certainly gives in a more ponderous flavor. And, yes,
he always receives top marks.
So
this is what we learn in school: how to disguise our thoughts
if we are not sure what we are saying, how to pad sentences
with unnecessary words, and how to project the image of
someone we are not.
Does
this style of writing work in the business world? Absolutely
not.
Our
readers do not receive a salary for pouring over our efforts.
Our readers are busy people who want to pick up documents,
read them quickly and know what they are to do next. They
also want to feel there is a live, warm-blooded person
writing to them-not the ghost of Ernest Hemingway.
Here
are some tips for today's writing:
