How to write
How to write
How to write
How to write
This is the easiest thing to get right but the most common thing to get wrong. I see so
many emails, letters and memos that have simple but yet detracting errors in them. Yes,
this is one of my pet dislikes and I regularly remind my staff to do that one important thing
- read through your communication before you communicate it.
It’s not that any of us are that unintelligent that we would deliberately write glaring errors
such as ‘we have did very well on the project’. It’s just that we originally wrote ‘we have
done very well on the project’ and then meant to change it (for some reason) to ‘we did
very well on the project’. But guess what, one of our team came into the office we were
distracted and couldn’t be bothered to read through the email from the beginning again. So
we just send it out. And so the risk is that our team, our boss and the senior management
team all form the impression that we don’t know how to write simple communications. Yes,
REMEMBER TO READ THROUGH YOUR WORK BEFORE YOU SEND IT OUT. I remember one
of my teachers telling me this when I got an ‘E’ for an essay assignment (he didn’t give any
‘Fs’) as I had clearly failed to read through my work. Perhaps I was fortunate that this
event happened so early on in my life. But hey, if this is an issue for you, it’s the simplest
one to correct. Whoopee!
So now that we all read through our work before distributing it let’s move on to the all
important bullet point list:
• Read through your work (couldn’t resist it!)
• Write in paragraphs
• Spell-check your work. Oh, and by the way, spell-checking your work doesn’t
mean that it has now been 100% auto-corrected. Wow, the amount of times I see
things like ‘what have we leant form this’ rather than ‘what have we learnt from
this’. The guy run it through spell-check but didn’t read through before sending. [By
the way, this book has been proof-reader by the publisher along with most of my
friends and family so if you find any typos or grammatical errors please write to
them directly. If I remember I’ll include their names and addresses in the reference
section].
• Get someone else to read it. If it’s that important send it to a colleague, work pal
or even to your boss (marked draft) so that they can use fresh eyes to pick up on
the errors that your brain no longer has the capacity to identify.
• Know your audience. Is it the end of the story once you have developed your
effective writing style? Well, no. It is important to remember that the style and
content of your communication will change depending upon the audience. One
example I came across was as follows: “You are one day late in submitting your
expense claim and as such you have breached company policy. Please note that if
the claim is not submitted within the next 3 working days or a valid reason provided
for why that is not possible it will not be processed for re-imbursement”. OK, this is
a pretty strict email and the wording may be effective in making people jump and
following protocol. However, in this particular case the email had been sent directly
to the CEO of the company who had been on business travel for 3 weeks. Rightly or
wrongly (you decide) the CEO did not take kindly to such an instruction and within one hour the standard communication had been reviewed and updated. That is not
to say that one rule should apply for more junior staff and one for more senior staff
(that’s simply unfair) but when you communicate with an individual think about their
level of seniority and question yourself on whether the wording you use will generate
the desired reaction from the recipient. So when writing a communication please
think about the following:
o How senior is the person (or people) receiving the communication?
o Is the tone of the email reasonable? Is it perhaps too harsh or indeed soft?
o What is the likely reaction from the communication? Will it perhaps kick-off
some type of ‘email war’?
o If there are deadlines set are they reasonable? It may not be wise to corner
senior members of staff or show them up in a bad light. Some of your senior
colleagues can certainly influence your career and reputation.
o How would you react to the email? If your reaction is likely to be adverse
then so is theirs.
o Is the title clear, concise and ‘eye-catching’? If it is truly important that all
staff read the email (rather than them sending it direct to their email ‘bins’)
then make sure the title includes ‘Important’ or ‘PLEASE READ’ or
‘***ACTION REQUIRED***’ or whatever is necessary but reasonable to grab
their attention.
• Send the email to yourself for review first (if it is an email). Do you know, it is
amazing how often I spot spelling, grammar and other errors in one of my
communications by sending it to myself to read first. As my brain becomes tired
since I have drafted and amended an email multiple times, I send it to myself and
then take a short break before reading it again, normally grabbing a coffee. I then
typically spot all the things I should have detected earlier as my word blindness has
disappeared. Try it and see whether it works for you.
• Imagine you are your own boss. Another trick of the trade is to imagine that you
are your boss and read the email from their perspective. If you are the ultimate
boss of your company thanks for buying this book, but I feel that you should be
reading one about strategy that incorporates impressive diagrams and flow-charts
along with incompressible buzzwords and complicated diction. Seriously, if you look
at your communication from your boss’s point of view there’s a great chance that
you’ll spot all the things that they would.
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