In the next few paragraphs I’ll provide you with ten reliable guidelines you can use immediately to make your own business writing more compelling, more credible, and easier to read.

Keep It Simple and Avoid Technical Language

Business writing should be straightforward and easy to read. Always avoid long words when short ones will do. Avoid technical language unless it’s absolutely required – and usually it’s not. Authors of business documents should expect their executive readers to be busy and impatient. They should never expect them to be technical experts.

Use Lots of Graphics

Business writers should allocate at least a quarter of their report space to graphics: pictures, logos, graphs, maps, diagrams, charts … anything that will help get their messages across. Words appeal to one hemisphere in the brain, graphics appeal to the other. A document with both text and powerful graphics will drive its points home. It will be far more compelling than a document with words only.

Don’t be afraid to use 50% or more of the report space for graphics. Interestingly, some of the best Web sites today allocate up to 80% of their real estate to graphics. That’s not a sin.

Use Colour – But Don’t Overdo It

Use colour and page design with deliberate thought. Preformatted report styles are readily available; colour laser printers are affordable today. They should both be used to advantage. Personally, I like the page designs that Apple provides in its proprietary software Pages. If you don’t have an Apple, find someone who does and take a close look at its page layouts. You can reproduce them in Word without much effort.

I like to use colour in my section and subsection headings. Use the same colour in all your headings. I use bright blue or dark brown. They both have an “executive” look to them and make the page look more interesting.

Charts should always be in colour.

Deliver on What You Promise – No More, No Less

I’ve read too many management reports with headings something like Findings that go onto talk about analysis, conclusions, and recommendations. If your report heading is Findings, then the only thing you’re allowed to discuss is your findings. Nothing else. Nada. That’s a rule and you’re not allowed to break it.

At the same time, all of your findings should be included under this heading. In other words, you should never introduce your findings in any other part of the report.

Keep It Short, Stupid

Keep your reports short. The shorter, the better. Busy executives are quite likely to throw short reports or proposals into their briefcases to read on a plane; they’ll rarely pick up heavy tomes to study on the train ride home.

I’ll take a risk and say that a business proposal shouldn’t be more than 25 pages long. I already know what you’re going to say: “My plan is so complex that it needs at least 40 pages – probably more – to make the points clear.”

Well, that’s simply not true. If your message is complex, put it in an appendix. Appendices can be as long as you like. Your business report, though, should include just the summary of your complex message.

Write an Interesting Table of Contents

The Table of Contents is an excellent place to tell your story. Most authors squander this opportunity by writing boring tables of contents. Here’s the Table of Contents for the Executive Summary I wrote for a client I’ll call the XYZ Company.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An Opportunity to Generate More Than $800,000 US over Five Years
The Patents Have Just Been Extended for Another 17 Years
Three Manufacturers Already Produce These Products
The New Owner Can Easily Improve Profitability by Making a Few Tactical Changes
There Are New Off-Shore Opportunities
We Are projecting 5% Annual Growth in Demand from Current Markets
We Project More Than $800,000 in Cumulative Profit – After Paying the $500,000 Debt and the Interest on That Loan
XYZ Needs to Borrow $500,000 US To Fund This Acquisition
We See Low Risk and High Reward in This Acquisition

You can see that the Table of Contents itself is interesting. Each line makes a bold claim that begs to be justified. The justification, of course, is in the body of the report. However, the reader is left with the clear impression that if he were to read the text, he would be satisfied with the justification.

Reports should have tables of contents that tell the story of the report itself. In an ideal situation, the reader wouldn’t even need to read the report. He could read just the Table of Contents and understand the essence of the report.

Start With Your Conclusions

Every good comedian holds his punch line until the end of his joke. The punch line is funny because the comedian has set it up to be funny.

In fact, we’re generally accustomed to providing our justifications before we provide our conclusions. Good creative writing will tell a story that leads its readers to a conclusion.

Good business writing calls for the author to do just the opposite! He needs to give his conclusions right up front. In fact, the Executive Summary should be dedicated to conclusions and recommendations with only a passing mention of the data that was collected and the analysis that led to those recommendations.

Executives are action oriented. They want to know what they should do. They recruit good people and they trust them. Executives don’t have the time nor the interest to revisit the entire rationale their trusted staff has already churned through. They just want to know what they’re supposed to do. A good business report will tell them exactly that – and it will do it right away.

If an executive feels uncomfortable or curious about a point, he should be able to flip to the part of the report that deals with that issue. Generally, though, the executive wants to be reassured that his trusted advisors have done their homework; executives don’t want to step through that homework themselves.

Putting the recommendations for action at the beginning of a report is one of the most challenging adjustments for new business writers to make.

Use the Active Voice

The sentence “The police shot the thief,” is in the active voice. The sentence “The thief was shot by the police” is in the passive voice. Always use the active voice unless there are compelling reasons to use the passive voice. There are not many compelling reasons.

Readers can understand statements written in the active voice far more easily than those written in the passive voice.

The writer can manipulate the passive voice to hide responsibility. For example, an author could write “The thief was shot,” and the reader would never know who did the shooting. The most famous case of this obfuscation was Nixon’s pronouncement that “Mistakes were made.” By phrasing his claim this way, he failed to take responsibility for his mistakes and looked even weaker for it.

Avoid Sentence Clutter

We often write phrases that simply don’t add value. Look at how I’ve eliminated clutter in these sentences.

It should be noted that my budget for $600,000 for next year is a 12% decrease from …
It would be helpful to view the annual performance review as an …
It is understood that during the prison sentence, he …

I feel slightly miffed when I see sentences started with phrases like these:

As per our earlier conversation, …
Enclosed please find …
Please be advised …

In general, we should write with the same style we use when we speak. Our manuscripts will be far more genuine and credible.

Learn the Basic Rules of Grammar and Observe Them

If you bungle basic grammatical rules, you’ll lose credibility. Let me give a few examples:

Incorrect: Charlie and myself founded the company.
Correct: Charlie and I founded the company.

Incorrect: The consultant’s report recommended we upgrade our computer, improving our documentation, better software, user participation in determining system requirements.
Correct: The consultant’s report recommended we upgrade our computer, improve our documentation, build better software, and ensure user participation in determining the system requirements.

Incorrect: The economics professor discussed the high cost of living with two young female students.
Correct: The professor discussed with two young female students the high cost of living.

I encourage you to revisit these sentences to discover exactly why they needed to be changed.

Ask Someone Else to Read Your Piece

I know I promised to give you ten points, so this one is a bonus.

When I first got into consulting I was interested to learn that the partners in the firm made it a practice to give both their proposals and reports to another partner for review. The key criterion for reviewing a manuscript was clear: the reviewer must have no background in the subject matter.

This meant that a partner who focused on Information Technology would critique proposals from the Human Resources partner. The Financial Services partner would critique the Natural Resources partner’s work.

At first, this struck me as odd. But it took me only a moment to see the wisdom of the practice. This review provided some assurance that the report was sufficiently clear and direct that a client executive would be able to follow it without ambiguity.

All of us should adopt this practice.

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Jan Wall has worked with Fortune 500 companies, global management-consulting firms and has led major development projects that called for business plans and technical writing. He has mentored senior business executives and critiqued graduate business students’ theses. It is a pleasure for synaptici.com to feature Jan as a guest author.

Business Writing is Difficult for 6 Reasons

Writing Education is Inadequate

Most students hated their English classes. Their classes just weren’t interesting. In fact, they were often downright boring. Teachers taught the rules of the language without giving their students any sense of excitement about the language itself. Essays were measured more for their weight (number of words) than for their accuracy, respect for the language, and intrinsic interest.

But it gets worse. For decades teachers were prohibited from teaching their students to write! Why? For one thing, education was geared to teaching “big picture” or “holistic” worldviews. Unfortunately, focusing on comma splices or run on sentences was considered too mundane — so it wasn’t treated as an important issue.

Excellent Writing Requires Clear Thinking

But here’s the real kicker. Strong business writing requires rigorous adherence to the rules for clear thinking. Most people have never been taught to think rigorously! Students are typically taught subject matter such as history or political science or physics. Students are rarely taught the rules for clear thinking explicitly. Language is our most important thinking tool and clear thinking enables powerful writing.

The ancient Greek philosophers developed the fundamentals of logic. Logic is a collection of rules that govern clear thinking – much as traffic laws govern safe driving. These rules don’t tell you what to think; they tell you how to think. Driving laws don’t tell you where to go; they tell you how to drive while on your journey. Logic tells you nothing about the “outside world.” It tells you a lot about your “inside world” – how to process, evaluate, and make sense of the world outside. Without this training, it’s very easy to come to the wrong conclusions. Lack of clarity in thinking is always reflected in poor writing. Poorly reasoned arguments are often ignored or forgiven during the give and take of conversations; they’re the kiss of death in business writing. All of us sense that intuitively.

English is a Difficult Language

The rules of English are inconsistent. Those who learn English as a second language are stymied by the inconsistencies. There are no consistent rules for spelling, punctuation, word usage, or forming plurals.

Graduate Schools Ignore the Problem

Graduate schools don’t teach their students to write well because they take the position that writing is a core skill students should have mastered before entering their graduate programs. Nevertheless, the schools recognize that their students can’t write well. But rather than teach their students to write well, they punish them for failing to write well!

To be fair, some schools do offer their students access to tutors – occasionally at some cost. Unfortunately, these tutors are often seen to offer remedial help – a service for the learning-disabled or disadvantaged. Since few are willing to brand themselves this way – either in their own eyes or the eyes of their fellow students – these tutors’ services often go unused.

Most graduate programs – with the notable exceptions of Literature, Journalism, and Philosophy – consider writing to be a background or secondary activity. The “meat and potatoes” of the discipline or field or study doesn’t insist on fluency in the written language to be a success. Since students are so preoccupied with learning the essence of their fields, they ignore – either by design or neglect – writing.

Now here’s the irony of this situation: Schools in general – and graduate schools in particular – are intended to create “conscious competents.” This means that the schools must educate their students with two aims in mind: First, they must master a given body of knowledge. Second, they must be able to explain the reasoning process for drawing their conclusions in that field of study. They often succeed at the former and fall short on the latter.

Students Need a Mentor to Learn to Write Well

Students need a mentor who will take the time to read their manuscripts carefully and critique them thoroughly. It’s unreasonable to expect students to study books on good business writing style, grammar, punctuation, etc. and apply the lessons flawlessly. Learning occurs when dealing with specific pieces of writing. Students need a mentor to learn to write well.

Unfortunately, there are few mentors available. Mentoring requires a lot of time and energy. Good mentors are generally unwilling to take the effort required to critique a student’s paper unless they either have a love of the subject or believe there are significant advantages for them. In practice, this means that there are few mentors available.

It also means that few writers will learn to write well.

Business Writers Avoid the Vernacular

All of us have developed a conversational style over the years. We’re comfortable with that style. However, that style often doesn’t work in business writing. Let me give two examples.

In our daily conversations, we often speak in a “stream of consciousness.” In other words, we tell stories. These stories describe a sequence of events as they occur to us. We’re tempted to adopt that same style in business writing. It just doesn’t work. In business writing, authors group their ideas under various headings.

In a management consulting report, for example, the headings are generally Terms of Reference, Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations. This structure calls for us to group all our findings under one heading, all conclusions under another heading, and all recommendations under a third. This is incompatible with stream of conscious thinking that leads a speaker to move from one finding to one conclusion to one recommendation.

Brevity or conciseness is another major difference between our daily vernacular speech and good business writing. In our daily conversations, we often indulge a speaker who overstates his points or is redundant. In writing, that same style will characterize the author as highly disorganized and therefore not credible. Making the transition from vernacular speech to effective business writing is difficult.

How Can You Learn Effective Business Writing?

The traditional way to learn business writing is to take a course. Often, this is just not practical. The course a student needs may not be available for a couple months, it may be too expensive, it may be offered in a remote location, and it may not offer the close scrutiny of a student’s writing that will make the difference between success and failure.

The most effective strategy, without question, is to retain a mentor. You need a mentor who will collaborate with you in writing your document. The relationship is all-important. If you simply want the writing done, you can turn the job over to a business writer. But if you want to learn the craft yourself, you need a mentor who will guide you. Ideally, he’ll encourage you to take the initiative to write a document – such as a business plan – and then critique your work through your various versions. The process is difficult and time consuming. The critiques can be harsh so this is not for the feint of heart.

But the committed student will write a document that suits his purposes and, at the same time, learn the craft so he can do it himself the next time.

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