Business Monitor
Effective communication T
brilliant on the phone, hugely impressive face-to-face but if you canʼt write your message, you are going to struggle.
he growth of email and social media has made this statement truer than ever. You may be
The truth is that a lot of business owners do struggle – they have never really been taught how to write, so we shouldnʼt be surprised. I have seen some brochures produced that are at best semi-literate – one was for a fairly large printing company, others have been for consulting engineers and high tech manufacturers.
Every time I see badly written English from such businesses it surprises me. In each of the above cases you would expect that accuracy was an important part of their promise, otherwise how do they stay in business? This is why it matters – if your brochure or selling email or social media posts are littered with spelling mistakes, bad grammar and missing punctuation, consider what message thatʼs sending to someone who knows the difference.
Be honest with yourself Putting it right is not a mountain to climb. First up you have to be honest with yourself. Admitting, even to yourself, that your written English skills are poor is embarrassing – itʼs like admitting that you canʼt read.
The basic solution is blindingly simple:
donʼt do it yourself, get someone else to do it. That someone could well be working for you; it could be your spouse, a child or best friend from school days. If you donʼt have such a resource or you think they are no better than you, professional help is at hand. A copywriter, journalist or English teacher will sort out the problem in double-quick time. To get best value, enthusiasm and availability add ʻrecently retiredʼ to each of those professions.
If you are paying someone to write for you, it will have certain benefits. You will be forced to give a proper brief which you have thought through. You will be keen to get it right first time and not keep changing your message as I have seen done many times. You will (I strongly recommend) have consistency of message, whether that is a brochure, advert or email.
Improve yourself
But you would probably like to improve your own skills as a long-term investment. The simplest start is to
| 20 | December 2019 Every owner of a small business needs to be an effective communicator in writing.
master the spelling and grammar- checking programme on your computer. This alone could be all the improvement you need. Being hectored by a computer is very annoying but do what it tells you and you will find you are writing better English immediately. Try your local college. Do they run a
ʻwriting for businessʼ evening class, one day a week? (If not, why not?). You will benefit, you will probably enjoy it and you might meet a new client (or two!) – very satisfying and tax-deductible, too. People worry about what tone to adopt when writing for business purposes. Well, stop worrying because the answer is easy: just be yourself. Dressing up your communications with a string of four syllable words doesnʼt make you look clever, it makes you look pompous. It also makes some readers feel foolish when they donʼt know those words. Click; goodbye sale.
The best advice I have read on this issue came from Maeve Binchy, the highly successful fiction writer. She said: “Write in a conversational style, but remember that there is such a thing as intelligent conversation.” You may well be conversant with the
ʻFor Dummiesʼ books. I have read several and I rate them highly. ʻBusiness Writing for Dummiesʼ is one of them and I recommend it. OK, itʼs American so you have to screen that out but the rest is a good guide. Not much money (£11.75 on Amazon new; used copies elsewhere from £3) and money well spent.
Edit your writing or get someone else to do it. Editing your own work can be really difficult because you thought those extra words were important first time around so you are inclined to still think so when you reread.
If in doubt
My favourite author is the American, Elmore Leonard (sadly dead now). His writing is often described as spare – his rule was, “If in doubt, leave it out” Good advice. Too many words is a classic error (I confess to it myself). It comes from a wish to explain a product or idea fully but you end up with the subject suffocating in an excess of words.
Similarly are you writing sentences that are just too long? Your readers will find three short sentences a lot easier to absorb than one long one. Punctuation. Aah, does this ever sort the sheep from the goats. In some cases it looks and reads like someone has got to the end and thought, “Iʼd better put some commas in” and sprinkled them like hundreds and thousands. Read Lynne Trussʼs book Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Itʼs actually funny and it was a surprise best seller which tells you how many people struggle with punctuation and how many are ready to pay to improve that weakness.
Amazon are selling at £6.47 and there are used copies from less than a pound. Buy a new one – youʼll be using it regularly.
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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