Every day, executives and managers share a common lament: “Why can’t people write anymore?”
First, most people aren’t taught to write for the real world. In school, writing can be a free-form exercise unburdened by such distractions as the rules of grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spelling. It’s just not considered important, or it takes too much time from other more popular subjects, or the teachers themselves don’t know the language well enough to teach it, or it’s considered passé, mind-clogging memorization trivia. And when writing did matter, it was an academic style suited for book reports, essays and on up to doctoral theses. That is not the kind of writing preferred in the marketplace. It’s pseudo-literary, wordy, and usually never gets to the point until the end.
Also, people who can’t write can still spot bad writing. It’s like a tone-deaf concert patron who cringes when the soprano butchers the high notes. Good writing may not always be attractive, but bad writing is always repulsive.
Second, even those with writing talent may not know how to write in the organization’s preferred style. Every enterprise has, or should have, a “voice.” It may be the result of a long corporate history or just the boss’s preference. Academics have a different style than corporate staff, and those styles differ from that of government or the military. To be a “good” writer, the employee must not only have talent for the use of the language, but also have the linguistic agility to fit the writing to the vocabulary and cadence of the organization. Keywords are defined and mandated; words deemed harmful to the mission are banned. This kind of writing can be taught, even to people with average writing skills.
I recently was asked to speak about writing at the State Department to public diplomacy officers working in Europe and Eurasia. This group didn’t need any instruction on the rules of English, but their supervisors wanted them to brush up on their memo writing. A certain form is used to tell Foggy Bottom about events and activities meant to foster U.S. public diplomacy. They can determine an embassy’s budget and staffing, and yet the writing often left administrators puzzled, or worse. So I explained basic writing tricks that news agencies use to report news under tight wordage limits. Recommendations included bullet point lists, partial sentences, elimination of fatuous and self-serving verbiage (“a good time was had by all”) and a concentrated compilation of relevant facts, including testimonials and media reports verifying the desired outcomes. The point was not to teach writing, but to teach a form of writing suited to the needs and “voice” of the organization.
Plenty of consultancies offer guidance on external communication to clients, stakeholders or targeted audiences. However, internal writing doesn’t get the attention it deserves. A well written memo or policy paper can be as influential in an organization’s success as a clever brochure or mission statement. Managers need to design an internal “voice” and then teach their writing staff members to follow that style. The result is clarity of internal communication and the subsequent efficiency that saves time and, in turn, money by letting everyone concentrating on the task rather than on trying to decode the poorly written directives from the corporate suite or human resources department.
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