Skilful business writing involves getting your message across simply and quickly. This often means writing instyle that is easily read and understood bybroad audience.

Yet, writing simply is often difficult for most of us.

Why? The answer lies in our school education. We learnt that if we used big words and complex sentences, we were more likely to get‘A’ by our English teacher or University lecturer. The education system taught us that people who usebroad range of vocabulary are more intelligent thatrest of us.

There is nothing wrong with writing beautifully pieces of prose that featurestunning range of vocabulary knowledge. However, such writing is unsuitable forbusiness market.

No business manager hastime to wade through material that meanders and weaves beforepoint is made. They are even less likely to have time to grabdictionary to work out whatwriter is trying to say.

When I used to work asmarket research consultant, I hadimpossible task of trying to write market research reports that seemed interesting. My immediate response was to writereport that would make my University lecturer’s proud. Sadly, my colleagues all feltsame way.

It wasn’t until we hadbusiness writing consultant come in to train us about how to write atlevel ofYear eight student that we realisedfolly of our ways.

Using my newly found skills of writingreport using simple English, I proudly produced my ‘easy onbrain’ report to my manager (who missedwriting class). He told me ‘You write like you talk’. To this day, I still don’t know if he was criticising my talking or writing ability, but I gathered either way he wasn’t happy.

However, fromcommunication point of view, this style of writing is perfect for getting your message across quickly.

Later on in my career, I worked atcompany that prided itself on its easy to read reports. While this was true (to some degree), one ofdirectors loved to throw indifficult word in every report he wrote to makemarketing manager reach for his dictionary. He thought this was really clever and that his clients would be in awe of his knowledge. I’m guessing his clients thought he wastosser (interestingly, I metex-client years later who told me that when their company received one of his reports they would quickly scan it to findunusual word and then erupt into hysterical laughter).

Articles that are written to impress your audience about how clever you are, do nothing more than distance them. No matter how learned your market is, they still prefer to read information that is easy to digest.

A great way to test whether your writing is easy to comprehend is to read it out loud. If someone spoke to you, using those words, could you instantly understand what they were getting at or would you have to really concentrate?

Scripts for marketing videos are no different. In fact, they need to be extremely simple in order to quickly grabattention of people walking past attrade show, for example.

Writing that is heavy on technical terms and jargon can bereal turn off. The beauty ofmarketing video is that it uses both pictures and words. The saying “A picture tellsthousand words” ispowerful concept with corporate movies. It means you can actually get away with saying less, but easily get your message across, becausepictures do all oftalking.

Surprisingly, clear writing can be quitedifficult writing style to master, buteffort is well rewarded. And look atbright side, at least people won’t burst into fits of laughter when they read your masterpiece.

(c) Marie-Claire Ross twozerozerofive. All rights reserved.

This article was posted on January twofour, twozerozerofive