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Pete Kistler, is a 20-year-old entrepreneur from Needham, MA. He has a passion for using technology to make life simpler, easier and happier
Pete currently runs 
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New here? Employee Evolution is a blog written by Ryan Healy. Ryan is a Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist, the webs #1 social network for young professionals. Ryan speaks with organizations on best practices for recruiting and retaining Generation Y and how to effectively use social media to reach your target market. To contact Ryan, please visit our contact page.
Whether they’re right or not, your audience forms impressions of you based on your writing.
Readers assume that if your…
- Writing is sloppy: You don’t care about quality.
- Writing is unclear: You can’t communicate ideas effectively.
- Writing rambles on: You have no sense of purpose.
- Writing is formatted poorly: You have no sense of design.
- Writing is not tailored to your audience: You don’t care about others’ needs.
- Writing is too informal: You are immature.
- Writing is unorganized: You can’t convey information effectively.
Luckily, writing clearly and effectively is easier than you think. The following 8 tips will significantly enhance your ability to communicate:
1. Decide for whom you’re writing.
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes: What do they want to find out about you? Make sure you give them what they want. Where do they expect to find what they’re looking for? Make sure it’s where they expect it to be.
2. Get to the point.
Writing is most effective when it’s simple. Your reader doesn’t want to follow you down a garden path. Almost anything can be clarified by putting it into fewer words.
3. Keep it skimmable.
Accept the fact that your reader is going to skim-read your content. Not because they don’t like you, but because that’s how people read text online. They should be able to grasp everything you have to say by reading only the first sentence of every paragraph. Always state your main point before you give reasoning that leads to it.
4. Use short sentences.
Simple writing is the single best way to communicate more effectively. If you were taught that longer sentences convey greater intelligence, you were taught wrong. The less extraneous words you use, the better you communicate.
The amount of time required to process a sentence with n words is n^3. If you cut the length of a sentence in half, it will be 8 times easier to read.
5. Don’t sound stuffy.
Only use a Thesaurus for words that express an idea more accurately or more succinctly. If you use one to make yourself appear smarter, you’ll end up sounding even less intelligent. Don’t try to sound sophisticated or formal either, or you’ll come off as stuffy.
6. Play the Devil’s advocate.
Is there anything that might be misunderstood? If so, change it so that it can’t be.
7. Proofread, proofread, proofread.
Fix grammar, spelling and punctuation. Then have two other people go through it for mistakes.
8. Keep formatting simple.
Use bulleted lists to convey information quickly. Use bold headings to help the reader decide which section will tell them what they need to know.
Evaluate right now how much you use these eight points.
How many do you regularly incorporate into your writing? Work them each into your writing process to enhance your ability to effectively communicate and exude a personal brand that stands for quality and clarity.
Well… I could have used this yesterday when I had to write an important email to my boss regarding our website.
Here i’ll allow you a sneak peek .Tell me what I did wrong.
Hi Mike,
Hope you had a good weekend…
Just wanted to have a chat about the recent changes that Doug requested be made to the [redacted] pages.
I’ll be short and blunt. The changes are all the wrong direction for this page. At the top you have three “We’re Awesome!” quotes next to three “We’re Awesome” graphics. Then a buy now button. Well what is the consumer buying? They have no idea. They will not click “buy now” unless they have already heard of [redacted] and know exactly everything they need to know about the product.
On top of that we got rid of the only useful link in that top section… “Product Tour”. The confused consumer had one link of refuge. One way of finding out what the heck our product did without scrolling and reading through an encyclopedia…. And we got rid of it.
The top section is useless, ugly, and without any merit. If we must have the “We’re Awesome” in the top section we need to also have some indication of what the product actually does that makes it so awesome. Or else it is wasted and inefficient space that the user will see right through.
Down below the addition of “The World’s Best-Selling Monitoring Software” is not as bad. But once again does not feel like it is part of the overall page. It looks like it is a last minute change that was transplanted from another site…oh wait…
If that is to stay we need to remove or cut back on the proceeding three paragraphs of text… More commonly called an essay. We really need to decide what we want in this important section of the website. And my suggestion is we keep the new transplanted “The World’s Best…” and remove the essay…. Essay’s have no place on a consumer product page.
If we do follow my suggestions I recommend changing the entire design of the “World’s Best Selling” section to fit in more with the product page. Out with the red and black… In with… Well anything but red and black. It’s such a confrontational color combination…. Which brings me to my next point
We’re assaulting our users. When they first land on [redacted] product overview page where the heck do they look? Is it the blue headline (it should be) or is it the assault of red “We’re Awesome” in the call out box? Or maybe it is the giant gold icons down below. If I was looking to buy [redacted] and came to this website I would promptly leave the site, order the product from Amazon and send over my resume with the promise of fixing all your website problems….
Well that’s that. Mark might want to weigh in on this as well which is why I CC’d him in on this.
- [redacted]
Excellent points!
I use similar rules when writing emails. In fact, I wonder how much writing most employees do these days that *doesn’t* involve emails.
May I make a few additions to your points?
To keep your writing skimmable, use short paragraphs. Many of my emails have one or two sentence paragraphs. This insures that people don’t miss important points that are buried in long paragraphs.
Always use commas in a sentence when there is a natural pause in the reading. Then, try to limit yourself to only 1 comma per sentence. NEVER use more than 2 commas. This will keep your sentences short.
Thanks for this.
You touch on something I’ve been thinking about lately - the impact of delivery. Nowadays, when eveyone seems to be racing to deliver videos, and podcasts and webinars and all the other vehicles that don’t rely so much on the written word, I’ve been wondering if my attempts at information delivery through my writing will hold its ground against the others. Time will tell and I believe many who do not know how/won’t take the time to craft/don’t like to write are grabbing onto the new media as an “instead” choice and consequently are missing out on the great challenge that you’re talking talking about.
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” ~Eward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, 1839
Great post. Another thing I have learned is to stick to the facts. When you go out on a limb with assumptions you can often end up with egg on your face. Always make sure you can back up what you say, especially if you are dealing with touchy or controversial topics.
Thanks for the good points.
Hey, nice tips. Perhaps I’ll buy a glass of beer to the man from that forum who told me to go to your site