10 tips for improving your writing in the workplace

I believe writing is one of the most important and valuable skills there is.

A well written email, post or article can reach widely, change people’s thinking, cause people to act, and have significant impact. Badly written articles are often ignored and achieve little impact. Even worse, bad writing can cause confusion among your audience and you may be perceived as unserious, unprofessional or incompetent.

I’m far from a perfect writer, but I have always been interested in language and I certainly have strong opinions and feelings about writing. If you want to improve your writing in the workplace, you may find it useful to review this checklist before you hit "Send", "Post" or "Publish".

1. What is my main message, and have I communicated it clearly? Know what you want to achieve with your writing, and make sure to make your point explicitly.
2. Will my readers be interested? Consider what motivates your intended audience. What do they find interesting, relevant and persuasive? Being boring is one of the deadly sins.
3. Will my readers understand me? You don’t want to talk down to your audience, but you also need to avoid or explain any concepts that readers can’t be expected to know. Provide enough context so I as the reader understand what you are telling me and why you are telling me this. Use examples, images, diagrams and links to more information or useful resources where effective.
4. Have I included a call to action? If you don’t want people to do something after reading your text, why bother writing in the first place?
5. Am I following a logical structure? Tell me the important stuff as early as possible. Make sure sections, paragraphs and sentences flow logically.
6. Have I answered the obvious questions? If you’re writing about an upcoming course that people can sign up for, tell people what they will learn, who it is for, whether there are any prerequisites, where it will take place and whether there is any cost involved.
7. Does my title communicate who should read my text and why? “Upcoming course” tells the reader nothing; they will have no idea whether the content is relevant or interesting. “10 tips for becoming a more effective board member”, on the other hand, screams relevance and value to the target audience.
8. Am I wasting the time of my readers? The biggest deadly sin, and one of the most frequent pieces of feedback I give when editing other people’s texts. People are busy. Remove any and all paragraphs, sentences and words that don’t contribute to the goal of the text. Remove filler text and empty phrases. If you can say the same thing with fewer words, do it, unless you have a very good reason not to.
9. Is my formatting correct and consistent? Double check your font, font size and how you use whitespace (spaces, line breaks, paragraphs). In a long article, use sections with headers and sub headers if necessary. All items in a bullet point list should either end with a period or not. Think about which words or phrases are included in a link.
10. Am I using language correctly? Ensure correct meaning, grammar, spelling and punctuation. Use a dictionary if necessary. Ensure paragraphs and sentences of reasonable length.

In summary, empathize with your readers.

Let me know if you have additional advice you think would be useful.