The business case for good writing

My freelance writing business serving professional firms, institutional organisations and government agencies in the UK’s architecture, engineering and construction sectors is 10 years old.

To celebrate, I'm writing a series of articles that I hope is useful to my wonderful clients.

The?first article?was about the demands of long-form writing and my tips for success.

The second one was about the strategic considerations for publishing written works for public consumption and what it takes to maximize the work’s impact.

This third article explores how failing to pay attention to the quality of your written output might be costing you, and offers an outline strategy for fixing it.

When did you last receive any training on how to write?

Does it feature as a topic in your CPD curriculum?

Or are you just expected to know?

If my experience is anything to go by, you receive no training – not even at university – and are just left to get on with it by yourself.

What’s more, you’re expected to put up with everyone else’s bad (by which I mean unclear, inaccurate, and unnecessarily long-winded) writing – including most unforgivably in missives from leaders.

This is odd, isn’t it? Running businesses is all about marginal gains for competitive advantage and managing risks, and yet we neglect the day-to-day quality of our written communication despite the jeopardy involved.

The risks become apparent when you ask yourself:

• How much does bad business writing (in emails, reports, staff manuals, strategy documents, and so on) impede productivity?
• How many mistakes and how much project rework does it lead to?
• How corrosive is it to working relationships?
• How much does it eat away at trust between project team members?
• How demotivating is it for staff?
• How badly does it tarnish reputations?

If your answer to any of these questions is ‘a lot’, then surely quality of writing deserves more attention.

This is especially true in professional practice, where your work involves plenty of writing and its quality affects not just your brand but also your contractual performance, conformance to standards and compliance with the law.

While these risks are unlikely to have high impacts, the low impacts accumulate in ways that grind you down. What you typically see is a self-perpetuating culture of business-as-usual muddling through, as described in an article by Josh Bernoff in the Harvard Business Review:

“Entry-level employees [are] immersed in first-draft emails from their managers, poorly edited reports, and jargon-filled employee manuals. Their own flabby writing habits fit right in. And the whole organization drowns in productivity-draining blather.”

What can you do about it?

First, pay it some attention. Estimate how much poor quality is hurting or could hurt your organizational objectives and the extent to which fixing it could benefit you. Do this by quizzing your staff, clients and professional colleagues: do they think that your reports and communiqués are clear?

If there is a business case for it, devise a strategy for improving the quality of your organisation's written output. This strategy should nudge your entire work culture to caring about it enough to reach a certain minimum standard and then to monitor and reliably maintain it.

Steppingstones along the way will include:

• Defining what is meant by clarity, accuracy, and brevity and how to achieve them. (You could do worse than adopt the rules of plain English as advocated by the Plain English Campaign.)
• Devising a policy for training staff, perhaps with standards of etiquette, templates and examples to help. This includes senior staff, who should lead by example.
• Devising a system for assessing quality and checking that it is being maintained … just like any other quality management issue. (Good writing is not easy, so cut everyone some slack, especially if English is not their native tongue or they are comparatively junior.)
• Differentiating between types of written communication by their relative importance. Although all writing benefits from being clear, accurate and concise, in some cases it matters more than others. Don’t forget the potential of well-drafted internal comms to boost staff morale, teamwork, and sense of purpose, which are important in attracting and retaining talent.

If you don’t happen to have outstanding written communicators among your staff, or if you do but they don’t have the capacity to help, consider instituting a protocol for employing professional writers for strategically important classes of writing. This includes content marketing pieces, staff manuals, big bids, and industry reports.

It’s all about investing time upfront to achieve consistently high standards of writing, all to save time and problems later.

Admittedly, this is a change to the status quo, which is likely to be a hard habit to break. But the upside, not just in time saved and problems avoided but in goodwill and boosts to your reputation, make it a smart goal.

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Are you drowning in ‘productivity-draining blather’?

Could parts of your organisation benefit from upping their overall standards of written communication?

If you want to discuss the potential for improvements in your organisation or need to hire a good writer, get in touch. I’d be delighted to talk.