Business Writing and its Discontents

Writing today can be tough business. Or rather, it can be tough business getting people to read your writing. If you write a blog post that holds your reader’s attention over social media for 700 words, you’ve accomplished something.

If the odds seem stacked against you when the written word has to compete with images, video, games and (gasp!) memes, imagine the difficulty faced by business writers. In a business setting, you not only have to compete with the media barraging your audience’s senses, but also with their meetings, e-mails and other time-sensitive commitments.

Understandably, business writing today reflects a need for brevity, efficiency and clarity. E-mails and proposals should be concise, memos and communiques to the point.

A new generation of styles guides has emerged reinforcing this ethos: Josh Bernoff’s excellent Writing Without Bullshit is probably the definitive statement. However, there are others: Ann Handley’s Everybody Writes, Anne Janzer’s Writing to Be Understood, and Steve Woodruff’s Clarity Win$. The list goes on. Business writing has never been a genre prioritizing aesthetic sensibilities, but what we see now is the need for a disciplined and more defined minimalist approach.  

For a multimedia corroboration, do a quick search on YouTube using the term “business writing.” You will see a list of short presentations and public webinars, each imploring the listener to “write in plain English,” “proofread and edit,” “know your audience” and “avoid jargon.” Proofread, edit, cut away anything unnecessary, proofread again, etc.

Many of these sources propose their own lists of rules for effective business writing, which I will condense into a generic representation and refer to as The List.

The List purports to be a set of rules for good writing and goes something as follows:

1. Write in the active voice
2. Avoid jargon
3. Say what you mean
4. Write in plain language
5. Use correct grammar
6. Proofread and rewrite
7. Avoid unquantifiable modifiers (adverbs, so-called “weasel words,” etc.)

We could add more entries, but you get the idea. Writing coaches all have their own version of The List, which they jostle to the forefront. These basic rules, in one arrangement or another, are becoming the definitive guide to how we in the business world approach language. Even Microsoft Word highlights when you use the passive voice (which, as you can see, I do all the time).

But here’s the thing: The List isn’t the key to good writing—it’s just a tool to help you avoid bad writing.

The truth is these rules won’t make you a better writer any more than lane bumpers will make you a better bowler—they are a way to keep your writing from spinning off into the gutter. That’s it. Bernoff’s title is straightforward about this: it is Writing Without Bullshit not How to Be a Good Writer. It is a guide to avoiding something.

There is a lot to be said for these rules. If you follow them, your writing will be clearer. That much is certain. If your boss needs a no-nonsense report by end of day and you struggle with writing, follow these rules closely. However, does this really exhaust the possibilities? We do more with language in the business world (and in life) than just report stuff. After all, there is more to writing than just presentation. 

Let’s break down the logic of the presentation model a bit more: The List contains guidelines for conveying information accurately and efficiently. As an information presenter, you are thus limited in your scope to what your reader already has a stake in reading. You are treating your reader as your customer.

I call this transactional communication. Bernoff articulates the idea with his “Iron Imperative,” which is to treat your reader’s time as more valuable than your own. Larry McEnerney, the head of the University of Chicago’s writing program, similarly argues writing boils down to the writer transmitting value to the reader. If the writer does not treat her writing as a transaction of value, the intended reader has no reason to read it. It’s a great rule of thumb, but how are we defining value?

If your boss is requesting a data set or a report on a specific topic, you are, in a sense, responding to customer demand. Fair enough—but if your reader is your customer, your role is limited to giving them what they already know they want. This is limiting.

What if you are writing about something that your readers don’t, but should, find interesting? What about if you’re trying to convince your readers that they should take an interest in something they haven’t considered? You have to do more than just present—you have to persuade. 

Sometimes you have to tell your boss something they don’t want to hear. There is something wrong with a project into which she has put a lot of time and resources. It is going to take a lot for her to switch positions. You have to elicit buy-in and build trust. Maybe you think a critical project’s infrastructure is flawed. To do what is best for the organization, you have to convince your boss of something they aren’t going to agree with off the bat. You have to do more than just present: you have to make a connection. Time and energy have been put into this project—emotion has been spent. You’re walking on egg shells just brining it up critically. This is about more than just writing skills: this is about leveraging human skills. This is the crucible where critical alliances are forged.

Besides, if your boss really wanted, she could probably get that data set herself. What are you really being paid for? To get information from one person and e-mail it to another?

Remember: you were brought on board for a reason. Be an active, thinking participant. Communication is more than a tool: it is a foundation stone for an organization’s culture. How members of a team speak and write to each other says a lot about how they come together and collaborate.

Written communication in any environment (academia, blogging, magazine publishing, etc.) comes with its own formatting imperatives. However, if we focus on business writing as a relationship between purveyor and consumer, we risk missing another crucial relationship shared between business writer and reader: organizational citizenship.

Mastery in language overlaps and intersects with other foundational abilities: close reading, critical thinking, interpersonal communication, emotional intelligence and consensus building. The “soft skills” developed through the course of a liberal arts education are, despite their dismissive moniker, critical to business success.

The business world, on the other hand, approaches writing as a technical skillset. A quick Google search for “business writing course” yields dozens of results: companies and writing coaches fill page result after page result. These courses are (presumably) effective, but they teach writing in a misguided way. They approach work-specific documents as though they were discreet topics for technical mastery. One will see a course on effective e-mail writing next to a course on how to write a strong white paper or project proposal as if they weren’t different applications of the same practice.

This approach is profitable since trainees are obliged to purchase multiple courses to obtain business writing mastery. However, it is misguided because it does not focus on teaching writing itself. In fact, it ignores it. Writing an effective e-mail becomes a skill in itself. So does writing a cover letter or a business memo. Of course, one can become proficient in a specific format. But is that what it means to write well?

The idea that we can learn to write memos or promo docs independent of core writing skills is simply wrong. Learning to write a grant proposal independent of a greater body of understanding isn’t learning at all: it’s memorization. Reading and writing are the core of a strong liberal education. There is really only one way to learn how read and write well and that is to spend years doing it (ideally with the guidance of experts).

In the course of a good liberal education, one learns the minutiae of communication; one reads a vast array of literary styles across historical periods. By simply writing, getting feedback, editing and writing again, one learns the rules of grammar, the complexities of syntax—one learns to use language with dexterity, sensitivity to word choices and with confidence they can make authorial choices that influence how their writing is read. This is what it means to master a language: to have the ability to manipulate it. As Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, the medium is the message.   

A mastery of language is a core competency (which sounds jargon-y, but that's what it is). A core competency applied to a specific format—a business memo, for instance—becomes a skill. A specific skill is developed when a deeper, more general understanding is applied to a specific usage. But that deeper understanding has to be there.

And let’s be honest—if everyone needs a stylesheet to do basic writing, the business world is in a bad spot.

We’re quick to shout down staples of traditional education like the five-paragraph essay as useless, memorization-driven formats that lack the flexibility to be viable skills in the real world. Do we really get value from having team members sit through classes teaching them how to write e-mails in a preformatted way? Does this fundamentally help our organization?  

Corporate learning should shift its efforts and focus on the core learning gaps of employees. It shouldn’t focus on teaching format-driven skillsets, but on cultivating the intellectual capacities that underlie them.