Practical Writing Lessons From A Fed Up Millennial

Lately I’ve been asked to speak in front of aspiring entrepreneurs and folks who are very early in their business careers. Through all of the questions and conversations, one common thread continues to come up. If I could give my fresh-out-of-college self one piece of business advice, what would it be?

Now there’s a lot of wisdom I can provide here about what skills or traits to focus on early in your career.

I can say that you should spend more time listening and less time speaking. Asking questions and playing dumb allows you to be a sponge. Plus people like to hear themselves speak.

I can say you should cut your teeth and work hard. Don’t worry about your pay yet. You have a lot to prove still.

I can say you should keep your options open and figure out what path you want to take as you go. Just because you’re an entry level sales development rep now doesn’t mean you need to be a SDR Manager or Sales Exec next. Many of these employees end up in Customer Success or even Product related roles. Get lunch and get to know other members of your company as you go along. Inquire into what their job looks like day in and day out.

Those are all valid responses. After all, twenties are for learnin’, thirties are for earnin’.

But the number one thing I’d say these entry level folks need to learn is structured thinking and how to write and speak concisely. This is the most underrated skill to acquire. It’s something that for some crazy reason still isn’t taught in traditional grade school or college english classes.

Let’s take a look at that for a second. We’re taught how many cells are in a leaf, and what an igneous and or a metamorphic rock looks like. We’re taught how to dissect frogs and sin, cosine, and tangents. But we’re still not taught how to properly and optimally converse with other humans.

That’s freakin’ ridiculous. On top of that, the world has changed drastically from writing letters with pen and paper and putting them in the mail, to typing with your thumb on a screen no bigger than your palm.

I remember seeing the first smartphone become mainstream in 2007. It was a Blackberry Bold I believe. This is when people outside of the white collar working class began BBM’ing and checking email on their phones. Since then, mobile has been a major player for eyeballs when opening, reading, and replying to emails. That means if you graduated after 2007, there’s a good chance that this is the native way of doing business for you.

Yet almost a decade later and education still hasn’t changed.

If you’re reading this, odds are that 90% of the time you spend writing, you’re writing for email. So of that 90%, you probably spend at least 50% of your time doing it on a mobile phone. This is why it’s so necessary that these emails be short and to the point.

Let’s take a walk in the time machine for a second. Do you remember your high school english class assignments?

Teacher: “Write a 5000 word essay on _______.”

Then they grade it, maybe ask you to write the next 5000 word draft, or fix things on the last draft, but then the assignment ends there with the final 5000 word product.

This is a great assignment for a creative writing elective. And I think it has it’s place in the curriculum at an earlier point, like middle school. But after a certain point, people should be focusing on learning how to cut things down and think in a structured manner. That’s much more practical for the real world, no matter what year it is.

A famous French Philosopher Blaise Pascal is often quoted for saying, “Sorry this letter is so long, I did not have time to make it shorter.”

The real skill in writing is learn how to edit and create something someone would want to read. Especially now more than ever, with the majority of your writing being email, and being read and responded to on a 4 to 7 inch screen.

With this in mind, I’ve created the assignment they should be using in your english classes.

Assignment:

Teacher: “Write a 5000 word essay on _______.”

Student hands in the assignment and teacher grades it and hands it back.

Teacher: “Now take the graded essay and make it 500 words without losing any of the main message.”

Student hands in the assignment and teacher grades it and hands it back.

Teacher: “Now take the graded essay and make it 50 words without losing any of the main message.”

This assignment allows them to teach students how to write creatively while also teaching them how to edit and think in a more structured manner. To really think through what’s important, and what’s filler. We are literally taught in grade school to add words. In what world is that the right way to write?

We should be teaching our youth how to write, then how to write practically. Any excessive creative writing should be an elective, not the standard.

Since traditional education failed us, I’ve decided to give you my top 10 quick tips for making emails more concise.

1. When writing emails today, write the whole email then go back and edit it three times.
2. Remove words that don’t mean anything. Words like “really”, "currently", "actually" and “very” are examples of filler words that just make sentences longer.
3. Only hit the spacebar once after a period, not twice. Cleaner. Shorter.
4. Enter is your friend. I was taught 5 sentences to a paragraph in grade school. That is not the case in email. Feel free to use it more frequently. I often use it after only 1 or 2 sentences. Remember, if they’re reading it on mobile and you don’t use enough paragraph spacing, it’s going to look like a screen full of endless letters. It will be immediately tiring to them.
5. Bullet point stuff if it looks too wordy all clumped together.
6. Dumb it down. People don’t want to process what words mean. You want them focused on what you’re saying, not how you’re saying it. There’s a reason the top songs on the Billboard 100 are consistently written on a 3rd grade reading level. An example would be using the word “use”, not “utilize”.
7. Write like you speak. Then go back an edit to make more formal if you need to depending on the recipient.
8. Make actions clear. The action item usually deserves its own sentence.
9. Think in a structured manner. Start with salutations. Ego stroke. Introduce yourself. Understand their situation/appeal to their pain point (or try a version of Feel, Felt, Found). Action item. Sign off. Then write the email like that.
10. This last tip comes to you courtesy of my good friend Scott Britton, who when proof reading this brought up a great point. His advice was, “Start blogging. Creating content in a public setting forced me to get good at writing, as well as copywriting, which is incredibly important for modern sales and marketing professionals.” I couldn’t agree more.

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

If you like this stuff, check out my other post on what I’ve learned in my late twenties, and all things B2B Sales at SalesHacker.com. I plan to write a lot more on Career Hacking for Millennials in the near future.