Reflections on 18 years’ writing skills training in professional services: Insight II — The 2nd Myth of Professionalism

I first talked about this Myth when I gave the keynote talk at an international conference of accounting firms in Rome, ‘The Eternal City’. It seemed fitting to look into the Latin origins of the words?profession?and?professional.

Dating from the 13th?century, they hail from the past participle (this is as grammatical as I get!) of the Latin verb?profiteri, ‘to declare openly or publicly’, originally done on entering a religious order. In the 15th?century this gained the meaning of ‘an occupation one professes to be skilled in’, and that’s how we arrive at the modern meaning of a professional qualification: a?public declaration of competence?(eg a certificate, charter or title)?to perform a highly specialised, technical job based on?a?codified body of knowledge.

In my Rome talk I called out these four mini-Myths of Professionalism:?

In last week's article I talked about the two lower mini-Myths, ie the compulsion for business writers to use needlessly formal language as a way of showing how clever they are.?

Today I want to discuss the two upper mini-Myths: the perceived need to give as much detail as possible and to show your expertise (clearly all four mini-Myths are linked).?

Bombarding your poor reader with detail?

This is where the writer’s fear of the reader criticising either them or their firm outweighs their desire to communicate and connect with the reader. Their overwhelming motivation is to ‘de-risk’ their writing. So they dump as much detail about the topic as they can on the reader, resulting in text that looks like this (a real example):?

The result is?long-winded, turgid, unstructured, daunting?slabs of?text. Effectively,?you’re dumping on your reader and saying ‘There you go, you work it out’.

Not a winning strategy.?

Showing off your expertise

The biggest risk here is you end up talking more about yourself than the reader.?

I call this ‘we’-ing all over the reader. It’s rude.?

You know the style:?

Founded in 1889, we are XYZ firm, employing 15,000 people in 23 offices around the world. We are a full-service legal firm operating in all the major jurisdictions and recently moved into exciting new premises in Hong Kong, where we employ 27 senior partners specialising in anti-competition law.

Yawn. (That cloud of dust you can see in the distance is the reader running for the hills.)

Was there any mention in there of the reader, or their needs or pain points, or the words?you?and?your??

‘We’-ing all over the reader is one of the most common syndromes I see in persuasive writing, eg bids, tenders, pitches, proposals, blogs, articles, thought leadership pieces. So let’s unpick the cure, ‘writing for your reader’ (what a radical notion!).

I call this a?meta?technique ‘cos it underpins and informs all the other 14 techniques of my?rhetorica??2.0 writing system.?

In the graph above, the vertical axis of ‘Affinity/Empathy’ basically means connection, ie how connected the reader feels with you through your words. The horizontal axis of ‘Focus’ is the writer’s mindset, ie is it on themselves and their needs, or on the reader??

You can see that when we focus on ourselves (‘writer-centric’), the predominant words are?we, us?and?our,?as well as?do (ie what we do, will do, can do). Typically, this focus also encourages us to talk about the features of our product or service. The writer is ‘we’-ing all over the reader. As a result, the connection they feel with us is weak (the dotted line bottom-left).?

But when we shift our mindset from ‘writer-centric’ to ‘reader-centric’, everything changes:

We start using the personal words?you?and?your?that make the reader feel as if we’re talking to them and only them. And we find ourselves using the powerful word?get, ie the benefits they will?get?when they follow our advice, instruct us or work with us.?

The dotted line top-right shows that the connection the reader feels is high, or strong. This is what we want, because in that frame of mind they’re likelier to be receptive to our message.?

The irony here is that curing the Myth of Professionalism is less about writing skills and more about mindset. Shift that and you’re halfway home.?

Another way of putting it is that we’re moving from the Myth of Professionalism to the Truth of Personalisation.?

The bottom line

Nothing expresses this personalisation idea better than the quote I cite in my workshops and virtual sessions:?

“People don’t buy because they understand what you do ? they buy because they feel understood.”

Anon.

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Come and hear me speak at The Business Show 2022 (12.30, Thursday 17 November 2022), or visit my Write for Results stand (B704), 16/17 November, at LondonExcel. Would be nice to see you!