Executives can multiply their influence by learning the techniques of forceful writing. High-powered writers learn to focus words the way a laser beam focuses light.
Focus your objective. What is the purpose of the material you want to write? Writing can help you achieve the five I’s: it can inform, inquire, influence, instruct and incite.
Focus your audience. Written materials such as reports and brochures can be valuable positioning tools. They should be written with a specific audience in mind — the audience you wish to influence to buy your products or services.
Focus your content. Make sure your message is the right message for the right audience. Don’t let unnecessary ideas intrude on your principal message. To quote Professor William Strunk, Jr., the renowned authority on English usage:
“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
Focus your organization. A good piece of writing flows like a symphony. Organize your material so that each topic fl ows easily and naturally into the next. Focus your clarity. Some writers think they can hide fuzzy thinking by burying it under a mass of words. To have impact, ideas must be expressed precisely and concisely. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address required only 275 words, and 196 of them were of one syllable.
Focus your refi nement. Perfection rarely emerges from a fi rst draft. Ambrose Bierce once said that “a saint is a dead sinner revised and edited.” Great writing is rough copy revised and edited.
Be your own toughest editor, but don’t stop there. Let others read what you have written before you submit it to your audience. You know what you meant, but you can’t know how others might interpret it until others have read it.
Focus your results. Unless results are built in, they don’t happen. Good writing always does four things:
- It creates a feeling.
- It gives an idea.
- It gives the reader a benefit.
- It produces a desired response.
Communication is not a nice-to-have skill. It is essential to success in the business world. To produce and market the products and services to support the billions of people who now inhabit the earth requires a level of communications undreamed of in previous centuries. When the quality of your product depends upon the collective eff orts of dozens, hundreds or thousands of individuals, communication becomes the lifeblood of your enterprise.
In fact, communication is at the heart of everything we do. It is the foundation for interaction among human beings. Communication has to do with meanings, with understandings, with feelings, with desires, with needs and with ideas. Our world is fi lled with information.
But the greatest need is for understanding — for building bridges between human beings so we can better live together, work together, get along with each other and make this earth the best possible home for the human race.