The terrible, teachable truth about business writing

There’s an awful truth you learn as a professional business writer: most people don’t want to read what you’ve written. They might invest time in reading a great novel, but it’s rare that anyone reads or writes at work for the thrill of it. Your writing should usually aim to get a message across as quickly as possible.

Here are five more unvarnished lessons for those seeking to improve their workplace writing.

No one reads every word

There’s evidence that people start skimming a piece of writing almost as soon as they start reading. Jakob Nielsen, an expert on internet useability, described website users as “selfish, lazy and ruthless” and that characterisation is likely to hold for your audience, too. Once you come to terms with that, there are a few specific tricks that really help.

Get to the point quickly

At school, you might have been taught to build up to your conclusion. This can help your thought process, but it’s really slow for the reader. Business writing is the opposite to that—you need to put the conclusion first. Readers who only care about your main verdict can happily stop there. Only the people who want or need more details have to plough on.

Use subheadings cannily

The research about skimming shows people are more likely to read a subheading than the paragraph that follows. So, if you’re clever about your subheadings, you can use them to make sure you still get the message across to the skimmers. Don’t trot out the subheadings you were taught to use in essays, such as “introduction”, “background” or “conclusion”. They still force the reader to process what comes next (which the reader probably won’t do). Instead, use subheadings like the ones in this blog, which summarise (or at least tease) the paragraphs that follow. If your reader absorbs just those, they’ll get the gist of what you’re saying.

Professional doesn’t mean formal

Whenever I run writing training I’m always waiting for the word “professional” to come up. Lots of us, it seems, are worried about sounding credible. One of my mantras is: “write more like you speak.” That means avoiding more formal words like “utilise” when you could just write “use”; swapping essayistic words like “however” for simple ones like “but”; even replacing “ensure” with “make sure”, because that’s what we tend to say when we’re talking.

Many studies have shown that using simple language makes you more understandable, more memorable and more persuasive. It can even make people think you’re more intelligent, because you sound straightforward and confident. Yet it’s the thing I get challenged on most, because so much of our education and training is, explicitly or implicitly, about sounding clever.

Mostly, though, the best writers aren’t trying to impress you. They want their language to be easy to read, so that you think about what they’re saying, not how. Sometimes people tell me they write formally to show they’re taking a subject seriously. But you can be less formal without being flippant. Reading your writing out loud is a good test: if you don’t sound like yourself, you probably need to rewrite it until it sounds more natural.

Get help

There’s something weird about the fact that if you’re a professional writer—a novelist or a journalist, say—you’re likely to have an editor to help you improve your writing. (This blog has been subjected to just such a process.) But when writing’s not your main job, often you’re just left to get on with it. 

So, before you press “send” on a document, get someone to read what you’ve written. And don’t just ask them if it makes sense. Ask: is it interesting? Would they keep reading? Is the best bit buried? These days you have AI and other kinds of software to help, too. Already, there are tools that are good at shortening your writing, or making it more accessible (but that's another post). They’re getting better fast. But the most important improvements you can make to your writing will involve applying your human judgment to the principles above. After all, in the end it’s humans—busy and distractible—that you’ll be writing for.