Get fresh perspectives and insights into the actionable approaches needed to build back smarter after inflation. Be inspired to transform your organisation while delivering profits.
Get fresh perspectives and insights into the actionable approaches needed to build back smarter after inflation. Be inspired to transform your organisation while delivering profits.
Get fresh perspectives and insights into the actionable approaches needed to build back smarter after inflation. Be inspired to transform your organisation while delivering profits.
How to be a dreadful writer
Economist Education’s executive editor, Martin Adams, shares his hard-won wisdom on ten traits that set bad business writers apart
Over the past couple of decades I have edited—and, often hardest, self-edited—thousands of pieces of business-related writing. These have ranged from emails to course materials, from reports to slide decks. I have also edited scores of writers in various organisations and roles: from analysts to marketers, freelancers to staffers, veterans to neophytes; and from the impressively accomplished (I think especially of colleagues at The Economist Group) to the painfully poor. During this period my hair has greyed, thinned and receded. This may be a coincidence. It may not.
What traits make writers irksome and ineffective? Understanding what bad writing is can not only help us avoid wasting the time (and taxing the patience) of those who edit or read us, whether professional word-wranglers, teammates or bosses. Defining what not to do can also help us learn what to do to get our message over clearly, concisely and compellingly, a fundamental skill in business. I have identified ten characteristics of writers who write especially badly. Here is how (not) to do it.
The writer stumbles before they start by failing to identify their main message (or, perhaps, they have nothing to say).
They proceed to present what they know, not tell a compelling story.
Lacking a unifying idea, they apply equal weighting to everything, rather than structuring a narrative around a few central points.
Naturally, they take the reader’s attention for granted—from the dull opening sentence to the inconclusive conclusion.
They overburden their writing with clichés and jargon, neglecting to consider the reader’s perspective.
They trade in long, abstract nouns; unwieldy, passive sentences; and meandering, protracted paragraphs—so their writing lacks concreteness and pace.
They favour detail for the sake of it, in place of facts supporting an argument.
In particular, they use enough numbers to bamboozle anyone left reading, without supplying crucial context.
Often they cite data in text that would be better communicated in charts.
And then they end, but probably without a full stop—their last of many crimes against punctuation when, fairly or not, we’re all judged on our presentation.
As a curmudgeonly editor I have framed these as traits of bad writers, not bad writing. Really, I know that our writing abilities are not fixed. Indeed, at Economist Education we see evidence of this all the time among executives who take our popular course, Professional communication: business writing and storytelling. Crafted by my journalistic colleagues at The Economist, this six-week programme provides many more tips on what to do (and what not to do) if you want to become a better writer.
My favourite module of the course covers editing. If only it had existed two decades ago, I might be slightly less curmudgeonly—and even have a full head of hair.
If you’re interested in exploring Economist Education’s business-writing course, click here.
Find out more on this topic in our course...
Business writing and storytelling
The course explores the psychology, craft and purpose of writing with a focus on the choices writers must make—from words, phrases and metaphors to the sentences and paragraphs that make up creative expression. It has been updated with bonus tips on making strategic use of AI.
