One of tricks that Hemingway plays on the reader is that while the prose is ‘ordinary’, you can’t help but keep reading on and on and on… It looks simple until you try it. Look at how he does it. His writing style is crisp, direct and engaging. All the signs of a great writer. Look at how he makes long sentences short, mundane subjects interesting, and clips along at a nice pace. And without ever losing the thread. Us business writers can use these techniques to improve business plans, proposals, white papers and case studies. Let’s get started.

10 Step Guide to persuasive Writing

Here are some ways to improve your business documents:

1. Highlight the Benefits to the Reader – Write from the reader’s perspective. Instead of writing about you and your products, turn it around and show the reader what’s in it for them. How does this proposal solve the company’s financial problems? How does this email keep the project on track? How does this procedure simplify complicated business processes?
2. Give the reader a compelling reason to open your email, read it through, and then take action. We’re all the same. When you get a business proposal, you’re first reaction is, "What’s in it for me?" It is your job as a writer to tailor the material so that it answers these questions.
3. Write at Appropriate Level – Match your writing style and choice of words to your audience. Do not use complex terms or jargon that the reader will not understand. Likewise, do not use simple terms or use poor examples if the reader is capable of understanding your material. They’ll assume you’re being condescending or patronizing them. Get the tone right and go from there.
4. How to Structure Paragraphs #1 – Business letters are not read the same way as articles, reports, or books. Usually, they are read by people in a hurry. Business people looking for answers. Quickly. Structure your material so that it’s easy for the reader to find the answers to these questions. Don’t make them dig it out. Use short paragraphs, lots of information rich headings, bullet points and useful summaries.
5. How to Structure Paragraphs #2- Fine-tune each paragraph for purpose, content, and function. If you have a paragraph that cover more than one idea, consider dividing it into two or more paragraphs. Likewise, if two paragraphs cover the same ground, merge them into one.
6. Be Specific – don’t mix two ideas in the same paragraph. Make it easy for the reader by giving each topic its own paragraph. Use language that describe your ideas correctly and highlights the relative importance of each concept.
7. Understand Relative Importance – Use phrases such as "most important," "major," or "primary" when discussing business concepts you want to emphasize. Use phrases such as "a minor point to consider" or "least important" to introduce ideas of less importance.
8. List Key Points – Use verb-leading lists whenever possible. These are lists that start with a strong action verb. Lists also help the reader identify the important points and get a feel for the material with a quick scan.
9. Prioritize Information – Consider how you introduce and position important information. Remember, content at the start and end of the paragraph tend to be read first. People scan documents. Critical business information buried in the middle of long paragraphs is easily overlooked. Knowing this, put important information in high-visibility points.
10. Get the Tone Right – Consider the tone and word choice when writing negative or critical communications. For example, in a ‘negative’ project assessment email, you can thank the team member for reader for their input or involvement but state that you cannot comply with their wishes. Then follow this response with your explanation.

Business writing is not difficult but…

Business writing is not difficult. What makes it hard is that the way we approach it defeats our purpose. Your goal as a business writer, oddly enough, is to write less.

Why?

Because every time you write something, you goal should be to push it towards completion. Write your emails so that your team knows what to do next and don’t come back looking for clarification. Write your status report so that your Project Manager know the risks and issues and doesn’t reply looking for more information.

PS – do you have a favorite book by Hemingway?

About the Author: Ivan Walsh provides Business Tips for Smart People on Klariti.com. His also writes on the Business Plan Blog at http://www.ivanwalsh.com

Ever wondered how some blogs appear on Google News and others don’t? Ever wanted to get your site on Google News. Google has published guidelines explaining how the process works. Do it right and you might be indexed. If you’d like a site to be included in Google News, you can also send them the URL directly.

How to Get Added to Google News

To be included in Google News, your articles (and their URLs) must be:

1. Unique

Each web page/blog post that display an article’s full text must have a unique URL. Google doesn’t include sites in its News that display multiple articles under one URL or that do not have links to pages dedicated solely to each article.

2. Permanent

Google can’t/won’t crawl pages (e.g. www.yoursite.com/news.html) if it displays a different story every day.  Make each post unique and permanent.
‘To ensure its links to articles function properly, each article on a news site must be associated with one unique URL, and that URL must be permanent (i.e., it can’t be recycled).’

3. Three-digit number

The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.

For example:

Google News can’t crawl this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html

Google News can crawl this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html

Add three unique numbers to each article.

Note: if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as:

http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html

…Google won’t be able to crawl it.

Exception: this rule is waived with News sitemaps

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323

Google News: How to Recommend a site for inclusion

If you’d like a site to be included in Google News, send them the URL here.

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40249

Recap: Get Added to Google News

Be

1. Unique
2. Permanent
3. Three-digit numbers

That’s it. Over to you.

Have you managed to get your blog indexed by Google for its news section? Was Bing easier? Share any tips you have below.

I need your advice. Someone has left a fairly negative comment on my blog. What should I do? Approve or Delete? The reason I ask is this. I want people to give their opinion and, even if it offends me in some ways—let’s say they made some sarcastic remarks or found a typo—I’d still approve it. Feedback can be a great learning opportunity. But, where do you draw the line?

How do you Manage Extremely Negative Comments on your Blog?

• Avoid Flame wars – If I publish the comments, it may (i.e. will) offend those mentioned in the comments. They may then respond in kind and the whole thing ends in a nasty squabble.
• Legal eagles – There is also the possibility that someone may feel wounded by these remarks and take legal action. I don’t want this. Especially as the comments are not even mine.
• Ignore the comments & the person – I can delete the comment but this undermines (to a certain extent) my wishes for the site, i.e. to be an exchange of opinions.

• Give them attention & email them – I could do this bit feels like a ‘halfway house.’ I may also provoke the person in stronger (more unpleasant) remarks. They may also start ‘flaming’ on other sites.

Where do you draw the line?

What approach do you take when you get these comments?

Goethe once wrote to a friend, “If I had more time, I’d have sent you a shorter letter.” Here’s why.

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We’re all guilty of using clichés and resorting to figures of speech, especially after a long day slaving over a PC. Nonetheless, we still need to streamline our material and make sure that readers get something worthy of their attention.

Here are seven ways to cut the fat from your documents and get them back to health.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book

Let’s start.

Get a recent sample of one of your documents writing, for example, a sales letter or proposal, and look for the following horrors.

1. There are…

Avoid using this as an opener; it sounds jaded. It gives the impression that you couldn’t think of anything more interesting.

The same goes for “It is.”

These empty subjects and weak verbs add no value to your work and dilute the power of your writing. Rearrange sentences to avoid these fillers.

Not: There are now thousands of websites on the Internet.

Use: Thousands of websites are now on the Internet.

2. Ditch clichés

Make a list of your most frequently used clichés.

Paste it next to your PC, or wherever you work.

Once you’re finished drafting a document, double-check that you have not let any of these creep in.

Watch out for clichés entering your copy when you are tired, in a hurry, or impatient.

I tend to resort to clichés when I’m low on energy or waste want to wrap things up. It’s a waste of time. In the morning, I have to re-write it anyway.

Some words and expressions are so overused that they’ve been reduced to meaningless phrases.

For example:

Pre-plan — plan is fine. Can you really pre-plan?
Solution — isn’t everything a solution these days? There must be an alternative.
Seamless — is it really?
Micro Manage — manage
Access — usage, allow,
Paradigm — business model
Radical — different
Broad Range — spectrum
Synergy — connection,
Enterprise — company
Virtually Unlimited — endless
Utilize — use
Proactive — active

3. Remove what’s redundant

Go through your writing and root out redundancies, such as:

Blue in color (what else could it be besides color)
Large in size (what other kind of large is there?)
New innovation (is there an old innovation?)
End result (and the beginning result was…)
Final outcome (… was just the outcome.)

4. Be selective with Passive verbs

Passive verb tend to offer a weak, roundabout way of saying something.

In general, you can replace a passive verb with an active verb and improve the clarity of the sentence.

Not: The computer was built by John.
But: John built the computer.

5. Evil adverbs.

“Rather,” “very,” “quite”: These adverbs dilute your writing.

Cut them out and the meaning of your sentence becomes sharper and will resonate with more conviction. Poor adverbs tend to convey vagueness and a lack of interest.

Not: I was rather worried that our computers were quite unsafe.
But: I was concerned that our computers were unsafe.

6. Get to the point

We use the verb “say” so much that we tend not even to read the phrase itself.

Hemingway could get away with it, but you’re not Hemingway. Well, I’m not anyway.

Even though it’s nice to use an alternative choice every now and then, avoid using different verbs simply to get around using “he said, she said”. Constantly using different verbs in place of “say” knocks the reader off balance; it sounds contrived.

7. Jargon

Just as rappers (and their fans) used their own private language to differentiate themselves from others, companies also fall into this trap.

One of my former managers always spoke about ‘low hanging fruit.’

I bet that if you worked for the company I did, you’d have heard it.

Why?

Everyone used this on conf calls and in presentations. It was company lingo. They all used it to emphasize that there were ‘in’.

There was never a plan – we ‘transitioned’ instead.

Programmers were ‘technologists’.

It was our own private, internal language. When it crept into emails, memos, and circulars, then it could be understood. But when it appeared in customer facing reports and technical documents, then you have a problem.

3 Style Guides and Writing Books I Recommend

The Non-Designer’s Design Book

Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition)

Technical Editing (4th Edition)

What clichés do they use at your place?

Jakob Nielsen warns us that users hate change. He recommends that “it’s best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture. ”

You often hear design team members (or their management) say, “We need a fresh design.” This usually gets redesign projects off on a wrong footing, with the wrong goals and strategy.

Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it’s new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users’ existing knowledge of how a system works.

Let’s consider Microsoft Office. The suite was introduced in 1989 as an incremental packaging of older stand-alone apps like Word (from 1983) and Excel (from 1984). By 2000, the underlying UI architecture was 17 years old, and MS Office was creaking at the edges. I frequently complained that the old approach was a muddled set of thrown-together features — and that the ever-more complex set of menus and dialog boxes made it hard for users to find most of them.

Read Jakob Nielsen‘s Alertbox, September 21, 2009

Ben Parr (Mashable) asks: “Say your project manager comes to you with his proposal that will be going out to investors, business partners, and potential clients.

Then you find that your manager has used “4” instead of “four”, “r” instead of “are”, and abbreviations such as lol, atm, and idk.

How would you react? “How To Mind Your Grammar On The Web.

When is it appropriate to use this type of language shorthand?

Ben has come up with this short guide on grammar on the web for business:

Do: Understand your audience and understand your company’s personality, especially when communicating with customers.

Do: Utilize some forms of Internet shorthand while tweeting.  Occasionally abbreviating to fit within the limit is an acceptable practice

Do: Be Authentic. If you’re known as someone that uses shorthand and you’re comfortable with that, then you shouldn’t do a complete 360 in your communications.

Don’t: Use Internet shorthand in emails.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a customer, an employee, or a potential business client.

Don’t: Use Internet shorthand in business-to-business communication. This includes Facebook, Twitter direct messages, and email.

Ben: http://www.openforum.com/grammar-on-the-web-some-rules-of-thumb-for-business-ben-parr

To this I would add:

• Think Local: don’t write localize (US) when it’s localise for those in the UK
• Jargon – avoid using insider speak that only you and your company use.
• TLA – cut out three-letter-acronyms. Sometimes it’s fine, but if you are going to use it, then make sure you spell it out somewhere in your report, preferably near the start. Otherwise, no-one will have clue when you’re ranting on about.
• Small words are fine. Don’t try to impress people with multi-syllable words and strange noun structures. Keep it simple.

What’s the most common grammar mistake you see on the web?

I’ve been developing a template for the business analysts at my client since Friday and have hit the proverbial brick wall. Here is the problem. The Business Process template will be used by the analysts to capture how the processes work when onsite. Ok, that’s fine. The problem started when I showed them the first draft.

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There wasn’t time for a requirements gathering session so I’m ‘guestimating’ what they want. Not an ideal situation but that’s how it is sometimes.

Some of the analysts wanted a ‘warts and all’ template that covered all possible scenarios.

I’ve done this and it’s now over 2 pages per process – and that’s before you type in a single word.

For most of the team this seems excessive. So, now I have a one-pager they can use just to capture the key steps involved.
We’re not finished by any means and I have another meeting on Friday.

One question in the back of my mind is: which of these will be the standard?

It can’t be both.

Can it?

Regards,

Ivan

PS – if you haven’t got enough to do already, you can follow me on Twitter @ivanwalsh

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I’ve been asked to prepare a set of guidelines for Twitter by a company I used to work for in Sacramento.

They’re a well-established financial services firm and are struggling to get a handle on how best to approach this.

What’s the balance between allowing employees to use it as their discretion while also protecting the company from legal issues and other possible negative fallout if/when an employee rants or discusses company business on Twitter? I should stress that they want their employees to use Twitter (within reason) but are a bit nervous. Remember they want to create guidelines – not rules.

To get things started, I gathered some examples of what other companies have setup regarding Twitter and Social Media usage.

Here are a few links I sent to the Sales/HR people.

Mosman Council Twitter Guidelines

http://laurelpapworth.com/australia-mosman-council-twitter-guidelines

Guidelines For Brands Using Twitter

darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2008/08/guidelines-for.html

11 Twitter Guidelines

http://www.seanbohan.com/2009/03/13/my-11-twitter-guidelines/

Twitter Guidelines

http://www.onlinecommunityconsultation.com/2009/05/twitter-guidelines.html

Twitter Guidelines

An example of Twitter Guidelines: Washington State University (Vancouver)

http://twitter.com/bspirit/statuses/1933059911

Telstra lays down the law on Twitter

Telstra has become the first major Australian company to set down guidelines on the use of Facebook and Twitter. www.smh.com.au/news/technology/telstra-lays-down-the-law-on-twitter/2009/04/19/1240079538773.html

My Twitter Guidelines

http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-twitter-guidelines.html

Why Employers Need Twitter Guidelines

Thoughts about Twitter and Social Media guidelines for employers.

www.jeremylindh.com/why-employers-need-twitter-guidelines

Drop me a line if you’ve done something similar or have some suggestions on what should be in guideline.

New ground for me!

What’s the best style guide to use? I use Microsoft’s technical publications guide for my technical documents but have started to use The Chicago Manual of Style online.

It’s been a while since I visited the site and there has been some very nice features added. Like the site says: Welcome to The Chicago Manual of Style Online—the indispensable online reference for all who work with words. For professional writers, book-mark this!

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My Manual    
Using the features of My Manual, you can add Notes, Bookmark favorite paragraphs, and create Style Sheets to make The Chicago Manual of Style Online your personalized style guide.

Chicago Style Q&A
The Q&A content is fully searchable along with the content of The Chicago Manual of Style. Your queries will return results—clearly distinguishable—from both the Manual and the Chicago Style Q&A.

Contents

  1 The Parts of a Published Work
  2 Manuscript Preparation and Manuscript Editing
  3 Proofs
  4 Rights and PermissionsBY WILLIAM S. STRONG
  5 Grammar and UsageBY BRYAN A. GARNER
  6 Punctuation
  7 Spelling, Distinctive Treatment of Words, and Compounds
  8 Names and Terms
  9 Numbers
10 Foreign Languages
11 Quotations and Dialogue
12 Illustrations and Captions
13 Tables
14 Mathematics in Type
15 Abbreviations
16 Documentation I: Basic Patterns
17 Documentation II: Specific Content
18 Indexes

Tools 
It also provides convenient Tools, such as sample forms, letters, and style sheets.

Manuscript Preparation
The tools provided here are intended to help authors prepare manuscripts for submission. They will also be of use to writers, editors, and publishers at other organizations who are looking for models for procedure and content.

Books
The Books Division offers general guidelines for preparing electronic manuscripts as well as art submission requirements.

Journals
Many of Chicago’s journals provide statements of editorial policy and instructions for submission of manuscripts for Web-based peer review on their Web pages.

Electronic Manuscript Preparation
The Journals Division offers Instructions for Preparing Manuscript Files Using Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, as well as special instructions for the preparation of tables and math.

The Journals Division also offers online Guidelines for Submission of Artwork, including digital art.

Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide
Students, researchers, writers: for help citing sources, visit the Quick Guide to see clear examples of how to use Chicago-style citation.

Visit: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html

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A colleague in South America asked me this week to help “design and development standard operating procedures for training.”

I’ve done a lot of this over the years and even developed Standard Operating Procedure templates for Klariti Ltd.

Writing your first Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) can be a daunting task. Before I left for Japan I managed to get some words over to Carlos. Here’s a few ideas I had. What do you think I should add?
 
The first thing to do is prepare the Table of Contents, i.e. identify all the procedures that need to be written-up.
 
This involves lots of chasing people to determine what goes into the final document. I’d really stress this point as otherwise your doc may go off in the wrong tangent and what gets delivered wont please those who are responsible for signing it off.

Once you have that, agree on a common structure for all procedures. The templates are ideal for this. Just use the suggested layout / format.
 
Write up 2 or 3 first and get them out for review. After review, refine the SOPs and resend for more reviews. Keep this up until they (reviewers) are happy with the direction you’ve taken.
 
Then it just a matter of cranking out the SOPs.
 
… and prepare a schedule so you can keep track of where you are otherwise you’ll get overwhelmed. I use Excel. Keep it simple.
 
And send out status reports to your line managers. Always keep them in the loop.

Resources: Standard Operating Procedure Templates