Turn corporate sludge into focused, compelling writing
Your business success depends on your ability to craft messages and stories with clarity, efficiency, and focus. Whether you are writing a persuasive e-mail to an executive, an entertaining story for your intranet, a news release, or a disappointing message to a colleague, your writing needs to be precise, interesting, and convincing.
The Writing With Clarity workshops have helped thousands of professionals worldwide at such companies as Chevron, Visa, Oracle, Campbell’s Soup, Raytheon, Sprint, John Deere, Burson-Marsteller, and Fleishman Hillard.
At the top of the abstraction ladder are obscure terms and concepts that leave you in a fog; at the bottom is concrete language that people can visualize. You see a promo for a “virtual knowledge transfer event” and then realize it’s a webinar. You discover that a company promoting its “point-of-sale solutions” is really selling cash registers. Or you read about a Hum...
Knowing where to use a comma after the word so is often challenging. Sometimes you need it; other times you should omit it because the context is different. The comma is the most common punctuation mark and the one people wrestle with the most, particularly when it involves words such as so, when, where, which, and however. Let’s look at so. The word so serves as different parts of speech, m...
Summary paragraphs are helpful to readers, but while many people have heard of them, few people actually write them. In an email of several paragraphs, a formal memo, or a report, the opening paragraph should give the reader a window into what the entire memo is about. Here are the hallmarks of a summary paragraph: It is usually two, three, or four sentences in length, occasionally longer dependi...
A Wall Street Journal story about the increasing demand for foods that say “protein” on the packaging, http://on.wsj.com/ZsMZhK, highlights the careful use of words for a persuasive effect. For nearly a century, marketing people and politicians have carefully chosen words that have positive connotations, because those words influence the way people think about a product, issue, or person. And...
If you are trying to persuade someone in a written message or speech, they need to carefully consider your position. And for them to take the time to do it, the issue must be personally relevant. Social psychology experiments show that persuasion does not occur when readers skim or when a listening audience is daydreaming. So when you are writing a persuasive message, the challenge is to craft one...
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