How to achieve business writing clarity that impresses

When I was a journalism instructor at the University of Texas and the University of Houston, my students would often ask, “What’s the one thing I can do to improve my writing?” My response to them is the same thing I’d tell business writers to improve communication clarity:

Write to inform, not to impress. When we write to inform, our writing is so clear and understandable that it is impressive.

Business writers attempting to impress others with big words, stilted language or too many words often miss the mark and create unreadable and cumbersome prose. Even worse, they create documents too long in a world awash in communication clutter and overload.

Professional business writers who wish to inform -- whether writing a memo, a group email or a white paper – are clear at the onset about (1) to whom are they writing (key audiences) and (2) their communication goal (inform, persuade, gain acceptance). When writers are clear on the audience and communication goals, they then can begin to work to find the clearest way to say what needs to be said.

A technique I taught was “phone a friend” to help enhance brevity and clarity in a communication setting. If you had only three minutes over the phone to get the gist of your message across, what would you say? With the clock ticking, you don’t have a lot of time for superfluous, irrelevant information. If you have three minutes to summon help from a friend because you’re stuck on the freeway with a flat tire, there’s no time to ramble on about how bad the potholes are or how the mayor has long ignored infrastructure improvements in your city. Instead, you focus on what’s the problem and what’s the fix. You hit a pothole. Your tire is flat. You need your friend to bring a jack and some flat fixer.

In short, impressive writing is tight, concise and gets the message across, sometimes leaving people wanting more because you impressed by communicating your main points with brevity and clarity.