You can all relax. This is not a grammar lesson.
It is not enough to do a good job. You must also give the appearances of doing a good job. That is why writing well is so important. Writing well is not an add-on to your job skills. It is a central part of it. Your writing must communicate you doing a good job. Many who read your reports will never meet you. Yet they have powerful influences over your career. Their only vision of you is through your writings.
Since only your writings are available to them, the writing must be outstanding. You are outstanding. Your writing must reflect that.
Just what are we trying to achieve when we write? The US novelist Robert Stone said it best: “What you’re trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You’re trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves them just from mere information.”
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone with a clear logical mind can write well. You have such a mind or you would not be here. Writing well is a three-step process. And you have already mastered the first two:
Knowledge.
Without knowledge you cannot convince anyone to do anything. Our knowledge tends to be disorganized. We learnt a bit here, a bit there and a lot from some place else. It’s all good stuff but gathered then stored in a random pile, so to speak.
Navigation.
You must plot a logical course leading the reader from A to B to C to your conclusion. Do not worry about the verbiage at this stage. Just have the logical sequence laid out Point form, broken sentences, whatever. Your readers will not tolerate your logic wandering. You cannot be like the man who rode his horse backwards. His friend said, “That is remarkable. You have visited all those wonderful places, yet you only ride your horse backwards! Just how do you do it?” “Oh, that’s easy,” he replied, “I only want to go where the horse wants to go.”
Salesmanship.
This is what we consider as “Writing,” putting the words on paper. The task is to guide and comfort the reader. At the end of each sentence they must have the feeling of “that makes sense, that’s logical, that was easy to grasp, I’ll carry on reading.” Actually, it’s writing and thinking. The tough part is the thinking. What is the next logical step? Think. What is the reader expecting next? Think. Is what I said what I meant? Think.
Do not expect to write and not have to rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite. If you think, you can write without having to fine-tune it, your readers will surely be in trouble. Many readers will not bother to finish reading it. How many times have you started to read an article and quit reading it? Not because the subject was boring but because the story wandered, was confusing or difficult to read.
Searching out the errors, roadblocks, and poor sentence structure makes for hard, time-consuming work. It is so easy to be ambiguous. It is so easy to say it poorly. My favorite example of ambiguity is a manager’s memo requesting “a listing of all employees broken down by sex.”
For some, writing is a chore, for others, fun. I cannot change that. Writing well will not change that. You are who you are. For myself, I find writing well hard work and time consuming but very enjoyable.
Authority
You are paid to be an authority. You are paid to make decisions.
If you are not an authority on what you are about to write, put the pen down until you are. It’s that simple. With all simple things, there is a trick. We do not have to be an authority on everything. Just an authority on what we are about to write. I do not mean known a lot. I mean be a true authority on the very narrow topic.
If you are using a chemical, know everything about it. Who discovered it? What, why, and when is important. Know the history of the subject. Know all of today’s applications. It’s a narrow topic so it is not difficult. Putting some history in your report demonstrates your knowledge. It strengthens you implied claim of being an authority
Consider this brief statement:
“Mercury was first confirmed as a poison when the strange behavior of felt hat makers was investigated. It was discovered that they were being poisoned with the mercury used in felt manufacturing. The nervous Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a fairly accurate portrayal of a person suffering from the nerve damage caused by mercury exposure.”
By implication, what does this brief statement tell the reader?
Just to know this you must be an authority. The hazard label is well deserved and not simply a hazard promoted by some activist. And most importantly: Reader, don’t hassle me on what I am saying. I’ll fight back if you challenge me.
Every subject has interesting historical facts. Search them out. You may be surprised what you will learn during your search. Typically, you can be an authority in a relatively short time. Remember, we are only talking about very narrow subjects. For example, I am an authority on mathematical sales forecasting. I studied it well. As a frustrated mathematician, it fascinated me. To me, exponential smoothing, seasonal variations, and probabilities are all great stuff.
I went to the library to study its beginnings of mathematical sales forecasting, it’s history, and lore. A mathematician named Browne and a few others developed mathematical forecasting while in the US Air force during the Second World War. They developed the mathematics for the automatic aiming of guns to shoot down airplanes.
After the war they were unemployed. So they applied their principles to sales forecasting. I can still remember a magazine drawing of a gun, the bullets and airplane’s path with the military formulas beside each. Beside the military formula the same formula was rewritten using business terms: past sales (airplane’s path) etc. If you know how shooting down an airplane can help you forecast sales, please let me know.
As I said, I’m an authority: Mathematical sales forecasting is garbage. But it sells well.
Nomex
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