In 2001, the iconic author Elmore Leonard – who Stephen King once called “the great American writer” – published his ten “rules for writing” in a New York Times article. These rules have been widely embraced by hordes of fiction writers and their readers. I thought it might be fun and interesting to adapt them for business writing.
1. Never open a book with weather
“If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.”
No has time to indulge your atmospheric opening to a business message.
Too often I’ve had to reign in writers – usually contractors and free-lancers – who wanted to ‘set the scene’ and ease into a business story like it was a feature in a magazine.
They would bury the lede in the third paragraph. I would tell them: no one will ever read that far, because they won’t know why they are reading and what value it has for them.
You need to tell readers in the first line what the piece is about and its value to them – how it will help them do their job. In other words, tell them why they should read it. They will make the decision to continue reading or not.
You then need to put all the most important information in the first paragraph in case that’s all they read.
Save the poesy for the last paragraph so you can go out with a flourish for the readers that are still with you.
2. Avoid prologues
“They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword.”
Many business situations have a backstory that involves budget issues, office politics, leaders that change their minds, changing market conditions, and a host of other influences.
Don’t start your business messaging with a recap of all that drama. Your reader probably has no need to know about it. Even information that is genuinely relevant doesn’t need to be examined up front.
If you spend time trying to explain why things are the way they are, it is likely to be seen as a digression and may obscure the real reason you drafted the communication.
So get to the point. Break the news, or make the ask, or lay out the proposal, or pitch the idea.
Then if it requires some explanatory context or history for the reader, you can provide that. By that point the context will make more sense and be more relevant.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue
“The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied.”
Don’t get fancy. Leave the thesaurus on the shelf. Resist the urge to impress people with your vocabulary.
Use clear, simple, common words to craft clear, simple sentences for all business communications.
When writers use ornate language it distracts the reader’s attention from the topic. They pay attention to the language and the writer, rather that the purpose of the message.
The more obscure the word, the more likely it is the reader will not be certain of your meaning. They might even completely misinterpret your meaning.
The more obscure the word, the more likely the reader will need to re-read a section to understand the word in context. This will annoy most readers, especially executive leaders.
All of this goes triple when the reader is someone for whom English is not their first language. Business is increasingly global. Your audience is increasingly global. Write accordingly.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”
“… he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange.”
Adverbs are just a problem, period.
“If you are using an adverb,” said Kingsley Amis, “you have got the verb wrong.”
By artificially adding emphasis or nuance, adverbs often betray a lazy writer and clutter the page.
Adverbs can look like they add meaning when they do not and can be confusing. If your boss tells you to “cut back on frivolous spending” what, exactly, does she mean by “frivolous”?
In another example, telling me something is “very important” is unpersuasive. If you explain why something is mission critical, however, then its importance becomes self-evident.
Likewise, telling me someone is “quickly running” or “diligently researching” is not helpful. The quickness is in the running. Researching without diligence is not worth the name.
An adverb used in a business communication probably doesn’t belong there. It is the hand of the writer trying to shovel on meaning that should already be clear in the message.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control
“You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.”
Business writing has become overrun with exclamation points.
In some business cultures it has become so bad that if the first or last sentence in your email – or perhaps both – don’t end with an exclamation point, the recipient will think you are angry with them.
The exclamation point has also become the best friend of human resources personnel and executive assistants trying to organize an office party, and anyone trying to use perkiness to distract from a difficult message.
Used this way in a business environment, the exclamation point is intended to convey happiness or excitement, ideally in such a way that, I assume, every reader will immediately become happy or excited themselves. It ends up being both unpersuasive and, depending on the context, mildly annoying.
If you believe that you really, really, must use an exclamation point, here’s the general rule: use it once in the communication you are crafting. Be tough with yourself, and use it just once. Pick the single place where you think it fits best and will satisfy your craving. Never break this rule.
“You are allowed no more than two or three exclamation points per 100,000 words of prose,” wrote Elmore Leonard.
If only we could get business communicators to adopt this standard.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”
“This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ‘suddenly’ also tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.”
“Suddenly” is an adverb that, like other adverbs, probably doesn’t belong in your business communications (see item 4 above).
But suddenly, along with similar adverbs like extremely, incredibly, strikingly, and so on, are even more problematic than others.
They are degree adverbs and intensifiers that make no contribution to the meaning of the word being modified, or to the meaning of the sentence, but just attempt to artificially enhance the impact.
“All hell broke loose” on the other hand is a guilty of being a cliché. Seemingly different than an adverb, it is also guilty of not adding much value.
Most clichés, in fact, are useless in business writing. When specificity and clarity are the goals, clichés just muddy the process.
The worst are what are called “thought terminating clichés” that sound like common sense notions but are actually designed to terminate further discussion – the opposite of what we should be seeking.
Examples are “nobody’s perfect,” “it is what it is,” and “it’s all good.” When someone says a phrase like this, it means “I don’t want to talk about this any longer.” When the person saying it is a business leader, the negative impact on employees and colleagues in the room can be significant.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly
“Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop.”
Business lingo is a form of vernacular that should be avoided in all but the rarest situation. Lingo and idioms look like linguistic shortcuts but are actually designed to exclude people from the dialogue.
This most commonly takes the form of buzzwords. They develop in office cultures, and people who understand them feel like they are part of the team.
But the idea of communication is to convey information and ideas. If you rely on buzzwords and jargon and acronyms you’ll be able to effectively communicate only to a small group. Businesses can’t grow that way.
Buzzwords also quickly become overused and misused so that meaning becomes overly generalized, making them useless even within the original culture.
Some buzzwords do have specific meaning and value, such as “globalization,” “diversity and inclusion,” “disruption,” and “best practices.” But even these can see their value diluted by usage that is too glib and careless.
Other buzzwords seem to have been born trivial and virtually useless, such as “client-centric,” “paradigm shift,” “mindshare,” “pain point,” and “drill down.”
Keep in mind that the more your language relies on insider lingo and buzzwords, the more likely it is that people outside your work culture will find your use of them tiresome and unprofessional.
They’ll find your communications (both written and verbal) frustratingly vague, even evasive. This will damage the credibility and brand reputation of both your organization and you personally.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters
“In Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ what do the ‘American and the girl with him’ look like? ‘She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.’ That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.”
Visibility is important to workers. They want to be seen and appreciated for the value the contribute to projects and the business.
Those workers become offended when communications are issued that give full credit to a specific leader, or even worse a leader and that leader’s favorite associate, while ignoring the rest of the team.
This can discourage workers and prompt them to start looking elsewhere for a work environment that recognizes and rewards its people.
Some of this can be fixed by communications that provide a fuller description of the people that made a difference in an initiative.
The risk is that the more people you mention, the greater the insult if you leave some out. Your good intentions can backfire.
The solution can often be mentioning teams rather than individual people, to as specific a level possible. Those familiar with operations in that part of the organization will know who is being discussed.
You can still mention individuals who carried the greatest burden or responsibility, as long as you are certain the credit should go to them alone. For example, don’t single out Joe for leading such a great effort by his team when, in fact, his team member Louise did nearly all of the work.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things
“You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.”
Most business success stories are quite complicated. To completely explain the legacy, the challenge, the planning, the resourcing and financing, the setbacks and recoveries, etc., could take a book. How are you going to fit all that into three hundred to five hundred words in an email or on an intranet page? The answer is, you aren’t.
Vast amounts of details must be left out. Many of the most interesting aspects of the story will never be told because to explain what makes them interesting would require too much information and backstory.
It’s okay to focus on the broad strokes of the story, because for the story to have meaning and impact for the widest number of readers it needs to be understandable, easy to read quickly, in a format that feels accessible. That generally means brief and simple.
The art of writing business stories is often the ability to suggest key moments and imply the necessary efforts without spelling everything out. The underlying details shape the story but remain just outside the text.
“You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill,” wrote Elmore Leonard, and it applies to business stories as much as it does crime novels.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip
“My most important rule is one that sums up the ten: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
The most precious commodity in today’s business environment is time. And professionals, at all levels of the organization, guard their time zealously.
It is an “attention economy,” a phrase coined by the psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon, who noted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
All business communication should be as brief as possible. If it is too long, no matter how valuable the information contained therein might or might not be, it will not be read.
Business communication is not about what content you feel you want to share. It’s not about you. It is about what minimum content the reader needs to be effective and has the attention span to consume.
Try to cut everything by half. Make that email half as long. People should talk half the time during team meetings. Most importantly, take half the slides out of that PowerPoint deck, and cut out half the content on each slide that remains.
Remember, you aren’t removing important content that people should receive; you are deleting extra content that those people weren’t going to pay attention to anyway.
Write less, talk less, but say more.