Business Writing is Difficult for 6 Reasons

Jan Wall has worked with Fortune 500 companies, global management-consulting firms and has led major development projects that called for business plans and technical writing. He has mentored senior business executives and critiqued graduate business students’ theses. It is a pleasure for synaptici.com to feature Jan as a guest author.

Business Writing is Difficult for 6 Reasons

Writing Education is Inadequate

Most students hated their English classes. Their classes just weren’t interesting. In fact, they were often downright boring. Teachers taught the rules of the language without giving their students any sense of excitement about the language itself. Essays were measured more for their weight (number of words) than for their accuracy, respect for the language, and intrinsic interest.

But it gets worse. For decades teachers were prohibited from teaching their students to write! Why? For one thing, education was geared to teaching “big picture” or “holistic” worldviews. Unfortunately, focusing on comma splices or run on sentences was considered too mundane — so it wasn’t treated as an important issue.

Excellent Writing Requires Clear Thinking

But here’s the real kicker. Strong business writing requires rigorous adherence to the rules for clear thinking. Most people have never been taught to think rigorously! Students are typically taught subject matter such as history or political science or physics. Students are rarely taught the rules for clear thinking explicitly. Language is our most important thinking tool and clear thinking enables powerful writing.

The ancient Greek philosophers developed the fundamentals of logic. Logic is a collection of rules that govern clear thinking – much as traffic laws govern safe driving. These rules don’t tell you what to think; they tell you how to think. Driving laws don’t tell you where to go; they tell you how to drive while on your journey. Logic tells you nothing about the “outside world.” It tells you a lot about your “inside world” – how to process, evaluate, and make sense of the world outside. Without this training, it’s very easy to come to the wrong conclusions. Lack of clarity in thinking is always reflected in poor writing. Poorly reasoned arguments are often ignored or forgiven during the give and take of conversations; they’re the kiss of death in business writing. All of us sense that intuitively.

English is a Difficult Language

The rules of English are inconsistent. Those who learn English as a second language are stymied by the inconsistencies. There are no consistent rules for spelling, punctuation, word usage, or forming plurals.

Graduate Schools Ignore the Problem

Graduate schools don’t teach their students to write well because they take the position that writing is a core skill students should have mastered before entering their graduate programs. Nevertheless, the schools recognize that their students can’t write well. But rather than teach their students to write well, they punish them for failing to write well!

To be fair, some schools do offer their students access to tutors – occasionally at some cost. Unfortunately, these tutors are often seen to offer remedial help – a service for the learning-disabled or disadvantaged. Since few are willing to brand themselves this way – either in their own eyes or the eyes of their fellow students – these tutors’ services often go unused.

Most graduate programs – with the notable exceptions of Literature, Journalism, and Philosophy – consider writing to be a background or secondary activity. The “meat and potatoes” of the discipline or field or study doesn’t insist on fluency in the written language to be a success. Since students are so preoccupied with learning the essence of their fields, they ignore – either by design or neglect – writing.

Now here’s the irony of this situation: Schools in general – and graduate schools in particular – are intended to create “conscious competents.” This means that the schools must educate their students with two aims in mind: First, they must master a given body of knowledge. Second, they must be able to explain the reasoning process for drawing their conclusions in that field of study. They often succeed at the former and fall short on the latter.

Students Need a Mentor to Learn to Write Well

Students need a mentor who will take the time to read their manuscripts carefully and critique them thoroughly. It’s unreasonable to expect students to study books on good business writing style, grammar, punctuation, etc. and apply the lessons flawlessly. Learning occurs when dealing with specific pieces of writing. Students need a mentor to learn to write well.

Unfortunately, there are few mentors available. Mentoring requires a lot of time and energy. Good mentors are generally unwilling to take the effort required to critique a student’s paper unless they either have a love of the subject or believe there are significant advantages for them. In practice, this means that there are few mentors available.

It also means that few writers will learn to write well.

Business Writers Avoid the Vernacular

All of us have developed a conversational style over the years. We’re comfortable with that style. However, that style often doesn’t work in business writing. Let me give two examples.

In our daily conversations, we often speak in a “stream of consciousness.” In other words, we tell stories. These stories describe a sequence of events as they occur to us. We’re tempted to adopt that same style in business writing. It just doesn’t work. In business writing, authors group their ideas under various headings.

In a management consulting report, for example, the headings are generally Terms of Reference, Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations. This structure calls for us to group all our findings under one heading, all conclusions under another heading, and all recommendations under a third. This is incompatible with stream of conscious thinking that leads a speaker to move from one finding to one conclusion to one recommendation.

Brevity or conciseness is another major difference between our daily vernacular speech and good business writing. In our daily conversations, we often indulge a speaker who overstates his points or is redundant. In writing, that same style will characterize the author as highly disorganized and therefore not credible. Making the transition from vernacular speech to effective business writing is difficult.

How Can You Learn Effective Business Writing?

The traditional way to learn business writing is to take a course. Often, this is just not practical. The course a student needs may not be available for a couple months, it may be too expensive, it may be offered in a remote location, and it may not offer the close scrutiny of a student’s writing that will make the difference between success and failure.

The most effective strategy, without question, is to retain a mentor. You need a mentor who will collaborate with you in writing your document. The relationship is all-important. If you simply want the writing done, you can turn the job over to a business writer. But if you want to learn the craft yourself, you need a mentor who will guide you. Ideally, he’ll encourage you to take the initiative to write a document – such as a business plan – and then critique your work through your various versions. The process is difficult and time consuming. The critiques can be harsh so this is not for the feint of heart.

But the committed student will write a document that suits his purposes and, at the same time, learn the craft so he can do it himself the next time.

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