Defining your goal

Your first priority is to know exactly what you want to happen when the person you’re writing to reads what you’ve written. Determining this is far less obvious than it sounds.

Consider a cover letter for your résumé. Seen as a formal but unimportant necessity toward your ultimate goal — to get a job — a cover letter can just say:

Dear Mr. Blank, Here is my résumé. —Jack Slade

Intuitively you probably know that this isn’t sufficient. But analyze what you want to accomplish and you can see clearly why it falls short. Your cover letter must:

• Connect you with the recipient so that you become a person instead of another set of documents.
• Make you stand out from the competition in a positive way.
• Persuade the recipient that your résumé is worth reading.
• Show that you understand the job and the company.
• Set up the person to review your qualifications with a favorable mind-set.

You also need the cover letter to demonstrate your personal qualifications, especially the ability to communicate well. If you see that accomplishing your big goal, getting a shot at the job, depends on this set of more specific goals, it’s obvious why a one-line perfunctory message won’t do well against the competition.

A cover letter for a formal business proposal has its own big goal: help convince an individual or an institution to finance your new product, for example. To do this, the cover letter’s role is to connect with the prospective buyer, entice him to actually read at least part of the document, predispose him to like what he sees, present your company as better than the competition, and show off good communication skills.

How about the proposal itself? If you break down this goal into a more specific subset, you realize ideally the proposal must demonstrate:

• The financial viability of what you plan to produce
• A minimal investment risk and high profit potential
• Your own excellent qualifications and track record
• Outstanding backup by an experienced team
• Special expertise in the field
• In-depth knowledge of the marketplace, competition, business environment, and so on

Spelling out your goals is extremely useful because the process keeps you aligned with the big picture while giving you instant guidelines for effective content. Because of good planning on the front end, you’re already moving toward how to accomplish what you want.

To reap the benefit of goal definition, you must take time to look past the surface. Write every message with a clear set of goals. If you don’t know your goals, don’t write at all.

Try This: Invariably one of your goals is to present yourself in writing as professional, competent, knowledgeable, creative, empathetic, and so on, but don’t let me tell you who you are or want to be! Create a list of the personal and professional qualities you want other people to perceive in you. Then remember, every time you write, be that person. Ask yourself how that individual handles the tough stuff. Your answers may amaze you. This technique isn’t mystical, just a way of accessing your own knowledge base and intuition. You may be able to channel this winning persona into your in-person experiences, too.

Defining your audience

You’ve no doubt noticed that people are genuinely different in countless ways: what they value, their motivations, how they like to spend their time, their attitude toward work and success, how they communicate and make decisions, and much more. One ramification of these variables is that they read and react to your messages in different and sometimes unexpected ways.

As part of your planning you need to anticipate people’s reactions to both your content and writing style. The key to successfully predicting your reader’s response is to address everything you write to someone specific, rather than an anonymous, faceless “anyone.”

When you meet someone in person and want to persuade her to your viewpoint, you automatically adapt to her reactions as you go along. You respond to a host of clues. Beyond interruptions, comments, and questions, you also perceive facial expression, body language, tone of voice, nervous mannerisms, and many other indicators.

Obviously, a written message lacks all in-person clues. For your message to succeed, you must play both roles — the reader’s and your own. Fortunately, doing this isn’t as hard as it may sound.

Unless you’re sending a truly trivial message, begin by creating a profile of the person you’re writing to. There’s a really big payoff in doing this for people who are important to you, such as your boss. You emerge with illuminating guidelines on how to improve all your interactions with him or her, as well as knowing what to say and how to say it. This helps you with your face-to-face interaction as well as writing.

When the situation involves someone you don’t deal with often, or don’t know at all, the depth of the profile you create depends on how important the results are to you. If you’re responding to a customer query, you don’t need to know his decision-making style. If you’re writing to the department head with a request, you might want to find out how much information he prefers to have, what his priorities are, and more.

Before you try profile building, it might seem daunting to characterize someone when so much that drives each person is invisible. Trust me, you know much more about your audience than you think. In the case of a person already familiar to you, your observations, experience, and intuition go a long way. It’s a matter of drawing on these resources in a systematic manner, especially your memory of how she reacted to previous interactions.

Try This: Here’s the system I recommend. For now, suppose the person is someone you know. Begin with the usual suspects: demographics. Write down what you already know about the person, or take your best guess:

• How old?
• Male or female?
• Occupation?
• Married, single, or some other arrangement?
• Member of an ethnic or religious group?
• Educated to what degree?
• Social and economic position?

After demographics, consider psychographics, the kind of factors marketing specialists spend a lot of time studying. Marketers are interested in creating customer profiles to understand and manipulate consumer buying. For your purposes, some psychographic factors that can matter are:

• Lifestyle
• Values and beliefs
• Opinions and attitudes
• Interests
• Leisure and volunteer activities

You also need to consider factors that reflect someone’s positioning, personality, and, in truth, entire life history and outlook on the world. Some factors that may directly affect how a person perceives your message include the following:

• Professional background and experience
• Position in the organization: What level? Moving up or down? Respected? How ambitious? Happy in the job and with the organization?
• Degree of authority
• Leadership style: Team-based? Dictatorial? Collaborative? Indiscernible?
• Preferred communication style: In-person? Brief or detailed written messages? Telephone? Texting? PowerPoint? Facebook or other social media?
• Approach to decision-making: Collaborative or top-down? Spontaneous or deliberative? Risk-taker or play-it-safer?
• Information preferences: Broad vision? In depth? Statistics and numbers? Charts and graphs?
• Work priorities and pressures
• Sensitivities and hot buttons: What makes her angry? Happy?
• Interaction style and preferences: A people person or a numbers, systems, or technology person? Good team member or not?
• Type of thinking: Logical or intuitive? Statistics-based or ideas-based? Big picture or micro-oriented? Looking for long-range or immediate results?
• Weaknesses (perceived by the person or not): Lack of tech savvy? Poor people skills? Lack of education and training? No experience?
• Type of people the person likes, feels comfortable with, and respects, and the reverse: Who likes and gets along with him?
• Sense of humor, personal passions, hobbies

Do you know, or can you figure out, what your reader worries about? What keeps him up at night? His biggest problem? When you know a person’s concerns, you can create more compelling messages. I am not suggesting your aim should be manipulative. Taking the trouble to think within another person’s framework is respectful. Wouldn’t you rather be addressed in a way that acknowledges what matters to you most when you need to make a decision, for example?

And of course, your precise relationship to the person matters, as well as your relative positioning and the degree of mutual liking, respect, and trust — the simpatico factor.

I’m sure you’re wondering how you can possibly take so much into consideration, or why you would want to. The good news : When your message is truly simple, you usually don’t. More good news : Even when your goal is complex or important, only some factors matter. I’m giving you a lengthy list to draw on because every situation brings different characteristics into play. Thinking through which ones count in your specific situation is crucial and rarely hard.

For example, say you want authorization to produce a video explaining your department’s work to show at an employee event. Perhaps your boss is someone who’s enthusiastic about video. Or you may report to someone who values relationships and wants to cultivate a positive environment. This boss would probably welcome a way to show staff members they are valued. Or she may be a person who likes innovation and the chance to be first in the neighborhood. To gain approval, it’s best to frame the story differently for the specific decision-maker. I’m not saying you should distort the facts or omit any: The story you tell must be true and fair. But the focus and emphasis can be adapted.

You succeed when you take the time to look at things through another person’s eyes rather than solely your own. Doing so doesn’t compromise your principles. It shows that you’re sensible and sensitive to the differences between people and helps your relationships. It tells you how to frame what you’re asking for.

Brainstorming the best content for your purpose

Perhaps defining your goal and audience so thoroughly sounds like unnecessary busy-work. But doing so helps immeasurably when you’re approaching someone with an idea, product, or service that you need him to buy into.

Suppose your department is planning to launch a major project that you want to lead. You could write a memo explaining how important the opportunity is to you, how much you can use the extra money, or how much you’ll appreciate being chosen for the new role. But unless your boss, Mark, is a totally selfless person without ambition or priorities of his own, why would he care about any of that?

You’re much better off highlighting your relevant skills and accomplishments. Your competitors for the leadership position may equal or even better such a rundown, so you must make your best case. Think beyond yourself to what matters most to Mark.

A quick profile of Mark reveals a few characteristics to work with:

• He likes to see good teamwork in people reporting to him.
• He’s a workaholic who is usually overcommitted.
• He likes to launch projects and then basically forget about them until results are due.
• He’s ambitious and always angling for his next step up.

Considering what you know about Mark, the content of your message can correspond to these traits by including:

• Your good record as both a team player and team leader
• Your dedication to the new project and willingness to work over and beyond normal hours to do it right
• Your ability to work independently and use good judgment with minimal supervision
• Your enthusiasm for this particular project, which, if successful, will be highly valued by the department and company

Again, all your claims must be true, and you need to provide evidence that they are. For example, you could include a reminder of another project you successfully directed and handled independently.

Your reader profile can tell you still more. If you wonder how long your memo needs to be, consider Mark’s communication preferences. If he prefers brief memos followed by face-to-face decision-making, keep your memo concise, but still cover the major points to secure that all-important meeting. However, if he reacts best to written detail, give him more information up front.

Creating a reader profile enables you to create a blueprint for the content of all your messages and documents. After you’ve defined what you want and analyzed your audience in relation to the request, brainstorm the points that may help you win your case with that person. Your brainstorming gives you a list of possibilities. Winnowing out the most convincing points is easy, and you can organize simply by prioritizing, as I show you how to do in Chapter 3.

Thinking through how to profile your reader works equally well when you’re writing a major proposal, a business plan, a report, a funding request, a client letter, a marketing piece, a blog, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, networking message, or website copy. Know your goal. Know who your intended audience is and what that person or group cares about. Then think widely within that perspective.

Another way to think about your content is to consider that everything you write is an “ask.” Even a message that just conveys information is asking your audience to read it and act upon it in some way, if only to absorb or file it. An event announcement asks the recipient to take note and usually, you’re asking her to feel motivated to participate. A “congratulations on your promotion” note asks the lucky person to notice that you’re on her side.

Try to think of a written communication that doesn’t ask for something. It’s pretty tough. There’s an advantage to seeing every message as a request: Doing so sets you up to frame your message with the right content for the person to whom you’re writing.

Writing to groups and strangers

Profiling someone you know is relatively easy, but you often write to groups rather than individuals, as well as to people you haven’t met and know nothing about. The same ideas covered in the preceding section apply to groups and strangers, but they demand a little more imagination on your part.

Here’s a good tactic for writing messages addressed to groups: Visualize a single individual — and/or a few key individuals — who epitomize that group. The financier Warren Buffet explained that when writing to stockholders, he imagines he’s writing to his two sisters: They are intelligent, but not knowledgeable about finance. He consciously aims to be understood by them. The results are admirably clear financial messages that are well received and influential.

Like Buffet, you may be able to think of a particular person to represent a larger group. If you’ve invented a new item of ski equipment, for example, think about a skier you know who’d be interested in your product and profile that person. Or create a composite profile of several such people, drawing on what they have in common plus variations. If you’re a business strategy consultant, think of your best clients and use what you know about them to profile your prospects.

Imagining your readers

Even when an audience is entirely new to you, you can still make good generalizations about what these people are like and even better, their needs. Suppose you’re a dentist who’s taking over a practice and writing to introduce yourself to your predecessor’s patients. Your basic goal is to maintain that clientele. You needn’t know the people to anticipate many of their probable concerns. You can assume, for example, that your news will be unwelcome because long-standing patients probably liked the old dentist and dislike change and inconvenience, just like you probably would yourself.

You can go further. Anticipate your readers’ questions. Just put yourself in their shoes. The dental patients may wonder:

• Why should I trust you, someone I don’t know?
• Will I feel an interruption in my care? Will there be a learning curve?
• Will I like you and find in you what I value in a medical practitioner — aspects such as kindness, respect for my time, attentiveness, and experience?

Plan your content to answer the questions your readers would ask, and you won’t go wrong. You’ll save time, too. How many memos do you send or receive daily, asking for clarification or trying to sort out some kind of confusion? Careless communication is a huge concern for business leaders. One badly written email sent to ten people can waste many hours of collective work just to retrieve the situation. An even bigger worry is the impact of mistakes generated by poor communication. Recently an auto company’s engineers failed to clearly describe a safety problem to upper management, with disastrous consequences. On an everyday basis, minor variations on this theme occur everywhere.

Notice that in addition to being “me”-centered, nearly all the questions asked by the dental patients are emotional in nature rather than factual. Few patients are likely to ask about a new doctor’s training and specific knowledge. They take that for granted. They’re more concerned with the kind of person he is and how they’ll be treated. This somewhat counterintuitive truth applies to many situations. Good salesmen don’t pitch themselves — they pitch their ability to make the customer’s life better. Notice also that the questions would be essentially the same for a new accountant or any other service provider.

When writing, you may need to build a somewhat indirect response to some of the questions you anticipate from readers. Writing something like “I’m a really nice person” to the dental patients is unlikely to convince them, but you can comfortably include any or all of the following statements in your letter:

• I will carefully review all the records so I am personally knowledgeable about your history.
• My staff and I pledge to keep your waiting time to a minimum. We use all the latest techniques to make your visits comfortable and pain-free.
• I look forward to meeting you in person and getting to know you.
• I’m part of your community and participate in its good causes such as …

Apply this audience analysis strategy to job applications, business proposals, online media, and other important materials. Ask yourself, whom do I want to reach? Is the person a human resources executive? A CEO? A prospective customer for my product or service? Then jot down a profile covering what that person is probably like and what her concerns and questions may be.

Everyone has a problem to solve. What’s your reader’s problem? The HR executive must fill open jobs in ways that satisfy other people. The CEO can pretty well be counted on to have one eye on the bottom line and the other on the big picture — that’s her role. If you’re pitching a product, you can base a prospective customer profile on the person for whom you’re producing that product.

Connecting instantly with your reader

Only in rare cases do you have the luxury these days of building up to a grand conclusion, one step at a time. Your audience simply won’t stick around.

The opening paragraph of anything you write must instantly hook your readers. The best way to do this is to link directly to their central interests and concerns within the framework of your purpose.

Suppose you’re informing the staff that the office will be closed on Tuesday to install new air conditioning. You can write:

• Subject: About next Tuesday
• Dear Staff:
• As you know, the company is always interested in your comfort and well-being. As part of our company improvement plan this past year, we’ve installed improved lighting in the hallways, and in response to your request that we …

Stop! No one is reading this! Instead, try this:

• Subject: Office closed Tuesday
• We’re installing new air conditioning! Tuesday is the day, so we’re giving you a holiday.
• I’m happy the company is able to respond to your number one request on the staff survey and hope you are, too.

One of the best ways to hook readers is also the simplest: Get to the point. The technique applies even to long documents. Start with the bottom line, such as the result you achieved, the strategy you recommend, or the action you want. In a report or proposal, the executive summary is often the way to do that, but note that even this micro version of your full message still needs to lead off with your most important point.

Notice in the preceding example that the subject line of the email is part of the lead and planned to hook readers as much as the first paragraph of the actual message. Chapter 6 has more ideas of ways to optimize your email communication.

Focusing on what’s-in-it-for-me

In marketers’ terms, the acronym is WIIFM (what’s-in-it-for-me). The air-conditioning email in the preceding section captures readers by telling them first that they have a day off, then follows up by saying that they’re getting something they wanted. Figuring out what’s going to engage your readers often takes a bit of thought.

To make people care, you must first be able to answer the question yourself. Why should they care? Then put your answer right in the lead or even the headline.

If you’re selling a product or service, for example, zero in on the problem it solves. Rather than your press release headline saying,

New Widget Model to Debut at Expo Magnus on Thursday

Try:

Widget 175F Day-to-Night VideoCam Ends Pilfering Instantly

If you’re raising money for a nonprofit, you may be tempted to write a letter to previous donors that begins like many you probably receive:

For 25 years, Freedom’s Path has helped incarcerated women transition to the outside world by providing job training, counseling, and support services. Your donations have been essential to equipping young transgressors to …

This sounds worthy but yawn-inducing. Would you respond better to a letter that opens more like this?

• When we talked to 19-year-old Jenny Y., she was holding back tears. “Sure, I’ll get out in six months, but so what? Where’s my life? No family. No education. I’ll be right back on the street and what else can I do than go back with the friends who got me here. I don’t want to. But I don’t have a choice.”
• Against the odds and for the first time in her life, Jenny was lucky. We picked her for the Second Chance Program and gave her a new start …
• We want to help more Jennys. And with your help we can …

The second version works better not just because it’s more concrete, but because it takes into account two factors that all recipients probably share: (1) a concern for disadvantaged young people, and (2) a need to be reassured that their donations are well used.

Highlighting benefits, not features

People care about what a product or service can do for them, not what it is.

• Features describe characteristics: a car having a 200-mph engine; an energy drink containing 500 units of caffeine; a hotel room furnished with priceless antiques.
• Benefits are what features give us: the feeling that you can be the fastest animal on earth (given an open highway without radar traps); the ability to stay up for 56 hours to make up all the work you neglected; the experience of high luxury for the price of a hotel room, at least briefly.

Benefits have more to do with feelings and experiences than actual data. Marketers have long understood the power of benefits, but psychologists now confirm that most buying decisions are made emotionally rather than logically. You choose a car that speaks to your personality instead of the one with the best technical specs, and then you try to justify your decision on rational grounds. You buy a dress that makes you feel beautiful, not because the seams are cleverly designed.

The lesson for business writing is clear: People care about messages that are based on what really matters to them. Don’t get lost in technical detail. Focus on the impact of an event, idea, or product. You can cover the specs, but keep them contained in a separate section or as backup material. Approach information the way most newspapers have always done (and now do online as well). Put what’s most interesting or compelling up front and then include the details in the back (or link to them) for readers who want more.

Finding the concrete, limiting the abstract

The Freedom’s Path example in the previous section demonstrates that focusing on a single individual delivers a more effective message. One concrete example is almost always better than reams of high-flown prose and empty adjectives. Make things real with techniques like these:

• Tell stories and anecdotes. They must embody the idea you want to communicate, the nature of your organization, or your own value. An early television show about New York City used a slogan along the lines, “Eight million people, eight million stories.” A good story is always there, lurking, even in what may seem mundane or ordinary. But finding it can take some thinking and active looking.
• Use specific examples. Tell customers how your product was used or how your service helped solve a problem. Give them strong case studies of implementations that worked. Inside a company, tell change-resistant staff members how another department saved three hours by using the new ordering process, or how a shift in benefits can cut their out-of-pocket healthcare costs by 14 percent. And if you want people to use a new system, give them clear guidelines, perhaps a step-by-step process to follow.
• Use visuals to explain and break up the words. Readers who need to be captured and engaged generally shy away from uninterrupted type. Plenty of studies show that people are much more drawn to read material like blogs, articles, and social posts when there is a good visual element. When you’re depending on words, look for ways to graphically present a trend, a change, a plan, a concept, or an example. Incorporate photographs, illustrations, charts, graphs, and video to suit your purpose. When you must deliver your message primarily in words, use graphic techniques like headlines, subheads, bullets, typeface variations, and icons — like this book!
• Give readers a vision. Good leaders know that a vision is essential, whether they’re running companies or running for public office. You’re usually best off framing your message in big-picture terms that make people believe the future will be better in some way. Don’t make empty promises; instead, look for the broadest implications of what you want to communicate and use details to back up that central concept and make it more real. Will your product or service save readers time or money? Make them healthier or more attractive? Those are bottom-line messages for everyone. Framing a complicated document within a broad vision also makes it more organized and more memorable — both big advantages.
• Eliminate meaningless hyperbole. What’s the point of saying something such as, “This is the most far-reaching, innovative, ground-breaking piece of industrial design ever conceived”? Yet business writing is jampacked with empty, boring claims.

Today’s audiences come to everything you write already jaded, skeptical, and impatient. If you’re a service provider and describe what you do in words that can belong to anyone, in any profession, you fail. If you depend on a website and it takes viewers 20 seconds to figure out what you’re selling or how to make a purchase, you lose. If you’re sending out a press release that buries what’s interesting or important, you’re invisible. The antidote: Know your point and make it fast!

Go for the evidence! Tell your audience in real terms what your idea, plan, or product accomplishes in ways they care about. Show them

• How the product improves their lives
• How the nonprofit is helping people and prove it
• How the service solves problems
• How you personally helped your employer make more money or become more efficient

Proof comes in many forms: statistics, data, images, testimonials, surveys, awards, promotions, case histories, biographies, social media followers and likes, and video and audio clips. Figure out how to track your success and prove it. You end up with first-rate material to use in all your communication.

Aligning tone with the occasion, relationship, and culture

Pause before writing and think about the nature of the message. Obviously if you’re communicating bad news, you don’t want to sound chipper and cheery. Always think of your larger audience, too. If the company made more money last month because it eliminated a department, best not to treat the new profits as a triumph. Current staff members probably aren’t happy about losing colleagues and are worried about their own jobs. On the other hand, if you’re communicating about a staff holiday party, sounding gloomy and bored doesn’t generate high hopes for a good time. The same is true if you’re offering an opportunity or assigning a nuisance job: Find the enticing side.

Just as in face-to-face situations, the moods embedded in your writing are contagious. If you want an enthusiastic response, then write with enthusiasm. If you want people to welcome a change you’re announcing, sound positive and confident, not fearful or peevish and resentful, even if you don’t personally agree with the change.

Make conscious decisions about how formal to sound. After you work in an organization for a while, you typically absorb its culture without really noticing. In fact, most people don’t realize their organizations have a culture until they run into problems when introducing change or a high-level hire. If you’re new to the place, observe how things work so you can avoid booby-trapping yourself. Read through files of correspondence, email, reports, as well as websites and online material. Analyze what your colleagues feel is appropriate in content and in writing style. What communication media are used? How formal is the tone? Adopt the guidelines you see enacted.

Every passing year seems to decrease the formality of business communication. Just as in choosing what to wear to work, people are dressing down their writing. This less formal style can come across as friendlier, simpler, and more direct than in earlier years — and should. But business informal doesn’t mean you should address an executive or board member casually, use abbreviations or emoji your reader may not like, or fail to edit and proofread every message. Those are gaffes much like wearing torn jeans to work or to a client meeting.

And you want to be especially careful if you’re writing to someone in another country, even an English-speaking one. Most countries still prefer a more formal form of communication than American business English.

Writing as your authentic self

Authentic means being a straightforward, unpretentious, honest, trustworthy person — and writer. It doesn’t mean trying for a specific writing style. Clarity is always the goalpost. This absolutely holds true even for materials written to impress. A proposal, marketing brochure, or request for funding gains nothing by looking or sounding pompous and weighty.

Never try to impress anyone with how educated and literate you are. Studies show that in reality people believe that those who write clearly and use simple words are smarter than those whose writing abounds in fancy phrases and complicated sentences.

Smiling when you say it

People whose job is answering the phone are told by customer service trainers to smile before picking up the call. Smiling physically affects your throat and vocal chords, and your tone of voice. You sound friendly and cheerful and may help the person on the other end of the phone feel that way, too.

The idea applies to writing as well. You need not smile before you write (though it’s an interesting technique to try), but be aware of your own mood and how easily it transfers to your messages and documents.

I’m not saying your feelings of anger, impatience, or resentment aren’t well-grounded, but displaying them rarely helps your cause. Nobody likes to get negative, whiny, nasty messages that put them on the defensive or make them feel under attack. Suppose you’ve asked the purchasing department to buy a table for your office and were denied without explanation. You could write to both your boss and the head of purchasing a note such as the following:

Hal, Jeanne: I just can’t believe how indifferent purchasing is to my work and what I need to do it. This ignorance is really offensive. I’m now an Associate Manager responsible for a three-person team and regular meetings are essential to my …

Put yourself in the recipients’ places to see how bad the impact of such a message can be — for you. At the least, you’re creating unnecessary problems, and at worst, perhaps permanent bad feelings. Why not write (and just to the purchasing officer) this, instead:

Hi, Hal. Do you have a minute to talk about my request for a small conference table? I was surprised to find that it was denied and want to share why it’s important to my work.

The best way to control your tone is to let emotion-laden matters rest for whatever time you can manage. Even a ten-minute wait can make a difference. Overnight is better, if possible, in important situations. You’re far more likely to accomplish what you want when you come across as logical, reasonable, and objective. Positive and cheerful is even better.

Try This: If you don’t have the luxury of waiting for a good mood to hit before writing, try a method I often use. I churn out the basic document regardless of my spirits, and later when I’m feeling bouncier, inject the energy and enthusiasm I know the original message is missing. Typical changes involve switching out dull passive verbs and substituting livelier ones, picking up the tempo, editing out the dead wood, and adding plusses I overlooked when I felt gray. Chapter 3 is chock-full of ideas to energize your language.

People naturally prefer being around positive, dynamic, enthusiastic people, and they prefer receiving messages with the same qualities. Resolve not to complain, quibble, or criticize in writing. People are much more inclined to give you what you want when you’re positive — and they see you as a problem-solver rather than a problem-generator.

Showing active caring and respect

Never underestimate or patronize your audience, regardless of educational level, position, or apparent accomplishment. People are quite sensitive to such attitudes and react adversely, often without knowing why or telling you. In all work and business situations, take the trouble to actively demonstrate respect for your reader. Specifically:

• Address people courteously and use their names.
• Close with courtesy and friendliness.
• Write carefully and proofread thoroughly; many people find poorly written messages insulting.
• Avoid acronyms, jargon, emoji, and abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to some readers.
• Never be abrupt or rude or demanding.
• Take the trouble to consider cultural differences.

Apply these guidelines whether you’re writing to a superior, a subordinate, or peer. You don’t need to be obsequious to an executive higher up the chain than you are (in most cases), though often you should be more formal. Nor should you condescend to those lower down. Consider, for example, how best to assign a last-minute task to someone who reports to you. You could say,

Terry, I need you to research consultants who specialize in cultural change and send me 10 names tomorrow. Thanks.

Or:

Terry, I need your help. The CEO called a surprise meeting for tomorrow afternoon to discuss ideas for making some organizational changes. I’d like to be ready to describe some consultants we might call on. Can you do the groundwork by morning and come up with 10 possible specialists? I’ll appreciate it very much. Thanks!

Either way, Terry may not be thrilled at how his evening looks, but treating him respectfully and explaining why you’re giving him this overtime assignment accomplishes a lot: He’ll be more motivated, more enthusiastic, more interested in doing a good job and happier to be part of your team. At the cost of writing a few more sentences, you improve your subordinate’s attitude and perhaps even his long-range performance.

Explaining how assignments fit into the bigger picture and why they matter is especially inspiring to Millennials. If you have people under 35 reporting to you, take note.

Whatever their age, people who report to you are doing your work and helping you perform better and look good. Why not make them feel as important as they are, in ways that matter to them?

Personalizing what you write

In many countries, business email and letters that get right down to business seem cold, abrupt, and unfeeling. Japanese writers and readers, for example, prefer to begin with the kind of polite comments you tend to make when meeting someone in person: “How have you been?” “Is your family well?” “Isn’t it cold for October?” Such comments or questions may carry no real substance, but they serve an important purpose. They personalize the interaction to better set the stage for a business conversation.

In any culture, creating a sense of caring or at least interest in the other person gives you a much better context within which to transact business. If you’ve thought about your audience when planning what to write (see “Defining your audience” earlier in this chapter), you can easily come up with simple but effective personalizing phrases to frame your message. You can always fall back on the old reliables: weather and general health inquiries. If communication continues, you can move the good feelings along by asking whether the vacation mentioned earlier worked out well, or if the weekend was good — whatever clues you can follow up on without becoming inappropriate or intrusive. The idea works when you address groups, too: You can, for example, begin, “I hope you all weathered the snowstorm okay.”

Some techniques you can use to make your writing feel warm are useful, but they may not translate between different cultures. For example, salutations like Hi, John set a less formal tone than Dear John. Starting with just the recipient’s name — John — is informal to the point of assuming a relationship already exists. But both ways may not be appropriate if you’re writing to someone in a more formal country than your own. A formal address, such as Mr. Charles, Ms. Brown, Dr. Jones, General Frank, may be called for. In many cultures, if you overlook this formality and other signs of respect, you can lose points before you even begin. Or not even get the chance to begin.

Framing messages with “you” not “I”

Embrace this basic concept: People care infinitely more about themselves, their problems, and what they want than they do about you. This simple-sounding premise has important implications for business communication.

Suppose you’re a software developer and your company has come up with a new template for creating a home page. Your first thought for an announcement on your website might be:

We’ve created an amazing new home page template better than anyone ever imagined was possible.

Or you could say:

Our great new Template X helps people build beautiful home pages with the least effort ever.

The second example is better because it’s less abstract and it makes the product’s purpose clear. But see if you find this version even more effective:

Want a faster way to create a knock-out home page in half the time, with resources you already own? We have what you need: Template X.

When you look for ways to use the word you more, even implicitly (the first sentence of the last pitch omits the “you”), and correspondingly decrease the use of I and we, you put yourself on the reader’s wavelength. In the case of the new template, your readers care about how the product can help them, not that you’re proud of achieving it.

The principle works for everyday email, letters, and online communication, too. For example, when you receive a customer complaint, instead of saying,

We have received your complaint about …

You’re better off writing:

Your letter explaining your disappointment with our product has been received …

Or, much better:

Thank you for writing to us about your recent problem with …

Coming up with a “you frame” can be challenging. It may draw you into convoluted or passive-sounding language, such as, “Your unusual experience with our tree-pruning service has come to our attention.” Ordinarily I recommend a direct statement (like, “We hear you’ve had an unusual experience with …”), but in customer service situations and others where you need to instantly relate to your reader, figuring out a way to start with “you” can be worth the effort and a brief dip into passive voice.

In every situation, genuinely consider your reader’s viewpoint, sensitivities, and needs. Think about how the message you’re communicating affects that person or group. Anticipate questions and build in the answers. Write within this framework and you will guide yourself to create successful messages and documents.

Before sending a message, always ask yourself: How will it make the person feel? When you care, it shows. And you succeed.

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I give you a full set of techniques to draw on for delivering your message clearly and powerfully. Discover how to use the tools of writing — words, sentences, and structure — to say what you mean in a way most likely to earn respect, support, and agreement.