CHAPTER 1

The Change-Maker Writing Process

If you want to improve what you write, you need to start by improving how you write. In this section, you’ll throw away any “rules” you’ve heard about writing and instead embrace a user-centered approach you can adapt to each communication situation you face.

Before we dive in, take a moment to notice three key terms in the above paragraph:

•User-centered—As cognitive scientist Mike Sharples showed way back before “design thinking” became trendy,¹ writing is essentially a design process. It starts not with a vision of the final product but with a deep understanding of the user’s/audience’s perspective and needs.

•Adapt—While the Change-Maker Writing Process provides guidelines for you to follow, you’ll need to flex those to fit the kind of document you’re writing and its context, including the amount of time you have to spend writing.

•Communication situation—The process you’re about to learn will help you communicate more effectively in face-to-face interactions as well as on the page or screen. You can use the Change-Maker Writing Process to create presentations, conduct client meetings, and even use the phone more effectively.

Ready to roll up your sleeves and get started? I suggest you read this chapter with a pen and paper handy so you can take notes and brainstorm about how you could apply the Change-Maker guidelines to a real communication situation you’re facing (or have faced) this week.

Key Principles for Producing Change-Maker Writing

Change-Maker writing moves people. It may also educate them along the way, but its ultimate goal is persuasive. It aims to get people to join your mission and buy into your new, creative solution to a challenging problem.

If Change-Maker writing simply teaches people about your products or explains how they work, it has missed the mark. You don’t want well-educated customers. You want buying customers.

The same applies to investors. Yes, it’s critical that a potential investor understand all the inner workings of your product, but unless you’re also hoping to bring the investor on board as your new chief engineer, that’s not what really matters. Persuasion, not technical proficiency, is what will put funds in your bank account.

To convince people to buy your ideas and your offerings, you need a writing process that centers on your audience, their problems, and targeted solutions to those problems. You also need a process that’s streamlined and quick because “writer” is just one of the many job titles you fill on any given day. In other words, the way you produce writing should be as nimble and flexible as you and your organization are.

Two key principles will help you develop a writing process you can adapt to the many different communication challenges you encounter. The first of these principles is creative destruction. Throw away all the “rules” you’ve learned about writing, and tune out the mental chatter that tells you what “good” writers do and don’t do. Instead, start thinking about writing as a series of interrelated activities that anyone can master with guidance and practice. If you can learn to ride a bike or code an app or cook an omelet, then you can certainly learn the craft of written communication.

The second principle for writing success is design thinking. Designers create artifacts that solve problems, and so do writers.

Just take a look around your home or office. From pens to pots, door handles to dog food dispenser, every item you see was created to solve a problem. For instance, my favorite pens have a cushiony rubber grip to solve the problem of hand fatigue. My double-handled pots solve the problem of imbalanced cooking utensils and long handles crowding the stovetop. My super-light Mac Air solves the problem of having to lug around a heavy laptop.

Take a moment now to scan your environment and consider how the items in it solve problems for you. And now let’s consider an everyday example of writing as problem-solving.

Imagine a client sends you a casual e-mail asking to increase the amount of technical support included with the software installation you’re doing. That’s a problem because your contract with the client doesn’t include any tech support. Therefore, the e-mail you design in response to the request has to solve several issues. It must clarify contract terms, ensure that you get paid for all the work you do, satisfy the client, and preserve the positive relationship you have with them.

You can see the potential for conflict among these goals. What makes you happy may not make the client happy. For starters, if you uphold the terms of the contact, you could alienate the client. On the other hand, if you offer free technical support, you’ll take a financial loss. In such a situation, the e-mail you write must be a complex and customized solution, carefully crafted to address a multidimensional problem.

This is not the same as saying that the e-mail must present a complex solution. The most persuasive solutions are always simple, and in this case, the more straightforward you can make matters for your client, the better. (They’re currently confused about the terms of the contract, so your task is to clear up that confusion.)

The e-mail must itself be a complex solution. Thinking of a piece of writing as a designed solution means distinguishing between the message the client hears and the process that goes into creating the message. This is exactly what we do with complex technology solutions. For example, when I get in my car to go visit a client, I click on an app that automatically tracks my mileage and calculates the amount to deduct from my taxes. From my perspective, this is a brilliantly simple solution to the problem of recording my travel expenses. But from the perspective of those who created the app, the solution is an astoundingly complex product that involved thousands of hours of coding, raising capital, testing, and marketing.

When you start recognizing writing as the process of designing complex solutions to multifaceted problems, it’s easy to see why templates and lists of writing rules offer little help. Such pre-fab solutions fail to take into account the human factors that can complicate business interactions. And there are always human factors.

Human-centered design thinking provides a better way. Designers approach a problem with curiosity, not a pre-formed answer. They start by focusing first on the user of the product or service they’re designing. They explore the problem in depth, from the user’s perspective, finding out as much as they can about the user’s world, their tasks, and their purposes. During this process, they make it a habit to continually second-guess themselves, questioning their own assumptions about what will or won’t make a solution effective for the user. Only after they’ve viewed the problem from the user’s point of view do designers articulate the criteria a solution must meet and create a prototype that fits those criteria. After they’ve built their prototype, they test it out with real users so they can confirm that the item or process they’ve built works in the real world.

You can follow a similar process to create writing that really works, that communicates clearly with your target audience in ways that build strong business relationships. While such a process may appear laborious, with practice you’ll soon find that the steps become intuitive, making your writing both easier to produce and more impactful.

Put Your Audience First

Imagine you’re a biomedical engineer who’s been asked to design a new device that will allow surgeons to close incisions without sutures or staples. But you’ve never been in an operating room. Nor have you watched a video of a surgical incision being closed or interviewed a surgeon. Where do you begin?

Without the opportunity to view the end user (the surgeon) in their context, you risk making some serious, even potentially life-threatening, assumptions. You might assume that certain chemical materials would work well, not realizing the way they could interact with the presence of anesthetic in the patient’s body. Or you might assume that a device of a certain shape would work, not realizing it wouldn’t fit in the tray used to sterilize surgical instruments. Without in-depth knowledge of the user and the user’s context, how can you possibly create a viable solution?

If you dive into writing without taking the time to learn about the people who will be reading your words, your solutions (your messages and documents) inevitably flop. Your e-mails go unanswered, your proposals fall flat, and your marketing copy fails to magnetize opportunities. You may be communicating accurately, even clearly, but if you’re not connecting with your audience in ways that resonate with them, you’re just wasting your time and energy.

But here’s the good news: when you invest time in analyzing your audience, you gain instant focus and insight into how to attract and persuade your target readers. And you don’t need to hire a research assistant or private eye to investigate your audience. You can collect rich information about your audience by considering four simple questions:

•What is my audience’s level of technical knowledge about my subject?

•What fears keep my audience up at night?

•What aspirations does my audience have?

•What values does my audience treasure?

The chart below suggests further questions you can ask yourself as you explore each of these aspects of audience analysis (Table 1.1):

Table 1.1 Audience analysis questions

An Example of Audience Analysis in Action

Let’s see how these questions help with a specific writing challenge. Imagine you’re writing a proposal to introduce a new skin test for multiple sclerosis (MS) into a large hospital. Since nurses would administer the test, you know that the hospital’s chief nursing officer Angelica Francis (AF) will be a key reader and decision maker. You’ve not met Angelica, so you don’t have any first-hand knowledge to draw on. Consequently, you mine every information source you can think of to learn as much as you can about her. You consult LinkedIn, Angelica’s publications in nursing journals, news stories on the hospital website, and one of Angelica’s former staff members, whom you’ve gotten to know at the gym. Based on this research, you make some inferences about Angelica’s knowledge, fears, aspirations, and values, captured in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2 Audience analysis in action

With these inferences in hand, you’re now well-positioned to craft a proposal that doesn’t just provide information but also connects with your target audience emotionally. As you write, you’ll keep at the front of your mind the matters Angelica cares most about, and that awareness will guide your creative process. In other words, you’ll be able to design a document custom-built for your particular user.

If you’ve ever helped develop a product or service, then you know that the design process happens as a series of decisions. Writing evolves the same way. Once you’ve completed your audience analysis, you face decisions in four key areas: content, structure, style, and word choice.

Table 1.3 lists specific design questions you can ask as you start to build your prototype, your draft document. As you read through the questions, apply them to a current writing situation you’re facing. You may want to take notes you can refer to later as you start to draft the writing solution for that situation.

Table 1.3 Change-Maker writing design questions

Note that I said you’d be able to answer “some” of these questions. In some cases, especially if you’ve interacted with your reader in person, you’ll be able to respond confidently to most of them. In other cases, you may find you can answer only one or two questions per category. That’s fine. A little information gives you more persuasive power than no information.

A word of caution as you start to get into the habit of analyzing your audiences in depth: regardless of how much audience “data” you collect, bear in mind that none of it is “hard data.” Be careful that your inferences don’t lead you to indulge in mistaken assumptions or stereotyping or to jump to unfounded conclusions. Designers continually query their assumptions, and so should you.

In fact, you should look for opportunities to test your assumptions. For instance, in the hospital example, if you haven’t yet met with the primary decision maker who will be reading your proposal, you might be able to arrange a meeting before you start writing. If you’re responding to an RFP (Request for Proposals), then you may find yourself up against a rigid submission process that prevents you from approaching Angelica directly. But if the situation is less formal, then you could perhaps set up a quick chat to clarify what Angelica expects from the proposal. As any designer will tell you, whenever you can involve the user in the design process, you greatly increase your chances of creating something the user actually wants to engage with.

Gaining Efficiency

Right about now, you may be wondering just how on earth you’re going to find time to analyze your readers in such depth when writing tasks are already stealing more than their share of the day. The key is to give your method for producing writing an Agile upgrade. Three helpful concepts will enable you to do that: process, proportion, and prototyping.

1.Embrace audience analysis as a process that will quickly become a habit. As you internalize the process, you’ll soon become more efficient at it. By training your curiosity, you’ll develop a kind of writer’s intuition.

As you become more used to investigating your audience, you’ll also tweak the analytical process to suit your needs. As you experiment with the charts in this chapter, I’d encourage you to develop your own questions, checklists, and resource lists to help you quickly drill down into deep audience insights.

2.Redistribute the proportion of time you spend in writing production. Much of the activity of writing, including audience analysis, occurs off-page as the writer wrestles internally with such matters as design, organization, and tone. Yet many writers allocate most of their writing time to production, the external act of forming words and sentences. In fact, this aspect of writing should suck up only about a third of your total writing time.

Challenge yourself to become more efficient at production so you have ample time to invest in audience analysis, other kinds of research, planning, revising, editing, and proofreading. To get your thoughts into written words more rapidly, you’ll need to shut down the inner voice that criticizes each syllable as you squeeze it out. For most of us, that voice is so dominant that it takes deliberate effort to silence it. Here are a few techniques you can try:

•Beat the Clock. Set a timer for a certain block of time and produce as many words as you can during that period. Turn off your Quality Assurance monitor completely during this time so that you concentrate only on output. (You’ll also need to shut down your e-mail and other distractions, such as interruptions from your team.) When you produce at this level of intensity, you can probably work for no more than 30 to 90 minutes at a time, so be reasonable about the time goal you set for yourself.

•Pomodoro Technique. Italian developer Francesco Cirillo advocates for a variation on Beat the Clock that applies to any task. Using his technique, you work in 25-minute sprints with 5-minute rest periods in between.

Pomodoro means tomato in Italian, referring to the shape of the kitchen timer Cirillo used when he first developed the method. If you don’t happen to have a veggie-themed timer on hand, just download one of the several Pomodoro apps available for your computer or smartphone. (I like the free version of FocusKeeper.)

•Invisible Writing. That internal critic we all struggle with can’t make snarky comments on your writing if they can’t see the words you’re producing. Try dimming your computer monitor and writing for short spurts without viewing the text you’re turning out.

•Daily Freewriting. If you’ve ever challenged yourself to learn a second language, then you know that the only way to improve your fluency as a speaker is to practice as often as you can. The same goes for improving your writing fluency, the rate at which you’re able to express your thoughts in written language.

One of the best ways to work on your fluency is to practice freewriting for 10 minutes each morning. For this activity, I like to write by hand because I find the break from the computer screen liberating; the writing process literally feels different. I’d encourage you to experiment with using both the keyboard and the pen to find the method that feels most freeing for you.

When you’re ready to freewrite, set a timer for 10 minutes and write without pausing for that entire time. If you get stuck, simply repeat the last word you’ve written until a new word comes. Or talk to yourself on paper about why you’re feeling stuck. If you keep writing, the breakthrough will come. And if you practice freewriting daily, you’ll retrain your brain to stop worrying about creating a perfect first draft and just get that draft done.

3.Aim for a prototype, not a polished final product. Take a page from Agile product development. Rather than investing a huge amount of time trying to create the perfect draft, assume that your first draft will be a rough prototype you’ll need to re-engineer based on feedback.

Mike Cyr, cofounder and COO of Nanuk Technologies Inc., has learned first-hand the value of getting a minimum viable product to market quickly. Based on Canada’s East Coast, Mike and his team create virtual reality tours for real estate developers. The developers use Nanuk’s preprogrammed VR headsets to sell buyers properties before they’re built.

Nanuk’s first headset was, in Mike’s words, a “kind of clunky” product, and Mike and his two partners had no idea how the market would react to it. So instead of trying to sell it, they treated it as a prototype and invited potential clients to give them feedback on how to improve it. That, says Mike, was tough to do because it meant allowing people to “tear apart” what Nanuk had spent years building. But the gutsy strategy paid off. Nanuk received candid comments that enabled it to launch a product more attuned to customer needs. And they established strong relationships with the people who provided feedback, who became collaborators in the development process.

Mike’s advice about building innovative solutions applies equally well to creating writing: “Don’t make it perfect. Just ship it.” If you don’t get your early product out to the market and brave the criticism, he says, you’re not going to end up with a winning product: “At the end of the day, we’re building a product for our customers, not ourselves.”

In the same way, the writing you’re creating is for your readers, not yourself. Treat your first version of any document as a prototype, and get feedback on it from your audience as soon as you can. By approaching writing as a collaborative, iterative process, you’ll show your audience that you’re truly invested in developing a relationship with them, not just talking at them in print.

Polishing the Final Product

When the product you’re creating is a document, you can’t always follow the Nanuk approach and share your draft with your customer or client (though you may be surprised to discover that there are many situations when the risk of sharing a draft weighs less than the risk of presenting a polished document without any audience input). But treating your draft as a prototype ensures that you allow ample time for the phase that follows prototyping—rework.

You can simplify and speed up rewriting by tackling it in three separate steps. (When you try to do all three at once, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose your focus.) Table 1.4 describes each step and lists questions you can ask to coach yourself through each stage.

Table 1.4 Stages of rewriting

Leverage Your Personal Strengths

As you try out the tips and techniques I’ve shared with you, pay careful attention to what works—and what doesn’t work—for you and your team. The surest way to gum up your writing process is to force yourself to follow routines that don’t align with your personality or working style.

For instance, not everyone benefits from outlining. In fact, many writers produce better-organized writing without spending a lot of time crafting a detailed writing plan. So don’t force yourself to follow the model outline your tenth-grade teacher gave you if it’s not working for you. As an innovator, you know that inventiveness can follow an unpredictable path. Why should you pre-judge how you’ll get a piece of writing from concept to delivery-ready?

Focus on your audience, commit to observing and refining your writing habits, and you’ll soon evolve your own effective process for producing Change-Maker writing that makes great things happen.

Checklist for Change-Maker Writing

□Identify the target audience.

□Assess the audience’s knowledge level.

□Probe the audience’s fears.

□Explore the audience’s aspirations.

□Describe the audience’s values.

□Make informed design decisions about content, structure, style, and word choice (using the Change-Maker Writing Design Questions).

□Revise the document, examining it for clarity of main ideas, structure, and depth of thought.

□Edit the document, assessing clarity and correctness of sentences, the writing style, and graphic design.

□Proofread the document, checking for typos and inconsistent formatting.

___________

¹M. Sharples. 1999. How We Write: Writing as Creative Design (London, UK: Routledge).