Lately my social media feed¹ has included an increasing number of complaints about young employees who don’t have writing skills. They can’t string an email together. They don’t know how to get their point across. They can’t persuade people through their writing. They can’t even answer a question when asked.

I haven’t seen young employees with this issue, myself. Even my Lego-obsessed teen niece, who hated reading until she developed an obsession with Minions and I was able to lure her into books by starting with Minion mini-novels, and who sends me animated videos as thank you cards², even she can string enough sentences together to get her point across. And get her started on antique video games, whew!

That said, not everyone starts a new job with business writing skills. When I managed communications for a particularly literate retailer, I hired team members who a) had real-world experience in the business; b) analyzed situations and applied their experiential knowledge to those situations to come up with solutions; c) could explain to peers in other departments what, in their proposals, would and would not work in a real-life situation, in a way that was persuasive; d) could organize their thoughts logically; e) seemed like they would be fun to work with. They did not, however, always come into the department with business writing skills.³ And that was fine with me: I could train for that.⁴

And one of the ways I trained for that was with this book. New hires, as part of their onboarding to our department, received a copy of this book. (I gave it to them all, regardless of previous experience. Being a beautiful writer does not mean that you are going to be a good business writer. It’s a slightly different animal.) If they continued to struggle, I sent them to the Business Writing Center for a quick course.

This book contains helpful examples, and describes how to develop clear objectives, adapt information include to your audience, respond effectively to other people’s requests the first time so they stop asking you the same question, build collaborative relationships through tone and style, organize your thoughts to get the response you want, use a framework to make longer writing easier to read, prevent misunderstandings, and get your point across so quickly that readers don’t have a chance to get bored.

While Hogan does include information on grammar and punctuation, the book is mainly about the things I listed above. Interestingly, many of these same lessons are the same speech projects that Toastmasters used to include in its Competent Communicator guide to public speaking: having a point, organizing your thoughts, bringing your speech to a conclusion, using information effectively to support your point, adapting your speech to your audience, etc.

So, if you or someone you know could use some help in this area, I recommend this book or the course at the Business Writing Center. I don’t usually recommend courses but not everyone learns well by reading; and I’ve seen this one work.

Enjoy!

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1. Which pretty much consists of LinkedIn. I just don’t have time or inclination for the others. ↩︎
2. Hey, she sends thank you cards. That’s all that matters. And they’re very cute videos. ↩︎
3. Occasionally I ended up with a ringer, an editor, for example, who had been working in L&D and would otherwise have been downsized. They were generally unhappy working with my team, who really couldn’t care about the difference between an em-dash and an en-dash. Oh, don’t get me started on the em-dash wars that wasted soooooo of one team member’s much time. ↩︎
4. Made HR insane when I was recruiting. They kept sending me very nice English teachers who expressed themselves with perfect grammar and punctuation but didn’t know a waterfall from a PDT. I’m not kidding, one young communications associate, who had been writing about waterfalls all day finally got up the courage to ask, what was a waterfall? I explained and I saw the lightbulb go on over her head. She scurried back to her desk to re-read what she had been writing and re-write with that in mind. ↩︎