“The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate,” is a quote by Joseph Priestley and is very accurate especially when it comes to the written word.
If your language and style are such that even your most loyal friend refuses to read it, then there’s little chance that your clients will read it either.
All communication between you and your clients or your employees should be clear and easily understood by all parties involved.
In order to do this, we need to break down how we communicate into easy to follow steps.
- Choose a topic: In order for the message to be clearly understood, the writer needs to have a good understanding of the message they wish to send to the receiver.
- Research: Once you have chosen your topic the next step is to do research, if you are unsure of the information about the topic in question, this will come across in the message.
- Start writing: you have chosen your topic and have done your research, now is the time to start writing your core message, don’t worry about formatting at this point that will come later.
- Read aloud: This is an old, but effective way to see if there are any mistakes with the grammar or spelling that the grammar checker may overlook such as spelling there instead of their, this also gives you the opportunity to see if the communication flows.
- Cut out waffle: I have a tendency to use as much English as possible when writing, this step makes sure that you don’t have to read it, and there is every chance you will finish reading the entire message.
- Ask for Criticism: At this point you have to ask one of your colleagues that will tell you the truth to read the piece you have just written, no one that I know appreciates being told what we have just written is crap, but we must ask before we send it out to the wider audience.
- Put it aside: Every one becomes bored with something they have been looking at for hours and start to believe what they have written is rubbish. By setting aside your edited and reviewed content for a couple of hours, this will make the content fresh and more engaging.
- By following a structured communication strategy, your content will start to shine. This will lead to happier readers and ideally more leads and sales.
Till later,
Brendan Dunne.
