Despite all of our hopes for technology over the last couple of decades, the paperless office remains a dream. Whether we like it or not, this means that most, if not all, of our business communication will be through some form of document.
As a consultant your job entails convincing clients. Either to buy services, or to implement a solution. Often both.
So as we move forward, expect more posts to help us lift our game here. In the meantime though, here are some well researched and collated tips to jumpstart your persuasive English.
Note: None of the “wrong” examples are grammatically incorrect per se. These tips will simply help you write more compelling, easier to read English.
Tip 1. – Active Voice.
For some reason as soon as people write a “business” document, they start using Passive Voice. It just sounds more formal. However, for compelling copy, this sucks for two reasons:
- Passive sentences are more difficult to read. This is because we have to transpose subjects and objects, and often comprehend the tense as well.
- Passive sentences are longer. Thicker proposals are not more persuasive. If you can knock 3 words off a 10 word sentence throughout your document, you’ve shaved 30% off the overall length.
Example
Passive: The system will be implemented by ACME Consulting after the development has been completed. (14 words)
Active: ACME Consulting will implement the system upon completing development. (9 words)
Tip 2. – Short sentences.
This goes hand in hand with the previous tip. There are 3 sub-tips to help here.
- Split complex sentences into shorter ones. Try not to have a subordinate clause if you can help it (check for “and”, “but”, “which” and other conjunctions). Definitely don’t have more than one subordinate clause per sentence. Complex sentences introduce ambiguity, as you often have more than one subject.
- Remove redundant words like “that.”
- Remove superfluous adjectives (like that one
) and adverbs. Replace the unadorned verbs with more descriptive words.
Example:
Complex: In general when notified by a customer of an issue, ACME will attempt to provide a response as soon as possible and within one hour within the parameters of the support tier. (32 words, 1 sentence, 2 subordinate clauses)
Simple: ACME will generally respond as soon as possible to a customer issue. We attempt to respond within one hour dependent on support tier parameters. (24 words, 2 sentences)
Redundant words: The team will typically work to 10 day sprints with the workload for each iteration being derived from a product backlog. (21 words)
Simple: The team will work to 10 day iterations on tasks contained in a product backlog. (15 words)
Superfluous adjectives and adverbs: The man ran very quickly to get away from the extremely large alien. (13 words)
Simple: The man sprinted to escape the massive alien. (8 words)
Tip 3 – Consistent Tenses.
The final tip for today’s post. It is very easy to see when a team cobbles a document together. Especially when they cut and paste content from other documents. The giveaway is inconsistent text, both in voice (Active, Passive) and in tense (past, present, future).
As soon as you use a different tense (or voice), the reader has to “reset” their comprehension. With complex documents, often written by many people, this rapidly becomes tedious.
So stick to a single tense within your document unless there is an appropriate reason to change tenses. E.g. you refer to a past event.
Your turn.
Ok time for some quick homework. Grab one or your pieces of collateral of at least 200 words, and edit it 3 times. First check for passive/active voice. Then re-read it and shorten sentences as much as you can whilst retaining the meaning. Finally, check your tenses.
You’ll be tempted to try and fix all the problems on the first edit. Withstand this temptation. Do not edit any less than 3 times. I guarantee your document will be much shorter; much easier to read; hence, far more compelling.
Challenge: See if you can reduce the 200 words to 60, whilst retaining the meaning.