Writing well is an underappreciated skill

I've been working a lot recently with clients who have formed teams but then aren't getting the efforts or results that had been initially expected.  I think a lot of the delta between what's been delivered and what's been expected boils down to poor written communication.  Too many times in our slap-dash, get it out quick world, we sacrifice meaning and directness in our communications. 

What I appreciate in others is the ability to write well, concisely and with great meaning.  There's really nothing better than reading a document that says exactly what it means to say - nothing more and nothing less - and does so with such clear prose that you can draw conclusions from the writing and have few if any questions remaining.  It is so rare to receive good writing anymore, and I think that is a significant contributor to the fact that we are still struggling to communicate well when we have literally hundreds of communication channels and strategies.

In good writing, each word is carefully chosen and used for its meaning and significance.  In a good document, the meaning would not be as clear if one more word were added or one more word taken away.  However, in most of our business writing we violate almost every "rule" of good writing.  There are rarely if ever any drafts, we approach writing as a challenge and a problem rather than a useful tool, and we use only two approaches to writing documents - the "look how few letters I can use" method that comes from too much addiction to BlackBerrys and IM or the "let's really layer it on" approach from your college term paper days.  The first approach often leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about what you meant, so transfers the power of the writer to the reader, and the second often just obfuscates the meaning altogether.

If we can't communicate clearly and concisely, then we can't expect others to work effectively and efficiently in tandem with us.  Since most of the work we do is sharing and exchanging knowledge, good communication and good writing should be essential to our work.  However, we've become comfortable and lazy with our writing and created a challenge for communication when one should not exist.

Comments

[James Shewmaker]

Recommendations:

"The Eloquent President" by Ronald White, Jr.

Ruth Walker writes a weekly column entitled "Verbal Energy" at CSM on transistional usage and grammar. URL: http://weblogs.csmonitor.com/verbal_energy/

Daphne Grey-Grant writes a weekly article entitled: "Power Writing" available at the Publication Coach. (Use my name.) URL:
http://publicationcoach.com/

[Joanna Young]

Good points here. It's worth taking the time as the writer to construct good, clear material that will save the time and aid the comprehension of your reader.

Joanna

[Denise]

I SO agree with this post. People don't seem to feel it is important to take the time to express themselves on paper the way they did years ago. Maybe the fault of the Internet? I don't know, but I DO know that I heartily agree with you about writing well and the importance of word choice.