The Hindu Business Line : Writing with a purpose

All professional communication has a purpose. The absolutely vital key to good communication is a clear understanding of the purpose. It should be stated in terms of a reaction, the effect one wants to produce on the reader or listener, which is much the same for our purposes. All good speech also needs some writing and so is included in what is said here.

For example, do you want her to say: “Aha! I didn’t know that!” Or, do you perhaps want her to exclaim: “How come? This is incredible; quite different from what I have heard all this while.” She might say, “Now I know. At last a mystery is cleared up.” or “OK, now I can see why I have to follow such and such process.”

Thus, persuasion, eliciting an exclamation, clarification, entertainment, shock and awe — all are legitimate and quite common goals of different kinds of business or political communication. Think back and you will no doubt remember the experience of either making a sales pitch, a presentation or a speech at some time (or being at the receiving end of one) when one or the other of these responses would have applied.

So, responses define how a communication is shaped. It is generally believed that a good talk or essay mainly needs a gift of the gab, flair for expression, command of the language and word-smithy. While this is essential, there are at least four things that are as important and need our attention before we think of finding the right words. One of them has already been dealt with, namely, defining the purpose as a response. The other three are: understanding the audience; finding a point of view; and finding the storyline.

Understanding the audience is much the same as in drawing up an advertising copy or brief. It implies asking oneself all the questions about who the listener/ reader is, what they want from the communication, what the state of their mind is likely to be, and so on. Basically, the more one can get under the skin or into the shoes of the audience, the better one’s empathy and, therefore, crafting of the piece of writing.

Finding a point of view is to know one’s own stance on a particular subject. This will invariably affect the tone of voice one comes to adopt. Most of the time, a scholar or a journalist is expected to be neutral and be open to be surprised by the truth, whatever it might happen to be. But this is not always the case. If one is writing, for example, about child abuse, global warming, slave labour, caste discrimination or political corruption, it would be difficult to claim that one is neutral. One must clearly be aware of this position within oneself as it is bound to affect the way one marshals the argument and the information.

Nearly all writing (or talk) involves dealing with something that happened to someone or will or might happen, and all the attendant detail — when, where, why, how, and so on. It can describe something or narrate or discuss something, but nearly all the time there is a better way of telling — in other words, sequencing the words, so that the reader is hooked and kept on as if on a line, all the way to the end.

One simple discipline to ensure this after one has put the whole piece down into words is to run through it to see if every sentence naturally flows from the previous one or if the flow tends to be broken up.

If one has arranged all these three in order — understanding the audience, point of view and storyline — then you will find that the piece more or less writes itself. All you then need is paper and pencil and the facts. A dictionary and thesaurus is usually handy as well. Finally, after a piece is written there is almost no limit (besides one’s own time and patience) to how much one can improve it by polishing and cutting and removing the non-essentials.