Forget lessons from school

Our formal schooling teaches us to write so we demonstrate our knowledge. (Remember the political science professor who assigned you a term paper comparing the U.S. and U.K. foreign policies?) But that approach doesn’t serve us well once we are in the workplace. In a professional setting, we often write to convince a reader to change his/her mind or pursue a particular course of action.

Before you begin writing a memo to your boss or an email to a potential business partner consider what your reader needs to know. How can I serve the reader’s interests as I write this document? How much knowledge do they have about the subject as compared with what I know?

Answers to those questions should shape how much background you provide, the level of detail you include, and what terminology you use. And those three factors combined affect how easy it is for your reader to consume what you’re communicating.

The more effort a reader must put forth to understand what you’ve written, the less likely they will finish reading it.