Persuasive writing techniques and applications

¶ … Business Communications

For want of literacy skills, workers are lost; for want of workers, profits and companies are lost; for want of competitive companies, markets are lost; for want of markets, the country's economy is being helped to hell; and all for the want of literacy skills. -- Myra J. Linden and Art Whimbey, 1990

Effective communications have been studied for well over 2,500 years and has been recognized as increasingly more important during the last 30 years; in fact, Meyer, Sterkel and Tucker suggest that effective business communication is the key strategic advantage for many of today's successful firms. It is virtually impossible to sell any type of good or service without effective business communications. In fact, the earliest writings discovered to date involved business transactions and inventories (Horton, 1995). While it is critically important for a business to ensure that its customers are provided with such communications, it is equally important to make every effort to provide a company's employees with a comparable standard of communication. No matter how unintentional, poorly written internal communications can result in a lowered morale, hurt feelings, a loss of productivity and increased absenteeism and employee turnover.

It is the purpose of this paper to provide the background and rationale in support of an employer-sponsored effective writing skills workshop to improve the quality of the company's business communications. A summary of the research and a recommendation will be provided in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Background and Overview.

Prior to the turn of the 20th century, most businesses in the West were relatively small and their internal operations were controlled and coordinated through informal business communication avenues such as word of mouth except in those cases where written letters were needed to reach parties at greater distances. By sharp contrast, corporations today are "held together by networks of internal communication that extend up, down and across hierarchies. Employees at all levels read and write countless memoranda, letters and reports and spend untold hours in meetings" (Horton 35). Popular thought also suggests that most people spend more time talking than writing in business settings; however, the results of a study by Nellermoe, Reinstein and Weirich (1999) conflict with many business communication studies that have reported that individuals spend proportionately more time of their business day in listening and speaking rather than writing. These results, they say, serve to further underscore the importance of effective communications skills for employees today. According to Wade (1998), effective writing should be "as honest as bricklaying and as satisfying as painting a landscape that one knows well" (p. 25). Unfortunately, the recent events in this company resulting from a poorly worded internal communication certainly highlight the fact that some employees do not enjoy these levels of writing skills, and the impact from this internal communication in particular emphasizes the importance of "meaning what you say, and saying what you mean" in business settings; these issues are discussed further below.

Importance of Effective Internal Business Communications.

In his book, The Bargaining Manager: Enhancing Organizational Results through Effective Negotiation, Ramundo (1994) reports that the prevailing view today is that communication is "a dynamic interpersonal process that affects organizational behavior" (p. 86). Effective internal business communication involve more than a mere linear flow of information though; as recent events in the company so clearly showed, internal business communications can have an enormous impact on influencing employee behavior in the workplace. According to Ramundo, the internal communication process involves both the vertical and horizontal transmission of information from management to employees and back again within the organization: "Organizational communications are essentially administrative, with some having special operational significance. In both types of communication there is a need to ensure that the message is clear and accurate, timely, and understood as intended" (emphasis added) (p. 86). Some effective way of developing effective internal business communications include helping employees achieve success through practice, encouraging feedback, developing good listening skills, keeping emotions out of communication, and selecting the appropriate communications channel (Ramundo, 1994). It is also in the best interests of any enterprise to have employees with good communication skills; unfortunately, Linden and Whimbey report that more than half of the adults in the United States are unqualified for today's technical jobs because they lack adequate reading and writing skills. Furthermore, in an increasingly globalized marketplace, good communications skills be take into account not only accuracy in the choice of words, but avoid any inadvertent use of terms that might be offensive to other cultures (Hendon, Hendon & Herbig, 1996).

What Can Be Done.

To help overcome these constraints to effective business communications, it is recommended that the company sponsor a writing skills workshop. According to Linden and Whimbey (1990), most types of skills are best learned through instruction and demonstration by an expert, followed by practice, preferably with frequent feedback and guidance from the expert. The writing skills workshop approach is based on the concept that most people already know how to write because writing is based on an innate competence for expression (Linden & Whimbey, 1990). Based on their experience, Campbell and Dierking (2000) report that, "Writers' workshops have proven to be a powerful method for the delivery of writing instruction" (p. 362). The workshop approach is also recommended by Reynolds (1995), who conducts writing workshops for corporations across the country. This author reports that he has found that the majority of people in corporate settings are very defensive about their writing skills for two fundamental reasons:

First, many of the writers were affected by a troublesome corporate class-consciousness based on education. Some of the people I worked with were convinced that they didn't write well because they didn't have a college education, whereas others believed they wrote well because they had earned a graduate or professional degree. The relationship between educational level and writing ability is, of course, not an absolute one, perhaps evidenced best by the number of academics with doctorates who have trouble writing clear and compelling prose. The myth, however, prevails, endures, and causes trouble (p. 29).

Writer's workshops are also useful for helping employees learn how much they know about writing, and what areas require work (Petit & Soto, 2002). Providing employees with training in effective writing skills by applying prescribed standard writing principles also appears to be a major factor in generating standardized documents that facilitate business operations (Nellermoe et al., 1999).

A factor that should be addressed in such a writing skills workshop for the company, however, is the manner in which most people write today because long gone for many are the days of a using a yellow legal pad and number 2 Eberhard-Faber pencil for composition purposes. According to Reynolds, the majority of people he has worked with in such workshops in the past would have substantially benefited from having an increased awareness and more control over document arrangement and presentation to develop the visual emphasis involved during the writing process. Based on the preponderance of personal computers and word processing software in place across the country, this author recommends that where appropriate, such writing skills workshops be conducted on such PC-based word-processing systems and incorporate contemporary issues such as effective email preparation as part of the workshop agenda.