You Have to Learn to Write Well
I see a lot of people who work in tech startups, who can't write well. And it generally hampers their ability to get promoted, raise funding, or influence colleagues. Whether you work in an office or work remotely, much of modern knowledge work requires that you write to colleagues. You're either writing emails, or instant messages, or Slack posts, or blog posts, or marketing copy. You're writing to induce someone to do something. And if you can't write well, you'll fail.
This post may be useful for people who work in different contexts, or environments, but the main purpose here is to dispel myths about what good writing is in the context of business.
Since both "good" and "writing" are fairly abstract, and abstraction tends to confuse more than it clarifies, I am making this post as concrete as possible. A lot of what follows may strike you as obvious or self-evident, but this is intentional. I find a lot of people are just utterly lost when they are told that they need to learn to write well, so this post follows from first principles.
What good writing is and what it is not
The question here turns on "good". What is good writing in one context is not good writing in another. When I tell people "you need to learn to write well," they sometimes bristle at the suggestion. They bristle because they have been taught over the years, through various academic experiences, that "good writing" is either flowery literary language or turgid academic prose. While both kinds of writing may be considered "good writing" for their purpose, they are not good writing when it comes to business.
Let's make this more concrete. Here is an example of literary writing, from A. S. Byatt's novel Possession:
The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its board were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or, rather, protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland Mitchell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library. It had been exhumed from Locked Safe no. 5, where it usually stood between Pranks of Priapus and The Grecian Way of Love. It was ten in the morning, one day in September 1986. Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through wihch you could see the high green leaves of St. James's Square.
Imagine if your boss sent you an email with this kind of language, about the presentation that you needed to prepare for next week's meeting about your quarterly budget. How would you extract meaning from it?
Good business writing is not literary: it is functional and transactional. Its goal is to get someone else to do something. You know that you are writing well for business if your words result in the other person doing the thing you expected her to do.
Consider academic writing. Here is a quote from a paper titled Uncovering the Relationship between Real Interest Rates and Economic Growth:
We analyze long-span data on real interest rates and productivity growth with the focus on estimating their long-run correlation. The evidence points to a moderately negative correlation, meaning that real interest rate is mildly countercyclical, although the estimates are not precise. Our best estimate of the long-run correlation is 0.20. The implications for long-term projections are as follows. A negative correlation implies that long-run costs due to a period of low interest rates will tend to be slightly offset by a period of high productivty growth. Conversely, long-run benefits during a period of high interest rates will be offset by low productivity growth. This implication is consistent with the question raised in the Project Solicitation concerning why the trust fund stochastic simulations tend to show less long-run variability than do the alternative assumption projections. We also examine the implications for the variability of long-term projections of trust fund accumulation. As expected, we find that a negative correlation reduces the variability in the stochastic intervals. However, our simplified calculations suggest that the effect is modest.
So is this good writing? Maybe it is, for someone doing research in economics. But it is no model for a business person looking to influence colleagues.
Good writing in business achieves one thing, and one thing only: it induces the person to whom it is addressed to do something that the writer expects. Good business writing is functional and transactional.
So what does good business writing look like?
To understand what good business writing looks like, consider what it does:
- It uses complete sentences.
- It avoids jargon.
- It avoids slang.
- It uses full words (e.g., you write "you" and not "u").
- Someone can parse your intent quickly and efficiently, and act upon it.
But this list of bullet points is abstract. Let's make this more concrete by looking at some good business writing. The founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham, is frequently seen as a hero by many people who work in startups. He also happens to be a great writer. Here's a quote from his essay How to Think for Yourself:
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet.
The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
So why is this good business writing? There's no call to action here, and I have repeatedly said that good business writing induces the person to whom the writing is addressed to take some action. Surely, I'm contradicting myself!
But here is the point: Graham's essay is a great example of good business writing because:
- It uses complete sentences.
- It avoids jargon.
- It avoids slang.
- It uses full words, and not textspeak.
- Someone can parse his intent quickly.
Some recommendations of other people to read
Other examples of writers who you might want to read include: Morgan Housel, Patrick Collison, and Julie Frederickson. They each write about differnet topics, but each writes crisply and clearly.
If you want to read books about how to write well, two classic suggestions are:
Finally, I'd be remiss if I did not recommend George Orwell's famous essay Politics and the English Language.
Good writing requires practice and intention. But if you can write well, you will quickly find that you are able to achieve much more professionally.
A word about Elon Musk's text messages
A lot of digital ink has been spilled recently about Elon Musk's text messages to Larry Ellison, and others, in regards to fundraising for Musk's acquisition of Twitter. The messages appear to be very clipped and succinct, and much commentary has been made by journalists about how this is a bizarre communication style for businesspeople.
Aside from the fact that it is not bizarre, we can learn something useful about why Musk's text messaging works. And, there is a lesson here, but it is not necessarily the one you would expect.
Musk's text mesages work because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, and you are not. He not only has a track record to back his $44 billion tender offer for Twitter, but he also has pre-existing relationships with the people with whom he is conversing. All the rules about good business writing go out the window when you are writing to people with whom you have a substantive, long-term relationship. You will find that you can get a lot done, very quickly, when writing to people who you have known for years, and who trust you implicitly.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that what works for Elon Musk will work for you when you're pitching your startup's SaaS offering to a big company.