BUSINESS: How To Communicate Clearly With Your Audience

Writing is such an important skill for anyone running an online business so, UK Handmade caught up with Kieran Sullivan of Pureprose for his tips on how to communicate clearly with your audience.

Do you ever find yourself reading a sentence more than once to get the gist of it? Do you sometimes jump ahead to find the important bits in an article? If the answer is yes, then don’t fret: there’s a good chance that you’re actually reading poorly written text.

Here’s a quick quote from William Strunk, the Godfather of writing styles:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and threat subjects in outline, but that every word tell.”

Before you race away to write “Me Tarzan, you Jane” type sentences, consider also who will be reading what you write. There are tonnes of books out there prescribing how you should analyse your audience. Before writing anything, however, perhaps ask yourself just two questions (courtesy of docsymmetry.com):

1. What does the reader already know about the thing I’m writing about?
2. What does the reader need to know about the thing I’m writing about?

Armed with these two questions and the above nod to concise writing, here are some guidelines—from the pen of George Orwell, no less—to help you communicate more effectively with your readers:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (Make up a new one.)
• Never use a long word where a short one will do. (Replace ‘compressed’ with ‘concise’, for example.)
• If it is possible to cut a word, always cut it out. (Omit useless words!)
• Never use the passive where you can use the active. (Instead of ‘At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard,’ write ‘The cock’s crow came with dawn.’)
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or jargon if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (Swap in ‘manage’ for ‘micromanage’.)
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

For more bite-sized tips and musings on all things technically communicable, visit Kieran's blog here: http://pureprose.wordpress.com/

Follow Kieran on twitter here: http://twitter.com/techspeakieran