For a long time — well, it seemed like a long time — seven or eight years, I taught effective writing seminars to business people. I was young, and I looked even younger. But I had to get up in front of engineers, chemists, lawyers, sometimes accountants, people who were accomplished in their fields but were not necessarily good at writing, and I was supposed to talk to them about how to write reports and letters and memos. And they challenged me because I looked like I was 10 years old, and they expected to be bored also.
[…]
OK, the most consistent mistake … not mistake, but inefficiency of business writing — and it was very consistent — is the absolute refusal on the part of the writer to tell you right away what message he or she is trying to deliver. I used to say to them, “The most important thing you have to say should be in the first sentence.” And “Oh, no, you can’t. I’m an engineer. We did a 10-year study, this is way too complicated.”
And inevitably, they were wrong. Inevitably, if they really thought about it, they were able to, in one sentence, summarize why it was really important. But they refused to do that because the way they found out was by spending 10 years of study and all this data and everything, and that’s the way they wanted everyone to look at what they did. They wanted their supervisors to go plowing through all they had done to come to this brilliant conclusion that they had come to.
COWEN: Through their history, through their thought patterns.
Drag everybody through it. And it was the one thing the newspaper people were taught to do that made more sense. You don’t have your reader’s attention very long, so get to the point. I found it was very difficult to get even really smart businesspeople to get to the point. Sometimes it was because they really couldn’t tell you what the point was.
What I wanted to say, but rarely felt comfortable saying, was, “If you don’t know what the point is, then you can’t really write this report.” But it was always too complicated for a layperson like me to understand. That was the way they did it. I was being hired by their bosses to tell them, “No, we want you to write clearly, and we want you to get to the point.”
COWEN: And why were they, at this meta level, resistant to your message?
Because nobody else was doing it. When I would start the class, I’d have 32 people in the class typically, and when they would turn in all their samples of writing, every one of them wrote the same way. They all wrote business-ese writing. This is my parody of it, but it was, “Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure.” That kind of formal, nonsensical, meaningless flow of words. Somewhere in there would be something important, something significant, or maybe not.
Dave Barry, interviewed by Tyler Cowan in “Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man”, Medium, 2017-08-16.
November 2, 2019
QotD: Business writing
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