My plan was to condense my leadership book down to 2,000 words or so. Hold that thought.
I’ve started the final section of my CIO.com “Building effective IT 101” series. It will cover the most important organizational effectiveness dimension – human performance.
Strong human performance entails leadership – all eight tasks of it, along with compensation and organizational structure. Having already written 28,000 words about leadership, I figured I could knock this one out without breaking a sweat.
Somehow I’d forgotten a long-ago-learned publishing lesson: editing is harder than writing.
Not that writing is easy. But at the risk of splitting hairs rather than infinitives, bad writing is easy, good writing is hard, and editing is easier or harder in inverse proportion to the ease of writing.
(Metrics sidebar: Some publications pay by the word. That’s counterproductive, because the more words a writer puts in, the more time an editor has to expend to remove them.)
Effective writing is part of every business executive’s, manager’s, and knowledge worker’s job description, too. But they (you) don’t have the mixed blessing of an editor to sharpen up the dull penpoint that’s supposed to be mightier than your average sword. Then add this challenge: Much of the advice you’ll find about how to write effectively pertains to scribing for publication. Its value for your average Reply All email ranges from limited to counterproductive.
Don’t believe me? Google the subject and count how often you’re told to eschew adjectives. Plot spoiler alert: You’ll find this advice scattered all over the Googleverse.
I’ll take it when someone explains how I’m supposed to describe an edifice made of stacked blocks that reflect 700 nanometer electromagnetic radiation without preceding the noun “brick” with the adjective “red.”
In business writing, sometimes the most tedious adjectives (adverbs too) are modifiers – words like very, somewhat, mostly, and so on – and they’re essential.
They can make a published work dreary. But excluding them in business writing can commit a manager to unachievable results. “We’ll get this done by the end of the year,” makes a dangerous promise. “We’ll probably get this done by the end of the year” does not.
Nor is “probably” just a safety play. It’s more accurate. Certainty might make for better writing, but when it’s about the future it’s best left to the Oracle at Delphi, not those responsible for implementing Oracle.
When you, like me, need to squeeze a first draft that fully explains a complex or contentious subject into a much smaller space, cutting down on modifiers doesn’t help. What you need to do is to make hard choices about what and what not to leave in.
For example: The first of the eight tasks of leadership is setting direction. I could limit my explanation to a definition – “Setting direction is about how things are now that the leader wants to be different and better in the future.”
Or I could break setting direction down into its component parts: “Setting direction includes vision, strategy, mission, and values,” and leave it at that.
But that still leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. I’ve tentatively decided (this is, after all, a work in progress) to provide brief explanations of each of these, along with a few dos and don’ts.
But extrapolating my leadership word count to all human performance factors, I’m going to exceed 10,000 words – roughly five additional articles to give human performance its due.
There’s another factor people who write in business settings have to contend with: What we know exceeds our audience’s reading appetite. Whenever we leave something in to reduce the chance of misunderstanding we also motivate our audience to scan our deathless (or, in many cases, lifeless) prose instead of reading it for complete comprehension.
For this, two tips. #1: When you do decide to provide in-depth information, use bolded headings or paragraph labels so readers know what to expect. That puts them in a position to choose whether to dive deep or be satisfied knowing you dived deep.
#2: Keep paragraphs short to give your audience’s eyes a break. Ten lines is a practical maximum. Five is better, two to three is better yet.
Bob’s last word: Editing is harder, and more painful (for the author), than writing. Trimming, not just fat but a fair amount of muscle and connective tissue hurts.
As evidence: The first draft of this essay was about a hundred words longer than what you’re reading, and I was quite fond of every one of them.
Bob’s sales pitch: The holidays season approaches. What could be a better gift for your favorite business and IT professionals than one of these beauties? (And yes, that was a rhetorical question.)
You had some good tips on writing and some that may be less useful.
What I find on the net is admonishment about adverbs not adjectives.
Does it matter what color the brick is? If not then omit ‘red’ from the mss.
Please do tell us what your method (process and procedure) is for writing.
Do you adjust it depending on the size of the writing job?
Do you tailor your method depending on the context and constraints?
Or do you use agile aka pantsing for every writing job.
My Tip for doing the short version of your book:
Go back to your outline then it will be very easy to do.
No outline? Then make one using the reverse outline approach.
Then accept that a 10K document is not going to be the same as one with 100K.
They can not both achieve the same result so focus on the audience and what they need.
And if they need 100K then don’t expect to meet their need with your 10K.
lagniappe: bigger is not better. I just quit reading a 165000 word novel that could have been done better in far fewer words.
My process? Depends on the nature of the beast.
First, I figure out who I’m writing for. That informs everything that follows.
If I’m writing to persuade I generally break down the subject into Problem / Solution / Plan and outline it from there. If it’s to inform I’ll usually start by explaining why the reader should care about the subject and want to be better informed about it. If it’s a how-to piece I’ll usually rehearse the sequence and make sure I haven’t skipped any steps or branches.
When it comes to structuring whatever it is I’m writing I next figure out the best narrative sequence to take the reader along from one idea to the next, connecting the dots along the way. I approach much of what I write as being akin to a geometric proof.
Once I’ve decided on the sequence I re-outline the building blocks, and also figure out how to smooth the transitions from one point to the next.
Also, Before I spend a lot of time writing I research the important “dots” to do my best to avoid (especially) confirmation bias and optimism bias.
There are a lot of variations depending on the specifics, but this should give you a sense of it.
Bob,
Thanks for that info.
Then why is there a problem condensing your larger work down to 10K words?
Start with the outline. Adjust the document for goal and readers needs.
Select what fits best from the big document.
Final polish.
Is there more to your problem than I see in the description first given?
Have you considered doing the draft and then just hiring an editor?
Might be a lot cheaper, especially if you can use your time consulting at a higher rate.
The problem is straightforward: I want to provide more depth than fits into a reasonable length limit for this sort of article.
I’ll start with the short answer and follow with explanatory exposition. While trimming words you wish to provide enough content to avoid misunderstanding. You can’t. No one can.
This was a lesson I learned from working with an engineer who developed and refined methods of finite element analysis on aeronautical structures, something many leagues beyond my scope. He also had a “gift” for breaking simple, straight forward procedures. Not intentionally being malicious, not stress testing them, just naturally finding outlier cases that fit with his understanding of how that process worked.
Your writing does a good job of balancing clarity and completeness when you cover complex subjects, but no amount of effort will avoid running into someone’s intelligent misunderstanding of what you wrote. So, keep it up, but don’t wear yourself out.