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Business writing

Write like Ayrton Senna

by nick on December 8, 2008

sennaThe best advice anyone’s giving me regarding clearer communication is to write as Aryton Senna drove: fast. Take the shortest route and get there as quickly as possible. Remove all excess baggage. When done, look back and see if you can go even quicker.

That leads me to ask how did this badly written nonsense get past anyone in marketing and make it to their home page?

“The Content Group is a technologycontentgroup agnostic Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consultancy and solutions provider whose proven ECM Expert best practice methodology ensures successful ECM projects for their clients across the globe”

What? Who on earth speaks like this within this firm? Cisco is one of the world’s greatest tech companies; you wont find any such drivel on their massive site. Or Microsoft’s. Or Nokia’s.

Another example is something like this:

Last week the dates for the next courses and workshops were finalised. These are the dates…

Does it matter that you finalised last week or last month? Why not just give us the info? It could become:

The dates of our courses and workshops are… [8 words vrs 20 = 60% less. It could be even shorter.]

We’re all bombarded with content, so help us out by getting straight to the point. An excellent business writing book is Read This by Robert Gentle. It has loads of suggestions that will help readers understand you better. Definitely one for your Christmas book list if you’re any sort of copy writer.

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How to rebuke a national treasure

by nick on August 19, 2008

Since the Yahoo! and Microsoft will-they, wont-they saga I’ve taken a closer interest in uber-investor, Carl Icahn. That most capitalist of papers, The Wall Street Journal, recently wrote a very non-flattering piece about him.

Mr Icahn has blogged his thoughts on the article, tearing the journalist’s (though I doubt he thinks she’s worthy of the noun) opinions apart with fact, insight and obvious relish. All in all it’s a lesson in dressing down with style. A couple of snippets for you:

“…the article was so wrongheaded that I am surprised that it was afforded an appearance in a premier business newspaper. I hope better academic guidance is provided for students in California than that exemplified in the editorial.”
“To imply that these companies’ balance sheets are anemic and debt-strapped is simply not the case. I truly hope Ms. Stout reviews the facts and corrects this kind of distortion that is used to bolster her already weak arguments… Motorola has approximately $7 billion in cash on its balance sheet.”

Reading his blog, you get unbridled access to his thoughts (granted on limited subjects) and are left with the clear impression that this is no absentee businessman. I’m sure he plays golf, or sails, or collects art like others who can afford to, but I bet he knows every inch of his organisations’ KPIs – he probably wrote them.

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