Writing for the reader | Working Principles

It’s time to start a new series, called Working Principles – a few ways of doing things that I find make life more successful when I follow them. I’m not sure how many of these there will be, I’ve never written them out before, but having started I already have several titles listed out.

In our education system we are taught to write essays. The purpose of authoring an essay is to demonstrate what we know about something. In education we write for our purposes – to pass an assessment.

When I started work, I would write in the same way, documents full of information that I knew, but I never stopped to consider the purpose of writing and who I was writing for. I was several years into my career before someone pointed out that I should flip my perspective around and ask a couple of questions when I write:

• Who am I writing this for?
• What do they need to know?

Simple questions, but it’s clear from the many communications that I read that they aren’t common questions. In my mind I have a phrase which applies to a lot of business writing “never mind the quality feel the width.”

There are so many documents, emails, presentations which completely miss the needs of the person they are trying to communicate with. A plethora of words missing their purpose. A mountain of lexicon going to waste.

These are questions I’ve tried to stick to over the years of my career and they’ve helped me and hopefully helped the people I’ve been writing for.

When the reader is in focus, I use fewer and simpler words.

When the reader is front-of-mind I write things in a different order. Putting the need first.

When I focus on what the reader needs, I can leave lots of unnecessary information out.

(When I write a blog post the person that I am writing for is mostly myself 😊)

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Header Image: This is the view from the local hills, just a few minutes drive from my house.