Always be Specific; Avoid Generalities and Jargon

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From the course by University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

539 оценки

University of Colorado Boulder

Business Writing

539 оценки

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation

Writing well is one of the most important skills you can learn for success in the business world. Knowing how to write well allows you to deliver your ideas with the power they deserve. Good writing also conveys a sense of your professional excellence to the world around you. In this course, you'll master the simple, effective skills that drive all successful business writing. You'll create impactful documents that not only showcase your ideas, but showcase your own professionalism to your audience. The principles you learn in this course enable you to become a great business writer. They also provide the foundation for moving into Graphic Design and Successful Presentation, so that you can unleash your best professional self whenever--and however--you present your ideas in the workplace.

From the lesson

Activate Your Voice!

So, you've started to write a document . . . Module Four takes you beyond the scaffold and good grammar to provide you with specific tips that will elevate your language, infuse your writing with clarity, and amp up your ability to communicate your ideas effectively. Every lesson in this module is based on the principles you learned in Module One, and they form a checklist of techniques that you can apply to any business document to insure your ideas shine on the page. Short videos on emails and longer documents give you simple techniques for applying the lessons of this course to a broad range of your work.

Writing IS Revision3:18

Check Your Scaffold1:18

Keep It Simple4:43

Brevity is the Soul of Wit5:06

Dave on How Logo Design Reflects Brevity and Clarity5:22

Always be Specific; Avoid Generalities and Jargon5:04

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Quentin McAndrew
Instructor
Department of English, University of Colorado Boulder

We've discussed the power of brevity and simplicity,

which do wonders to make the windowpane of your writing spotless.

To complement those principles, really good writers also rely on specifics.

[SOUND] This plays into our writing principle, be the authority.

Because specifics and data add power to your writing.

You don't want to say the marketing campaign was highly successful.

This is vague.

What does highly successful actually mean?

How are you measuring success?

Why should your audience believe you when you claim success?

Instead, you want to provide objective specifics whenever possible.

So let's try it again.

The marketing campaign increased lead generation by 50% and conversions by 20%,

adding $500,000 to the bottom line.

That's specific and

much more powerful than, the marketing campaign was highly successful.

Besides providing non specific information like, the marketing campaign was highly

successful, or customer service is better than ever, you also want to

avoid general statements in your writing like, everyone knows finance is important,

P&Ls are hard to read, or all managers know that talent development is important.

A general statement saps your writing of specifics and

energy, and they're also really easy to disprove.

Surely, not all managers realize that talent development is important, and

generalities gives your audience no real information.

They muddy the windowpane of your writing and

obscure your real thinking from the view of your audience.

To avoid generalities, watch out in your sentences for what I think of as absolute

words, like everyone, no one, all, always, never.

Their presence is a warning that you may have written a generality.

Non-specific words like many, most, a few or some, are also clues to you,

that you need to add more details to your writing.

For instance, the statement, everyone think general accounting is hard,

is a generality that's impossible to prove.

Similarly, many people participated in the reorganization, says very little.

What does many mean?

You should say instead something like, the division heads and

the labor union president participated in the reorganization.

This statement has more authority and force.

The writing is much stronger.

You also want to avoid statements with a hugely vague or general subject like,

in today's society, everyone knows that design drives success.

Anything that begins with a reference to society needs to be cut,

just get it out of your writing entirely.

Also, in this sentence, who is everyone and what does success mean?

This is really pretty bad writing.

Similar phrases to avoid are, throughout history or everyone knows.

Whenever you can, you want to avoid jargon when you write.

This can be a matter of feel for your own corporate culture, but

the problem is, jargon-heavy sentences become completely meaningless.

A sentence like,

we want to drive the metrics to optimize the leveraging of the sales parameters

to achieve a paradigm shift, is an example of total jargon overkill.

Seriously, what does this sentence even mean?

This is probably someone who is writing to sound smart instead of to be smart.

They probably haven't taken the time to ask themselves if they're really saying

what they want to say.

Worst of all, it's a lot of work to read and interpret the sentence.

Any time your reader has to stop and interpret what you mean,

any time they have to work to understand you, you've lost them.

Also, there's no guarantee that they're going to interpret the vague writing

correctly.

As the writer, you want to maintain more control over the reading experience.

Rather than a jargon heavy sentence, wouldn't your reader thank you for

writing the same idea as, we need to diversify our sales?

Of course,

I'd like this sentence even better if it were broken out into specifics.

In order to meet our year-end goals,

we need to increase sales by 15% in the gift market, is even better.

But wait a minute, I have some extra phrases there, so

let me take another swipe at it.

To meet our year-end goals we need a 15% increase in gift market sales.

There we go.

The lesson of this video is to always be specific.

You've probably noticed a tension between cutting words and

adding detail, and you'd be right.

But in this case, we're adding specifics to add power and clarity to your writing.

And then we're going in and cutting as many words as we can.

When you write,

use objective specifics whenever you can to add power to your writing.

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