5 ms·

First, let me say that I don't mean this to be offensive, and I'm trying to be helpful to you. As someone who occasionally hires consultants to solve urgent pr

First, let me say that I don't mean this to be offensive, and I'm trying to be helpful to you. As someone who occasionally hires consultants to solve urgent problems for me, I would be nervous about hiring a company whose point of contact had a communication style like yours. When I need a problem solved, I want someone who understands exactly what I need and who makes me confident that they will follow through and make sure I'm successful. Those people start building that confidence from day one by communicating clearly and making sure that I can understand them easily. In contrast, your comment is verbose and uses a lot of non-standard punctuation. That makes it hard to understand you. So my first thought is "wow, I'm going to have to do a lot of extra work to make sure lsc understands what I need." I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship.

lsc 13y ago
>I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship. That makes sense. The thing is, I always thought that my writing was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I mean, it's not perfect, or even very good by English-major standards, but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself. You know how some people enjoy the sound of their own voice? I enjoy my own writing. The problem is that I'm writing for myself, not for the audience. Which is bad communication, even when it is good prose. >In contrast, your comment is verbose and uses a lot of non-standard punctuation. That makes it hard to understand you. So my first thought is "wow, I'm going to have to do a lot of extra work to make sure lsc understands what I need." Huh. I have always thought of most sales and management folks as not very good at written communication. Even when trying to convey complex ideas, usually their emails are all of two sentences, and often grammar errors make those sentences nonsense without context. This lines up with what you have said, though. If they are communicating in two-sentence messages, maybe my three-page essays are not appreciated. No matter what the reason, they /do/ communicate in soundbytes, and my insistence on essays is... counterproductive. If you are writing to communicate, and not just to read your own prose, the whole point is being understood. More to the point, it's irrational arrogance on my part to say that folks who are better than I am at sales, which is essentially communication, are worse communicators than I am. You have... significantly changed my opinion of the consulting situation and the direction in which I need to move in order to improve my business communication. Thanks.
- gridspy 13y ago
  Just to push you further in the right direction - you need to decide what you want the email to accomplish. It should do that and no more. Often you want them to arrange a consultation with you. So they just need a taster of your solution that will leave them curious for more in person where you can still adapt it to their requirements. Once they are sold, stop selling and go for the close. Otherwise you might talk them out of it. Respect their time and keep communications short. That way they'll read every word.
  - wsinks 13y ago
    Yay!
  - jpelker 13y ago
    Well put.
- joshyeager 13y ago
  Glad to help. :-) I agree that a lot of sales and management types are sloppy and overly terse. That's just as bad. A good balance makes communication much easier and more effective. Best of all is if you can do all that and still show a unique personality. That's what I'm working on, because I feel like my writing is pretty bland.
- phamilton 13y ago
  A very simple change you could make to your writing would be to swap out commas for other punctuation. Parentheses, semicolons, and other less often used punctuation serve distinct purposes and add to readability. I'm no expert. Here is a stab at fixing a sentence of yours. >I mean, it's not perfect (or even very good by English-major standards) but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself That drops the comma count from 5 to 3 and makes it a little more fluid. Just my 2 cents.
  - lsc 13y ago
    From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff. My takeaway is primarily not that I did verbosity wrong, though certainly that comment wasn't right, but that the verbosity itself is the problem. Take, for example one of the bits of writing I'm most proud of: http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf We had a real editor, and my co-author had significant writing skill, but even so: Look at the Scheduling for providers section; that was mostly me. This is about what I had been aiming for in my business communications, and while I still think it's a reasonable bit of writing for a semi-technical audience, it is far too verbose for a business email. If I was sending that same passage to a business person, I suspect the optimal format would be something like: "We will allocate CPU based on how much ram the user purchases." The rest is technical details and fluff. When dealing with a businessperson, the technical details are my job, not something they care about. I think that my primary self-destructive impulse here is that I want to throw out technical details, in part to prove that I actually know something. I need to restrain that bit of ego, as worrying about the technical details is what I'm (hopefully) getting paid to do.

lsc 13y ago

>I have no idea if that is accurate. But if one of your competitors was easier to understand, I would probably pick them because I don't have the extra time required to understand you and make sure you understand me over the course of our whole relationship. That makes sense. The thing is, I always thought that my writing was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I mean, it's not perfect, or even very good by English-major standards, but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself. You know how some people enjoy the sound of their own voice? I enjoy my own writing. The problem is that I'm writing for myself, not for the audience. Which is bad communication, even when it is good prose. >In contrast, your comment is verbose and uses a lot of non-standard punctuation. That makes it hard to understand you. So my first thought is "wow, I'm going to have to do a lot of extra work to make sure lsc understands what I need." Huh. I have always thought of most sales and management folks as not very good at written communication. Even when trying to convey complex ideas, usually their emails are all of two sentences, and often grammar errors make those sentences nonsense without context. This lines up with what you have said, though. If they are communicating in two-sentence messages, maybe my three-page essays are not appreciated. No matter what the reason, they /do/ communicate in soundbytes, and my insistence on essays is... counterproductive. If you are writing to communicate, and not just to read your own prose, the whole point is being understood. More to the point, it's irrational arrogance on my part to say that folks who are better than I am at sales, which is essentially communication, are worse communicators than I am. You have... significantly changed my opinion of the consulting situation and the direction in which I need to move in order to improve my business communication. Thanks.

gridspy 13y ago
Just to push you further in the right direction - you need to decide what you want the email to accomplish. It should do that and no more. Often you want them to arrange a consultation with you. So they just need a taster of your solution that will leave them curious for more in person where you can still adapt it to their requirements. Once they are sold, stop selling and go for the close. Otherwise you might talk them out of it. Respect their time and keep communications short. That way they'll read every word.
- wsinks 13y ago
  Yay!
- jpelker 13y ago
  Well put.
joshyeager 13y ago
Glad to help. :-) I agree that a lot of sales and management types are sloppy and overly terse. That's just as bad. A good balance makes communication much easier and more effective. Best of all is if you can do all that and still show a unique personality. That's what I'm working on, because I feel like my writing is pretty bland.
phamilton 13y ago
A very simple change you could make to your writing would be to swap out commas for other punctuation. Parentheses, semicolons, and other less often used punctuation serve distinct purposes and add to readability. I'm no expert. Here is a stab at fixing a sentence of yours. >I mean, it's not perfect (or even very good by English-major standards) but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself That drops the comma count from 5 to 3 and makes it a little more fluid. Just my 2 cents.
- lsc 13y ago
  From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff. My takeaway is primarily not that I did verbosity wrong, though certainly that comment wasn't right, but that the verbosity itself is the problem. Take, for example one of the bits of writing I'm most proud of: http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf We had a real editor, and my co-author had significant writing skill, but even so: Look at the Scheduling for providers section; that was mostly me. This is about what I had been aiming for in my business communications, and while I still think it's a reasonable bit of writing for a semi-technical audience, it is far too verbose for a business email. If I was sending that same passage to a business person, I suspect the optimal format would be something like: "We will allocate CPU based on how much ram the user purchases." The rest is technical details and fluff. When dealing with a businessperson, the technical details are my job, not something they care about. I think that my primary self-destructive impulse here is that I want to throw out technical details, in part to prove that I actually know something. I need to restrain that bit of ego, as worrying about the technical details is what I'm (hopefully) getting paid to do.