Most business people write for a living; they just don't consider themselves writers. They have to distil complex and frequently indistinct, sometimes contradictory, information into a credible, coherent story that sells a product, persuades a client or a boss, garners the funds and motivates the people necessary to accomplish a project, delays a creditor; the list of purposes for business writing is endless.

Business writing is transactional; your words are supposed to do something for someone in particular: inform, explain, persuade, clarify, motivate. You aren't writing a novel. You aren't writing an academic essay either. The ideal business communication contains a 1::0 information to noise ratio, all information, no noise, no ornaments, no ego. Use the fewest words necessary. The subject matter, the content, is everything. That does not mean, however, the grammar and spelling don't count. The details count more than you might expect. Busy people look for any reason to move on, and a typo might make them hit delete, to say nothing of a badly written sentence or a foolish assumption.

Really good business communicators draft and revise and proofread tirelessly in private so when they make their writing public, it speaks for itself. A full 3/4s of your time writing should be self-directed, for your eyes only, notes, diagrams, flow charts, graphs, drafts, revisions. The more work you do, the less work your readers have to do, and saving your readers time and effort are mission critical. You want to give your readers a spoonful of honey, not a wagonload of pollen.

Overview of "the Writing Process"

People who teach writing often talk about "the writing process", which consists of gathering, drafting, revising, proofreading, and editing. Talking about writing this way leaves people with the mistaken belief that writing is a linear set of discrete tasks, like that depicted left. Writing is in fact iterative; the tasks blend and recur. Click on the image below on the right to visualize "iterative".

Nevertheless, because writing is so difficult and there are so many things to learn and practice, having a parts lists and a schematic, as it were, may help you get your bearings.

I will give you the view from 36,000 feet first and then some concrete advice and opportunities to practice.

Information gathering is the process of objectively gathering as much content from as many different sources as you can to create an archive. The content you gather can take many forms: words, images, storyboards, audio files, data sets, diagrams, graphs, video clips. During the gathering stage you don't yet know what you want to say, so you can't yet determine the value or even the relevance of anything you put into your archive. The bigger your archive, the better. Build with expansion in mind. Ideally you will get to reuse parts of it for subsequent projects.

For information gathering you might find a program like Evernote or OneNote or Keep helpful because you can keep any kind of digital file in these programs and you can make tags and keywords and otherwise search your information as it grows beyond what you can keep in your own memory.

Most people enjoy information gathering, especially if the subject interests them, and they don't yet have any fixed ideas about it. If you start archiving information with a fixed idea in mind, any information that supports your prior beliefs will please you. But anything that doesn't conform will be a source of dissonance, and you, like me and everyone else, will tend to discount or deny or even entirely overlook any evidence to the contrary. This tendency to seek confirmation and avoid disconfirmation is called the confirmation bias and it is hard to overcome. Try to gather impartially. If you don't, your archive will be misleading.

Data Acquisition -- getting primary content for your archive

Data can be acquired in different ways, resulting in different kinds of evidence, each with its own characteristics, issues, and values.

• Observational data -- you were there
  But did you see it clearly, without perspectival distortion or interpretive bias?
  Did you record it accurately?
• Reported data -- someone who saw what happened wrote it down or recorded it
  Second hand reported data suffers from the same issues as observational data, but human memory is notoriously fallible and audio and video are acquired, typically, from a single vantage point with equipment that has inherent flaws, and thus the recording has to be factored in (perspective distortion, noise)
• Acquired data -- through interviews and questionnaires
  Self-reports are fallible because people lie; they don't remember clearly; they misinterpret the question; they want to be helpful and will say what they think the researchers want to hear; they will make stuff up if they don't have an answer, and they will quit before they finish or just tick option A all the way down.
• Passive data -- machine generated based on user/client activity (aka, data analytics)
  Only as good as the algorithms that identify and record the data. You may have so much of this kind of data that the interpretation process will require careful thinking
• Real time data -- recorded as it happens, updated constantly
  How is the data being acquired? At what point do you stop collecting? What is the context in which the data is being generated? All you have is the changing numbers. You can see patterns in changing numbers, but without knowing what causes the changes you have very little real information even if it is regularly updated
• Historical data -- generated from past records
  The past is no guarantor of the future. Hindsight is perfect. Only the survivors are counted -- whatever didn't make it into the historical record, for whatever reason, is lost and its significance unknowable, which means the known has to be treated as only a fragment of the real.

Here's a cheat sheet for thinking your way through your data:

1. What assumptions guided your selection (and rejection) process?
2. What does the data teach you?
   How accurate is your knowledge and how certain are you of its accuracy?
   What doubts are there and how strong is each doubt?
   What further research could minimize that doubt?
3. What don't you know?
   Your known unknowns
   • What do you need to find out?
     What subsequent research is required?
   • What will be revealed in the future? And can you wait?
4. What are your unknown unknowns?
   The questions that cause the most trouble in life are the ones you don't think to ask, either because you mistakenly thought the answer was obvious or because you had no idea what was coming.

Eventually you will need to shift your focus from gathering to drafting. You need to resist the urge to remain forever in the archival stage, but you also need to avoid sealing the vault. A late arriving piece of information or data may be critical, and it may be merely distracting. So rather than thinking of gathering and drafting as exclusive activities, simply shift the bulk of your attention to one while leaving enough energy for the other.

Drafting (aka thinking with a keyboard or pen) is the initial stages of writing up what you think your archive says. Some people start drafting by writing a detailed outline of the subject, switching back and forth between overview and detail view as ideas occur to them. Some people just start writing and then create an outline after they have a clearer sense of what their data says. You should schedule multiple drafting sessions because not everything will occur to you at once. Some ideas surface slowly. Many people re-read before bed and then revise first thing in the morning. Sleeping on it helps.

Diligent researchers sit down to proofread a section and find themselves revising a sentence only to get up hours later having re-written the whole thing. No pain, no gain. Trying to figure out how best to say something often leads to clarity about what you are actually trying to say. Proofreading helps you clarify your ideas and clarity leads to effective revision.

Revising is about sorting and organizing ideas in order to clarify what the data says; refining definitions; making careful distinctions among similar things, vivid distinctions among dissimilar things, establishing important connections through correct transitions; responding to anticipated objections; finding and eliminating gaps in the logic, unwarranted assumptions, over-generalizations, needless repetitions. Through revising you might discover that you have more drafting to do, that you haven't yet said everything or that in the process of clarifying the meaning of a key idea you realize you wrote other parts with a fuzzy understanding and now you have to re-write those sections and then look for other places where the fuzziness persists or may have lead to other fuzzy thoughts. Just as proofreading leads to more revising, more revising leads back to the archive and then more drafting. Then the cycle resets.

Editing is the process of making sure the document conforms to the company style sheet (in school that means APA or MLA but businesses have their own style sheets) and community standards before it gets published (or sent up the chain of command). Getting the footnotes and works cited sections right as you go along is a good work habit. Even at this stage you still want to be proofreading, looking for errors, imperfect expressions, opportunities to reduce the word count. With any luck, you won't have to rewrite anything or add substantially to what's there. If you do find a significant gap, then you need to get an extension on the deadline or prepare for the fallout.

You need to develop your own way of writing and refine it over time. If you are like most college students, you already have a writing process and that consists of drafting and proofreading performed in a single session, often the night before an assignment is due. Your mantra is: "The best grade for the least possible effort." Efficiency when it comes to learning is actually suboptimal. The real value of writing is to refine your understanding of things and to question your assumptions and beliefs. You can't learn deeply in a single session any more than you can get fit by working your biceps for fifteen minutes.

Drafting is the process of taking your data and turning it into a coherent message. A complete draft is one that says pretty much everything that needs saying in order for the document to do what it needs to do. If writing were building, the draft would be a signed-off-on blueprint, the foundation laid, and the walls and the roof up. Structural changes at this point are possible but highly undesirable--unbuilding in order to rebuild is very expensive. But writing isn't building. You are working with ideas and words and using a digital medium so you can make big changes late in the process as long as you have the energy and courage to make them.

If you were to watch first-year students writing, you would see them writing the way a person reads. They start in the top left-hand corner and put down word after word, sentence after sentence, line by line. If they mistype, they will backspace from the moment they noticed the mistake back to the mistake, and retype, as if they are laying bricks (in space) rather then typing words on a screen. Finish the sentence, move on to the next. End one paragraph (often because it seems that paragraph is now long enough), move on to the next. Finish the last paragraph, reread from the top looking for spelling and punctuation errors. Done.

First-year students write in a straight line because they are accustomed to timed writing assignments and word counts and because the don't understand the difference between proofreading and revising. When they do have the luxury of writing something over a period of days or even weeks, they prefer to wait until the last moment and then let deadline anxiety focus their attention, essentially replicating the timed writing assignment scenario even when there's time for a more sophisticated writing process. Straight-line writing only works if you really know what you are talking about and what your readers want. It also helps if your readers don't actually need what you have to say in order to do their jobs, a situation that only exists in school. If your boss needs your work to do their job correctly, and you send them some half-baked jumble of sentences. . . .

If you were to watch experienced researchers writing, you would see a very different process, an iterative rather than linear one and one enacted over multiple days rather than a few hours in a row. Experienced writers type an idea, maybe a complete sentence, maybe just a keyword or a subject heading. If they can think of what needs to be said next, they might write a few more sentences, maybe a dozen more if they have a single idea square in their sites. You would see them pause to think, re-read what they just wrote, add something, maybe delete a line or two. Pause to think some more. They might stare at a single sentence for five minutes. If an idea occurs to them that seems important but not closely enough related to be in the same paragraph, they will enter a blank line and then write the sentence down or a key word or a heading. If the idea seems more distantly related, they might add half a dozen blank lines to remind them of the distance. If the two ideas are closely related, but they aren't quite sure how yet, they might just write the word "transition" on a separate line and keep writing. If the experienced researcher isn't certain the idea belongs at all, she might write it down and put a question mark beside it. She may also leave notes to herself, reminders to do something with a section next time she sits down to work on it, or a brief list of other topics she needs to add but doesn't yet have enough time or knowledge for. Or maybe just a question in [square brackets] or a different color, to make sure she doesn't leave it behind when she sends the final version.

Experienced researchers draft in expanding and collapsing outline form because they don't want to forget ideas as they occur to them, but they also know that ideas don't tend to arrive in optimum order, and they don't want to jumble different ideas together -- associative thinking is fine for drafting but readers can't read associative writing because all the implicit knowledge that instantaneously leads the researcher from A to G is missing from the reader's perspective until the writer goes back and fills in the blanks.

You will also see experienced researchers stare hard at a paragraph for minutes at a time, then highlight it and stare some more, and then, sigh, hit delete. Unwriting is a BIG part of effective drafting, and by far the hardest lesson to learn because it feels like going backwards. Travelling even faster down the wrong path won't get you home any quicker.

Transitions

--definition of a transition, diffentiated from a forecast
-- list of transition words and phrases
	-- grouped by application

Critically, experienced researchers schedule multiple drafting sessions, letting their ideas ferment in the back of their minds and their thoughts distance themselves from their words, so that when they return to a draft, they can see their work with fresh eyes and greater clarity.

Why drafting is harder than the written makes it look

The flawed writing process that novice researchers employ is partially the fault of the education system they came up in, timed writing assignments, specified word counts, disinterested readers. But novices tend to turn in drafts because they don't always realize what they've written doesn't match what they are thinking.

For researchers, novices and experienced researchers alike, objective interpretation of our own writing is difficult. The nature of that difficulty is neatly explained by the following excerpts, both of which come from a book you should read called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners". Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The star-Spangled Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener's job was to guess that song, based on the rhythm being tapped.

Most people guess 50% will guess right.

Only 2.5% of the participants guessed the song correctly.

Why are we so bad at predicting this? Because we can clearly hear the tune we are humming and imagine therefore that our tapping is a perfect representation of the same. Try it. It's not.

If you draft some ideas until they make sense to you, and then walk away and do something else for a few hours, or better yet a day, when you return the tune you were humming will be gone and you will be able to hear what the words are really saying.

Given the following data, what should be the headline for the school newspaper?

Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills high school, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchens, and California Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown.

Answer

No school next Thursday.

When we are drafting, especially early on, we are so close to the words we can't see the page. We are so focused on the details we fail to see the implications; we bury the lead, as the journalists say. For most readers, the implications are what matter. No student or parent cares why school is closed on Thursday so much as they care to know that it is. Recipients of research findings are more interested in the results and the implications of the results than they are in the data and only fellow researchers are interested in the methodology that created that data.

Time, the psychological equivalent of distance, allows you to see more clearly what your words are actually saying as well as the implications of your data.

In an ideal world, once you've figured out what your readers need to read and what order they need to read it in, once you've finished drafting, then you can start revising: polishing the sentences, finding exactly the right word, shortening some sentences and lengthening others, changing the order of this and that, eliminating useless repetition, and so on. In an ideal world, revising would be like sanding and varnishing a piece of fine furniture after the construction was complete. If you have to re-glue and re-screw at that point, something has gone terribly wrong. Heaven help you if you have to re-measure once the paint's dry. But writing isn't like building or furniture making. Most of the time you will need to have multiple sessions of draft/proof/revise/draft/proof/repeat because you won't fully understand the message you are trying to convey until later in the process than you would like. So the following advice is offered under the heading of revision with the caveat that some or all of it might also apply during the early, drafting stages, while the points you are trying to make are still partially buried in stone, as it were.

Specify

What kind of X is this X? When you see a comparative adjective like "better", ask yourself, what kind of "better" (more, superior, rarer, preferred) and "better than what?" Comparative adjectives logically require two items or more, but often we will use implied comparisons, say that something is better.

What kind of X is this X applies to nouns as well. Our minds tend to work from generalizations of personal experiences and so when we write we tend to grab a place-holder word, something more general than what we ultimately need. So, for example, we might write "house" even though we are talking about a townhouse or a condominium or an apartment or, and this is a bit more nuanced, not a house at all but rather a home. So after you've written house down and finished the thought, later in that sitting or a day or more late, go back and ask yourself, what kind of house is this house? Is it actually a dwelling place or am I really talking about a state of mind, a sense of belonging and well being?

A few lines up this screen I wrote "a local example" and then twenty minutes later looked at it again and asked myself, what kind of example is this "example", hence "a local example" became "a local example of drafting," and several days later "a local example of what I mean by drafting." Context may have been enough to convey the thought, but readers shouldn't have to make inferences.

On a shallower level, specificity also means finding words that point to other words and making sure they point clearly. Often it's best to replace the pointing word with the word it points to. So, if you begin a sentence with "this," make sure your readers will know what "this" refers to and seriously consider replacing it with the subject of the previous sentence. Same goes for "it" and the other relative pronouns.

Disambiguate

If a statement can be interpreted in different ways, it is ambiguous. Ambiguity can be hard to track down because you know what you mean, your assumptions inform your expectations of meaning. Other assumptions might lead to other interpretations. Remember the tappers and the listeners.

When were you born?
• In the summer
• 1995
• At the turn of the last century
• October 3, 2000

Clarity is the opposite of ambiguity, metaphorically, the same object observed from the same angle in the same light with the same instrument. What does a red apple look like to a color blind person?

To clarify, look for words with multiple meanings, look at the opposite word, look for synonyms, near and far. Identify assumptions, prior knowledge's influence on interpretation, trigger words. shared context and shared attitudes lead to same interpretation but allow different responses. (If the answer is always the same, why ask? If the question is interpreted differently, the answers aren't meaningful)

Try to identify social lenses that influence perception, connotation, and even denotation. The same word might be clear to all but mean different things to different groups. Consider the word "best". Product x is best:

• To accountants, best might mean cost effective
• To teachers, best might mean user-friendly
• To marketer, best might mean newest

Product x might be best in all these ways but if not, then the word will infuriate those whose criteria it doesn't meet.

Scrutinize abstract words and use only when necessary and not open to interpretation.

However, intentional ambiguity can be useful.

• If you want people to supply their own meaning. This kind of ambiguity is called "gnomic." It's kind of like a riddle only with several different interpretations.
• If you want to avoid responsibility, or spare feelings, or sound clever to those who can see your intention to be ambiguous.
• If you are speaking to someone who is very powerful in your life, you might find being ambiguous can protect you from being obviously at odds with what they want, especially if you don't know what they want. Because people tend to fill in the blanks with whatever they think belongs there, if you can anticipate how a given person will fill in the blank, you can increase their engagement by making them feel smart and with you. But if they fill in the blank in a way that doesn't serve your needs, then you've miscommunicated. Mind the gaps.

People hear what they want to hear, so an ambiguous statement can make it easier for them to hear what they want without you having to commit or running the risk of saying something they don't want to hear. Writing in empty phrases unintentionally is sloppy thinking. Using empty phrases intentionally to mislead or manipulate is reprehensible unless the audience is in danger and can't be helped to a better understanding by less manipulative means.

Animate -- The Ladder of abstraction

Ambiguous is not the same thing as abstract. Abstractions are not objects in the world but ideas people have about how the world works, generalizations about experience and feelings. Abstractions are real even though you can't see or feel them directly. By substituting a concrete representation for an abstraction, you can help people see and feel an idea.