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.

>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.

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.

Well put.

Yay!

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.

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

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.

I usually write whatever I would say, then go over it after and take out any words or phrases that might be superfluous, or that can possibly be removed. Wholesale removal of extraneous stuff goes a long way towards making yourself clearer. I'll occasionally leave things in that I feel add to my "voice", but more often than not, if a word can be removed, it is removed.

--- becomes ---

I write whatever I would say, then go over it and take out anything superfluous. It makes things clearer.

Struggling typists prefer conciseness.

Here is a simple improvement that should help a lot. Write everything in the active voice. This will make your language less "pretty", but more understandable. Doubly so when talking to people with a short attention span.

Let me rewrite your first paragraph to show the difference.

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.

vs

That whole sentence is superfluous from a business writing standpoint. It is an insertion of humility. Social fluff that would be important when speaking about yourself to other nerds.

> Write everything in the active voice.

Every verb in the original paragraph was already in the active voice. I'm not sure whether your replacement is better or worse than the original, but the differences have nothing to do with active vs. passive voice.

(You are far from alone in saying "active" where you mean something else. See, e.g., http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html and the various Language Log articles linked from there.)

You are right, I was merely using the term as I've seen it used.

My real point was that he does not organize sentences by the standard subject-verb-object. This makes the sentences more complex. That complexity makes it harder for people to understand what is said. It would be OK to do that occasionally, but he did it with every single sentence!

For me that pdf chapter example was very hard to read.

>For me that pdf chapter example was very hard to read.

Huh. Interesting. I often value other people's opinions based on my perception of their skill. Going through your comment history, you do have a very terse, very readable style, so it's probably worth my time to look over that chapter.

The whole thing suffers from the apparent fact that I had been reading a lot of Nietzsche at the time. Man. "The will to power" was very clearly a collection of notes that he did not intend to publish that were organized and published by lesser men. Not something one ought to use to calibrate one's aesthetics.

Hm. I need to read, perhaps, more Churchill. "Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all." Though, if I remember correctly, the context of that quote is a paragraph on the merits of germanic vs. latin derived words, his thesis, if I recall, was that Germanic words are generally better than those derived from Latin. That man could write; His work was a joy to read, but it also effectively communicated his ideas. I like his speaking style, too; Especially in contrast to the 'uncontrolled rage' style that was popular with the other warlords of his day, something my modern sensibilities associate with comical powerlessness.

You have written two comments in this single discussion that begin with a single paragraph saying "Huh. Interesting."

This sort of habit, if noticed by others, can look bad.

(I've been caught out in similar things myself.)

I disagree with the proposed fix. As an English major software engineer, I would treat that as a run-on sentence. First, you should clearly ask yourself if the sentence is necessary before looking for a fix. If you find that the sentence is useful then break it into two sentences, use active verbs, and make sure your logic is clear.

The original sentence begins with the premise: my writing is not perfect. It ends with: I think highly of myself. Self-esteem and writing quality may be unrelated.

"My writing is hardly perfect. However, I write better than a typical salesperson."

I love the epiphany by the author of the comment. Communications is a HUGE factor in sales. Clear, effective writing will amplify your business overnight.

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.

Like you implied, when you're trying to get a business deal, you're communicating for the audience. It's really all just sales. A lot of really successful salespeople probably don't have good spelling and grammar, but they're great communicators.

Dunno if you've read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but Kiyosaki says in it, "I'm not a best-writing author, I'm a best-selling author."

That said, I probably have the same problem sometimes, haha.

The other issue is that prose is horribly inefficient for transmitting concepts direct to a person's brain. It's a representation of verbalization, and verbalization is based on our limitations around hearing & generating sounds. We end up doing a 2-step process with reading & writing in prose.

I'm going to be roughly saying the same thing as josh but I noticed a few examples. Paragraph #1 is barely a sentence. "The thing is.." used more than once and paragraph 4 spurred this comment. That much in parenthesis likely shouldn't be.

I'm only commenting because I myself do this quite often. I'll be very verbose and break into parenthesis for almost no reason. I've noticed a trend lately in my writing that may help you: my verbose emails get largely ignored. I can ask for 5 things that are clear as day to me and get barely a response for one. I've often said the same thing in emails multiple times until the other party finally understands. This is as a full time employee talking to coworkers and partner companies. I would likely blow my brains out if this occurred with every customer.

It still happens now but I take the time to prune every email. I may take 3x as long writing multiple drafts until I can be concise and clear. One of my biggest pet peeves is repeating myself, second is getting a response confirming something I said 5 emails ago. The amount of wasted energy is soul crushing when I think about it and this is a daily struggle. I do write for myself but when that point comes when no one is really reading the response you give, you start to question responding in the first place. That's a terrible place to be.

>I'm only commenting because I myself do this quite often. I'll be very verbose and break into parenthesis for almost no reason. I've noticed a trend lately in my writing that may help you: my verbose emails get largely ignored. I can ask for 5 things that are clear as day to me and get barely a response for one. I've often said the same thing in emails multiple times until the other party finally understands.

This is something I have a hard time with; sometimes I want to repeat something that I think the other party is having a difficult time with, but often that just makes the document longer, and they don't read it.

You could always test your emails.

Yesterday, I found this service: http://www.yesware.com while reading Neil Patel's post on email outreach: http://quicksprout.com/2012/12/07/the-link-builders-guide-to... .

Have been through more or less the same process as you stated. Its really tough to define what value as you pointed out at the end.

Faking the full-time bit is completely true, does not make sense ... but then seems to be a necessity.

>Faking the full-time bit is completely true, does not make sense ... but then seems to be a necessity.

It's weird, 'cause I do think I'm unusually good as a temporary worker; I'm willing to tailor the time when I leave to something comfortable for the employer (whereas someone wanting a full-time job is going to jump at the request of a company that is willing to hire them full-time)

And because I'm looking at it as a temporary gig, Not only am I going to feel okay with it when you do let me go, I'm trying to set things up so that the person you get to replace me has an easier time of it; I pride myself on the ability to do things like train replacements. Hell, often I'll help you /find/ the replacement. (another thing that I can do well, but that so far I've failed to figure out how to monetize.)

Offer a Contract-to-Recruit service?

Have a lower rate "partners" who can maintain the code once it's clean?

hah. I haven't even managed to get recruiters to throw me a small bone when I give them people.