Business Writing With Buzz

Rosemary Gillespie - Monday, June 06, 2011

For every reader who spends thirty minutes pouring over every word of your document, there are five (maybe more) who won’t get past the first page.

Reading styles affect how much information people take in
Why is that? Because people have different reading styles. Some people (let’s call them nerds) love detail – the more the better. For others, if a document doesn’t give them the key points at first glance, they will be off looking at something else. Given the length of their attention span, we’ll call them gnats.

Unfortunately for us writers, a lot of business people are gnats, just through lack of time. Give a CEO a 50 page tome and watch her glance at the first page, then toss it in the bin. However, there are exceptions. People in technical or procurement roles are paid to get into the detail, and will scrutinise every word of your proposal, brochure or report.
 
Which means that when you have to write a business document, you have a dilemma – how to engage both the nerds and the gnats?

Different documents for different readers
One answer is don’t. You can provide a summary document (as many companies do for their annual reports) that alerts gnats to all the key points they need to know, but keeps them well away from the withholding tax calculations.

However, that is not always possible. Tenders, for example, are likely to be read by both senior management (probably gnats) and technical or procurement teams (almost certainly nerds). They will look at your document from very different perspectives.

Give skim readers sign posts
Given your technical people will be happy to load up your document with as much detail as they can, the biggest issue you, the writer, face is ensuring the gnats don’t get swamped.

Readers who like to skim need sign-posts to direct them to the information that is most important to them. Some writing and graphic elements that work for gnats include:

• Executive summaries: always put the most important information or message first.
• Headings and subheadings: a reader should be able to get a sense of the content just from reading the headings (look at this article as an example). Then they can dive into anything of interest.
• Pullout boxes that highlight key facts
• Graphs and charts, ideally with key points highlighted
• Photographs to demonstrate features or show the team
• Pull quotes: quotes that illustrate your key messages help to engage
• Bullet points and lists: have a look at our previous article on using these effectively
• Lots of white space: given skim readers are more visual, white space will help them absorb your content more easily.

With a few of these tricks up your sleeve, you will leave a great impression with that CEO gnat as well as their team of nerds.