Business Writing - How to Influence your Readers

Let's start by looking at what the reader wants from your writing.

It’s amazing how many people write without considering the most important person in the process - the reader.

You need to give readers reasons to read, and the more reasons you give them, the more loyal your readers will be. Readers like reading for three fundamental reasons – because it’s useful, interesting, or enjoyable.

It can even be all of these things!

Useful writing has a practical, immediate purpose. Your message offers the reader an immediate benefit.

Interesting writing makes the reader curious. The message is mentally filed (or saved to your computer) because it will have a value in the future.

Enjoyable writing gives pleasure to the reader. This is the category that suffers the most in business writing!

First impressions are absolutely vital when attracting readers. You have to make sure the reader selects your report from their to-read pile. If your writing looks like it’s going to be hard work, boring or condescending, people just won’t read it. Make it look welcoming, attractive and easy to read. If not, you’ll be writing for nobody but yourself.

Cognitive cost is shorthand for everything that puts a reader off your writing.

It’s what you feel when you pickup a slide deck and see that it’s full of orange text on a yellow background. Or that it’s in landscape format and packed with extended sentences that leave your eyes absolutely exhausted because you are being forced to read without pause. You feel cognitive cost when you open a box off lat-pack furniture and can’t tell whether you’ve got the instructions upside down.

To avoid putting obstacles between you and your reader, your need to know two indisputable facts about readers:

1. Readers decide whether to read or ignore in entirely predictable ways.

2. We all scan much more than we used to.

People choose what to read in very similar ways. Here are some rules to help you grab – and keep – their

attention:

Everyone prefers to pick up a short, attractively presented report rather than something that looks shabby and poorly constructed. If the content of two competing reports is exactly the same, the one with good design will get more readers. It’s that simple.

Readers read summaries and recommendations first. They want to know the conclusion of the report before they dig in. If your reader reads your key recommendation – and not a single word more –you can consider your communication to have been successful.

Readers like content pages because they want to understand the structure of the report. They automatically feel they’re in safe hands because you’ve organised your thoughts. It’s as if they want to see your scaffolding as well as the building it supports.

Readers flick through the section headings looking for areas that are relevant to them. The headlines you use at the top of pages and to break up the report plays vital part in attracting the potential reader’s attention.

Anything labelled background or appendix is ignored.

The RRM is a systematic way to consider how important it is that you do indeed write what you are intending to communicate. Will your readers respond in a way that justifies you writing that email, report or document?

The four questions you should ask yourself before writing something are:

1. What is the probability that your readers will read more than half of your writing?

If the probability is very low, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write, but it does suggest that you should write a lot less, and vice versa.

2. How hot or cold are your readers? Are they receptive?

3. How much time do your readers have?

The less time your readers have, the less likely they are to really engage with your writing. If you think your readers are extremely busy, then perhaps write less or consider not writing at all, and vice versa.

4. How useful, enjoyable or interesting is your writing to your readers?