The Need for Precise Writing

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Today’s Pillar: Craft the Skills

While reading this article, your elementary school self is probably cheering, and every elementary school teacher you ever had is most likely screaming or crying. That’s because, in today’s article, I’ll discuss precise writing and the need for it, especially in business.

We almost have to unlearn the way we were taught to write as we enter the workforce. We were trained to write enough to hit the 2000-word mark for a school assignment or to add as many colorful synonyms to common words in our writing as possible during our formative years. I understand this; we want to expose children to as many words and grammatical concepts as possible. Let’s face it, without word minimums, most middle-schoolers would hand in a 10-word essay. However, this style of writing is best for teaching and in literature.

When I was in college, I took a corporate communication class and thoroughly enjoyed it, because it was the first class I ever took that taught me how to make a statement in such a way as to be as brief as possible and without leaving out any crucial information. Instead of adding “fluff” as one did in high school, this was actively shunned – we were taught to communicate directly and concisely or our grades would suffer.

When one uses imprecise language, this can have ill effects as people can be misled, wrongly interpret the message, or worse, people may feel that you’re trying to hide something or are glossing over a situation. You don’t want miscommunication, and using imprecise language can lend itself to that.

One way in which to practice precise writing is to try and communicate an idea or task to someone in such a way as to limit the need for follow-up questions or clarifying questions. If you constantly have follow-ups or clarifying questions coming back to you, you should adjust your writing to alleviate this back and forth.

Wordy prose has its place, but in a business setting, clear communication is a necessity. Communicating tasks in writing should be precise and without uncommon words. It’s the reason why newspapers are written at an elementary school level – you want as many people to understand the message as possible and page space is limited (at least it used to be). In business, time is money, and efficiency is king, so it follows that our writing should be congruent with this mindset.

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