Planning Business MessagesBe careful with intimacy. Business messages should avoid intimacy....

Chapter 4

Planning Business Messages

1 Chapter 4 - Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Prentice Hall

Compose

the message

Three-Step Process


Define the Purpose

General

Specific


Analyze the Purpose

• Will your message change anything?

• Is the timing right for your message?


5 Chapter 4 -

Profile the Audience

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Prentice Hall

Identify the primary audience. If you can reach the decision makers or opinion molders in

your audience, other audience members will fall in line.

Determine the size and geographic distribution of your audience. A report for wide

distribution requires a more formal style, organization, and format than one directed to three

or four people in your department.

Determine the composition of the audience. Look for common denominators that tie

audience members together across differences in culture, status, or attitude. Include evidence

that touches on everyone’s area of interest.

Gauge your audience’s level of understanding. If audience members share your general

background, they’ll understand your material without difficulty. If not, you must educate

them. Include only enough information to accomplish your objective. Everything else is

irrelevant and must be eliminated.

Understand your audience’s expectations and preferences. Will members of your

audience expect complete details or will a summary of the main points suffice? Do they

want an e-mail or will they expect a formal memo?

Forecast your audience’s probable reaction. If you expect a favorable response, state

conclusions and recommendations up front and offer minimal evidence. If you expect

skepticism, introduce conclusions gradually, and include more evidence.

Gathering Information



Audience

perspective

Community

input

Company

documents

Audience

input

Informal Techniques

Selecting the Right Medium


Oral Media

• Conversations

• Interviews

• Speeches

• Presentations

• Meetings 9 Chapter 4 - Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Prentice Hall

Written Media

Memos

Proposals Reports

Letters


Visual Media

• Communicate fast

• Clarify complexity

• Overcome barriers

• Expedite memory


Electronic Media


Choose the Medium

Richness

Limitations

Cost

Formality

Urgency

Preferences


Organizing Information


Define the Main Idea


Overall subject Topic

Topic statement Main idea

Generating Ideas


Brainstorming. Generate as many ideas and questions as you can, without stopping to criticize or organize. Then, look for the main idea and groups of supporting ideas. Journalistic approach. Introduced earlier in the chapter, the journalistic approach asks who, what, when, where, why, and how questions to distill major ideas from piles of unorganized information. Question-and-answer chain. Start with a key question, from the audience's perspective, and work back toward your message. In most cases, you'll find that each answer generates new questions, until you identify the information that needs to be in your message. Storyteller's tour. Some writers prefer to talk through a communication challenge before they try to write. Pretend you're giving a colleague a guided tour of your message and capture it on a tape recorder. Then listen to your talk, identify ways to tighten and clarify the message, and repeat the process. Working through this recording several times will help you distill the main idea down to a single, concise message. Mind mapping. When using this graphic method, start with the main idea and then branch out to connect every other related idea that comes to mind.

Limit Message Scope


Choose the Approach


Message length

Ind

ire

ct D

irec

t

Audience reaction

Message type

Choose the Approach


With the direct approach, the main idea (such as a recommendation,

conclusion, or request) comes first, followed by the evidence. Use this

approach when your audience will be neutral about your message or pleased to

hear from you.

With the indirect approach, the evidence comes first, and the main idea comes

later. Use this approach when your audience may be displeased about the

message or may resist what you have to say.

Your choice of a direct or an indirect approach depends on the following

factors:

•Audience reaction: positive, neutral, or negative

•Message length: short (memos and letters) or long (reports, proposals, and

presentations)

•Message type: (1) routine, good-news, and goodwill messages; (2) bad-news

messages; or (3) persuasive messages

Outline the Content


• Main idea

• Major points

• Evidence

Message Structure


• Main idea

• Major points

• Examples

• Evidence

Inspiration

Teaching

Warning

Persuasion

The beginning

The middle

The ending


Adapting to Your Audience: Being Sensitive to Audience Needs


Practice Etiquette


• Diplomacy

• Courtesy

• Tactfulness

Positive Emphasis

Avoid negativity

Employ euphemisms (milder synonyms)



Bias-Free Language

• Gender

• Racial

• Ethnic

• Age

• Disability

Adapting to Your Audience: Building Strong Relationships


Establish Credibility


Honesty Objectivity

Awareness Expertise

Establish Credibility


Endorsements Performance

Sincerity Confidence

Adapting to Your Audience: Controlling Style and Tone


Conversational Tone

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Prentice Hall 43 Chapter 5 -

Texting and

writing

Pompous or

stale language

Preaching or

bragging

Intimacy and

humor

Conversational Tone


Understand the difference between texting and writing. The casual, acronym-filled

language friends often use in text messaging, IM, and social networks is not

professional business writing. If you want to be taken seriously in business, you simply

cannot write like that on the job.

Avoid stale, pompous language. Avoid using dated phrases, obscure words, stale or

clichéd expressions, and complicated sentences to impress others.

Avoid preaching and bragging. Few things are more irritating than know-it-alls who

like to preach or brag. However, if you need to remind your audience of something that

should be obvious, try to work in the information casually, perhaps in the middle of a

paragraph, where it will sound like a secondary comment rather than a major revelation.

Be careful with intimacy. Business messages should avoid intimacy. However, when

you have a close relationship with audience members, such as among the members of a

close-knit team, a more intimate tone is sometimes appropriate and even expected.

Be careful with humor. If you don’t know your audience well or you’re not skilled at

using humor in a business setting, don’t use it at all. Avoid humor in formal messages

and when you’re communicating across cultural boundaries.

Plain Language

Read it!

Understand it!

Take action!


Use the Right Voice

Active Passive


Composing Your Message: Choosing Powerful Words


Powerful Words

Correct

Effective


Meaning of Words


The denotative meaning is

the literal, or dictionary,

meaning. The connotative

meaning includes all the

associations and feelings

evoked by the word.

Balancing Words

Abstraction Concreteness

Concepts

Qualities

Characteristics

Tangible

Objective

Visualization



Powerful

words

Familiar

words

Clichés &

buzzwords

Technical

jargon

Finding Words


Finding Words Choose strong, precise words. Choose words that express your thoughts most clearly,

specifically, and dynamically. Nouns and verbs are the most concrete, so use them as

much as you can. Adjectives and adverbs have obvious roles, but they often evoke

subjective judgments. Verbs are especially powerful because they tell what’s happening

in the sentence, so make them dynamic and specific.

Choose familiar words. You’ll communicate best with words that are familiar to your

readers. However, keep in mind that words that are familiar to one reader might be

unfamiliar to another.

Avoid clichés and buzzwords. Although familiar words are generally the best choice,

avoid clichés—terms and phrases so common that they have lost some of their power

to communicate. Buzzwords are newly coined terms often associated with technology,

business, or cultural changes. The careful use of a buzzword can signal that you’re an

insider, someone in the know. However, using them too late in their “life cycle” can

mark you as an outsider desperately trying to look like an insider.

Use jargon carefully. Jargon is the specialized language of a particular profession or

industry; its use can help you communicate within the specific groups that understand

it. When deciding whether to use jargon, let your audience’s knowledge guide you.

Composing Your Message: Writing Effective Sentences


Paragraph Elements


Revising Your Message: Evaluating the First Draft


The Revision Process

• Content

• Organization

• Proper tone


Review Work of Others


Revising to Improve Readability


Paragraph Length

• Appearance

• Readability

• Emphasis


Headings and Subheadings


Descriptive Informative

Organization

Attention

Connection

Headings and Subheadings


A heading is a brief title that tells readers about the content of the

section that follows. Subheadings indicate subsections within a major

section; complex documents may have several levels of subheadings.

Headings and subheadings serve these important functions: They show

readers at a glance how the material is organized, they call attention to

important points, and they highlight connections and transitions between

ideas.

Descriptive headings, such as “Cost Considerations,” identify a topic

but do little more. Informative headings, such as “Redesigning

Material Flow to Cut Production Costs,” put your reader right into the

context of your message.

Editing for Clarity and Conciseness


Editing for Clarity


• Long sentences

• Hedging sentences

• Faulty parallelism

• Dangling modifiers

Editing for Clarity


Break up overly long sentences. You can often clarify your writing

style by breaking overly long sentences into shorter individual sentences.

Rewrite hedging sentences. Sometimes you have to use words such as

“may” or “seems” to avoid stating a judgment as a fact. Nevertheless,

when you have too many such hedges, you aren’t really saying anything.

Impose parallelism. When you have two or more similar (parallel) ideas

to express, use parallel construction, the same grammatical pattern for

each related idea. Parallelism can be achieved by repeating the pattern in

words, phrases, clauses, or entire sentences.

Correct dangling modifiers. Sometimes a modifier is not just an

adjective or an adverb but an entire phrase modifying a noun or a verb.

Be careful not to leave this type of modifier dangling with no connection

to the subject of the sentence.

• Noun sequences

• Camouflaged verbs

• Sentence structure

• Awkward references

Editing for Clarity


Editing for Clarity


Reword long noun sequences. When nouns are strung together as modifiers, the

resulting sentence is hard to read. You can clarify the sentence by putting some of the

nouns in a modifying phrase. Although you add a few more words, your audience won’t

have to work as hard to understand the sentence.

Replace camouflaged verbs. Watch for word endings, such as -ion, -tion, -ing, -ment, -

ant, -ent, -ence, -ance, and -ency. Most of them change verbs into nouns and adjectives.

Get rid of them. Also try not to transform verbs into nouns (writing “we performed an

analysis of” rather than “we analyzed”).

Clarify sentence structure. Keep the subject and predicate of a sentence as close

together as possible. When subject and predicate are far apart, readers have to read the

sentence twice to figure out who did what. Similarly, adjectives, adverbs, and

prepositional phrases usually make the most sense when they’re placed as close as

possible to the words they modify.

Clarify awkward references. Business writers sometimes use expressions such as the

above-mentioned, as mentioned above, the aforementioned, the former, the latter, and

respectively. These words cause readers to jump from point to point, which hinders

effective communication. Use specific references, even if you must add a few more

words.

Edit for Conciseness

Unneeded words

and phrases

Long words

or phrases

Redundant

combinations

“It is/There are”

starters


Edit for Conciseness


Delete unnecessary words and phrases. Some combinations of words have more

efficient, one-word equivalents. However, well-placed relative pronouns and articles

can prevent confusion. Avoid the clutter of too many or poorly placed relative pronouns

(who, that, which). Even articles can be excessive (mostly too many the’s).

Shorten long words and phrases. Short words are generally more vivid and easier to

read than long words. The idea is to use short, simple words, not simple concepts. Plus,

by using infinitives in place of some phrases, you not only shorten your sentences but

also make them clearer.

Eliminate redundancies. In some word combinations, the words tend to say the same

thing. For instance, “visible to the eye” is redundant because visible is enough; nothing

can be “visible to the ear.”

Recast “It is/There are” starters. If you start a sentence with an indefinite pronoun

(an expletive) such as it or there, odds are that the sentence could be shorter.

Revise with Technology

Spell checker

Thesaurus

Text tools

Grammar checker

Style checker

Revision tools


Producing Your Message


Design for Readability

Consistency Balance

Restraint Detail


Design for Readability


Consistency. Throughout a message, be consistent in your use of

margins, typeface, type size, and spacing. Also be consistent when using

recurring design elements, such as vertical lines, columns, and borders.

Balance. To create a pleasing design, balance all visual elements; that is

text, artwork, and white space.

Restraint. Strive for simplicity in design. Don’t clutter your message

with too many design elements, too much highlighting, or too many

decorative touches.

Detail. Pay attention to details that affect your design and thus your

message. For instance, headings and subheadings that appear at the

bottom of a column or a page can offend readers when the promised

information doesn’t appear until the next column or page. And narrow

columns with too much space between words can be distracting.

Multimedia Documents

Skills

Tools

Time and cost

Content

Structure

Compatibility


Formatting Business Letters


Letterhead

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Date Inside

address Salutation

The

message

Complimentary

close Signature

block

Formatting Memos


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Memo

title

Headings

The

message

Proofreading Your Message


Careful Proofreading


Make multiple passes. Go through the document several times, focusing

on a different aspect each time.

Use perceptual tricks. To keep from missing things that are “in plain

sight,” try reading pages backward, placing your finger under each word

and reading it silently, covering everything but the line you’re currently

reading, and reading the document aloud.

Double-check high-priority items. Double-check names, titles, dates,

addresses, and numbers.

Give yourself some distance. If possible, don’t proofread immediately

after finishing the document; let your brain wander off to new topics,

then come back later on.

Careful Proofreading


Be cautious. Avoid reading large amounts of material in one sitting, and

try not to proofread when you’re tired.

Stay focused. Block out distractions and concentrate on what you’re

doing.

Review complex electronic documents on paper. If you can, print out

electronic documents and review them on paper.

Take your time. Quick proofreading is not careful proofreading.

In the final analysis, the amount of time you need to spend on proofing

depends on the length and complexity of the document and the situation.

Electronic Media for Business Communication


Brief Message Media

Social

networking

E-mail

messages

Community

participation

Instant

messaging


Brief Message Media

Text

messaging

Podcasting

Blogs and

microblogs

Online video


Printed Documents

Make a formal impression

Stand out from e-messages


Printed Documents

Follow legal requirements

Offer security And permanence


Compositional Modes for Electronic Media



Creating Content

Social Networking and Community Participation Sites


Business Communication


• Gathering market intelligence

• Recruiting and connecting

• Sharing product information

• Fostering brand communities

Business Strategies

• Choose a compositional mode

• Join existing conversations

• Anchor your online presence

• Facilitate community building

• Limit conventional promotions

• Maintain a consistent personality



User-Generated Content

Valuable Easy-to-use

Community Q&A Sites


Community Participation


• Social bookmarking sites

• Content recommendation sites

• Product and service review sites

E-Mail Messages


Writing E-Mail


Completing E-Mail


• Revising

• Proofing

• Producing

• Distributing

Instant Messaging and Text Messaging


Business IM Benefits

Rapid Response Reduced Costs

Conversational Wide

availability

Rapid

response

Reduced

costs

Conversation

aspects


Business IM Risks

• Security issues

• User authentication

• Incompatibility

• Spam messages


Blogging and Microblogging


Effective Blogs

• Personal style

• Authentic voice

• Timely information

• Interesting topics

• Audience participation Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Prentice Hall 107 Chapter 7 -

Blogging and Microblogging


Podcasting


Business Podcasts


Human

resources

Training Marketing

Selling

Required Resources



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mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

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