Chris Shevlin - Penguin Writers Guides: Writing for Business

Its easy for books like this to sound like lectures dusty, cramped harangues from semicolon obsessives to deeply patronized readers. I hope this one doesnt sound like that, and I hope its because I understand some of the reasons for peoples mistakes and hang-ups about writing.

I work for a company that helps organizations to write more effectively by training, by advising, by editing, or by doing the writing for them. We cover a lot of ground: helping staff respond to customers letters of complaint; working with teams who write proposals for winning new business; and writing articles, reports and manuals along the way. Ive worked with quite a few people now, and when I first started I was surprised by how badly people wrote. I have spent a lot of time thinking about why this should be, since the people we work with are, on the whole, very intelligent, highly qualified and often in senior jobs.

I now think that there are two main reasons. The first is simply that most jobs require people to do ever more and more difficult writing in less and less time. The second is that theyre expected to do it without any specific training or preparation. I think this makes writing quite an anxiety-laden affair for most people.

In the sixties, seventies and eighties, teaching grammar was gradually abandoned. There was plenty of evidence to show that the way it was taught before wasnt very helpful, but abandoning it altogether has meant that many people now have no framework for talking about their writing. They have no way of saying why one sentence works and another doesnt, apart from vague ideas like flow. While this may make people more creative, I think it can also make them more fearful. Most people realize that there are rules which good publications and writers follow, but they have no idea what they are, and no means of finding out.

This makes people unconfident about their writing: they have a nagging feeling that they are getting things wrong, but they dont know where to go for help. Specifically, they dont know where to go for help which they can easily apply to their situation. This leads to disorientation. Many of the resources that are supposed to help writers actually require a fair amount of expertise just to use. Most of the people who own a thesaurus dont know how to use it. In fact, most of them have never been told what it is for, so how should they be expected to use it?

The strategies that people employ to help them deal with their lack of confidence are often counterproductive. Very often, they make peoples writing much less effective than it would have been without them. These strategies include: