SEAR

These days, it seems that everything needs an acronym. But while acronyms used to exist to make complex terms and phrases (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) into words less terrifying (SCUBA) and easier to remember, sometimes it seems that they exist today just to bewilder and embarrass us. Maybe it’s because more and more technical terms are leaking into our everyday language. Maybe it’s because so many of them (HTML, SQL, IEEE 1394) don’t even look like words and give us no cues as to how we are supposed to pronounce them. Or maybe it’s because our clever and secretive teenagers seem to write in a new language that consists of little more than a series of acronyms strung together with smiley faces. IMHO a combination of all these factors has done a lot of damage when it comes to making everyday writing easy to understand.

Just the same, I’m going to go out on a limb and introduce an acronym of my own in the hope of making it easier to remember the key elements that I think are most important when it comes to writing clearly and effectively. I hope that mine is more reminiscent of the days of clear and helpful acronyms (CARE) than the muddled-sounding efforts (UNIFEM - which sounds like an evil supercomputer with a female voice but actually stands for United Nations Development Fund for Women) that people have been resorting to lately. I wanted to come up with a real acronym, something that you could recognize as a word and didn’t have to struggle to pronounce. Above all, I wanted something that you could remember and would help you to recall the four points that I wanted to emphasize as key to successfully writing business email.

What I came up with is SEAR, which is, I think, pretty good. Not only is it a real word, but it’s a verb-- an active, forceful word. It’s a command, for crying out loud! This is an acronym with a lot going for it! Creative writing teachers will always tell you that in order for your language to be memorable you should engage as many of your reader’s senses as possible. SEAR is just the kind of word to do that. It evokes the bright heat of a flame; you can practically hear the sizzle of the fire in its long, sibilant “S”. To make it even more memorable, take the mental picture a step further and imagine that it’s a nice steak that you’re searing. You can practically smell it, can’t you, your mouth watering as you almost taste that first bite?

“Alright, enough of the acronym,” you say. “We remember it already! You’re making us hungry! But what does it mean? How are those four letters going to help me with my writing, and why are the letters arranged in that order? Why is it SEAR and not EARS?”

So here we go. Here are the four things you need to think about when you sit down to write, in the order you should generally think about them:

Strategy-- Basically the idea here is to do a little planning before you start to write. Take the time to think about whether email is really the right format for your message. Have you clearly worked out what it is that you have to say, or are you still struggling? Have you given yourself enough time to write and to write well? Is there something in your email that could get you in trouble down the road?

Emotion-- Believe it or not, feelings play a crucial role in the overall success of your writing. As I mentioned earlier, email that is loaded with emotional content can cause you more severe problems than any other issue. And most of the time emotions get stirred up unintentionally because we are simply better at communicating in person than we are in writing. Email is notorious for lacking the cues to tone and meaning that we share in our everyday person-to-person conversations. Because of this, it’s often hard to tell if someone is kidding or if they’re really angry with us. Are they just being brief, or are they upset? And the truth is that we don’t always take the time to be good readers, either, which makes it even harder to communicate clearly. But we all need to take a little more responsibility for our writing to make sure that it isn’t going to stir up emotions unnecessarily. Is the message you need to convey something that’s loaded with emotional content? If so, maybe you would be better off considering another, more personal format. Do you have a history of conflict with the person you intend to write? Are they likely to react badly to this particular topic? If so, you might want to reconsider using email and pick up the phone instead. Better yet, walk down the hall and see them for a change.

Audience-- This idea really builds on the topic of emotion. It’s critical that you always think about who you are writing to. How are they going to react to your message? Do they even know who you are? If not, you’ll need to introduce yourself. How are you going to get their attention when they get hundreds of emails every day? What are they interested in and what information do you have that they are going to care about? It’s important to make sure that your message is modulated for this particular audience. Are you using the right tone? If you’re writing to the president of your company in the same tone that you use to write to your best friend, you should probably reconsider-- unless you’re also a VIP. Is the person you’re writing to a stickler for spelling and grammar? If so, you’d better run that spellcheck and proofread one more time.

Rules-- The rules really have to be followed to make sure that all of your other hard work isn’t wasted. So far I’ve played down the importance of correct grammar and punctuation, which is why I’ve made this the last of my four topics. But the fact is that you can do everything else well and still lose all of your credibility if your readers are put off by typos and missing punctuation. There are still lots of people out there who will judge your intelligence and ability based on the mechanics of your writing, whether or not that is fair. Know who those sticklers are and do your best to weed out the mistakes in your messages to them. But really, why not do your best in all the emails that you send? The rules of grammar and punctuation only exist to make language clear and easy to read. When you write poorly you increase the chance that your message will be misunderstood or not read in the first place. After all, if you can’t take the time to write clearly, why should your reader struggle to make sense out of what you have to say?

Those are the headlines, the big ideas from what follows. Read on for the specifics.