Are you asking the right questions?
Whenever I host a conference or workshop, I distribute a survey asking attendees about their biggest writing challenges. And many of them ask the same questions.
How do I:
- write for different target groups
- adapt my content for different audiences
- write interesting content while staying true to the facts
- write without being legalistic
- make complex or dull stuff interesting?
It’s clear that voice-related issues are high on the list of writing challenges. But if you look closer at these questions, you’ll see that they’re all writing focused—the writers are asking how they should write. They’re actually asking the wrong questions!
In reality, these business writers should be asking:
- Who is my reader?
- Why do they read my writing?
- What is their attitude to me, my organisation and this topic?
- What problems do they want me to solve?
- What do they already know about this topic?
- How do they want me to speak to them—and not speak to them?
To find the most appropriate (and successful) voice for your writing, you need to answer the above questions for all your reader groups. Knowing your reader is one of the most important things—possibly the most important thing—you can do as a business writer.
Understanding the business writing job
You’ve probably heard a lot of advice about putting the reader first in your writing. But you need to understand why or, more importantly, how doing this affects your success as a business writer. You need to understand what your job as a business writer actually is.
You’re not writing a novel for a holidaymaker to read on a beach in Fiji. In business writing, there’s a result you want to achieve. You want your reader to feel something and then do something—whether it be subscribe to a blog, share the content, buy something or agree to fund a project.
Business writing is about achieving an outcome. And you can’t successfully achieve that outcome if you don’t know who you’re writing for because you won’t know how to make them feel or act. You won’t know how to persuade them. You will talk to them and get nothing back.
Blocking out the noise
So this is my lesson for the day: If you don’t know everything you can possibly know about your reader and their motivations, attitudes, knowledge levels and problems, you will never find the right voice for them.
Get very clear on your goal for the writing—what action or result you want from it. Then get reader focused. There’s no point trying to rework complex content or find a voice for a future blog or anything until you do this. How will you know what words or tone to use?
You need to block out the noise of the deadline and the client or organisation. Have only the reader and the outcome in mind. And then you’ll find the voice that’s going to work for everyone.