September 26, 2016
Interview with Josh Bernoff, author of the book Writing Without BS
Mike Carruthers:
When you add up all the email, posts, tweets, office correspondence we write a lot and we could probably write a little better.
Josh Bernoff:
Let me be as clear as I can about this anything you write would be better if it were 20% shorter.
Josh Bernoff, author of the book Writing Without BS, says one common problem is not getting to the point quickly enough in your writing. Instead he suggests we frontload our writing.
Frontloading is a principle that says you want to have the payload (the most important information) in the 1st 2 sentences rather than warming up and saying how was your day? You get directly to the machinery has flaws and we need to change the way we tool it or whatever it happens to be. By doing that you ensure that somebody who is going through that quickly knows exactly what you’re getting at and can decide to read the remainder of the information.
Something else we often don’t do when we write is be clear. For example…
You may have heard that Samsung had a little problem with a few of their phones catching on fire. They put out a release about this but the release doesn’t use the word fire anywhere in it – they call them battery incidents. Well you what if you’re going to try and communicate to people what the problem is I think you have to tell the truth about the fact that some of your phones catch on fire – not call them battery incidents.
