SMART WRITING AT WORK
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Audit Writers
My youngest son, who is beginning his second year in law school, was, over the summer, a “summer associate” in a big NYC law firm. It wasn’t his first brush with the business/corporate world, but he made an observation to me about writing on the job recently that I thought was interesting and worth passing along.
I’ve taught business/technical writing to grad and undergrad students for 35 years. Since 1984, I’ve also regularly consulted with writers in the workplace at NASA, KPMG, Catholic Charities, Whiting Turner Contracting, the State Department, the Justice Department, and many, many other places. I’m disenthralled with the giant textbooks used in most college business-writing classes—they’re WAY too expensive and don’t focus well on the simple, common-sense, matter-of-fact critical-thinking and workplace-writing skills students need for the rest of their working lives
The reader is everything. That is the simplest truth about business writing. Writers must serve the needs of their readers. Business writers should work hard so their readers don’t have to. Documents must be, above all, useful to the reader and highly readable.
