5 Lessons of Good Writing from World Famous Copywriters and Bloggers: Use them to make your Corporate Communication Effective

Elon Musk has decided not to join our Board.

This is the first line of the Email that the CEO of Twitter sent to his employees (and later to social media). No context setting, no beating around the bush- straight to the point. This is one of the first lessons to make your corporate communication effective.

I recently did a course on Digital Writing and have been studying the work of digital influencers, alongside reading literature and best-selling books on Effective Writing.

Here’s a synthesis of the best of all these worlds which I’d encourage you to use to make your corporate communication effective.

1. Don’t Mumble

Once you’ve decided what you have to say, come straight to the point.

Traditionally, we write long, flowery and verbose sentences to lead our reader to the main point. Readers (aka leaders) don’t have time- Most CEOs admit that they delete/ignore most of the emails that they receive.

Hence, make your point, right in the beginning.

2. Make it Skimmable

Organize your writing in a manner that it’s easy to read. Structure it in paragraphs, have section headings, use lists (e.g. numbering) wherever needed.

3. Use Short Sentences and Easy Words

Your corporate writing is not a English Essay Competition, where you need to Google the thesaurus for a difficult word. Instead, use simple and short words. E.g. instead of Initiate, Indicate, Finalize write Start, Show and Finish respectively.

Write so that it’s understood.

4. Make your Writing Active and Personal

Active voice adds energy to your writing.

Good writers use a lot of subject-verb-object format in their writing. Some examples are:

The client needs the data by Friday instead of Kindly send the data by Friday as it needs to be sent to the client.

We recommend instead of It is recommended.

Without your inputs to the proposal instead of It will be great if you could share your inputs.

Another key point to note in your writing is to make it specific and personal. Your reader should know/feel that it’s written for him.

5. Think-Write-Edit

Golden Rule of writing is to first draw a rough sketch of what you want to say in your mind. Then start the process of writing. At this point, let all words and thoughts flow naturally. Once it’s written, go to other tasks. Come back to your piece with a fresh mind and start editing.

Remove un-wanted words, check for spellings, numbering, punctuation and grammar.

Writing, even Corporate Writing, is a skill. Like all other skills, it needs to be learnt and practiced.

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