How to write
This is the easiest thing to get right but the most common thing to get wrong. I see so many emails, letters and memos that have simple but yet distracting errors in them. Yes, this is one of my pet dislikes and I regularly remind my staff to do that one important thing - read through your communication before you communicate it.
It's not that any of us are that unintelligent that we would deliberately write glaring errors such as 'we have did very well on the project'. It's just that we originally wrote 'we have done very well on the project' and then meant to change it (for some reason) to 'we did very well on the project'. But guess what, one of our team came into the office, we were distracted and couldn't be bothered to read through the email from the beginning again.
So we send it out. And so the risk is that our team, our boss and the senior management team all form the impression that we don't know how to write simple communications. Yes, REMEMBER TO READ THROUGH YOUR WORK BEFORE YOU SEND IT OUT. I remember one of my teachers telling me this when I got an 'E' for an essay assignment (he didn't give any 'Fs') as I had clearly failed to read through my work. Perhaps I was fortunate that this event happened so early on in my life. But hey, if this is an issue for you, it's the simplest one to correct. Whoopee!
So now that we all read through our work before distributing it let's move on to the all important bullet point list:
• Read through your work (couldn't resist it!)
• Write in paragraphs
• Spell-check your work. Oh, and by the way, spell-checking your work doesn't mean that it has now been 100% auto-corrected. Wow, the amount of times I see things like 'what have we leant form this' rather than 'what have we learnt from this'. The guy ran it through spell-check but didn't read through before sending. [By the way, this book has been proof-read by the publisher along with most of my friends and family so if you find any typos or grammatical errors please write to them directly. If I remember I'll include their names and addresses in the reference section].
• Get someone else to read it. If it's that important send it to a colleague, work pal or even to your boss (marked draft) so that they can use fresh eyes to pick up on the errors that your brain no longer has the capacity to identify.
• Know your audience. Is it the end of the story once you have developed your effective writing style? Well, no. It is important to remember that the style and content of your communication will change depending upon the audience. One example I came across was as follows: "You are one day late in submitting