Writing Blogger

You’ve probably come across this in your career oh, probably a thousand times or so. You’re reading a deliverable document or white paper for a project or initiative within your company, and the size of the document is the thing you notice the most about it. When I used to work in consulting, it was called the “thud” factor, this idea that anything we delivered to a client had to look like a phone book in order to validate the hours and hours we spent working on our deliverables for them.

Why is business writing like this? Why can’t we adopt more often the writing philosophy and practices of the Ernest Hemingways of the world, and simply be simple and clear? I think it’s all related to that idea of the “thud” factor — that we have to try to appear to have spent eons of time on our work, no matter whether simple might be more effective or not.

When writing for a client, I try always to keep in mind one of the most essential ideas of Strunk and White — “omit needless words.” That places a premium on editing and re-writing, which is actually the heart and soul of all good writing, when you think of it. As Hemingway himself once said so appropriately, “the first draft of anything is sh*t.”