|
||||||
Creating a Message for "Your" Audience |
||
|
No one likes to be told what to do. Employees and customers react better to a request if they can see a benefit to themselves. By simply rephrasing your sentence, you can improve the tone of your writing and learn to use the “you-viewpoint” writing style. Which sentence has more appeal to you?
The first sentence is demanding information. The second sentence is requesting information and showing you a benefit for submitting the information. It answers the reader’s question of “what’s in it for me.” What is tone? The tone in your writing reflects how the reader feels after reading a message. If the words in the message are demanding, authoritative and harsh, the reader is going to react with anger or refusal to cooperate. Too often you see this type of writing coming from the top of an organization. Management is in charge, so they tend to write from a position of power where their phrasing of the message is from their viewpoint, not the reader’s viewpoint. The tone of the message becomes authoritative. To understand an employee’s reaction to an authoritative message, just put yourself in his/her shoes for a moment. How do you feel? Do you want to cooperate? Do you feel like you are an important part of the organization? If you are in management, take a moment after you have composed your message and look at it through your employees’ eyes. Just doing this simple exercise will alert you to wording that needs to be changed to create a more positive tone. It will also help you to include information that may help the reader better understand your message. Appeal to Your Audience Unless you make an effort to connect with your audience, the chances are, your message is not going to be communicated correctly. The best way to connect is to create a positive tone in your writing by using the reader’s point of view. Emphasize what the reader wants to know, not what you can do for the reader. Completely change your mindset from “I” to “you.” Instead of saying, “I will allow you to take vacation beginning June 1,” say “Your vacation will start on June 1.” This is the difference between writing in the “I-viewpoint” versus the “you-viewpoint.” Notice how it also gets the reader involved in the message. The key to keeping a reader’s interest is getting the reader involved in the message. It’s just like holding a polite conversation with someone. If you spend all the time talking about yourself, your listener is going to get bored. However, if you bring your listener into the conversation, then your listener is going to stay interested in what you have to say. Don’t just think about what you are going to say, think about how what you are saying is going to affect your listener. We-We Writing Not using the you-viewpoint creates a style of writing I call “we-we” writing. This commonly occurs when a company wants to tell you how wonderful it is. Here are some examples of “we-we” writing:
Maybe the above sentences are all true statements, but “we-we” writing does not show any benefits to the reader. Why should I care that ABC has the biggest inventory of widgets in Riverside County? Maybe I will save money by buying at ABC, but that point is not clear. If these “we-we” sentences were rewritten in the you-viewpoint, they would look more like this:
Word of Caution Maybe by now, you’ve noticed that using the word “you” and taking out the “I” and “we” when rewriting a sentence is necessary to create the you-viewpoint. This is generally true. However, you could create a negative tone by using you in a demanding or accusing way. For instance, “You failed to sign the document” sounds rather harsh. A better statement would simply describe the problem: “The document arrived without a signature.” This way you can save the reader’s ego and still address the problem. Good business writing is not just a matter of composing grammatically correct sentences. Good business writing takes into account how the reader interprets the message. It creates a tone of good will and keeps the reader’s interest.
This article reprinted from the Riverside Business Journal |
