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Just to push you further in the right direction - you need to decide what you want the email to accomplish. It should do that and no more.

Often you want them to arrange a consultation with you. So they just need a taster of your solution that will leave them curious for more in person where you can still adapt it to their requirements.

Once they are sold, stop selling and go for the close. Otherwise you might talk them out of it.

Respect their time and keep communications short. That way they'll read every word.

Yay!

Well put.

Glad to help. :-)

I agree that a lot of sales and management types are sloppy and overly terse. That's just as bad. A good balance makes communication much easier and more effective.

Best of all is if you can do all that and still show a unique personality. That's what I'm working on, because I feel like my writing is pretty bland.

A very simple change you could make to your writing would be to swap out commas for other punctuation. Parentheses, semicolons, and other less often used punctuation serve distinct purposes and add to readability.

I'm no expert. Here is a stab at fixing a sentence of yours. >I mean, it's not perfect (or even very good by English-major standards) but compared to your average salesperson, well, I think highly of myself

That drops the comma count from 5 to 3 and makes it a little more fluid.

Just my 2 cents.

From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff.

My takeaway is primarily not that I did verbosity wrong, though certainly that comment wasn't right, but that the verbosity itself is the problem.

Take, for example one of the bits of writing I'm most proud of:

http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf

We had a real editor, and my co-author had significant writing skill, but even so: Look at the Scheduling for providers section; that was mostly me.

This is about what I had been aiming for in my business communications, and while I still think it's a reasonable bit of writing for a semi-technical audience, it is far too verbose for a business email.

If I was sending that same passage to a business person, I suspect the optimal format would be something like:

"We will allocate CPU based on how much ram the user purchases."

The rest is technical details and fluff. When dealing with a businessperson, the technical details are my job, not something they care about.

I think that my primary self-destructive impulse here is that I want to throw out technical details, in part to prove that I actually know something. I need to restrain that bit of ego, as worrying about the technical details is what I'm (hopefully) getting paid to do.

I usually write whatever I would say, then go over it after and take out any words or phrases that might be superfluous, or that can possibly be removed. Wholesale removal of extraneous stuff goes a long way towards making yourself clearer. I'll occasionally leave things in that I feel add to my "voice", but more often than not, if a word can be removed, it is removed.

--- becomes ---

I write whatever I would say, then go over it and take out anything superfluous. It makes things clearer.

Struggling typists prefer conciseness.

For me that pdf chapter example was very hard to read.

>For me that pdf chapter example was very hard to read.

Huh. Interesting. I often value other people's opinions based on my perception of their skill. Going through your comment history, you do have a very terse, very readable style, so it's probably worth my time to look over that chapter.

The whole thing suffers from the apparent fact that I had been reading a lot of Nietzsche at the time. Man. "The will to power" was very clearly a collection of notes that he did not intend to publish that were organized and published by lesser men. Not something one ought to use to calibrate one's aesthetics.

Hm. I need to read, perhaps, more Churchill. "Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all." Though, if I remember correctly, the context of that quote is a paragraph on the merits of germanic vs. latin derived words, his thesis, if I recall, was that Germanic words are generally better than those derived from Latin. That man could write; His work was a joy to read, but it also effectively communicated his ideas. I like his speaking style, too; Especially in contrast to the 'uncontrolled rage' style that was popular with the other warlords of his day, something my modern sensibilities associate with comical powerlessness.

You have written two comments in this single discussion that begin with a single paragraph saying "Huh. Interesting."

This sort of habit, if noticed by others, can look bad.

(I've been caught out in similar things myself.)

Here is a simple improvement that should help a lot. Write everything in the active voice. This will make your language less "pretty", but more understandable. Doubly so when talking to people with a short attention span.

Let me rewrite your first paragraph to show the difference.

From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff.

vs

That whole sentence is superfluous from a business writing standpoint. It is an insertion of humility. Social fluff that would be important when speaking about yourself to other nerds.

> Write everything in the active voice.

Every verb in the original paragraph was already in the active voice. I'm not sure whether your replacement is better or worse than the original, but the differences have nothing to do with active vs. passive voice.

(You are far from alone in saying "active" where you mean something else. See, e.g., http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html and the various Language Log articles linked from there.)

You are right, I was merely using the term as I've seen it used.

My real point was that he does not organize sentences by the standard subject-verb-object. This makes the sentences more complex. That complexity makes it harder for people to understand what is said. It would be OK to do that occasionally, but he did it with every single sentence!

I disagree with the proposed fix. As an English major software engineer, I would treat that as a run-on sentence. First, you should clearly ask yourself if the sentence is necessary before looking for a fix. If you find that the sentence is useful then break it into two sentences, use active verbs, and make sure your logic is clear.

The original sentence begins with the premise: my writing is not perfect. It ends with: I think highly of myself. Self-esteem and writing quality may be unrelated.

"My writing is hardly perfect. However, I write better than a typical salesperson."

I love the epiphany by the author of the comment. Communications is a HUGE factor in sales. Clear, effective writing will amplify your business overnight.

Like you implied, when you're trying to get a business deal, you're communicating for the audience. It's really all just sales. A lot of really successful salespeople probably don't have good spelling and grammar, but they're great communicators.

Dunno if you've read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but Kiyosaki says in it, "I'm not a best-writing author, I'm a best-selling author."

That said, I probably have the same problem sometimes, haha.

The other issue is that prose is horribly inefficient for transmitting concepts direct to a person's brain. It's a representation of verbalization, and verbalization is based on our limitations around hearing & generating sounds. We end up doing a 2-step process with reading & writing in prose.