Today good written communication skills are highly expected by most the organizations. All kinds of employee work such as exchanging emails, submitting reports or making presentation etc. requires excellent written communication capability.
Clear, concise and concrete writing will help your colleague to understand your ideas easily. Its basically attracting reader’s attention to make them understand your particular point.
And this increases your impression on others mind, makes you powerful. Remember, this ability doesn’t come naturally. You have to write everyday to get great at it.
But this daily practice needs a proper guideline to shape your communication skills for writing. Luckily, in this post you will learn the Ultimate 18 tactics to master your writing communication skills. So, keep reading.
Difference between Verbal and Written Communication Skill:
In verbal communication you express your message by body language and how you speak. But when its writing, your views are calculated by perfect grammar, punctuation and word selection.
Two strangers could know each other by talking 5 minutes. Here your facial expression, tone of your voice, gaze of your eyes should be enough to judge the other person.
But when you are writing to someone, then it’s the grammar, punctuation and choice of words which will be responsible to give a good or bad impression of yours to others.
And knowledge of good written communication skills is not common to everyone. So, lets discuss the tactics “to the point”. Don’t skip reading any point.
In this post I have summarised all the tactics necessary to become an expert in written communications.
Regular speech may not last if it’s not recorded, but something that is written will be there and people will link back to it later.
So, you must write in a way to have the good impact on your readers during all the years while it remains available for public.
Written communication skills:
I have researched quite a few skills that are compulsory to improve anyone’s written skills. So let me brief you.
1. Write with Clarity:
In writing, it is important to be clear when you are trying to communicate with others. If you want people to understand what you are writing, you should be clear and use words that they can understand. The best way to do this is to write “to the point” using words that your reader will be able to understand.
Many people think that they should use fancy words and do tricks with sentences. But this does not help people understand what the writer is trying to say. The reader will struggle to figure out what the writer means if they have a difficult writing style. It’s best when you write in a simple way so that people can understand your message easily.
2. Write to the point:
Lets see for an example what is a complex big sentence-
“Mike started to read about Digital marketing on various websites where he got to learn a dozens of interesting lesson of search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, earning through Google AdSense by campaigning advertisement on websites etc. which led him to invest in courses to start business for earning online; therefore he created his first website”.
Now let’s see the concised version-
“Mike researched on digital marketing. Here he learnt some key tactics regarding digital marketing. Then he completed couple of courses to start an online business. So he created his first website.”
Both of these paragraphs mean the same thing. The first paragraph were written critically. The idea was portrayed in one sentence. This made it difficult to understand for the reader. He will have to read couple of times to comprehend the meaning.
But when I sliced the sentence into four lines and used words like Digital marketing to indicate everything like content marketing, SEO etc. then it started to sound meaningful. I shortened the big line into short and concised lines. I erased unnecessary extension of the sentence.
So, in the same way, erase any unnecessary information in the paragraphs. Write everything to the point by staying on the topic. Remember, Less is More. If a concept is written with 1000 words including unnecessary sentences, then cut off all the unnecessarily information. Write only the facts.
3. Writing Tone:
When you speak, your body language and your voice tone are responsible for the professionalism or friendliness of your presentation. Make sense!
But what will you , when you are to represent your thoughts by written communication. For an instance, if you ask someone very nicely, “Shut the door” then the other person will take this instruction positively. Because, he noticed the polite behaviour of the instructor by seeing him.
But if the same instruction was given on paper, then it would sound like an order. And by this, the other person might not listen to the instruction, as he may be ignorant to take orders from anyone.
From his point of view, he might follow the instruction if he was asked politely in written indication. And that would be, “Can you please, Shut the door.”
So you see, by adding “can you please” it’s been clarified that the written instruction was a polite request but not an order!
So, tone is very important in writing skills to give the right impression on your readers.
4. Use Active Voice More In Writing:
Whatever and wherever you’re writing, you are actually doing it for the reader, right! So you should create a piece which comforts the reader.
And in this case, an active voice is the perfect weapon you should use for your writing. You see in passive voice things seems critical. Let’s see a passive example, “Danny wrote the next big novel alike Harry Potter.”
Now, the active would be, “The next big novel alike Harry Potter was written by Danny.”
Here, reader will understand easily that Danny did a great work. But in the second line, it takes couple of times for the reader, to grasp the actual meaning of the sentence.
Because at a first glance, it seems that the novel is the big deal not the writer Danny, which is not true for the meaning of that line.
So passive voice creates confusion while active voice confidently directs the message with clarity.
5. Grammar Confirms Correctness:
Although it is said to avoid grammatical mistakes while speaking a new language. But when you try to write something, it becomes compulsory to structure grammar correctly in a sentence. Otherwise the meaning of the sentence will go in a wrong direction.
Like if I say “Mac drank water. Then suddenly, he felt dizziness. So he thought may there was something wrong with the water. But after checking with a doctor, he have found that he was having problems with his eyes that led the dizziness.”
You see, I wrote all the sentences in an Active Voice. This type of writing ensured easy understanding that Mac did all the action. So we understand easily, what has been done and by whom.
But if I write, “Some water was drank by Mac. After that on a sudden dizziness was felt by him. So a thought came to him may be there was something wrong with the water. But he went to a doctor who checked him.
This checking let him know that his dizziness was caused because he was having problem with his eyes.” -So confusing, right!
Writing everything with passive voice made the topic critical to understand. And the sentences lack basic punctuation like “comma”. So this has turned the paragraph quite impossible for readers.
Remember, You may write something formally or informally. But in both cases, grammar and punctuation ensures, if your point is getting across easily.
6. Know the End of your writing before you start:
For focused writing you should have a clear goal in mind. Your writing should prompt the reader to take measurable action. Like, subscribing to your email list, purchasing something with your affiliate link, learn something new, order some of your own product or service etc.
Now among all these targets, you must clarify your message in the beginning of your writing. You can do this by writing the most necessary points, relevant to draw the targeted message and detail them accordingly. Writing this way will ensure, even “skim through readers” won’t forget to take action.
Now, to check if your writing is going this way, you ask some questions to yourself. For instance,
- Are the details written “To The Point”?
- Is there any unnecessary repeating information in your writing?
- Does the writing tell the reader to take the targeted action?
See! Asking these questions to yourself will help you to understand, if your writing is good enough, to meet your end goals.
7. Outlines are the Skeleton of your writing:
Have you ever thought, how it would look like in a human skeleton, if the hands were set in the legs section and the legs were attached in the hands section.
By this, the skeleton will actually look like a horrific ghost. Now, it’s not because by origin it’s a ghost, but some of it’s parts’ were organised disorderly.
The same thing will happen, if your writing all in all doesn’t show a logical order. So to avoid this mismanagement in your writing, you must plan key points as “outlines” that will create the structure of your writing. You’ll actually create sub-headings to explain your writing title.
By this, you’ll get to know, if your writing is carrying the end message all the way and no necessary information left out from the discussion.
The rest of the article is coming soon…