Does your company's writing make transactions happen?
Show me any brochure, presentation, white paper, business plan or proposal that your company has written or is writing, and— chances are— I can show you how to make the writing more effective, more powerful, and more interesting to your target audience. I can show you and your colleagues how to organize facts, concepts and illustrations in ways that make transactions happen.

Most business writing has multiple weaknesses. I know what those weaknesses are. I can spot them. I can fix them.

Does the writing go wrong before the first word is written?
Business writing often gets off to a bad start for a simple reason: It is too un-ambitious. The goal the un-ambitious writer has in mind may be to "describe our products", "provide an update", "list features and benefits", "tell our story", "fill a thirty-minute time slot", "develop content" or some other lazy notion. When the writer defines his or her goal in this way, simply producing a document achieves the goal. The writing preserves the status quo.

Setting an ambitious goal always makes writing more powerful
I believe the purpose of all business writing is to make transactions happen. The transaction you want to bring about may be a purely monetary one: Persuade a venture capitalist to invest in your business, invention or discovery. Get an investor to migrate some of his portfolio into a hedge fund you run. Or persuade a customer or client to buy your products and services.

Other transactions may be of a more educational, behavioral or managerial nature: Change the way your prospective clients think about issues they face. Change the way employees think about their jobs, their company, and about you. Or change how employees behave toward clients.

Whether the transaction at hand is monetary, intellectual or behavioral, once you realize that the goal of business writing is to make the transaction happen, the writing automatically becomes more powerful and effective. If it is successful, the resulting communication changes your relationship with your target audience.

Is the tone of each piece of writing the most powerful possible for your purpose at hand?
In my writing samples, you will see that I tailor tone to the purpose at hand. In a recruiting brochure, you'll find a rhapsodic empowering tone. In an earmark proposal to obtain funding for economic education, the tone is a zeal for free markets and capitalism. For advocacy against vivisection, you'll find a tone of moral indignation. In an invitation designed to induce managers of financial firms to reveal their best thinking, you'll find a playful, wise-guy tone. In a presentation designed to educate non-financial people in a friendly way about collateralized mortgage obligations, you'll find a tone that travels from casual to silly to earnest to shrewd.

Whatever it needs to be, having the most powerful tone for the purpose at hand largely determines whether you will succeed or fail in the purpose you have at hand. If you don't have command of your tone, you won't have command of your audience.

Your audience— your most important unit of analysis
If a writer sets the wrong goal, he or she is likely to focus on the wrong unit of analysis. If the goal a writer has in mind is to describe something, his or her unit of analysis is the thing he or she is describing. The dominant response of the target audience is likely to be "What has this got to do with my life?"

When the writer's goal is to make a transaction happen, then the target audience becomes the most important unit of analysis. What is his or her situation, quandary, motives and concerns? What things are happening in the world that your company can help him or her deal with? What is the mental checklist that your target audience goes through to make decisions about transactions like the one you are proposing? How will the person you are addressing be better off after the transaction than he or she was before the transaction?

Once you make your target audience your dominant unit of analysis, you can get the tone right. You can make certain your audience will find your writing more interesting, more powerful, and more persuasive.

Do you have the courage to raise your company's writing standards?
From what I've told you already, you can see that, when it comes to business writing, I have very high standards. On many projects I have been able to meet those standards. I created a board-of- directors presentation of which the chairman of IBM said, "That was the best presentation I've ever seen." I wrote a book on Black-Scholes option pricing theory that has a five-star rating at amazon.com and has won rave reviews from investors, finance professors, and the financial press. I created a presentation on derivatives-based investment strategies that the private bank of a major money center bank used to bring under management millions of dollars from many of the richest people in the world. I wrote proposals that secured millions of dollars in government funding to establish the Center for Neural Science at New York University.

If your company's writing standards are not as high as you would like, I can provide a positive shock to how you and your colleagues think about and approach writing.

Email me what you're working on or call me in
The next time you find yourself looking at a draft of an important brochure, speech, presentation, proposal or white paper and you realize that the language is dull, the logic is flawed, the concepts are vague, clichés abound, and excitement is nowhere to be found, send the draft to me. I can work as a coach and editor to you, your colleagues or staff. I can point out where the writing loses the thread of what you're trying to accomplish. I can point out where you're getting in your own way. I can spot where a flawed structure causes the writing to loop back on itself and generate redundancy. I can suggest ways to reframe the writing goal so that the writing and layout propel the reader through the transaction at hand.

Or I can do the writing for you. I can do research on my own. I can interview your experts and negotiate the document through your organization's politics.

In many organizations, writing an important document and getting everyone to sign off on it is a lot like negotiating a treaty. In those situations, I negotiate documents the way diplomats negotiate treaties. Your colleagues who always disagree with one another will say, "Well, it's not what I would've written, but it's pretty good."

When you're ready for writing that is ambitious, has the right tone, accommodates contending points of view and makes transactions happen, email me what you're working on or call me in.

I look forward to hearing from you.

jerrymarlow@jerrymarlow.com

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