This, right here, is the sole purpose of ALL business writing
I rediscovered this brilliant quote today, while preparing a workshop on clarity in academic writing:
“My goal is not to impress anyone. My goal is not to certify that some theorem is proved. My actual goal is to empower my readers to be able to prove more theorems of their own, using similar methods. And so you have to make things transparent. You have to organize things so that the thing that you want them to understand actually seems as easy as possible. I think that’s true in many disciplines.” — Professor Vin Da Silva, Episode 14 of the Coffee, Tea or Something Stronger podcast: “The mathematician who teaches writing”
Vin’s a mathematician with a very particular audience. But it dawned on me his words don’t just apply to writing aimed at mathematicians. They apply to all academic writing. And, for that matter, all good business writing.
Whether you’re writing for customers, clients, employees, investors or other stakeholders, your purpose shouldn’t be to impress. Your purpose shouldn’t even be to persuade.
Your purpose, ultimately, should be to empower your reader.
Impressing and persuading your reader may be by-products of giving your reader power. But they shouldn’t be your starting point. Instead, set out with the intention to make your reader feel clever and competent, energised and inspired.
Here are the two main ways you can empower your reader through your business writing:
1. Empower your reader to use their voice
For Vin, the need for clarity in his work is deeply linked to giving his reader a voice. To him, academic writing exists as part of an ongoing dialogue among a community of scholars, because that’s how knowledge is created. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
I also think encouraging people to use their voice is often what we mean when we talk about engaging our readers. For example, you can empower people to use their voice by:
- Inspiring readers to share their comments on a blog or LinkedIn post.
- Encouraging customers to leave reviews and testimonials for your product, or provide you with feedback on what to improve.
- Inviting employees to share their ideas, insights, or views with management or each other.
I do a lot of writing for employee comms, so this last one particularly resonates with me. Modern employee comms is all about encouraging dialogue — with and among employees. It’s less about broadcasting top-down “messages” from management and more about empowering employees to use their voice. Employee engagement and employee empowerment are related.
2. Empower your reader to act
All good business writing seeks an end result, an action from the reader. Here are just some of the possible actions you, as a business writer, may be exhorting your reader to take:
Buy my product
Sign up for this service
Invest in our start-up
Approve the budget
Greenlight my proposal
Contribute to our strategy
Improve your life
Mentally reframing your call-to-action less as persuasion and more as empowerment can have a powerful effect. It forces you to see the world not from your point of view as the persuader, but from your reader’s point of view as someone to be empowered. It has in-built reader empathy.
And again, it all ties back to clarity – because if you’re going to empower your reader to act, you need to arm them with explicit details of:
- what you want them to do – your call to action
- how they should go about doing it – the steps they need to take
- why they should do it – what’s in it for them
So if you want to impress and persuade your reader, repeat after me:
My goal isn’t to impress my reader.
My goal isn’t to persuade my reader.
My goal is to empower my reader.
And next time you sit down to write, ask yourself this question:
“How will I empower my reader with this thing I’m about to write?”
