Spence & Company

Organizing Ideas Book Review

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 09:49:56 -0800

In the Journal of the Society for Technical Communication.

Spence describes Organizing Ideas: The Key to Effective Communication as a cookbook, and this is true. It is a collection of recipes for producing effective business writing. But just as a well-written cookbook teaches the reader essential kitchen skills, using the Spence & Company guide to decision-oriented communication will teach the writer essential business writing skills. I recommend adding it to your reference bookshelf.

This book is well-written, presents concepts clearly and simply, and has a layout that is unfussy, with just enough formatting to skim for major points in each chapter. The chapters build on the skill learned in the previous chapter.

Throughout the book, attention is paid to the usual best practices for business writing. The Spence method endorses plain language, simple sentence structures, and signposting important sections. It recommends putting technical details and databases into attachments instead of the document’s body.

The Spence method uses the disciplines of rhetoric. The author argues that all business writing should persuade the reader to make a decision or to take action. The Spence & Company method combines three rhetorical tools of persuasion: Logos (appeal to logic or reason); Ethos (appeal to character or trust); and Pathos (appeal to motivation or inspiration).

Reader needs are a frequent checkpoint through the guide. The Reader Profile is critical to this process as it identifies the primary and secondary decision-makers or readers.

Organizing Ideas uses the same structure for all business communications, customizing the structure to the target reader and communication type. The framework always has an Opening Statement (Why are you writing this document? What is your document about? How will you discuss your subject? What decision or action do you recommend?), a Body (all the data, issues, and...Read More

Just Say No to PowerPoint—Then What?

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 10:38:46 -0700

Someone decided a few years ago to declare the first week in February “Say No to PowerPoint Week.” Great idea, except it fizzled after a few years. Maybe the problem was that no one knew what to do instead.

Fast Company mentioned that tech conferences like Demo and Finovate have banned presentations and replaced them with 7-minute product demos—substituting one technology for another. The idea, apparently, is that the product will talk instead of the slideshow.

After bringing up the usual debate about whether the fault lies with PowerPoint or with the presenter, TheJobBored suggested that what we really need is a Learn to Give Better Presentations Week. How about we work on that one?

The problem with most presentations comes done to one thing: people don’t plan what they are going to say. Instead, when there’s a presentation to prepare, they dive right into their slideware and start creating slides. No wonder so many presentations are bad. A picture is only worth a thousand words if you have something to say in the first place.

So, the first remedy to bad PowerPoint is to figure out what you are going to say—before preparing your slides. All the best books on presentation skills recommend spending as much as 60% of your preparation time on planning your message, and only 20% each on creating slides and rehearsing your talk.

Nobody trusts the advice because they think they don’t have time to plan. But the only way to develop a smart presentation that holds peoples’ attention is to hone your message. Planning what you are going to say is, furthermore, the best way to save time.

By creating an outline, you create your script first, instead of at the end, after you have spent hours creating slides and there is no time left to think about what you are going to say about...Read More

Effective E-Mail – It’s the Structure that Counts

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 17:18:03 -0700

Business e-mail is a Darwinian world. Although you may think you have a special relationship with each person you are writing to, you are in fact competing everyday with at least 50 to 150 other e-mails that each of your correspondents receives. As a result, only those e-mails survive that are fit to be read. If your e-mail is unclear or too detailed, your readers may misunderstand your message. Or, they may simply lose patience with what you have written and put their attention on another e-mail that is easier to understand.

What none of the countless books and articles on communicating effectively by e-mail ever tell you is that, more than any other factor, the structure of an e-mail, the logical sequence in which you present your ideas and information, will determine whether your e-mail gets the attention you want from your readers.

The assumption most people make is that e-mail is like a conversation. Just to keep up with an incessant deluge of e-mails, the tendency is to open a screen, write whatever comes into your head, and hit the Send button. Each e-mail is treated as if it were just the latest contribution to an oral back-and-forth, and a casual one at that. As a result, most e-mails ramble. And if they make a point at all, it’s usually at the end, when the author has finally figured out what he or she wants to say.

The basic structure for any e-mail looks like this:

Set context: Tell your readers why you are writing about your topic at this particular moment. Are you responding to a question the reader asked you? Have you finished the research your reader requested? Are you writing to update your reader on a project or topic?
Tell your readers what you want them to do or believe. What action needs to be taken, or what is your evaluation of the situation?
State your reasons for advocating a particular action or evaluation. Use no more than 3 to 5 supporting points, in a bulleted list, if...Read More