Writing for Success

High level writing skills are one of the most important qualities for success in the workplace and here at the School of Graduate Studies. Students seldom lose points on written assignments because they simply did not get it. Rather, they failed to express their ideas clearly. When grading an assignment, a teacher can only evaluate what lands on the page, just as a boss can only read a memo or report, not the writer’s mind. Improving the transfer of ideas between brain and paper is the number one way to improve your grades.

I’d like to provide some principles for writing well both in your education and your profession.

Start by Motivating your Topic
One Lou Grant episode began with Lou, the cantankerous newspaper editor, looking over the first paragraph of an article written by a neophyte reporter. “You make murder sound boring,” he deadpans. The writer replies, “But I did what they told me to do in journalism school; provide the where, what, when, why, and how in the first paragraph.” Lou explains that if the first paragraph hasn’t grabbed the reader’s attention, he or she will never read the second one.

The same principle applies to scholarly writing. Motivate your work by first telling your reader why your topic is important. Notice how I began this article by telling you that good writing will help you in your studies and career. Do the same in your own work before jumping in to the subject matter.

You can come up with a good opening line by asking yourself what makes your topic important. Are you going to fix a widespread misconception in the profession? Is your topic critical to the reader’s job? Will your article improve your reader’s looks?

I like to state a problem that the reader or a profession faces and how I will solve it. I also like to start by stating a common belief that I will prove wrong. Some examples of opening lines include:

“Employee resiliency is critical to the success of any emergency response plan, yet it is often overlooked in a business continuity management program….”

“All business continuity methodologies claim that a Risk Assessment is needed for a Business Impact Analysis, but in reality the two are independent of one another….”

“Access control is one of the most important elements of an information assurance program…”

Avoid Shop Talk
Whether you’re an information security director or business continuity manager, you’re going to be spending much of your time working with people outside of your profession. Persuading these people to follow your advice requires expressing yourself in language that they can understand. This means avoiding “shop talk,” or professional jargon.

Even articles for professional journals should avoid shop talk. Besides losing people who are not as technically savvy as the writer, shop talk makes the writer appear to be showing off their technical knowledge to compensate for a lack of original insights. We encourage our students to use language that anybody could understand, not just those in the profession. This prepares them for writing to those outside of the profession.

You can use technical terms, but define them when they are introduced. For instance, instead of saying:

“An organization’s DMZ needs to be hardened both inside and out”

Use something like:

“An organization’s most secure computing systems, sometimes referred to as it’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), should be secured from the perimeter to its core.”

Note how “DMZ” is defined right away. You can now use the abbreviation in all future references. Also, “inside and out” is better explained as “from the parameter to its core.”


Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
(On Writing Well, William Zinsser, p. 7)

Henry Thoreau told us to “simplify, simplify, simplify,” and I can think of no better advice for improving your writing. Many people who start the MSIA or MSBC program think that they must write in what they believe to be an “academic” style: long, verbose sentences with sophisticated-sounding words. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Write in plain, simple English.

Simplify your language and streamline your prose by eliminating any unnecessary words.
I highly recommend reading On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, a classic that focuses less on the rules of grammar and more on creating readable text. Follow his advice, and I can almost guarantee that your grades will improve.

For instance, Zinsser recommends writing your first draft, and then going over it with a red marker to cross out as many words as possible without losing the meaning. This is the best writing advice I’ve ever heard, and has improved my writing tremendously.

As an example of what to avoid, let’s take a look at some poor writing by a lawyer. This passage should make your skin crawl. My own comments are in parentheses:

The discourse of this book review sets out to critically focus on and to descriptively evaluate (replace with “I will examine”) the writer’s literary writing (huh?) of the expressive renaissance of Caribbean nineteenth and twentieth century writers. The author seeks to establish how the Afro Caribbean post colonial literary writers used the art form to develop a consciousness of self, culture, economics and freedom. His supposedly main objective in the book is to demonstrate how the Caribbean literary writer in his newly imposed culture and language, has accepted as a norm, the intellectual teachings extracted from the imperialist, to become the bourgeois of an art form namely in status, color and race (I’m doing my best to follow him here).

In this review the author (Is he talking about himself or the author of the book?) is observed to be attempting (replace with “attempts") to demonstrate that post colonial Caribbean Literary writers use the educational system, imposed upon them as a ‘new world’ of acceptance, as the means to achieving a status for which most of them cannot show any contribution toward the emancipation of post colonial struggles of the Afro Caribbean peoples--this preview leaves the mind boggled. However this conceptualization of Caribbean literary art form as a medium of developing consciousness for the deliverance from the post colonial struggles and the negative cultural engineering was not clearly identified by the author (he lapped me).

GURU Law Student Book Review, August 8, 2007

The author of this review is clearly trying to sound smart, and only proves the opposite. Rule of Rules: Be smart, don’t try to sound smart.

Cultivating good writing skills is not easy; if it were, we wouldn’t focus on it in our programs. It takes years to develop an ear for writing. But focusing on these few simple principles will improve your writing considerably.


Weekly Question:
Last week’s question was:

What major event happens at Joe’s Pond each spring?

The answer is:

The Ice Out Contest, where people try to pick the exact moment when a cinder block will fall through the ice at Joe’s Pond in the spring. See all the action at the following site:

http://joespondvermont.com/iceout.html

Dianne Tarpy’s name was chosen among the thousands of correct entries to win a copy of my latest book: The Importance of the Wet Bar for Emergency Operations Centers.

This week’s Question:
Why did Norwich University move from its original location in Norwich, Vermont, to its current location in Northfield, Vermont?

One correct entry picked at random will win a copy of the book 100 Encrypted Sudoku Puzzles for the Information Assurance Professional.

Good luck.