One of a writer’s major responsibilities is to facilitate reading. Another way of putting this idea is that writers should make their audience’s work as easy as possible. You might think that for literate adults, reading is eff ortless, but it’s work and often hard work, particularly when the con- tent is complicated. A writer who throws up obstacles to reading, such as long and convoluted sentences, makes the reader’s task of understanding complex content that much harder. As a writer, transparency is your goal.
Consider ways to make your writing like a pane of glass so that readers easily see through the words to the meaning you intend.
As you read the following sentence, be aware of how much mental eff ort you’re investing.
As a matter of fact, this backlog of orders that the plants are experiencing at this time of the year makes procurement managers within each plant so busy with making sure that they received enough supply to keep up with the demand, that they would not even aff ord time delays that this new policy would add to the process at this time of the year, especially because no pro- cess is in place to optimize the process for busy times of the year.
Even after you’ve fi nished reading the sentence, you probably don’t have a clear idea of its meaning, despite the eff ort you’ve put into reading it. Now read these sentences:
The backlog of orders puts plant procurement managers under extreme pressure to make sure manufacturing receives raw materials when it needs them. Any delays in procurement could easily slow down production, resulting in unhappy customers, possible canceled orders, and confl ict inside the company. From the managers’ point of view, the new policy risks a slowdown in procurement.
The second version of the original sentence is divided into several short sentences that are easy to comprehend. It also uses fewer words than the original without loss of meaning.
Imagine an essay that has many sentences similar to the original.
Poor writing creates a cascade of negative eff ects. Readers aren’t sure of the meaning even after they’ve paid close attention to the writing, and they’re certain to be annoyed that the writer has made them work so hard for such a small reward. This isn’t the result you want from your writing.
The following are qualities of effi cient writing that professors and, in the real world, bosses and peers favor. The premise of effi cient writing is that readers are rewarded with the maximum amount of meaning for the minimum amount of eff ort.
Direct
Professors (and audiences in the real world) are reading your writing for one purpose: to understand what you think. Indirect writing obscures or delays the audience’s understanding of your thinking and, as a result, frustrates them. Understandably, you may feel anxious about stating your position on a case for fear that it isn’t correct. But you gain no protection or advantage from avoiding a direct statement of your position. Say what you think and do your best to prove it.
Concise
When you write something, you implicitly make a demand on the audi- ence’s time. It’s true that you write about cases because a professor asked you to, but you still want to help the reader make the best use of her time.
Sentences that get maximum meaning from the words in them accom- plish that goal.
The example at the beginning of this section demonstrates two approaches to writing— one that, intentionally or not, hands off the work of organizing and making sense of the content to the reader and one that makes the reading easy.
Clear
Writing in clear sentences has a signifi cant impact on readers. Clear sen- tences are transparent. They orchestrate words, sentence structure, and correct use of language to convey meaning to readers. Using active voice
verbs, simple sentence structure, and words familiar to your audience are the ingredients of clear expression.
Active voice verbs are words that make sentences do something.
Sentences that use active voice verbs make sentences easier to read than passive voice verbs, according to research. Here is a passive voice sentence:
Plant procurement managers have been put under extreme pressure by a backlog of orders that results from the need of manufacturing to receive raw materials when they are required for production.
Compare it to this sentence, which expresses the same meaning in active voice. The action verbs are underlined.
The backlog of orders subjects plant procurement managers to extreme pressure to make sure manufacturing receives raw materials when it needs them.
The passive voice sentence has more words and makes the reader work harder. The passive voice sentence has thirty- one words, and the active voice sentence has twenty- two; the active voice sentence is 30 percent more effi cient than the passive voice sentence. The passive voice example forces the reader to spend more time thinking about the sentence to understand it. One passive voice sentence isn’t signifi cant, but consider the cost to the reader of an essay that has many of them.
A good guide for sentence structure is to use active verbs in a simple grammatical pattern: subject- verb- object. Here is a sentence from an example in this section that uses the pattern:
From the managers’ point of view, the new policy risks a slowdown in procurement.
The sentence begins with a short introductory phrase, “From the man- agers’ point of view.” The subject, “new policy,” is paired with an action verb, “risks,” followed by a direct object, “a slowdown in procurement.”
The grammar of the sentence is less important than the fact that the sen- tence structure is simple and straightforward, resulting in a meaning that readers absorb with ease.
Another aspect of creating clarity is using words that are familiar to the audience. An unfamiliar term stops the reader, who must decide whether to look up the meaning of the word or try to understand it from the con- text. For example:
The product development meetings instantiated most of the traits of a dysfunctional group.
Most readers will pause at the word “instantiated” and either try to understand it from the context of the sentence or look up the meaning. A more familiar word eliminates the extra eff ort:
The product development meetings exemplifi ed most of the traits of a dysfunctional group.
The best guidance is to use the language of the audience, including technical terms you can assume they know. If you have a reason for using a word that the audience might not know, defi ne it.
This book is written in English and primarily assumes language and writing- style norms of American business English. The global reality is that many students leave their home countries and study cases in other languages throughout the world. If you are in that situation, there are two issues you should be aware of.
First, students writing in a non- native language can fall into a trap that distracts them from the content of their essays. The trap is trying to impress professors with vocabulary, idioms, and sentence structures that they think will show a sophisticated command of the language. These attempts too often lead to strange word choices, misuse of idioms, and sentences compromised by grammar errors.
Second, when writing in a language that is not their native language, students often compose sentences that conform to the structure and style of sentences in their native language. English, as used in business envi- ronments, favors relatively short sentences, economical expression, and familiar language. Written Spanish has diff erent norms, especially in academic settings: it is more hospitable to relatively long sentences and expansive vocabulary. When a Spanish speaker writes an essay in English that observes Spanish norms of expression, the results can be disappoint- ing for the student.
To avoid these problems, be aware that professors are reading your essays for content and ideas, not stylistic displays and arcane vocabulary.
The more your written language gets in the way of the reader’s eff orts to understand your thinking, the more you risk a negative evaluation of your writing. Also, when you write an essay, avoid language choices (words and idioms) and grammatical choices that you aren’t sure of.
Correct
Mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation aff ect the reading process of an audience: the reader must correct the mistakes to comprehend the meaning of sentences. A misspelled word causes readers to compare the
letters of the misspelling to the lexicon of words in their brains. If they fi nd a close match between the misspelling and a familiar word and that word makes sense in the sentence, they can continue reading. Frequent mistakes can cause an audience to resent that the writer was careless and shifted error correction to them. Audiences can also question the com- petence of an author who seemingly doesn’t recognize language errors.
Logical
The organization of a piece of writing is arguably the most important characteristic for readers. Writing that has an obvious and logical organi- zation is easier to read and remember. By contrast, when readers run into what appears to be a signifi cant inconsistency in the logical order of the content, they slow down or stop while trying to resequence the ideas.
Let’s say you’re writing an argument to justify an evaluation of a lead- er’s performance. You begin to discuss the leader’s positive performance on a criterion, move on to a negative evaluation on another criterion, and then, without notice to the reader, return to fi nish the discussion of the positive evaluation on the fi rst criterion. This kind of movement— from A to B and back to A— requires more concentration from readers so that they can identify and repair the disorganization or, failing at that, con- tinue, with a gap in their understanding.
Writing demands a lot from our brains. A writer is not just compos- ing sentences that express her thinking; she’s also building structures—
paragraphs in which the sentences are connected meaningfully and paragraphs that work together to build a compelling argument. In the upcoming chapters (9, 10, 11) you will learn how to write essays using a distinct structure for each of the three types of core case scenarios described in detail in part I: decision, evaluation, and problem diagnosis.