The world moves fast these days. Your readers are busy — distracted, multitasking, under pressure from a dozen directions. More appealing things jockey for their attention, and too often they lack intrinsic interest in your work. It’s your job to write so they keep on reading.

For many of you with highly specialized knowledge — scientists, engineers, policy analysts, others — if the strength of your writing doesn’t match the strength of your research, the impact of your work suffers, often dramatically. Writing is an integral piece of your works value. But who was prepared for that in school? From what I see, virtually no one.

Your task in your articles, reports, or grant applications is to create a bond with your readers immediately, and sustain that over the course of the piece.

But, how? If you ask people with technical or scientific expertise how to create and maintain a bond with their readers, giving them an experience of ease, clarity, and flow, most don’t know where to start. We know it when we read it, but the mechanisms at work beneath the surface of compelling writing are not well known.

Strong research deserves strong writing

So many organizations support cutting-edge research and analysis but send it into the world packaged in weak writing. Writing that doesn’t explain — in the terms appropriate for the target audience — why the work was done and why it’s important. Writing that sets expectations for the reader and doesn’t deliver. Writing laden with detail (some relevant, some not) but nowhere for the reader to hang on. Or writing filled with generalities and abstractions but missing picturable specifics that readers need to understand what the work is really about and get on board.

I’ve designed work | write | connect to offer you a crash course in translating your expertise to the world whose benefit you’re working for.

What’s here

If this is your first visit, I suggest that you start with writers and readers to get a sense of how I understand the bond between you and them and the common ways that we as writers fail our readers. Here I discuss the general principles for getting from what writers produce to what our readers need. Once you see in broad strokes why we’re here, dive into re-engineering your writing, where you’ll find the details you can apply in your own writing — the nuts and bolts of creating sentences, paragraphs, and whole documents that really do their work. In there I also spend a little time talking about grammar and punctuation. I’ve filtered out all of the grammar book advice that, in my experience, you don’t need, and summarize the issues that still seem to trip up people with advanced degrees and long experience writing at work.

To increase the efficiency with which you put together your proposal, report, etc. — whether you’re working alone or with a group — take a look at productivity and process. […]