Seth Godin writes:

“The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Orwell was on the right track. Just say it. Say it clearly. Say it now. Say it without fear of being criticized and say it without being boring. My best tip is this: buy a cheap digital recorder. Say what you want to say, as if the person you seek to persuade is standing there, listening. Then type that up. “

Maybe it’s the nature of the people I typically interact with (highly educated and opinionated), but I’m not picking up on a lot of fear of communicating in the workplace. In fact, I think Gen Yers are more confident expressing their opinions that Gen Xers or Boomers before them were.

My take: Fear might play a role in it, but there are other — and more important — reasons why business writing sucks.

If your writing sucks, it’s probably because you:

• Aren’t thinking clearly. Poor writing — and poor communication in any form, for that matter — springs from poorly formed ideas and thoughts. Too much of business writing relies on buzzwords and meaningless platitudes — which are simply shortcuts for getting at the core of an idea or thought. On countless occasions on this blog, I’ve taken someone (blogger, researcher, etc.) to task for not critically thinking through what was expressed on the blog or white paper.
• Aren’t clear why you’re writing. If your writing sucks, you probably haven’t figured out why you’re writing what you’re writing. Is it to educate the audience? Entertain the audience? Persuade the audience? Some of all three? If you can’t articulate why you’re writing, your writing won’t be very articulate.
• Haven’t practiced. You can sing, can’t you? But just because you can sing, it doesn’t mean you can make good music. Same with writing. Just because you can speak, it doesn’t mean you can write effectively. Good writing is a skill. You get better by practicing.  If you’re not Beethoven, you’re not going to write a great symphony on your first try. And if you’re not Seth Godin, you won’t produce great business writing just by speaking into a recorder and typing up what you said.

Speaking isn’t a substitute — nor a prerequisite — for writing. When we speak, we use phrasing, intonation, and facial expressions to help convey meaning. If you simply translate what you say into the written word, something will be lost. I can guarantee that.

This isn’t the first time Godin has written about writing. Back in January 2008 he wrote:

“Don’t let the words get in the way. If you’re writing online, forget everything you were tortured by in high school English class. You’re not trying to win any awards or get an A. You’re just trying to be real, to make a point, to write something worth reading. So just say it.”

I said it then, I’ll say it now: DO let the words get in the way. Read through it through the eyes of your audience (to the best you can), and ask yourself: How will they interpret what I’m trying to say? Am I using words that could be misconstrued? Is there a simpler and more concise way to say what I just said?

Here’s why this is so important: The ideas that win in the business world aren’t necessarily the best ideas. They’re the ones that are most effectively communicated, by the most persuasive communicators.

If you want to record and type up what you say — with all your “ums” and “likes” and the poor grammar we get away with when we speak — go for it. Your writing will suck. And my ideas will kick your idea’s ass every time.

Gizmodo ran an article titled Behold, the World’s Worst PowerPoint Slide. As Gizmodo wrote: 

“It often seems like every PowerPoint slide is the worst, but here lies what projector company InFocus deems history’s most heinous. I’m inclined to agree. It’s almost brilliant in its horror. Diabolical. The arrows. The colors. This is Satan’s face.”

Here’s the offending slide:

My take: I’m inclined to disagree. 

Here’s why:  A good slide isn’t necessarily about legibility. In fact, for the most part, you don’t want people to read your slides when you present something. 

Good Powerpoint slides do a number of things. For one, they remind you what you’re supposed to be talking about at that point in the presentation.

Another thing a good Powerpoint slide does is elicit an emotional reaction. And the quicker that reaction is generated, the better.

When I look at the slide above, I can’t read a damn word on the slide. But I do have a reaction: “Holy sh*t, IT modernization is going to be really freaking complicated, time consuming, difficult, and probably expensive.”

And if you’re the CIO of a large organization, eliciting that kind of response from the senior management team is golden. After all, those bastards think your job is easy, don’t they? 

Bottom line: This is far from being the world’s worst Powerpoint slide.

Disclaimer: I have a lot of respect for eMarketer. They do great work, and although I’m picking on one of their graphs, I mean them no disrespect.

OK, with that out of the way, take a look at graph below. See anything wrong?

Here’s what ticks me off about it: The 58.4% bar stretches all the way across the graph.

Think about this for a moment. This chart can be translated into words: “Talent was cited by 58.4% of marketers as a web analytics challenge. Actionability was mentioned by 47.3%. Finding insights was the third most frequently mentioned challenge…..” And so on.

What a snooze that would be. That’s why we use charts and graphs — they’re a more efficient (and perhaps effective) way to communicate something.

But when you stretch a 58.4% bar all the way across your graph you diminish the efficiency of the graph because you make viewers work harder than they have to to interpret the graph. A bar that occupied about half the space allotted to the graph would be perceived as having a value of about 50%.

But in the graph above, with the 58.4% bar taking up the whole space, it’s not only not intuitive that the value is 58.4%, but it makes it harder to interpret the other bars.

I see this kind of thing in a lot of presentations. Sometimes it’s the result of not consciously thinking about, but sometimes it is intentional. Like stretching a 20% bar across the space of a graph is going to make people think that 20% is a really big number.

Next time you construct a graph and chart for a presentation, think about how you use the space. And round the percentages down to no decimal places (exception: when the numbers are less than 10%).  When people have to work harder than they should to understand what you’re talking about, you’ve lost a little of your potential effectiveness as a presenter.

Many of you have probably experienced this: You’ve been asked to speak at a conference. About 12 weeks before the conference date, the conference organizer sends you a Powerpoint template for you to use.

There are three things wrong with this:

1. It’s too soon. I have a better chance of sleeping with Tiger Woods than I do of having my presentation for the conference ready at that point. Even 12 days before the conference is a stretch for me. But hey, that’s my problem, not the conference organizers. And in the scheme of things, this problem isn’t nearly as bad as the next two.

2. The templates are butt-ugly. No offense (who am I fooling, of course I’m offending someone), but these templates are usually atrocious examples of poor design. The one I received the other day had two huge blue boxes — one at the top of the page, one at the bottom — and a space in the middle for the page header and text. Right, the header was below the blue box at the top. The bottom blue box had the logo and conference name in large font, of course. And I’m supposed to cram my content in the white space in the middle. This was one of the better designed templates I’ve received.

3. Templates are counterproductive. It’s a shame that conference organizers don’t understand this: Clinging to some fantasy of “conference branding” detracts from the attendee experience. Most Powerpoint presentations are poorly designed as it is.  A conference -branded template doesn’t help the situation. The purpose of each slide in a deck is very simple (to describe, not to execute): To communicate an idea. Any extraneous text or graphics on a slide detracts from that goal.

What do conference organizers think? That attendees don’t know what conference they’re attending, and have to be reminded by each of the 600 slides that they’ll be subjected to looking at?

I, for one, will continue to ignore conference organizers’ requests to use their templates. I’m this close to telling them to take their templates and….

Don’t do Q&A at the end of a presentation.

I’m not saying to not do Q&A — just don’t it at the very end of the presentation. By waiting until the very end of a presentation a few things can go wrong: 1) You leave insufficient time for discussion; 2) You end with a thud if no one asks a question; or 3) You get sucked into answering bad questions.

Here’s what I plan to do with my presentations from now on: Before my last two closing slides (which typically restate my presentation’s theme and close on a humorous note), I plan on inserting a slide titled “Thoughts/reactions?”

Instead of asking the audience if they have any questions, I’m going to say “before I go on, let me pause here a moment and ask you — what are your thoughts, comments, reactions?”

This will (hopefully) accomplish a couple of things:

1) Change the tone from “questioning the speaker” to “generating conversation”. How many times have you seen a presentation, had some thoughts you thought worth sharing, but didn’t because you didn’t have a “question”? I want to change that in my presentations.

2) I can manage the time better. No more looking at the conference organizer to see if I have time for another question. I’ll know that I have to leave enough time to end with my last 2 slides, so I can stop the discussion when I want to.

3) I get the last word to close on the tone and note that I want to close on, with people leaving remembering my last slide, and not necessarily the lousy answer I gave to the last question.