First, you’ve got to decide what it is that you want to communicate. As we all know, once something is said, it’s hard to take it back (… no I didn’t mean it darling!) - so even for one person, deciding - with certainty - what message you want to convey is difficult enough. When it comes to creating a communications strategy for something as amorphous as a whole business - well, it’s not so straightforward. Which is why people like us can sometimes help to facilitate this difficult process, which I’d like to say is a little bit like giving birth, but suspect that as painful as it is, it’s a lot less painful than having a baby.

And even when you’re certain you know what you want to tell people, there’s so much clutter between you and your audience, it’s more of a game of Chinese whispers than a concerted act of communication. “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” can so easily become “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.” A sincere attempt by a great company to tell the world about how fantastic they are, can easily be interpreted as pompous fluff by their potential customers.

People - and by extension - customer organisations, don’t tend to believe what you tell them, they’d much rather see what you can do with their own eyes. As the saying goes, action is stronger than words. So how can the words we use to communicate with customers embody the strength and energy of an action? Surely, if all we have at our disposal is words, we’re powerless to demonstrate what we can do? Not so. Show - don’t tell. If we say something about our brand, make some sort of claim, then all we have to do is back it up with some irrefutable evidence. Don’t make unsubstantiable claims in any communications product, and make sure that everything you say about  your brand is supported by good evidence. If you’re a young company without any real evidence of success, then make a big thing about your youth and freshness - don’t pretend that you are what you’re not - because your customers will know. Be authentic, don’t be fake.

People believe in evidence, not wishes. Show - don’t tell.

Cultures like this can cause huge unintended knock-on effects - from losing out on the extra business that a compelling marketing story would generate, to the more mundane stress and confusion created when well-intentioned but unqualified people are forced to produce communications products.

A company like this probably doesn’t have much of a marketing budget - so it isn’t in the habit of buying the software and tools you’d find in a regular marketing department. It probably doesn’t employ professional communicators, and probably doesn’t even begin to understand that communication is about far more than ‘words’. Worse still, it probably doesn’t even grasp the basic fact that business begins by communicating.

Having met lots of such companies - and I have to apologetically admit that they are particularly prevalent in the UK - our antennae can sniff them out at long range. All we usually do is ask to see some pre-sales, customer-visible documents, like brochures and flyers and so on. And you know, the story they tell is writ large in their simple presentation - we rarely even have to read a word!

 Look at these two thumbnails:

The two documents are intended to perform the same function by their respective authors - they are white papers, discussing how their organisations can address topical IT themes. But honestly - which one would you prefer to read? You don’t have to read any of the words to be more drawn to the rightmost option, which uses simple presentational cues to make itself inviting to the potential reader.

Which at last brings us to graphic design for teams without graphic designers. If you work for one of those companies that doesn’t belive in marketing, doesn’t own a copy of Illustrator or InDesign, and doesn’t have a graphic designer, there’s still no excuse for alienating your potential readers before they’ve had a chance to read a word. Happily, the road to enlightenment has a small number of clear milestones:

1. White space is as significant a compositional element as the rest of your content - use it liberally to relieve your reader’s psychological burden and provide boundaries around related concepts.
2. Use signposts in the form of colour, typeface and style to attract and guide the scanning reader - a reader interested in gleaning concepts and overview more than detail.
3. Paragraphs should be separated by one blank line, and deal with one key concept.
4. Use a grid system to create page styles that run throughout the document - don’t create a unique layout for each page.
5. In print (rather than online), two-column text is generally easier to read than one-column, because the reader’s focus doesn’t have to travel so far for each new line.
6. Adjusting a document’s presentation like this will take some time, so be sure to budget for it, and that your boss and co-workers understand the need for it.

The good news is that you don’t need any specialised software to follow these guidelines - both of these documents could have been produced with plain old Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice for that matter. By creating something that interests the eye and invites a stranger to become a reader, you will have created the very best conditions for that reader to become engrossed in your content. And all without a graphic designer in sight.

Here’s a way that works. Draw a picture like the one below - it’s a chart in which one axis represents the length of time for which the intended audience has had a relationship with your client, the organisation you’re writing for - in this example we’ve labelled the two extremes as ‘pre-sales’ and ‘post-sales’. The other axis presents a view of  the spectrum of audience types - in this case from management to technical people.

Now you can start to talk with stakeholders, and map out where proposed documents actually live on the diagram. For example, on the following version, we’ve identified where we think a set of API-related technical documentation should live, together with a marketing brochure and a technical datasheet.

In all of this, we’re obeying the golden rule - any document can only address at most one of the small red sectors plus its immediate neighbours. If a client suggests that you write for an audience that includes everyone from senior management to the downright technical, you can draw a diagram like the one below and show him/her that the scope is wrong.

The more focused an audience, the more a piece of writing can do the job properly - the magic manual above is trying to do too many jobs for too many people, and will fail miserably.

Obviously, the diagram can be customised to your own circumstances, but it’s proved to be useful in many projects, from writing specialised marketing literature to documenting event-driven APIs for embedded hardware.

Lists and the brain

If you’ve ever had responsibility for contributing to a bid, it’s likely you’ll have structured your work by making a list first. This is a good idea - much better to rough-out the shape of your contribution than to dive straight into the detail. A beautiful list can be the beginning of a great passage of business writing. Most of us will have a tendency to produce lists whose elements are grammatically parallel. Asked to write about fruit, we might produce a list that starts with ‘apple’, ‘orange’, ‘pear’, and ‘banana’ - not ‘apple’, ‘yellow’, ‘juicy’ and ’spherical’.

The same thing happens in business writing. If we needed to write about our approach to Internet security, we might start:

1. Security
2. Intrusion
3. Firewalls
4. Viruses

So far so good, let’s develop our list into a tentative paragraph:

 ”Security will be managed centrally at our data centre. Intrusion attempts will be addressed by a number of measures. Firewalls will be configured to permit access only by authorised persons or agents. Viruses will be detected and processed outside the firewall.”

… and so on. Pretty awful eh? And I know this is just an example, but we’ve all seen stuff like this turn up in bids - and we don’t know who to feel most sorry for, our zombie who had to write it, or the client’s zombie who’s gotta read it!

Rewrite those list-inspired sentences

What’s gone on in the above example is that we’ve used our list to guide the structure of the sentences in our paragraph. And because the list’s elements were grammatically parallel, it’s not surprising that we’ve written sentences that also happen to be grammatically parallel. But the problem with that is as a reader, the big editor in our head doesn’t like parallel sentences. He finds them hard to unpick, laborious to parse, turgid … and in a word, boring.

Very many bid writers - especially if they’re time-constrained - make the mistake of leaving their paragraphs at the same stage as the one above. Better writers will take this initial paragraph and rewrite it to add a little texture and prevent the sentences looking as if they all came from the same sentence cookie cutter. A good writer will experiment with the positions of the subject and the object in each sentence, reinterpreting it until it has a little zing.

Here’s a tiny rewrite to demonstrate my point:

 ”Our high-performance data centre has many security features, and is equipped with powerful measures to foil intrusion attempts. Modern firewalls are specially configured to permit only authorised connections, and incoming email messages are purged of viruses before being allowed inside the network”.

OK I admit it, it’s still not going to win any literary prizes, but I hope you agree that it’s got a bit more sparkle and purpose than our first effort. Applying this rewriting technique across a whole proposal can really help breathe a little life into it, and, more importantly, give your reader - your potential customer - something to carry on living for!

Move one cell up, down, left or right -> Arrow keys

Move one cell to the right -> TAB

Move one cell to the left -> SHIFT+TAB

Move to the edge of the current data region -> CTRL+arrow key

Move to the beginning of the row -> HOME

Move to the beginning of the worksheet -> CTRL+HOME

Move to the last cell of the worksheet, in the bottom-most used row of the rightmost used column -> CTRL+END

Move down one screen -> PAGE DOWN

Move up one screen -> PAGE UP

Move one screen to the right -> ALT+PAGE DOWN

Move one screen to the left -> ALT+PAGE UP

Switch to the next pane in a worksheet that has been split -> F6

Switch to the previous pane in a worksheet that has been split -> SHIFT+F6

Scroll to display the active cell ->CTRL+BACKSPACE

Display the Go To dialogue box -> F5

Display the Find dialogue box -> SHIFT+F5

Repeat the last Find action -> SHIFT+F4

Move between unlocked cells in a protected worksheet -> TAB

A BT/Oracle white paper describing their solution to asset lifecycle management in the utilities and transport sectors.

A white paper for Systems Union, presenting their 2006 technology strategy.

Company-i (later acquired by Symantec) commissioned a white paper on the potential for shared computing to improve space, power and compute capabilities in today’s overcrowded datacentres.

A product overview paper for a large financial and performance management organisation.