Write to the Point

1Writing to the Point

“The difficulty is not to write,but to write what you mean.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson

WRITING IN BUSINESS HAS NEVER been more difficult and more stressful. We live in an age of information overload thanks to e-mail, voice mail, cell phones, and pagers. Although all these wonders were designed to make life and communication easier and faster, they have also created added demands on our time. Writers are expected to respond quickly to an endless flow of e-mail messages. What results is that readers complain about an increasing lack of clarity and abundance of mechanical errors. Supervisors and managers express bewilderment at employees’ inability to simply state the essence of what they need to express or neglect to apply appropriate ...