We spend a lot of our time with corporations who need to produce detailed commercial proposals. If it’s possible, we quite often write the whole things ourselves. If not, we help out by instilling a little structure and process, rolling up our sleeves and joining the editing team. This way of work helps us - by giving us lots of variety and exposing us to different ways of working. It also helps our clients, because we can bring best practice gleaned from many companies to our new projects. No bid will ever win a literary prize, but it is possible to engage the reader and make him or her eager to continue - regardless of how dry the subject matter is. And the great thing about this is that you don’t need a literature degree to start adding a little sparkle to your own business writing. That’s right, there’s an easy trick we can all use.
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:
- Security
- Intrusion
- Firewalls
- 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!
