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Chapter 4

Planning Business Messages

Learning Objectives

Describe the three-step writing process

Explain why it’s important to analyze a communication situation in order to define your purpose and profile your audience before writing a message

Discuss information gathering options for simple messages, and identify three attributes of quality information

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After studying this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

Describe the three-step writing process
Explain why it’s important to analyze a communication situation in order to define your purpose and profile your audience before writing a message
Discuss information gathering options for simple messages, and identify three attributes of quality information

Learning Objectives

List the factors to consider when choosing the most appropriate medium for a message

Explain why good organization is important to both you and your audience, and list the tasks involved in organizing a message

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After studying this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

List the factors to consider when choosing the most appropriate medium for a message
Explain why good organization is important to both you and your audience, and list the tasks involved in organizing a message

Understanding the Three-Step Writing Process

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By following a proven process, you can learn to create successful messages that meet audience needs and highlight your skills as a business professional. Use the three-step writing process to ensure that your messages are both effective and efficient.

The Three-Step Process

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Planning business messages. To plan any message, first analyze the situation by defining your purpose and developing a profile of your audience. With that in mind, you can gather information that will meet your audience’s needs. Next, select the right medium (oral, written, or electronic) to deliver your message. With those three factors in place, you are ready to organize the information by defining your main idea, limiting your scope, selecting an approach, and outlining your content. Planning business messages is the focus of this chapter.

Writing business messages. Once you have planned your message, adapt to your audience with sensitivity, relationship skills, and style. Then you are ready to compose your message by choosing strong words, creating effective sentences, and developing coherent paragraphs. Writing business messages is discussed in Chapter 5.

Completing business messages. After writing your first draft, revise your message to make sure it is clear, concise, and correct. Next produce your message, giving it an attractive, professional appearance. Proofread the final product for typos, spelling errors, and other mechanical problems. Finally, distribute your message using the best combination of personal and technological tools. Completing business messages is discussed in Chapter 6.

Optimizing Your Time

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The more you use the three-step writing process, the easier and faster it will become. You will also get better at allotting your time for each task during a writing project. As a general rule, set aside roughly 50 percent of your time for planning, 25 percent of your time for writing, and 25 percent for completing. Of course, the 50-25-25 time allotment can vary significantly from project to project. Start with the “50-25-25 split” as a guideline and use your best judgment for each project.

As soon as the need to create a message appears, inexperienced communicators are often tempted to dive directly into writing. However, even a few minutes of planning can save hours of rework and frustration later on. Planning your message reduces indecision as you write, and it reduces revision during the completing step. Careful planning can also save you from embarrassing blunders that could hurt your company or your career. With a solid plan in place, you are ready to move forward with analyzing your situation.

Summary of Objectives

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This section covered the following elements involved in Understanding The Three-Step Writing Process:

The Three Step Process
Optimizing Your Time

This concludes our discussion of Understanding The Three-Step Writing Process. The next section will cover Analyzing The Situation.

Analyzing the Situation

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Every communication effort takes place in a particular situation, meaning you have a specific message to send to a specific audience under a specific set of circumstances. The information you decide to include in your messages will contain a level of detail, a specific tone, and intentional word choices that relate to your specific situation. Making the right choices starts with defining your purpose clearly and understanding your audience’s needs.

Analyzing the Situation

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A successful message starts with a clear purpose that connects the sender’s needs with the audience’s needs. Identifying your purpose and your audience is usually a straightforward task for simple, routine messages. However, this task can be more demanding as situations become more complex. If you launch directly into writing without clarifying both your purpose and your audience, you will waste time and energy, and you will probably generate a less effective message.

Defining Your Purpose

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To Inform

To Persuade

To Collaborate

Your Goals

Audience Actions

Audience Thoughts

General Purpose

Specific Purpose

All business messages have a general purpose: to inform, to persuade, or to collaborate with your audience. Business messages also have a specific purpose. To help you define the specific purpose of your message, ask yourself what you hope to accomplish with your message and what your audience should do or think after receiving your message.

Checking Your Purpose

What will change?
Is it realistic?
Is the timing right?
Is it acceptable?

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Once you have defined your specific purpose, you can decide whether that

purpose merits the time and effort required for you to prepare and send your

message. Test your purpose by asking four questions:

Will anything change as a result of your message?
Is your purpose realistic?
Is the time right?
Is your purpose acceptable to the organization?

Once you are satisfied that you have a clear and meaningful purpose and that

now is a smart time to proceed, your next step is to understand the members of

your audience and their needs.

Profiling Your Audience

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Knowledge Level

Expectations

Probable Reaction

Primary Members

Size and Location

Composition

The more you know about your audience, their needs, and their expectations, the more effectively you will be able to communicate with them. Analyzing your audience involves the following steps:

Identify the primary audience. If you can reach the decision makers or opinion molders in your audience, other audience members will fall in line.

Determine the size of your audience. A report for wide distribution requires a more formal style, organization, and format than one directed to three or four people in your department.

Determine the composition of the audience. Look for common denominators that tie audience members together across differences in culture, education, status, or attitude. Include evidence that touches on everyone’s area of interest.

Gauge your audience’s level of understanding. If audience members share your general background, they will understand your material without difficulty. If not, you must educate them. Include only enough information to accomplish your objective.

Project your audience’s expectations and preferences. Will members of your audience expect complete details or will a summary of the main points suffice? Do they want an email or will they expect a formal memo?

Estimate your audience’s probable reaction. If you expect a favorable response, state conclusions and recommendations up front and offer minimal evidence. If you expect skepticism, introduce conclusions gradually, and include more evidence.

Summary of Objectives

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This section covered the following elements involved in Analyzing the Situation:

Analyzing the Situation
Defining Your Purpose
Checking Your Purpose
Profiling Your Audience

This concludes our discussion of Analyzing the Situation. The next section will cover Gathering Information.

Gathering Information

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When you have a clear picture of your audience, your next step is to assemble the information that you will include in your message. For simple messages, you may already have all the information at hand, but for more complex messages, you may need to do considerable research and analysis before you’re ready to begin writing.

Three Attributes for Quality Information

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Uncover Needs

Find Your Focus

Provide Information

With a clear picture of your audience, your next step is to gather information. To get started, try some informal methods, such as considering the audience’s perspective; reading reports and other company documents; talking with supervisors, colleagues, or customers; and asking the audience for input. You can also use the following techniques to guide your efforts:

Uncover audience needs. In many situations, your audience’s information needs are readily apparent; in others, your audience may be unable to articulate exactly what is needed. Asking a question or two often forces your audience to think through the request and define more precisely what is required. Also, try to think of information needs that your audience may not have expressed.

Find your focus. You may encounter situations in which the assignment or objective is so vague that you have no idea how to get started in determining what the audience needs to know. If so, you can use some discovery techniques (such as free writing or sketching) to help generate ideas and uncover possible avenues to research.

Provide required information. After you have defined your audience’s information needs, be sure to satisfy those needs completely. One good way to test the thoroughness of your message is to use the journalistic approach. Check to see whether your message answers who, what, when, where, why, and how. To gauge the quality of the information, make sure it is accurate, ethical, and pertinent.

Summary of Objectives

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This section covered the following elements involved in Gathering Information:

Three Attributes for Quality Information

This concludes our discussion of Gathering Information. The next section will cover Selecting the Right Medium.

Selecting the Right Medium

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A medium is the form through which you choose to communicate a message. You may choose to talk with someone face to face, post to a blog, send an email message, or create a webcast. The range of media possibilities is wide and growing wider all the time.

Select the Medium

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Selecting the best medium for your message can make the difference between effective and ineffective communication. Although media categories have become increasingly blurred in recent years, for the sake of discussion, you can think of media as being oral, written, visual, or electronic (which often combines several media types).

Oral Communication

Conversations
Interviews
Speeches
Presentations
Meetings

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Primary oral media include face-to-face conversations, interviews, speeches, and in-person presentations and meetings. By giving communicators the ability to see, hear, and react to each other, traditional oral media are useful for encouraging people to ask questions, make comments, and work together to reach a consensus or decision.

Of course, if you do not want a lot of questions or interaction, oral media can be an unwise choice. However, consider the audience carefully before deciding to limit interaction by choosing a different medium.

Written Communication

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Written media take many forms, from traditional memos to glossy reports that rival magazines in production quality. Even though electronic media have replaced many printed messages, the print medium still has a place in business today.

Memos are used for the routine, day-to-day exchange of information within an organization. Because of their open format and informal method of delivery, memos are less private than letters.

Letters are written messages sent to recipients outside the organization. In addition to conveying a particular message, they perform an important public relations function in fostering good working relationships with customers, suppliers, and others.

Reports and proposals are usually longer than memos and letters, although both can be created in memo or letter format. These documents come in a variety of lengths, ranging from a few pages to several hundred, and are usually formal in tone.

Visual Communication

Communicate Fast

Clarify Complexity

Overcome Barriers

Expedite Memory

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Traditional business messages rely primarily on text, with occasional support from graphical elements such as charts, graphs, or diagrams to help illustrate points discussed in the text. However, many business communicators are discovering the power of messages in which the visual element is dominant and supported by small amounts of text.

For the purposes of this discussion, you can think of visual media as any format in which one or more visual elements play a central role in conveying the message content. Messages that combine powerful visuals with supporting text can be effective for a number of reasons:

Today’s audiences are pressed for time and bombarded with messages, so anything that communicates quickly is welcome.
Visuals are also effective at describing complex ideas and processes because they can reduce the work required for an audience to identify the parts and relationships that make up the whole.
In a multilingual business world, diagrams, symbols, and other images can lower communication barriers by requiring less language processing.
Visual images can be easier to remember than purely textual descriptions or explanations.

Electronic Communication

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When you want to make a powerful impression, using electronic media can increase excitement and visual appeal with computer animation, video, and music. Here is a quick overview of the major electronic media now used in business:

Electronic versions of oral media include telephone calls, teleconferencing (when three or more people join the same call), voicemail messages, and audio recordings such as compact discs and podcasts.

Electronic versions of written media range from email and instant messages to blogs, websites, and wikis.

Electronic versions of visual media can include electronic presentations, computer animation, and video.

The growth of electronic communication options is both a blessing and a curse for business communicators. On the one hand, you have more tools than ever before to choose from, with more ways to deliver business messages. On the other hand, the sheer range of choices can complicate your job because you often need to choose among multiple media and you need to know how to use each medium successfully.

Choosing the Medium

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When choosing a medium for your message, consider how your message is affected by the following factors:

Media richness. This is a medium's ability to (1) convey a message through more than one informational cue, (2) facilitate feedback, and (3) establish personal focus. The richest medium is face-to-face communication.

Message formality. Your choice of media governs the style and tone of your message. For example, a printed letter is likely to be perceived as a more formal gesture than an email message.

Media limitations. Every medium has limitations. For instance, IM is perfect for communicating simple, straightforward messages, but it is ineffective for sending complex messages.

Urgency. Some media establish a connection with the audience faster than others, so choose wisely if your message is urgent. If a message is not urgent, choose a medium that allows people to respond at their convenience.

Cost. This is both a real factor and a perceived nonverbal signal. Distributing an interactive multimedia report on DVD is more costly than attaching an MS Word version of the report to an email message. While a prospective customer may expect a multimedia presentation, your manager would question the cost-effectiveness of such media for routine internal reports.

Audience preferences. Make sure to consider which media your audience expects or prefers. For example, the United States, Canada, and Germany emphasize written messages. In contrast, Japan emphasizes oral messages—perhaps because its high-context culture carries so much of the message in nonverbal cues and “between-the-lines” interpretation.

Summary of Objectives

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This section covered the following elements involved in Selecting the Right Medium:

Select the Medium
Oral Communication
Written Communication
Visual Communication
Electronic Communication
Choosing the Medium

This concludes our discussion of Selecting the Right Medium. The next section will cover Organizing Your Information.

Organizing Your Information

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Information organization in your message can make the difference between effective or ineffective communications. Avoid common mistakes: taking too long to get to the point, including irrelevant material, getting ideas mixed up, and leaving out necessary information.

Recognizing the Importance of Organization

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Good organization helps your audience in several ways:

Helps them understand your message. By making your main point clear at the outset, your well-organized message will satisfy your audience’s need for information.
Helps them accept your message. Even when your message is logical, you need to select and organize your points in a diplomatic way.
Saves them time. Well-organized messages are efficient. They contain only relevant ideas, and they are brief.

In addition to saving time and energy for your readers, good organization saves you time and consumes less of your creative energy. Furthermore, good organizational skills are good for your career because they help you develop a reputation as a clear thinker who cares about your reader.

Defining the Main Idea

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The

Topic

The

Main Idea

The topic of your message is the overall subject, such as employee insurance claims. Your main idea is a specific statement about the topic of your message, such as your belief that a new web-based claim filing system would reduce costs for the company and reduce reimbursement delays for the employees.

Generating Ideas

Brainstorming
Mind Mapping
Storyteller’s Tour
Journalistic Approach
Questions and Answers

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In longer documents and presentations, you often need to unify a mass of material, so you will need to define a main idea that encompasses all the individual points you want to make. For tough assignments like these, consider a variety of techniques to generate creative ideas:

Brainstorming. Working alone or with others, generate as many ideas and questions as you can, without stopping to criticize or organize. After you capture all these pieces, look for patterns and connections to help identify the main idea and the groups of supporting ideas.

Mind mapping. You can also generate and organize ideas using a graphic method called mind mapping. Start with a main idea, and then branch out to connect every other related idea that comes to mind.

Storyteller’s tour. Pretend you are giving a colleague a guided tour of your message and capture it on a tape recorder. Then listen to your talk, identify ways to tighten and clarify the message, and repeat the process. Working through this recording several times will help you distill the main idea down to a single, concise message.

Journalistic approach. The journalistic approach asks who, what, when, where, why, and how questions to distill major ideas from piles of unorganized information.

Question-and-answer chain. Start with a key question, from the audience’s perspective, and work back toward your message. In most cases, you will find that each answer generates new questions, until you identify the information that needs to be in your message.

Limiting Message Scope

Length Limits
Support Points
Subject Matter
Audience Knowledge

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The scope of your message must match your main idea. Once you have a tentative statement of your main idea, test it against the length limitations that have been imposed for your message. If you lack the time and space to develop your main idea fully, or if your main idea will not fill up the time and space allotted, redefine the main idea of your message.

Regardless of how long the message will be, limit the number of major support points to half a dozen or so—and if you can get your idea across with fewer points, all the better. Instead of introducing additional points, you can more fully develop complex issues by supporting your points with a variety of evidence.

How much space you need to communicate and support your main idea depends on the subject itself, as well as your audience members’ familiarity with the topic, their receptivity to your conclusions, and your credibility. You will need fewer words to present routine information to a knowledgeable audience that already knows and respects you. You will need more time to build consensus about a complex and controversial subject, especially if the audience is composed of skeptical or hostile strangers.

Choosing the Approach

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Audience Reaction

Message Length

Message Type

Direct Approach

Indirect Approach

Once you have defined your ideas and outlined or diagrammed the structure of your message, you are ready to decide on the sequence you will use to present your points.

The direct approach. The main idea (such as a recommendation, conclusion, or request) comes first, followed by the evidence. Use this approach when your audience will be neutral about your message or pleased to hear from you.

The indirect approach. The evidence comes first, and the main idea comes later. Use this approach when your audience may be displeased or may resist what you have to say.

Your choice of a direct or an indirect approach depends on several factors:

Audience reaction: positive, neutral, or negative
Message length: short (memos and letters) or long (reports, proposals, and presentations)
Message type: routine and positive messages, negative messages, or persuasive messages

Outlining the Content

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First Major Point

First subpoint

Second subpoint

Evidence

Third subpoint

Second Major Point

First subpoint

Second subpoint

1.0 First Major Point

1.1 First subpoint

1.2 Second subpoint

1.2.1 Evidence

1.2.2 Evidence

1.3 Third subpoint

2.0 Second Major Point

2.1 First subpoint

2.2 Second subpoint

Alphanumeric

Decimal

Whether you use the outlining features provided with word-processing software or simply jot down three or four points on the back of an envelope, making a plan and sticking to it will help you cover the important details.

The basic outline formats (1) use numbers—or letters and numbers—to identify each point and (2) indent points to show the relationship between major points, subpoints, and evidence. A good outline divides a topic into at least two parts, restricts each subdivision to one category, and ensures that each group is separate and distinct.

Organization Chart Outlines

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The Main Idea

I. Major Point

II. Major Point

III. Major Point

A. Evidence

B. Evidence

C. Evidence

A. Evidence

B. Evidence

C. Evidence

A. Evidence

B. Evidence

C. Evidence

Another way to visualize the structure of your message is by creating a message “organization chart” similar to the charts used to show a company’s management structure. The main idea is shown in the highest-level box and, like a top executive, establishes the big picture. The lower-level ideas, like lower-level employees, provide the details. All the ideas are logically organized into divisions of thought, just as a company is organized into divisions and departments.

Using a visual chart has several benefits. Charts can help you (1) see the different levels of ideas and how the parts fit together, (2) develop new ideas, and (3) restructure your information flow.

Basic Message Structure

State Main Idea
State Major Points
Provide Examples

and Evidence

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Whichever outlining or organizing scheme you employ, start your message with the main idea, follow with major supporting points, and then illustrate these points with evidence.

The main idea helps you establish the goals and general strategy of the message, and it summarizes two things: (1) what you want your audience to do or think and (2) why they should do so.

Support your main idea with the major points that clarify and explain your ideas in more concrete terms. If your purpose is to inform and the material is factual, your major points might be based on something physical or financial—something you can visualize or measure. When you are describing a process, the major points are almost inevitably steps in the process.

After you have defined the main idea and identified supporting points, you are ready to illustrate each point with specific evidence that helps audience members understand and remember the concepts you are presenting. Provide enough support to be convincing but not so much that your message becomes boring or inefficient. To keep your audience interested, vary the type of detail you include, such as facts and figures, narration, a dash of description, some examples, or a reference to authority.

Summary of Objectives

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This section covered the following elements involved in Organizing Your Information:

Recognizing the Importance of Organization
Defining the Main Idea
Generating Ideas
Limiting Message Scope
Choosing the Approach
Outlining the Content
Organization Chart Outlines
Basic Message Structure

This concludes our discussion of Organizing Your Information. The presentation will close with a review of this chapter’s learning objectives.

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Chapter 4

Planning Business Messages

This concludes the PowerPoint presentation on Chapter 4, “Planning Business Messages.” During this presentation, we have accomplished the following learning objectives:

Described the three-step writing process
Explained why it’s important to analyze a communication situation in order to define your purpose and profile your audience before writing a message
Discussed information gathering options for simple messages, and identified three attributes of quality information
Listed the factors to consider when choosing the most appropriate medium for a message
Explained why good organization is important to both you and your audience, and listed the tasks involved in organizing a message

For more information about these topics, refer to Chapter 4 in Excellence in Business Communication

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

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