Writing secrets of the pros

Follow these rules and I promise you will get results!

1. Start with the end in mind.
Do not wait until all the results are in to craft your conclusions. Write them first, that way you can make sure the research comes out right.

2. Manage expectations.
Devote several pages to the lack of data, uncooperativeness of interviewees, and indifference of managers that kept you from learning anything very useful.

3. Build suspense.
Why tell readers right away what they want to know? Drop it casually at the end of several pages of background. Better yet, bury it in the middle of the report. Readers love a good treasure hunt.

4. Showcase your skills.
Why let readers sail along on short sentences in plain English? Use your vast command of languages (don’t limit yourself to English) to dazzle them with unfamiliar vocabulary, impenetrable jargon, and elaborate sentence structures.

5. Match the writing to the ideas.
Complex ideas demand complex writing. If it takes you days or weeks to figure out what is going on in your organization, it should take your readers at least that long to figure out what you have to say about it.

6. Rules were made to be broken.
Only truly gifted or engagingly eccentric writers can break the rules of grammar with abandon. Show them how gifted or eccentric you are: toss out the rules you don’t like, experiment with alternative spelling, explore the limits of sentence length. Remember the immortal words of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

7. Leave interpretation to the pros.
Do not waste time clearly labeling your charts and explaining what they show, let the readers interpret them their own way—they’re going to do it anyway.

8. Neatness counts.
Bullets look like mouse droppings and headings interrupt the flow of ideas from page to brain. Blocks of text unhindered by such nuisance devices not only look better but also offer readers a more stimulating mental workout.

9. Make readers feel useful.
Do not edit the report yourself; everyone else is dying to do it for you. They enjoy finding all of your bizarre or amusing errors—not only does it make them look bright, it keeps them from looking too closely at the substance.

10. Leave them hungry for more.
Everybody loves a mystery. Sprinkle your report with red herrings, dead ends, and superfluous detail. Never be positive when you can be negative; never concrete when you can be vague; never clear when you can be misleading. Above all, follow the dictum “half an idea is better than none.”