DOES GOOD WRITING MATTER?

All writing aims to achieve results. Whether the aim is to communicate information, to influence a decision or to stimulate the imagination, the language needs to be marshalled and controlled. There are many ways in which the desired aim can be achieved – and many more ways of getting it wrong.

The aim of this piece of writing is to improve the effectiveness of your proposals by making better use of language. By a “proposal”, I mean any sort of document that is making a pitch: to your customers, to your manager, to your lover or to anyone whom you want to convince to take some action. We all receive many proposals, large and small, every day. But too often, although the information is accurate and the answers to our problems are in there, the way in which it is all presented is unconvincing and error-ridden. And so we don't buy; we don't take the action the writer wants us to. Maybe nothing could have been done – the ideas were rotten anyway – but possibly, if the writer could just have found the right words, we would have been convinced.

The purpose of this book is to help you find those “right words” for the proposals you produce, specifically those that seek to win or to initiate major IT projects. This is not to say that it is inapplicable to other kinds of proposals.