"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

We spend a lot of time in Duke’s MEM Program learning about and practicing effective presentations. There is no doubt that this is important for your future career since you will be asked to present in many different situations – from updates for your managers to persuading customers/clients. And for those of you who are in the MEM Program now or recently graduated, you have probably had readings about tapping into or developing an extroverted personality while at work in order to maximize your career potential. I wholeheartedly believe all of that is true. However, do not ignore your writing skills!

Although presentation skills, oral persuasion skills, and general verbal communication are at the top of the “skills needed for advancement” list, if you do not have decent writing skills, your career will stall as well. In today’s world of quick e-mail communications and text messaging, it is easy to think that the quality of our written communication is not important. A message sent from an i-phone or a Blackberry will look like a ransom note if you are careless! Capitalization used randomly and accidentally throughout the message, as well as misspellings are hard to follow. So you should keep two things in mind. First, even in these quick text applications, if you are constantly misunderstood or if people have to decipher your messages because you are a poor writer, your effectiveness is diminished tremendously, especially given the number of these communications in today’s corporate environment. Second, and in my opinion more importantly, the number of more formal (compared to e-mails and text messaging) memos and reports that you will need to generate as you climb the corporate ladder is very high! And the most significant point is that these more formal memos and reports will be read by people above you in the chain of command. This means they will be judging your competence based on your writing. Another thing to keep in mind is that given enough time, you may be a good writer, but I can promise you one thing about your future job as a manager – you won’t have enough time to do all the things you are expected to do. The old adage “if I had more time I would have made that report shorter” is certainly a truism that will apply as you try to write a concise, clear report or memo.

So my primary point for this blog is simply to emphasize that you should not neglect your writing skills because they are an important part of your portfolio of skills. As far as advice on how to write effective memos and reports, I am not an expert so I will mostly leave that up to our workshop instructors or your ability to do your own research about the effective written word. Suffice it to say here that the problems I generally observe with writing among students and employees include poor flow of the ideas in the document, run-on sentences and paragraphs, more detail than is needed by the audience (i.e., detail that is irrelevant for the task at hand), and no title/date/author context information in the document. So my advice in the writing area is the following:

• Study it like any other skill you want to develop, read the expert opinions on good writing, and make informed judgments about how you will write a document of any type.
• Spending too much time writing any type of a document, including e-mails and text messages is a bad idea, but knowing when to spend enough time to insure clarity of thought and quality of writing is very important.
• Use paragraphs and subheadings effectively in your documents! It helps avoid losing your reader, especially if they are busy people like your bosses will no-doubt be.
• Always include an executive summary for a document that is more than two pages in length – it may be the only thing that gets read.
• Be concise. Although I have run into a few instances of students who are so concise that the content of their writing was not clear, generally the content is not clear because there is much too much detail in the writing. Know your audience and make sure that you only include detail they would be interested in.
• It is a rare writer who can jump right into writing a document without starting with an outline. The outline will help you in organizing your flow and ideas before you start “data dumping” onto the page. A clear logical flow is critical to any written document.
• Remember that each paragraph should have its main point as the first sentence, followed by supporting information. The next paragraph should be a new topic and organized the same way. It is hard to develop an organized flow from lots of detailed information. Take the time to do this and I refer back to the previous bullet about an outline.

I think that is all I have to say about the written word. It is a skill that will take lots of time to develop and you won’t get it by reading a single blog post but I hope this helps you understand its importance. So please take the time to learn to write better than me! (erh uh “better than I?”)