My wife spent all Friday evening and Saturday morning trying to write a letter to introduce her services (she is a Physio) to a government health organisation. After all these hours, she only had two paragraphs and was not happy with it at all.

From that I realised that writing letters is not that easy for some people. So here is how I do it.

1) Outcome

Before starting to write, I decide what the letter is supposed to achieve. Is the reader supposed to call me, or be prepared for my call. Usually that is really all there is to letters. They are an introduction to a call or they are the follow up for a call or meeting.

2) Audience

Who am I writing to? That is probably the most important thing: putting yourself into the shoes of the person receiving the letter. Imagine their frame of mind when they read the letter, their interests in continuing the relationship with you.

Depending on that, I decide whether to show my expertise or highlight their benefits? Or find the right balance between these two.

3) Content

A letter is easiest to read (and write) if you’ve got a structure in mind. What are the main points you want to get across? I just write a list of points (just keywords) as they come into my mind. One keyword per line.

4) Flow

Once I have everything I want to say, I go through and number the key points to get a logical flow. While doing that I imagine my audience and have the outcome clearly in mind.

5) Write like you speak

That was one of the main points my wife made: she could not write, because she thought it was not stylish enough.

Written work that is similar to how we speak is actually much easier to read.

So I always just write whatever comes to mind and how I would speak. I go through my sorted list of keywords and just write as though I were speaking to the person. That makes it easy to write and easy to read.

6) Polishing

Naturally, you need to go through and make sure, it makes sense what you have written. While reading it again, it often becomes glaringly obvious where it needs some tweaking.

An excellent way is to read it out loud (might sound silly, but if you try it, you will see what I mean).

7) Checking

Spell checking is a given and so simple nowadays. (In case you are from the US and are wondering why I spell things like specialising with s, that is just the way things are done in Australia.)

I hope that helps. If you have any questions, just use the comment box.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.