Before you begin to write, ask yourself what purpose you intend to fulfill. Only after you have clarified your purpose will you be able to effectively structure and deliver your message. Everything about your document, including organization, word choice and format, flows from its purpose. If you do not have a clear purpose in mind before beginning to write, your entire document loses effectiveness.

Every document has one main purpose. When trying to clarify your purpose, ask yourself, "Why am I writing this? What result or effect do I intend it to produce? What do I want my reader to do after reading this?" The most common purposes of business documents are:

• Request
• Persuade
• Inform

To Request

Requests should be clear, detailed and include a deadline by which the requested action should take place. A sentence such as, “Get it to me as soon as possible,” places responsibility for completion on the reader. “As soon as possible” might be six weeks from now for your reader. If you want it by Friday at noon, say so. If you have stated your request in the body of your document, restate it at the end. People are most likely to remember the last thing they see.

To Persuade

Persuading is an indirect form of requesting. When you persuade, you are asking your reader to think or act differently. Rather than stating your request directly, you justify your request by using logical reasoning, or sell it by appealing to your reader's emotions. Identifying your reader's “hot buttons” is an important part of successful persuasion. What topics or feelings are most important to your reader? If you choose your arguments carefully and deliver them in a form that your reader can easily understand, you are more likely to suceed in convincing him or her to think or act in the way you had hoped.

To Inform

Informing people simply transmits information from one person to another. It requires no action and is not inherently persuasive. For example, if you say, “I feel cold,” you have informed a person about of your feeling. He or she will feel no impulse to turn up the thermostat because you have made no request. Similarly, if you write “We need to receive payment,” your reader could think, “That's interesting.” If you need the money by the first of the month, ask for it. Automatically assuming that your purpose is to inform may lead you to include gobs of information that have nothing to do with your actual purpose. Your reader will then have to sift through all the information to discern which points are relevant. Busy readers lack the time or the patience to do this.

Remember: If you want action, your purpose is to request or persuade. If you are documenting facts, your purpose is to inform.

The few moments you take to clarify your purpose will pay off richly when you generate your intended result.

© Elizabeth Danziger 2009