Category Archives: Non-sensitive correspondence

You want to explain first. But should you keep readers waiting for your point?

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If you’re writing to readers from Western cultures, don’t make them wait! Western attention spans are short. We value efficiency–most of the time.

But I need to explain when efficiency is (and isn’t) paramount to offer helpful guidance. Here’s my point in this post: Delay only if your point meets all the following criteria for sensitivity:

  • Your primary message communicates negative news (e.g., the program announcement and rejection but not the meeting announcement found below).
  • That message focuses negativity primarily on the reader (e.g., the program announcement and rejection but not the apology below).
  • That message conveys negative news that is both personal to the reader and rare (e.g., the rejection but not like the program announcement below).

Sensitivity is the key to effective placement of your point, which I like to call the bottom line. But we need to think about sensitivity in a little detail. Keep reading for that explanation and some simple examples. If you’re not sure how to identify the bottom line in a written message, you may want to view the video tutorial in Improve Your Reader’s Efficiency before you continue.

Positive vs. Negative Messages

The first component of sensitivity is obvious. Is the bottom line negative? Consider the meeting announcement below.

University Colleagues:

The Business Communication Roundtable will meet at noon on the first Friday of every month, beginning September 6. We’re especially interested in reaching out across the University and into our community.

Bring a business communication challenge and your lunch to Bidgood Room 15. Is your challenge writing a business plan? Creating web content? Planning an elevator pitch? Communicating performance feedback? Getting people to respond to your email? Or something else? Any topic related to communication in the workplace is appropriate. Everyone with a challenge is welcome whether you are a business person, faculty member, staff member, or student.The group will share resources — and laughs.

This document conveys the bottom line: “The Business Communication Roundtable will meet at noon . . .” That bottom line communicates not negative but neutral news to its readers. (Sidebar: We are going to attempt generalizable guidance; there are always idiosyncratic situations we can think up that violate our general principles.)  When the news is not negative, there is no excuse for delaying where/when the bottom line appears within the document. It should appear, as it does in the meeting announcement above, at the very beginning. That will satisfy the efficiency needs of Western readers.

Now consider the program announcement below.

TO: College Faculty and Staff
FROM: Senior Associate Dean
SUBJECT: Business Leadership Academy

The Business Leadership Academy has been run at a deficit since its inception.  Last year the loss was approximately $55,000, which was less than many previous years. To make this endeavor self sustaining would require a significant increase in fees to the attendees.  We were concerned that such a large increase in fees would reduce enrollment, resulting in even more deficits. [Administrative Finance Person] and I discussed this at length with [Faculty Leader Person] as well as alternatives to prevent further deficits.  We mutually agreed that none of these would preclude deficits.

I decided that, while this program has been a great success, it did not seem prudent in a financial sense to continue this program.

The program announcement conveys the bottom line: “it did not seem prudent . . . to continue this program.” That’s negative news. The emotional response to negative news involves a process of moving from shock/surprise to acceptance. And that means it might be advisable to delay. But we have to consider more components of sensitivity to make the best choice.

Reader vs. Writer Sensitivity in Negative Messages

The second component we need to recognize is the locus of sensitivity about the negative news. Is the message negatively affecting the reader? Consider the apology email below.

TO: Volunteer Editors
FROM: Director of Editorial Operations
SUBJECT: Journal Schedules

I am writing to you to give you an update on the status of our journal schedules for this year’s issues. Some of you may have already been contacted individually by your staff editor regarding our ability to meet scheduled mail dates this year. Our analysis of our performance to date is disappointing at 8% of all issues mailing either on or before their scheduled date through September. This is compared with our 20% target established for this year. The majority of these delays (approx. 64%) were internal to our Operations Center, while 27% of the delays resulted from receiving material late from the Volunteer Editors. The internal delays are a result of three major challenges we’ve faced this year.

[lengthy description of the three challenges is omitted to save space]

I would like to express my apology for the internal delays and to assure you of our commitment to resolve our performance issues.

In this email, the bottom line message is “I would like to express my apology . . .” Note that it is the writer — not the reader — who is most negatively affected by that message.  Apologizing can be uncomfortable to both the person offering and the person receiving the apology. But it is MOST uncomfortable for the person doing the apologizing.

So what about delaying the bottom line message?  There’s no excuse for decreasing efficiency by delaying just because you, as the writer, are uncomfortable with your message. That means the writer of the apology email should not have delayed.  Instead, that bottom line apology should have been stated in the first sentence or so.  (As well as signaled in the SUBJECT line.)

Compare that apology email to the program announcement from above. The bottom line message, “it did not seem prudent . . . to continue this program,” is negative primarily for the readers. While the writer may have been uncomfortable making the announcement, the readers who are hearing the news are most affected because someone discontinued a program they care about. The emotional response to negative news is a process of moving from shock/surprise to acceptance. Again, it might be advisable to give readers a chance to move toward acceptance by delaying in the program announcement. But we have to consider more components of sensitivity to make the best choice.

Personal & Rare vs. Impersonal & Common Negative Messages

The final components of sensitivity relate to how personal and how rare a bottom line message is. Basically, impersonal and common messages are more likely to be perceived as neutral. In contrast, personal and rare messages are more likely to be perceived as negative (or positive). Consider the rejection email below.

Hi, [Student’s First Name].

I enjoyed meeting you last week. You certainly demonstrated skills that will be relevant to my work with First Tee of Tuscaloosa. Your out-going personality and  interest in PR are valuable assets in doing this type of community outreach project.
 
Amazingly, another faculty scholar applicant has experience both identifying funding sources and writing grant proposals for non-profits. Because his experience is such a close match with my immediate needs, I have offered him the position.
 
I regret I cannot offer you a position as well. But the person I have hired will graduate next May so, if you’re still interested in a position for 2014-15, I hope we can talk again. I see a very bright future for you.
 
Wishing you great success,
Dr. Kim

The bottom line message is definitely a negative one: “I regret I cannot offer you a position . . .” While I, as the writer, was not happy to convey that message, the reader is more sensitive to it than I am.  Most important to this post, the bottom line of the rejection email is both personal and rare for the reader. That means its bottom line is highly negative, and the reader is likely to be highly sensitive to it. As a writer, I signaled my awareness of this level of reader sensitivity by delaying my bottom line message within the document. I judged that the reader’s sensitivity to my bottom line was greater than her desire for efficiency.

Once more, let’s consider the program announcement email. It is neither personal to nor rare for the readers to hear about a program change. (The document notes that the personally affected reader was involved in the decision.) That means its bottom line is somewhat but not highly negative. That level of reader sensitivity does not ordinarily warrant a delay.

When Should You Delay?

The visual below summarizes the guidance I’ve illustrated with examples above. You can predict that, of the examples provided above, only the rejection email is highly sensitive (like “You’re fired” in the visual). It’s the only example in which you should definitely delay stating the bottom line message.

Gauging Your Reader’s Sensitivity to Your Bottom Line

For the program announcement then, readers from Western cultures are likely to prefer efficiency.  You shouldn’t delay unless you know your reader well enough to know he or she expects greater sensitivity than the average Western reader. FWIW: There is some evidence that, as a group, Western women take longer to accept bad news than Western men. Most of the relevant research on sensitivity to messages takes place in health care settings.

Here’s the program announcement, with the bottom line message in boldface below to show its location near the beginning of the document.

TO: College Faculty and Staff
FROM: Senior Associate Dean
SUBJECT: Business Leadership Academy

The Business Leadership Academy has been run at a deficit since its inception.  Last year the loss was approximately $55,000, which was less than many previous years. I decided that, while this program has been a great success, it did not seem prudent in a financial sense to continue this program.

To make this endeavor self sustaining would require a significant increase in fees to the attendees.  We were concerned that such a large increase in fees would reduce enrollment, resulting in even more deficits. [Administrative Finance Person] and I discussed this at length with [Faculty Leader Person] as well as alternatives to prevent further deficits.  We mutually agreed that none of these would preclude deficits.

Placing an emphasis on efficiency in the documents you write for Western readers at work will pay big dividends. Don’t delay stating your bottom line in situations where it isn’t warranted.

Related Research

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3 guidelines for coaching novice workplace writers

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I’ve been thinking about the nuggets of wisdom I have to share with those who are new to teaching novices to write successfully in the workplace. I came up with 3 guidelines, which I shared with some new college instructors in a workshop last week.  I thought they were worth sharing on Pros Write as well.

Referring to these instructors as “coaches” is deliberate. Teaching and coaching are similar. But not identical.  Think about a golf pro.  She holds a teaching clinic where 10 or so students learn about chipping.  Her focus is on explaining a body of knowledge and offering general guidance.  She also offers one-on-one coaching lessons where her focus is on improving the chipping performance of the individual student. The new college instructors I spent time with last week will do some teaching. But their success will be measured by the quality of workplace-like documents produced by their individual students.  That means their role leans more heavily toward that of a coach.

Guideline #1: Make the consequences of performance quality explicit.

Each document a writer delivers within the workplace is a measure of his or her job performance. Take, for instance, the announcement I wrote about in Cut your email into 3 chunks for better digestion. (Follow the link to see the actual document I’ll be referring to throughout this post.)

Delivering that low quality announcement had consequences for three stakeholders as shown in the figure at right.

  1. For readers, the results of receiving the announcement fell into two categories. First, the majority paid little attention to the message because they thought it was irrelevant to them. Second, a few attended to the message but were confused and frustrated because they couldn’t figure out why they received it.
  2. For the organization in which the writer worked, the results included loss of money from the wasted staff time and resources used to create, print and deliver this document to several thousand employees. Because so many readers ignored the content of the message, the organization also failed to gain compliance with their requested actions. Yet another result was loss of credibility for the specific office in which the writer worked.
  3. For the individual writer, the result of delivering this announcement was negative attention from employees, including loss of credibility in future messages.

If a writing coach doesn’t get a novice to understand the kind of consequences prompted by low quality documents in the workplace, there’s little motivation for the novice to care about improving his or her own performance quality.  Plus there’s little understanding of the roles written communication plays at work.

Guideline #1 is primarily the result of my experience with traditional-aged business students in the U.S. Non-traditional college students, who have workplace experience, benefit when coaches follow this guideline, too. But it is critical for traditional students, who lack that experience.

Guideline #2: Teach principles that explain performance quality.

Part of being a good coach is helping a student understand what makes a performance good (or bad).  On the one hand, a writing coach can talk about perceptions.  A coach trying to help the writer of the poorly written announcement, might share thoughts like those shown at right.

While it’s helpful to know a reader thinks the details in the announcement are irrelevant, perceptions aren’t that useful to the writer because they’re not specific about what should be done differently to improve performance quality.

On the other hand, a writing coach can talk about specific wording (or organization or whatever) like the example shown at left.

Telling the writer specifically how to write a more effective announcement is terrific for fixing this document. Sadly, the coach’s editing doesn’t help the writer learn anything of value for future documents — unless the writer can intuit the unstated explanation behind why the coach’s version is better than the writer’s.

As a professional who makes my living as a writing coach, I have always felt obligated to provide an explicit explanation for performance quality. Those explanations are principles like the one shown at right.

A good workplace writing coach teaches novices about audience sensitivity, bottom lines, and directness in organizing content.  When combined, these concepts explain much about performance quality in the announcement and many other communication genres within Western business culture.

Specific examples are important in combination with principles. They are a means of showing how a principle applies in different documents or situations. Another means of teaching principles, my video tutorials include excerpts from workplace documents. I would also teach principles by asking students to read sample documents and come to class ready to discuss how a principle explains the quality (and consequences) of those documents.

It’s important to me that the principle behind effective bottom line placement is based on research. Not on tradition. Or personal preferences. That’s true of all of the principles included in 21 chapters of my co-authored workbook, Revising Professional Writing (RPW). I’m not interested in teaching “rules” that are not grounded in theory and data. (I like to actually use my Ph.D. in both teaching and research.)

If a writing coach doesn’t get a novice to understand all of the basic principles that explain the quality of documents in the workplace, there’s little chance the novice will avoid negative attention when delivering documents in his or her future workplace.

Guideline #3: Provide deliberate practice, with individual support and feedback.

As I tried to convey in 3 Lessons from Great Performers video, expertise requires a lot of practice. The 10,000-hour rule (i.e., the time-period required to attain expertise) has been confirmed by research in many domains: music, mathematics, tennis, swimming, and long-distance running. Innate talent does not significantly shorten the required time period. It took chess player Bobby Fisher 9 years to reach the status of Grandmaster.

A writing coach has to prepare a novice workplace writer for reality. It will take 250 hours of (3 months of 5-hour-per-day, 5-day-per-week) practice to move out of the beginner level and into the apprentice level of performance. That means most college students will still be beginning writers when they enter the workforce.

Performance quality is lower when you move into a different context. Experts have contextualized knowledge. Jack White might be an expert guitar player — in the alternative genre. But, if he decides to start performing classical guitar pieces, he won’t be an expert in that new activity even though it involves playing a guitar.

So a coach preparing students who are novices at writing in the workplace has to overcome the overconfidence of successful academic writers. This is hard on coaches and students.

It turns out that the quality of practice matters, too. Deliberate practice is required. It’s different from work or play that involves the same activity, as psychology researchers noted when reviewing studies in this area:

Let us briefly illustrate the differences between work and deliberate practice. During a 3-hr baseball game, a batter may get only 5-15 pitches (perhaps one or two relevant to a particular weakness), whereas during optimal practice of the same duration, a batter working with a dedicated pitcher has several hundred batting opportunities, where this weakness can be systematically explored.

In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance. In addition, engaging in deliberate practice generates no immediate monetary rewards and generates costs associated with access to teachers and training environments.

Deliberate practice is not fun.  Sad. But true. Just ask Michael Phelps about the time he spends lifting weights or running or swimming with paddles or listening to his coach tell him about the minute details of his kicking technique.

A writing coach has to plan and execute practice that helps a novice build up and maintain the writing tools and techniques that make successful future performance more likely. Exercises in RPW aren’t fun for many students. But they are deliberate practice with the principles that explain document quality in the workplace. Coaches assign them because there are some serious consequences to document quality at work.

A writing coach also implements guideline #3 when providing feedback on individual performances. If I was coaching the writer of the announcement, I’d provide something like the rubric shown below. The rubric reinforces the lessons learned through practice exercises. Or when implementing guideline #2 with tutorials or discussions. But it focuses on the specific strengths and weaknesses of the individual writer’s current performance.

View this document on Scribd

Final Words

Coaching novice workplace writers ain’t easy. But it sure is rewarding.  The reason I wrote Cut your email into 3 chunks for better digestion was that a former student was asked by his supervisors to share what he had learned that his colleagues at one of the Big Four audit firms had not.  That’s what I’d call positive attention at work.

If anyone is wondering, the vast majority of the novices who are the responsibility of these new instructors are traditional-aged, academically successful college students working toward an undergraduate degree in business at a large state university in the U.S. While my examples might be different for folks who are coaching a different group of students, the three guidelines would be the same.

Related Research

Follow links above to posts for research sources on bottom line placement, etc. The following research article is my primary source on deliberate practice and its role in developing expertise.

Ericsson et al. (1993). The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), pp. 363-406.

Cut your email into three chunks for better digestion

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Travis, a former student who now works as an IT consultant, asked for a summary of what we taught him about developing and organizing content in emails ’cause he wants to share it with his project leaders. (Seems they had asked him how he knew what the majority of new grads don’t.)  Although I’ve written here about email requests and different aspects of organizing content, I couldn’t find a single post to meet his needs.  So I whipped up this one.

Let me start by showing you an announcement I recently received at work. It was NOT easy to digest.

View this document on Scribd

This message was a blob I couldn’t begin to swallow. I mean I could read the words. It had well-formed sentences. It had three short paragraphs. But I had no clue what it meant. Because it was sent by a top administrator, I felt some obligation to figure it out. I actually read the entire message. And I talked to fellow employees. No one had a clue. Most had simply trashed the message without reading more than the first few words.

Note the problem isn’t one of brevity. The announcement was brief.

Here’s a revised version of the announcement I’ll use to describe the three chunks needed to help your readers digest an email easily.

View this document on Scribd

Chunk #1: State your bottom line message clearly as an obligatory appetizer.

The bottom line message in the revised version of the announcement is stated early. And twice.

  1. Subject line: Directions for Office of Internal Audit Requests for All University Employees
  2. First sentence: I want to clarify the role of the University’s Office of Internal Audit on our campus and direct all University employees to cooperate with their staff fully.

The first chunk of your email must establish your purpose in communicating with your readers. Stating it clearly requires that you can actually verbalize it before you hit the send button. The critical problem with the original announcement was that it did not explicitly state the bottom line message. There was a required chunk of information missing entirely!

Stating the bottom line in the first chunk of your email requires you to take responsibility for making the message easier for your readers to digest. Even if the writer had included a bottom line message at the end of the original announcement, it would have created indigestion. Believe it or not, there are few situations when a delay in stating your bottom line is warranted.  (See the video tutorial on placement of the bottom line for more help.)

Chunk #2: Provide details or other information supporting your bottom line as the main course.

The details in the revised announcement are nearly identical in content to the original. The details about cooperation for all employees appear in one paragraph. The details about cooperation for all managers appear in a separate paragraph. The content here is brief. But you can provide a load of detail in the second chunk of your email if you make it easy for readers to skim and scan. (See the video tutorial on format for help.) The more complex the second chunk is, the more important it is to provide a wrap-up, further analysis, justification, or something else to tie the details together.

In the revised announcement, I also altered the writer’s style from the original to make it more personal. I couldn’t stop myself.

  • Original bureaucratic tone: University personnel are expected to collaborate with the Office of Internal Audit during an audit review.
  • Revised personal tone: As a University employee, you are expected to collaborate with the Office of Internal Audit during an audit review.

That personal tone is more likely to succeed if you want readers to interpret what you have to say as directions. (See the video tutorial on tone for more on this topic.)

Chunk #3: Include a call to action for dessert.

Readers of the original announcement received nothing after their main course. Readers of the revised email received just a little something as the third chunk of the writer’s message.  Call it lagniappe. They were thanked. And they were told where to go if they had questions.

This chunk isn’t strictly necessary in a downward message like the announcement email (where the writer has more power relative to the readers). But it makes sense to create goodwill that may help you get readers to pay attention to what you say in the future. After all, the language you use with subordinates determines whether they will follow you.

The original announcement was not easily digested because it used three paragraphs, but not the three-chunk format. Thanks to Travis for requesting this summary guidance for writing emails. We’re delighted he’s not the cause of indigestion in his workplace . . . Oh, how we LOVE confirmation that we’re teaching the right stuff!

Research Support

If you’re interested in the research that backs up our guidance, you could start with the following.

Fielden, J.S. & Dulek, R.E. (1984). How to use bottom-line writing in corporate communications. Business Horizons, July-August, pp. 25-30.

Evans, S. (2012). Designing email tasks for the Business English classroom: Implications from a study of Hong Kong’s key industries. English for Specific Purposes, 31, pp. 202-212.

When should you delay stating your bottom line message?

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Rarely. That’s how often you should delay when writing to readers from Western cultures. Our attention span is short. We value efficiency. We want to know your bottom line first. Then we’ll decide whether to keep reading. (I’m assuming your goal is to communicate a point clearly to your audience.) But telling you it’s rarely a good idea to delay is not terribly helpful. Neither is saying only that you should delay when your audience is highly sensitive to your message. So I’ll try to provide better guidance in this post.

Sensitivity is the key to placement of the bottom line. But we need to think about sensitivity in some detail. It helps to tease apart several components of sensitivity. (If you’re not sure how to identify the bottom line in a written message, you may want to view The Video Tutorial on Bottom Line Placement before reading on. Or check out books on business writing from Ron Dulek and Jack Fielden.)

Positive vs. Negative Messages

The first component of sensitivity is obvious. Is the bottom line negative? Consider the meeting announcement below.

University Colleagues:

The Business Communication Roundtable will meet at noon on the first Friday of every month, beginning September 6. We’re especially interested in reaching out across the University and into our community.

Bring a business communication challenge and your lunch to Bidgood Room 15. Is your challenge writing a business plan? Creating web content? Planning an elevator pitch? Communicating performance feedback? Getting people to respond to your email? Or something else? Any topic related to communication in the workplace is appropriate. Everyone with a challenge is welcome whether you are a business person, faculty member, staff member, or student.The group will share resources — and laughs.

This document conveys the bottom line: “The Business Communication Roundtable will meet at noon . . .” That bottom line communicates not negative but neutral news to its readers. (Sidebar: We are going to attempt generalizable guidance; there are always idiosyncratic situations we can think up that violate our general principles.)  When the news is not negative, there is no excuse for delaying where/when the bottom line appears within the document. It should appear, as it does in the meeting announcement above, at the very beginning. That will satisfy the efficiency needs of Western readers.

Now consider the program announcement below.

TO: College Faculty and Staff
FROM: Senior Associate Dean
SUBJECT: Business Leadership Academy

The Business Leadership Academy has been run at a deficit since its inception.  Last year the loss was approximately $55,000, which was less than many previous years. To make this endeavor self sustaining would require a significant increase in fees to the attendees.  We were concerned that such a large increase in fees would reduce enrollment, resulting in even more deficits. [Administrative Finance Person] and I discussed this at length with [Faculty Leader Person] as well as alternatives to prevent further deficits.  We mutually agreed that none of these would preclude deficits.

I decided that, while this program has been a great success, it did not seem prudent in a financial sense to continue this program.

The program announcement conveys the bottom line: “it did not seem prudent . . . to continue this program.” That’s negative news. The emotional response to negative news involves a process of moving from shock/surprise to acceptance. And that means it might be advisable to delay. But we have to consider more components of sensitivity to make the best choice.

Reader vs. Writer Sensitivity in Negative Messages

The second component we need to recognize is the locus of sensitivity about the negative news. Is the message negatively affecting the reader? Consider the apology email below.

TO: Volunteer Editors
FROM: Director of Editorial Operations
SUBJECT: Journal Schedules

I am writing to you to give you an update on the status of our journal schedules for this year’s issues. Some of you may have already been contacted individually by your staff editor regarding our ability to meet scheduled mail dates this year. Our analysis of our performance to date is disappointing at 8% of all issues mailing either on or before their scheduled date through September. This is compared with our 20% target established for this year. The majority of these delays (approx. 64%) were internal to our Operations Center, while 27% of the delays resulted from receiving material late from the Volunteer Editors. The internal delays are a result of three major challenges we’ve faced this year.

[lengthy description of the three challenges is omitted to save space]

I would like to express my apology for the internal delays and to assure you of our commitment to resolve our performance issues.

In this email, the bottom line message is “I would like to express my apology . . .” Note that it is the writer — not the reader — who is most negatively affected by that message.  Apologizing can be uncomfortable to both the person offering and the person receiving the apology. But it is MOST uncomfortable for the person doing the apologizing.

So what about delaying the bottom line message?  There’s no excuse for decreasing efficiency by delaying just because you, as the writer, are uncomfortable with your message. That means the writer of the apology email should not have delayed.  Instead, that bottom line apology should have been stated in the first sentence or so.  (As well as signaled in the SUBJECT line.)

Compare that apology email to the program announcement from above. The bottom line message, “it did not seem prudent . . . to continue this program,” is negative primarily for the readers. While the writer may have been uncomfortable making the announcement, the readers who are hearing the news are most affected because someone discontinued a program they care about. The emotional response to negative news is a process of moving from shock/surprise to acceptance. Again, it might be advisable to give readers a chance to move toward acceptance by delaying in the program announcement. But we have to consider more components of sensitivity to make the best choice.

Personal & Rare vs. Impersonal & Common Negative Messages

The final components of sensitivity relate to how personal and how rare a bottom line message is. Basically, impersonal and common messages are more likely to be perceived as neutral. In contrast, personal and rare messages are more likely to be perceived as negative (or positive). Consider the rejection email below.

Hi, [Student’s First Name].

I enjoyed meeting you last week. You certainly demonstrated skills that will be relevant to my work with First Tee of Tuscaloosa. Your out-going personality and  interest in PR are valuable assets in doing this type of community outreach project.
Amazingly, another faculty scholar applicant has experience both identifying funding sources and writing grant proposals for non-profits. Because his experience is such a close match with my immediate needs, I have offered him the position.
I regret I cannot offer you a position as well. But the person I have hired will graduate next May so, if you’re still interested in a position for 2014-15, I hope we can talk again. I see a very bright future for you.
Wishing you great success,
Dr. Kim

The bottom line message is definitely a negative one: “I regret I cannot offer you a position . . .” While I, as the writer, was not happy to convey that message, the reader is more sensitive to it than I am.  Most important to this post, the bottom line of the rejection email is both personal and rare for the reader. That means its bottom line is highly negative, and the reader is likely to be highly sensitive to it. As a writer, I signaled my awareness of this level of reader sensitivity by delaying my bottom line message within the document. I judged that the reader’s sensitivity to my bottom line was greater than her desire for efficiency.

Once more, let’s consider the program announcement email. It is neither personal to nor rare for the readers to hear about a program change. (The document notes that the personally affected reader was involved in the decision.) That means its bottom line is somewhat but not highly negative. That level of reader sensitivity does not ordinarily warrant a delay.

When Should You Delay?

The visual below summarizes the guidance I’ve illustrated with examples above. You should delay stating your bottom line if it meets all the following criteria for sensitivity:

  • communicates negative news (like the program announcement and rejection but not the meeting announcement)
  • focuses that negativity primarily on the reader (like the program announcement and rejection but not the apology)
  • conveys negative news that is both personal to the reader and rare (like the rejection but not like the program announcement)

You can predict that, of the examples provided above, only the rejection email is highly sensitive (like sentence #5 in the visual). It’s the only example in which you should definitely delay stating the bottom line message.

For the program announcement then, readers from Western cultures are likely to prefer efficiency.  You shouldn’t delay unless you know your reader well enough to know he or she expects greater sensitivity than the average Western reader. FWIW: There is some evidence that, as a group, Western women take longer to accept bad news than Western men. Most of the relevant research on sensitivity to messages takes place in health care settings.

Here’s the program announcement, with the bottom line message highlighted below to show its location near the beginning of the document.

TO: College Faculty and Staff
FROM: Senior Associate Dean
SUBJECT: Business Leadership Academy

The Business Leadership Academy has been run at a deficit since its inception.  Last year the loss was approximately $55,000, which was less than many previous years. I decided that, while this program has been a great success, it did not seem prudent in a financial sense to continue this program.

To make this endeavor self sustaining would require a significant increase in fees to the attendees.  We were concerned that such a large increase in fees would reduce enrollment, resulting in even more deficits. [Administrative Finance Person] and I discussed this at length with [Faculty Leader Person] as well as alternatives to prevent further deficits.  We mutually agreed that none of these would preclude deficits.

Placing an emphasis on efficiency in the documents you write for Western readers at work will pay big dividends. Don’t delay stating your bottom line in situations where it isn’t warranted.

Related articles

Amateurs (and lawyers) beat around the bush

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Most of the world has heard that CNN and Fox News inaccurately reported the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Health Care Act last Thursday. Later that day, here’s how Ellen Killoran, a reporter for the International Business Times, explained their error:

The egregious error does not appear to be the result of the news outlets pulling the trigger on pre-prepared reports of possible rulings. It appears rather that journalists misapprehended Roberts’ preamble to the decision as indicative of the ruling itself . . . [emphasis added]

In light of these events, I decided to get to work updating my tutorial on bottom line placement.

Readers determine a document’s main point (what my colleagues Ron Dulek and Jack Fielden defined as the “bottom line”) by what they read first.  When readers are in a hurry, they may only read the beginnning of the document. Ergo readers extract the bottom line from the first few sentences. (More about the psychology of this in a later post.)  I can think of no lesson that is more important to the transition from amateur to pro writer.  Unless you work in the legal profession.

Writing for The Jurist, Tony Locy wrote,

Reporters still need to read the decisions, and read them carefully. That didn’t happen at CNN, Fox News and the re-tweeting news outlets on Thursday because their reporters failed to appreciate that arguments before the Supreme Court are nuanced, with multiple layers, and it is common for lawyers to provide the justices with several options in the Constitution to fall back on to justify ruling one way or another. In the health care case, the solicitor general gave the justices three possibilities. If reporters look for the Court’s response to only one of a party’s arguments, as CNN, Fox News and re-tweeters did, they increase their chances of being wrong.

Ms. Locy argues that US Supreme Court Justices should expect their audience to read carefully. I don’t buy her argument. But I won’t debate it here. I do, however, guarantee you will fail in your profession (even if you become an attorney) if you adopt the same expectation. When you beat around the bush, your readers will accuse you of being confused or lazy or weak or self-centered or deceitful. And they will avoid reading whatever you send them whenever possible.

To help amateurs avoid the negative consequences of beating around the bush, the upcoming tutorial refers to an Email Job Update. The document was created by me based on a student’s response to an assignment from a 1999 book titled, Scenarios for Technical Communication, by Stone & Kynell.

  • Writer: a project manager for a construction company
  • Readers: the company’s owner
  • Bottom line message: one project is over budget and behind schedule

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