Communication lies at the heart of any business. In fact I would even go so far as to say that without communication there can be no business. There is a simple thing that can be done to improve any businesses communications and yet few businesses ever pay any attention to it. This simple thing is to never assume anyone knows anything.
As a draughtsman I quickly had to learn that you must assume the person who was looking at your drawing knew nothing. This did not mean believing they were stupid (something business people often wrongly assume about those who read their communications) but that they just knew nothing about what I was trying to get across. Believe me if it is possible to misunderstand something then people will. If it is true that experts are people who have made lots of mistakes then I am a super expert.
You must never write as though you were having a conversation. When you have a conversation it usually means that part of the message is assumed. When so much of communication is usually down to visual clues in a conversation when those visual clues are not available communication becomes much harder.
I’ve often read in books about writing that you should think of yourself having a conversation. This is rubbish. You should be conversational (e.g. write using the kind of words you might use if you were having a conversation) but not as though you were having a conversation. Writing is a tool of communication; it is not simply a way of conveying a conversation. Writing is far more complex than this.
A little while ago I was involved in a project where we had to redevelop part of a web site. I had assumed from the beginning that we were working on one part of the site (the part I thought needed the most work) but the person employing me thought it was another part of the site. We were both very clear in our minds about which part this was and so never bothered to clear this up. To compound the problem both parts were tending to be referred to by the same name. This meant that our conversations became very annoying for both of us. I was frustrated that they couldn’t understand what I was talking about and they were frustrated that I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. This continued for about two weeks. It was only because I said something that immediately made the other person see we were talking about different things that suddenly we started making sense to each other. This is not an uncommon problem in business.
The real trick is to write in such a way that you communicate your message without overdoing the detail. There is nothing more annoying than having to read a simple message with a lot of other words in the way. This is a problem about 90% of web site suffer with.
So use few words but don’t assume that the other person knows what you are talking about.