The only business writing book you’ll ever need - Laura Brown, Rich Karlgaard 2019

Foreword

I fell in love with snappy writing in high school, and no thanks to my English literature classes. Credit goes to a birthday gift of a Sports Illustrated subscription. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, SI magazine had a stable of top sportswriters, among them Dan Jenkins (college football and golf), Anita Verschoth (Olympic sports), and Frank Deford, in my opinion the best profile writer of the last fifty years.

I always wondered why these writers, and others of my favorites, were able to do what they did. Why was Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff so gripping that the reader felt physically propelled like the astronauts? Why was dialogue so true in the novels of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, and John Sandford?

Later I had the privilege of working with Tom Wolfe. While the editor of a futurist magazine, Forbes ASAP, I assigned Wolfe a five-hundred-word piece on the 1990s Internet bubble. He agreed to write it, and then weeks later, on a Saturday, I happened to be standing by the office fax machine. (Remember those?) The fax started its hiss and screech, then spat out fifty-eight pages of triple-spaced copy evidently written on a typewriter. It was Wolfe’s draft, and it was nine thousand words long.

Why triple-spaced? I would soon find out.

During the next few weeks, Wolfe sent revisions to his triple-spaced draft. Some of his revisions were typewritten and looked to be Scotch-taped over the original text. Other revisions were handwritten and appeared as exclamation points and even, oddly, musical notes.

What I learned through the Tom Wolfe project was that Wolfe was a very good first-draft writer. No surprise there. But he became Tom Wolfe as we knew him, with his singular and unparalleled prose style, only through revision. And the revision was about craft. Tom Wolfe, great American prose stylist, was a master craftsman.

The craft of writing is wildly underappreciated. Many people mistakenly think great writing is a product of talent, but I’d say it’s one-third talent, two-thirds craft. The three jobs of any writer are to be read, understood, and remembered. Smart craft alone is enough to accomplish the first two. Whether you’ll be remembered is a matter of your talent, passion, and point of view. But if your craft is poor and you write gummed-up sentences and incoherent paragraphs, no one but your cat will care about your passion and POV.

To anyone who wants to be readable, understandable, and memorable in their writing I recommend a few classics, such as Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and George Orwell’s Why I Write. These will disabuse you of the temptation to ever be dull, obtuse, wishy-washy, or clichéd again. Another useful exercise is to retype favorite passages from your favorite writers. That and just write—a lot. Bank those ten thousand hours. Such practice will earn you a bachelor’s degree in the craft of writing.

But you can’t stop there, because now it’s time to get your MBA in prose. For that I enthusiastically recommend Laura Brown’s The Only Business Writing Book You’ll Ever Need. Lord, does the world need Laura’s book! If you think the need for clear, crisp writing is outdated, you’re not paying attention. The richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, begins his staff meetings with everyone silently reading the Bezos-assigned memo of the day. Would you like to be the writer of that memo? You think you might be under a wee bit of pressure to make yourself clear, credible, and persuasive? Ya think?

As Laura perceptively notes, all business writing is an “ask” of some kind. Your ask is a meeting, a sale, money to hire someone, or legal help to justify a sacking. All business writing, whether text, e-mail, or memo, is an ask. Your success in business is predicated upon getting people to say yes to your asks. Business writing, you see, is high-stakes writing.

Go ahead. Be muddled, obtuse, and clichéd in your business writing if you want. I can almost guarantee you won’t get anywhere useful. Learn to write right, and start with this book.

Rich Karlgaard

Publisher and futurist, Forbes Media

Author, Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement