Lesson 6: Revising Audience-Centered Business Messages

Overview

The main point of this lesson is that making an effort to revise and refine your messages helps your audience understand what you mean, exactly in the way you mean it. As you read and study this chapter, think about the ways the readability of your message is affected by word choice, design decisions, and accuracy of mechanics. When you finish reading, analyze the weaknesses in your own writing style and develop an approach to revising your written messages.

Objectives

After reading and studying Chapter 6 you will be able to:

1. discuss the steps involved in editing a message.

2. list five ways to make messages more concise.

3. list nine ways to improve your writing style.

4. identify seven issues to keep in mind when critiquing someone else’s writing style.

5. discuss how technology can be used to compose, revise, and design messages.

6. describe five design elements and explain how they can change the appearance and overall effectiveness of a message.

Editing is an ongoing activity that occurs throughout the composition process. It involves evaluating the message’s content and organization, reviewing its style and readability, and rewriting the message to make it clear and concise.

To make messages more concise, you should eliminate unnecessary words and phrases, use short words and infinitives, eliminate redundancies, replace indefinite pronoun starters, and eliminate awkward pointers.

To improve your writing style you should break up strung-out sentences, avoid hedging sentences, use parallel construction, correct dangling modifiers, avoid long sequences of nouns, avoid camouflaged verbs, keep words together that work together, moderate your enthusiasm and practice.

When critiquing some else’s writing style, you should first make sure that the document accomplishes its intended purpose, verify that the factual material is correct, and point out all ambiguous language so that it can be eliminated. Then ask yourself whether the document can truly be improved, whether the time needed to rewrite it can be justified and whether asking for a rewrite could have negative impact on morale. Finally, make sure your comments are constructive and professional.

Technology can assist you with entering and revising text, storing documents and text for future use, and finding error. In addition, you can use technology to jazz up your documents by adding graphics, sound, hypertext as well as to design and format your documents’ style. Finally, you can use technology to distribute your messages to any number of people all over the world and in a variety of formats.

White space provides contrast and gives readers a resting point. Margins define the space around the text and contribute to the amount of white space. Headings and captions invite readers to become involved in the message. Typefaces influence the tone of the message, and type styles provide contrast or emphasis.

Assignment

Read and study Chapter 6 paying particular attention to Sharpening Your Skills on page 178 and Keeping Pace with Technology on page 180. Complete the self-study quiz to determine if you understand the concepts presented. To reinforce the concepts learned answer the Critical Thinking Questions on page 190, email your responses to your instructor.