"The Craft of Effective Letter Writing"

Today's book is “The Craft of Effective Letter Writing” by Gordon Wells. Although I assumed a book from 1989 would be a bit dated, writing advice is to some extent timeless. Advice from the 18^th century, for example, might be hopelessly out of date, but even some Mark Twain quotations over a century old give some helpful tips.

The Planning Stage

The word budget is one new concept this book introduced. It means that if you have a required length, you should allocate a certain number of words to each topic so that you don't say too much about one or too little about another. I think this will be particularly useful in sales letters. As I discussed in another review, long copy does work, so word budgets will help organize thoughts when you need to present a lot of information.

This book also reminded me of the broad range of factors that define the audience. Obviously, you need to understand your audience as best you can. But there are more factors that affect your writing than you might think, including native language, identity (do they define themselves as individuals or part of an organization?), whether they have the authority to respond to your call to action, and so on.

Writing Style

The Twain quotation mentioned above is:

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English. It is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it.”

I found that most books said little about style, but rather focused on what is grammatically correct. Proper use of punctuation, abbreviations, commas, and so on. Also helpful and unique to this book was the advice to avoid pauses for thought, tautologies, and exaggeration. Thanks to other books' advice about unnecessary words, I generally avoid these errors, but it's good to be aware of other classes of mistakes.

Specialized Letters

I already knew that business letters are quite different from normal letters. For example, you can use things like exclamation points and underlining that you would never use in other writing. But this section also reminded me that the letters also have to be attractive, and how to do that. If your printer is running out of ink, stop printing, get rid of those letters, and get more ink. Choose a good font. Use a letterhead. Other books, like “Writing Copy For Dummies,” mention presentation options but don't go into much detail. This is a very important and often-overlooked factor: it's hard enough to get your letter opened, much less read. Don't hurt yourself with ugly packaging.

Reports

This is another area the other books didn't cover in depth. The main differences between reports and other letters lie in organization and presentation. You need an in-depth table of contents with numbered paragraphs and also plenty of white space to make it easier to read. As this is another task listed in “Secrets of a Freelance Writer,” but seldom discussed in writing books, I was pleasantly surprised to find it covered in this book. Word budgets will also be useful here. Reports are even more regimented than other copywriting tasks, and it's easy to unbalance the report when dealing with so many smaller, separate topics.

You can find useful advice no matter how old the book is. Don't pick up “The Craft of Effective Letter Writing” for up-to-date tips about using the internet, but it can still teach you about writing in simple English, effective business letter formulas, and using headings effectively.