I often think that business writing is really a form of translation. We translate one impenetrable form of English into a different, more understandable and more engaging form. There are many examples of this kind of translation in 26 ways of looking at a blackberry.
As with any language, you get better at it as you practise more. It’s a matter of craft. I’m just reading a book by Richard Sennett called The craftsman. He argues that we are in danger of losing craft skills, and that the way we have always learnt crafts – by practice, trial, error, learning from mistakes – is being lost. An architect, for example, can now produce computer-aided designs to give you, on a screen, a real sense of a designed space. But what is lost is the process of really understanding that space by going through the development of designs that comes with repeating and revising drawings. The architect lives in the space less, the machine does the living and learning instead. And, perhaps, you end up with unlivable spaces.
The same danger faces us as writers. We need to keep developing our craft, to avoid sinking back into easy, time-saving ways of working. For myself, I always write first drafts (and often second ones) in pencil on paper. It puts you more in touch with your thinking.
