Why Writing Matters - A Lesson from JFK

A recent CNBC article points to growing employer concern about the shortage of proficient writers in the workplace. I won’t explore all the reasons why writing skill is so rare, but I can offer a few thoughts about why it matters to business. 

As a communications and marketing firm, our strength is the ability to convey clear, compelling messages to a specific audience. The challenge often lies in distilling complex technical or abstract information into readily understood language that supports a larger theme or message. The leap between abstraction and defined message, or the bridge between complexity and synthesis, requires writers to do one simple yet incredibly difficult task: to think. 

If brevity is the soul of wit, then verbosity is the tortured soul of the clouded mind.

Writing matters because it is the physical manifestation of thinking. I preach language maxims to my kids: The way you speak affects the way people treat you and Writing is a discipline. These ideas are linked. A person can influence the way he is treated by others simply by mastering language. It’s a powerful concept.

Writing is a discipline—it requires practice, revision, rewriting and patience. It requires planning, integrated thinking and broad conceptualization. Clear writing requires logical thinking, and the best writers think through the flow of information—especially a persuasive case—before the first word is written. Confident writers self-edit their own work, reviewing it objectively and cutting for efficiency. In other words, good writing requires all the same skills you would want in a good manager or executive.

These are the creators, the problem solvers, and the innovators. 

But the reverse is also true.  Disciplined writing develops disciplined thinking. Like matter and energy, they are the same, only that one is ephemeral and the other tangible. Practice in one will necessarily improve the other.

Write often – it will exercise your mind. Refine your writing – it will correct your thinking. Condense your writing – it will give you clarity.

Writing matters because a clear vision unifies an audience. The discipline of writing is also the ability to understand the purpose of the writing project—to make a girl swoon, to convince a college admissions officer, or to persuade the IRS you need an extension, for example—and then to craft the arguments in a way that delights and compels the reader. 

A year ago I heard a speaker in Huntsville, a science and technology town, make the case for Math and Science education by stating “It wasn’t a liberal arts major who designed the Apollo 13 rocket that got us to the moon.” Fair enough. But it wasn’t a systems engineer that sold the vision “…before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” to congress and the American public. That took good writing. 

A clear, well-crafted message crystalizes a vision that compels our audience. President Kennedy, a brilliant communicator whose persuasive speeches are a great study in strategic communications, did not sell the vision of a man on the moon in scientific terms or with a business case. Kennedy presented the space race as essential to the cause of freedom in the context of the Cold War and creeping global communism in 1961. 

President Kennedy addresses a special session of congress to deliver an Urgent Needs Statement in May, 1961. Kennedy was inaugurated just 5 months earlier, and had already endured the Bay of Pigs humiliation, inherited as a ready plan from Eisenhower. Image credit: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

“If we are to win the battle for men’s minds…” is how he began his space pitch. It’s not the advance of science he’s selling, but a war for the imagination and dreams of all mankind. The leap between the “battle for men’s minds” and “landing a man on the moon” is an incredible string of logical positions that had to be carefully presented and individually sold to his audience. 

Read the text of the speech here.

Math and Science are critical disciplines, but to sway an audience requires more – you must be able to answer the question, “Why?”

Writing matters because so few people can do it well. As recent college graduates know, diplomas are not the discriminator they once were. The market is flooded. Get-Masters-Quick programs are increasingly popular.  Employers want experience.

Consider the possibility that “experience” is actually a code word for something else: true education. In other words, the push for experience may be the natural reaction to the devaluation of college diplomas, as record numbers of graduates squeeze through the puppy mill of academia each year.

The real problem is that a diploma is no longer a guarantee of a graduate’s critical writing and thinking skills (they are the same, remember). In fact, I will go out on a limb and propose that in some respects the college model for undergrads is anathema to good writing.

Before you cry heresy, understand that I engage with the product of university sausage making every day in our work. Aside from English courses, which many students side-step using Advance Placement or equivalent exams, style and presentation account for a fraction of assignment grades compared with content – defined loosely as the amount of technical information and lecture note regurgitation that can be stuffed into a paper before it finally exceeds the minimum length requirement. On many assignments, the ignominious length requirement is a binary criteria; more than 1,500 words = pass, less = fail. This is an odd lesson to teach students.

Outside of the university, where do we find a requirement for minimum length? In real life—the boogey man for .edu careerists—the opposite mandate applies. Maximum word limits and page count apply every day. From grant applications to pleading letters to congress, brevity matters. Twitter, with its max allowance of 140 characters, may actually be a better teacher than undergrad literature courses in terms of instilling good writing and thinking habits. 

Tight, audience-focused writing stands out on the page and signals an ordered intelligence behind the letters. After all, the principal distinction between a romantic love letter and the disturbed ravings of a stalker lies in the extra four thousand words, weaving in and out of topic, the stalker uses to communicate his infatuation with the particular strawberry scent of your hair. 

The point is this: writing well is a discriminator for anyone looking for new employment, promotion, recognition or contract award. Companies want people that write well, because those same traits save time and money on the job. Strong writing tips the balance of power in life, because stronger thinkers get their way through effective persuasion. Writing skills are in demand in every industry, in every market, and in every country in the global economy.  It’s the essential skill one must master in order to win the battle for men’s minds.

Daniel Price is the CEO of The Red Team, a communications and marketing company based in Huntsville, AL.