Blog

How Can Project Managers Improve their Writing Skills?

A project manager needs to maintain constant communication with the team members, management, and the clients. Obviously, this requires a lot of writing. Project managers have to write reports, memos, emails, and even tweets to communicate with different people.

While writing is one of the most practiced skills, it is also generally the most neglected. What people think of appropriate writing is often ineffective way to communicate with others. So, what writing creates an effective communication?

To find out the answer, you should read the five principles of effective writing that are mentioned in this article.

1. Strive for Simplicity

Using complex, pretentious and highfalutin words will achieve nothing but alienate the readers. While using complex language may be appropriate for academic literature, it is not effective in professional communication.

As a project manager, you should aim for simplicity and use words that most people will understand. With simplicity and clarity of language, your instructions will remain clear. It will ensure that your message doesn’t get lost in translation.

2. Quickly Get to the Main Point

Another important writing skill for project managers is to begin the message with the main point. Most of us are taught to write a few sentences to warm up the reader, and introduce the main point later.

However, this approach is not effective in business communication.

Remember that when writing a project report, you don’t have to impress your English language instructor. You should avoid writing long memos and emails and quickly get to the main point. Consider using the first sentence to summarize the message. This will simplify the writing and avoid any confusion.

3. Avoid Negative Words

When crafting memos, emails, or reports, you should avoid using negative words. You need to be assertive, definitive and direct instead of non-committal. This can be achieved by using positive language. For instance, for instance, you should write ‘delay’ instead of ‘didn’t complete on time’; ‘forgot’ instead of ‘didn’t remember’ and ‘over budget ‘ instead of ‘didn’t remain within the budget’.

4. Use Active Voice

The cardinal rule of effective writing is using active voice as much as possible. Using active voice will make you seem confident and determined. On the other hand, passive voice shows indecision or confusion. So, instead of writing ‘the meeting was commenced by Steve’ (passive), you should write ‘Steve commenced the meeting’ (active).

5. Don’t Use Buzzwords

Lastly, you should avoid using buzzwords as much as possible. In fact, you should consider banning the buzzwords in your writing. The reason is that they only create confusion without painting a clear picture for the readers.

Buzzwords such as empower, visionary, innovative, cost effective, and disruptive are a sign of lazy writing. They will only bore or confuse the readers. You should read the ‘bizspeak blacklist’ mentioned in the Harvard Business Review article to find out buzzwords that you should avoid using in business language.

Following the above five tips can help you easily communicate your message to different readers. It will not only help in communicating but also result in effective task management. You will be able to more effectively communicate your message across to the project team that will avoid confusions, which will have a positive bearing on the project outcome.