Ah, May was busy! Several trips, revising my textbook, and planting my organic garden filled the month until I realized that I wouldn't have time to write to you. I hope you enjoy my June newsletter.

Good writing doesn't happen by accident, but good writing does happen. Employees want to communicate well but may lack skills or experience. In addition, their managers may not know how to model good communication. (I hope that most managers are not as dysfunctional as one whom I just encountered: His employees told me that he required them to change everything in their drafts, and then on second review, he made them change it all back to the original text.)  

We will assume that managers want to encourage employees to write better. One major strategy that will help employees is to nurture a writing process and recognize that good writing requires several steps. Tell employees that it takes more time to follow this process than to dash off a draft, but the process will result in clearer, better quality documents with less rework.

A second way to help your employees is to set objective standards (specifications) for good writing and provide examples. Give as much guidance as possible and spell out your expectations explicitly before your writers start prewriting. If you have templates, samples, or examples, share them. Most writers will look for examples or patterns to copy on their own, so you might as well define what you think is good writing.

A final tip is to adopt style conventions. A published style guide like The Gregg Reference Manual will save arguing over individual style choices. For example, battles rage over the serial comma (the use of the comma in a series in business and technical writing). All style guides except the Associated Press require the serial comma for a series like this: red, white, and blue. Because style guides can be a logical benchmark of best practices in writing and grammar, provide at least one copy of your chosen style guide per department. As a result, you will get more compliance when your writers understand where rules come from.

These strategies and others will improve the writing of those you manage and save you time and stress. Likewise, you'll become a better writer and can therefore lead by example.