Precept Lady

Precept Lady
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I have a chance to buy 96 precept lady balls for 15 bucks. Is this a good deal. They are for my wife.?

She is a beginning golfer. Will these balls suit her game as a 28 handicap?

Yup! Any ladies ball will help with her distance, the less compression the ball has the more it will fly especially in the colder months. The best compression would be about 70-80.

And by the way $15 for 96 balls is a great deal!

"Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph." ~Anonymous high school essay.

It's impossible to know whether that young man or woman will ever make a dime at the craft of writing, but you have to appreciate the precision, don't you? Pithy analogies clearly aren't his or her strength, but details matter a lot.

Those are the sorts of young minds I had the pleasure of working with recently at the Energy Department in Washington, D.C. As brand-new hires, six scientists and engineers spent two days with me on the basics of clear, concise writing. Not a one of them had had a writing class in college, but along the way they reinforced a valuable lesson when it comes to putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

First, we had to get over a looming obstacle - what to write about. Writing exercises are most productive and least daunting when the topic is familiar to participants. At settings like the Energy Department's Environmental Management Office, which supervised their communication skills training, that would mean writing about cleaning up radioactive waste sites.

The problem was that these recent college graduates knew virtually nothing about the specifics of the jobs that awaited them after leaving DC. All they had was a location, like Idaho Falls or Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or Cincinnati. So what, I asked myself, could I expect them to write about?

My concerns were short-lived. College had filled their heads with so much useful knowledge that all I had to do was prompt them to view me, the reader, as a lay person (a congressional aide, perhaps) who'd asked a question about a technical matter with far-ranging policy implications.

As they began to develop that idea, I told them to fill in with details, following the "show don't tell" precept that governs any worthwhile explanatory business writing: Don't tell me that the groundwater has been contaminated by radioactive waste. Show me with details about type of waste, measurements that depict degree of damage, cause of damage - all of which set the stage for what environmental clean-up types love to call "remediation."

Framed by a four-stage process - exploratory, draft(s), edit/revise and publish/send - the young professionals followed the three guidelines of successful business writing, whether a project report, a technical evaluation, a follow-up sales pitch or a brief e-mail:

• Writing is thinking. It should be viewed as an opportunity, a gift of time to show how smart you are.

• Know and respect your readers. Good writers use inclusive language, not pompous, jargon-laden language that excludes. They write to edify, not to impress.

• Edit/revise. The first two guidelines are meaningless if you don't check your work carefully. Sloppy or nonexistent editing can make you look foolish.

The result was a revelation to each of the students, who'd begun the first day telling each other that they found writing intimidating. Aided by one-on-one peer review, they came up with straightforward, concise, get-to-the-point-at-the-start writing that I, the lay person, understood.

A Peruvian-born lady who had so little faith in herself and her command of English did a bang-up job describing vitrification - turning nuclear waste into glass. A young engineer from Michigan wrote an unambiguous argument for an employee drug-testing program and described how a hypothetical small business dealing with potentially dangerous substances could put it in place. What lubricated the process for him was calling on details he'd picked up in a college class and putting himself in the place of the hypothetical reader - in this case a business owner who was skeptical about drug testing.

"The best style is the style you don't notice." That's how the novelist Somerset Maugham described writing that works. The world of business communications is no different. Effective writers get their points across concisely without calling attention to the way they write. The reader understands what is being conveyed - questions, answers to questions, a call to action, a persuasive point - in one reading.

Please visit my website at http://www.davegriffithscommunications.com, where you'll find that I've worked with a variety of government, nonprofit and private-sector clients on business communication skills -- from effective writing to presentation skills to media training.

I travel widely to do writing skills training and media and presentation skills training for clients ranging from the U.S. Coast Guard to the Red Cross to the Department of Homeland Security to the Veterans Administration to the National Nuclear Security Administration to Navy SEALs to senior executives at a variety of federal agencies to businesses that need help with technical writing and written sales proposals.

Many thanks for reading our Precept Lady article

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