Building a relationship with your readers

Writing is often described as building a bridge between you and your readers.

In The Craft of Argument, Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb state that we develop an argument by understanding our relationship with our readers. Business writing is often based on providing answers to conceptual or pragmatic problems.

With conceptual problems, our role as writers is to help our readers understand something better; with pragmatic problems, we aim to solve the problem by asking our readers to do something or support our recommended action.

Both kinds of writing have the same structure: problem + destabilising condition + cost/consequence.

For pragmatic problems, the destabilising condition can be anything that has a cost and for conceptual problems, the destabilising condition is always a gap in knowledge or a lack of understanding.

You can develop your argument for both kinds of problems by asking yourself five types of questions:

• What's your point?
• Why should the reader agree? (reasons)
• What evidence do you have?
• What's your logic? (what assumptions have you made?)
• But have you considered . . . ?

So next time you're having difficulty structuring your writing, think about your relationship with your reader and it may help you ask and answer the right questions.

Source: Williams, Joseph M., Colomb, Gregory G., The Craft of Argument, Longman, New York, 2003.

Labels: business writing, craft of argument

posted by Unknown @ 7:05 PM