Writer at work.

Note: This post is the first in a series of excerpts from a style guide I wrote in 2021 when I was the CISO and General Manager of QOMPLX, a visionary but now-defunct security services vendor. Its internal title was “Writing for Impact: Ridding Yourself of Habits that Cause Your Written Communications with Clients and Colleagues to Suck.” The primary targets for the guide were consultants on our professional services team. I am publishing it here as a service to the cybersecurity community, which has been so generous to me over the years.

This guide describes how to “write for impact” across a range of deliverables we produce, including a typical assessment style document and a “Red Flags” review. It includes a thorough discussion of the structure of these formats, and how to write them effectively.

As Paul Roberts likes to say, writing is a muscle. You must exercise it regularly to keep it strong. Effective writing is one of the best ways for you to increase your ability to communicate persuasively. This, in turn, increases your credibility and enhances your personal reputation. But when we don’t practice writing, our muscles become flabby, and we find ourselves slipping into comfortable but unhealthy habits: larding prose with weasel words, bulking up sentences with unnecessary language that distorts what we mean, and—perhaps worst of all—lapsing into passive sentences that obscure accountability.

Bad writing is everywhere. Few business professionals know how to write effective prose. Most have never been trained to do so. People in technical fields, in particular, suffer from the peculiar notion that abstract, non-specific, passive writing makes their words come off as “objective” or “factual.” Too often, it comes off as “boring” and “lazy.”

Bad writing bores our clients. The worst writing is mushy, jargon-filled crap that nobody wants to read. By contrast, high-impact writing hits readers straight between the eyes. At QOMPLX, we want to write prose that conveys risk— directly, succinctly and powerfully.

Are you offended yet? Good.

Writers are not born—they are made. One of the best lessons your correspondent learned at a tender age was to have his prose ruthlessly dismantled and rebuilt by a succession of English teachers and professional mentors. He learned that five-dollar words, acronyms, and passive voice didn’t make him look smart; they made him look confused. He learned that long sentences that wind on and on… and on… didn’t help readers understand what he was trying so very hard to say. And he learned that by not having a mental model for good writing, his prose was formless and aimless. In short, his writing sucked.

Good writers want to improve their effectiveness. Your correspondent started paying attention to what he liked to read, and what those authors liked, too. He realized he liked publications such as The Economist, famous for its “house style,” written with verve and in a consistent editorial voice. And he was influenced by authors such as Josh Bernoff, a former colleague and noted analyst at Forrester Research, who wrote the aptly titled “Writing Without Bullshit”; by Bryan Garner, who has taught an entire generation of lawyers to write clearly without needless legalese; and by Ben Dreyer, who wrote “Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.” Everyone can benefit from these resources. All three recommend that prospective authors write:

  • Direct, simple prose that keeps sentences short and meanings clear, and which avoids long constructions separated by too many “ands” and “buts.”
  • Unvarnished language free from qualifiers such as “maybe,” “could,” “might,” “could very well be,” and so on.
  • Actively voiced sentences that convey who is doing something, rather than passively-voiced ones that hide them.

QOMPLX’s “house style” embodies these three qualities.

In the next post in this series, I discuss how to write a high-impact Executive Summary—arguably the acid test for any consultant worth his or her salt.