Barely half a week after returning from Viable Paradise (a creative writing course), I’m taking "The Essentials of Business Writing" for my day job. Interestingly enough, one of the first things I’m taught is how to "ignore" the previous week’s worth of learning. To quote my training manual "Replace wordy prepositional phrases with adverbs whenever possible." To deliberately mis-quote Doyle & Teresa, "Adverbs be EVIL."
Quite a contradiction.
On the other hand, there are gems that apply equally to both creative and business writing. Things such as be concise (meaning don’t use big words just because you can) and avoid sentence fillers such as "there" and "it". The two biggest gems relate to Active verses Passive voice and sentence / paragraph comprehension.
In business writing, Passive voice is only appropriate when the actor is unknown or unimportant, the writer is deliberately hiding responsibility or the author is giving more emphasis to the receiver of action instead of the doer. This rule gives me ideas (bwahahahaha).
Apparently studies have been done about how readers comprehend the material they’ve read. For instance, Active voice is comprehended more quickly and completely than Passive voice. Sentences of 8 words long or shorter have a 100% comprehension rate, 15 word sentences have 90% comprehension and 28 word sentences have a 50% comprehension rate. There are levels in between 15-28 words, but that’s getting too detailed. Also, paragraphs are easier to comprehend if they only cover one major idea and have a variety of sentence lengths and structures.
I could actually see these rules being applied to creative writing. I’m not through with the course yet, so I haven’t mined it of all its gems. Yet, I think this could definitely prove useful in all my writing.
So long as I can keep the business-only elements separated from the creative-only elements. After all, no one wants to read a novel that’s been written by a formal business letter, do they?
Oh. Now there’s an idea… Dare I try it?
