Could stone age people teach us a thing or two?

Business communication in the age of Twitter is increasingly an art form driven by the need to get your message across as quickly as possible, with minimal complication or distraction. That means fewer words, more carefully crafted. It also means images should do a lot more heavy lifting in your communication mix: something stone age people knew all along. 

We’re all trained to varying degrees at writing. It’s one of the first things we are taught. First the alphabet, then words, then sentences and on it goes. In business, professional writing skills are essential – whether for general communication or preparing proposals or submissions. We’re familiar with our language, so we tend to use a lot of it in describing proposals or ideas or how our business operates and what it can offer.

What we’re generally not taught from an early age is the art of drawing. We start in kindergarten with some rudimentary stick-figures of our family, but few of us ever develop our drawing skills anywhere near the extent we develop our language skills, nor are we encouraged to through our schooling or career. Most adults go through life with the drawing skills of a kindergarten child.

This balance of skills is becoming more and more ill-suited to modern communication practice. In a time-poor, highly competitive environment, we have less time to get our point across or to demonstrate understanding of a topic. Mark Twain once said words to the effect “I went to write you a short letter but didn’t have time, so I wrote you a long one instead.” It’s a trap we all fall into: without a lot of time, we write large volumes or words of a rambling narrative, using arcane trade terms or acronyms known to ourselves but not shared by our audience.

Rarely do we devote a lot of time preparing visual illustrations as part of what we’re trying to communicate. But why not? There are now so many illustrative software packages that – even if the best we can actually draw by hand is a stick figure – there are many other ways to improve the performance of your communication effort:

• Statistics and figures are always best explained by charts. Add a small explanation and you’ve achieved what 1000 words couldn’t.
• Flow charts are good for explaining processes – but don’t get too carried away with the confusing array of shapes and their meaning. 
• Bullet points – numbered or otherwise – are a good way to focus your mind (and that of your reader) on the key salient points you’re trying to make. There’s every chance they’ll look at the bullet points before reading a long narrative. 
• Past successes are best explained with a picture if possible, accompanied by a caption. If your past success is difficult to imagine visually, think of using an image of the company logo of the business you helped, or some other visual clue.
• Testimonials are wonderful things, and even better with a photo of the person who’s prepared to support you. 
• Explore all the options for turning sections of narrative into images, be it in brochures, websites, submissions or proposals. Keep a file of things you’ve seen in business magazines or elsewhere to fire your imagination. 

I’m not suggesting you ditch language altogether, but it’s getting more important to keep the words to a minimum and to use images to support getting your message across quickly. Think of our stone age person. Their description of a cow pretty much said it all. How many words would you need to do the same thing?

(By way of example, I tried to apply these principles to my own website. See what you think).