Chapter 6

1. Chapter 6 Completing Business Messages

2. Evaluating Your Content, Organization, Style, and Tone • To evaluate your message, ask yourself these questions: • Is the information accurate? • Is the information relevant to your audience? • Is there enough information to satisfy your readers needs? • Is there a good balance between the general and the specific?

3. Reviewing for Readability • Once you are satisfied with the content, you should look at its readability. • Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score computes reading difficulty relative to grade-level achievement. • A score of 10 suggests that a document can be read and understood by the average 10th grader. • Technical documents often score a 12-14. • The Flesch Reading Ease score ranks documents on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to read.

4. Reviewing for Readability • Vary your sentence length. • Try to create a rhythm that emphasizes important points. • Effective messages use a sentence structure that use a mixture of short (up to 15 words) and medium (15-25 words), and long (more than 25 words). • Too many short sentences can sound choppy, too many medium lack punch, too many long sentences are difficult to read.

5. Reviewing for Readability • Keep paragraphs short: large blocks for text can be visually daunting. • Short paragraphs are typically 100 words or fewer. • Use lists and bullets to Clarify/emphasize. • Add heading and subheadings. • Organization – headings show the reader at a glance how the document is organized. • Attention – Headings grad the reader’s attention • Connection – headings helps the reader see relationships between main ideas.

6. Producing Your Message • Add graphics if it adds to the clarity of your message. • Have enough white space (any space free of text) to provide visual contrast. (be generous) • Margins/Justification: • Justification makes your message look more formal. • Ragged edges “lightens” your message. • Make sure margins provide for white space.

7. Producing Your Message • Typefaces or font refers to the physical design of letters, numbers, and other text characters. • Typeface influences the tone of your message. • Serif typefaces have small crosslines at the ends of each letter stroke (times new roman) and can look busy or cluttered (need lots of white space)/ • Sans serif typefaces have no serifs. (Arial) They are ideal for display treatments. Sans serifs can be difficult to read in long blocks.

8. Producing Your Message • Type Styles refers to any modification that lends contrast or emphasis to type, including bold-face, italic, underlining, and other highlighting. • Using boldface isolated words in the subheadings breaks up long expenses of text. • Generally, avoid using any style in a way that slows your audience’s progress through the message.