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STOP WASTING TIME: GET ORGANIZED!

by Gary Blake
Director
The Communication Workshop

(In this article, we’ll discuss a few tips on organizing various types of messages and then use several insurance letters to illustrate a 5-step informative sequence: Executive Summary, Background, Findings, Conclusions, and Recommendations.)

As I travel throughout the United States presenting on-site business writing seminars at insurance companies, I am often amazed that only about 3 documents in 10 actually tell the reader the main point of the message in the first paragraph.

So what? More than $1 billion dollars in productivity and profitability is lost in insurance each year because of poor writing skills, some of that waste is attributable to not knowing how to organize information for the reader:

• An adjuster, examiner, customer service, or loss control professional may sit at a PC for a half hour trying to “figure out” how to begin a letter. Waste.
• An insured starts reading a disorganized letter, gets confused, calls, the file is pulled, there’s “telephone tag” for a few days--all because the writer never got to the point and the reader never knew what he or she was supposed to do. More waste.
• Even if your company relies on form letters, how many of those letters are organized, well-phrased, easy-to-understand, and concise? When an insurance professional finds the courage -- or simply is forced to -- depart from following a form letter, has that person ever had a day’s worth of training in organizing, phrasing, and editing letters?

It may not show upon a ledger book, but disorganized writing represents lost time (i.e., money), time you could be spending better at work (or at play ... or with the kids ... or on the golf course)!

How you organize your denial letters, reservation of rights letters, letters to opposing attorneys, letters to physicians, and letters to the insured determines, to a large extent, whether you effectively communicate your main points to your readers. People want to get to your main message without wading through lots of extraneous material, and they like to know where they can find information they’re expecting, whether it’s figures, a list of issues, or your opinions. If your readers believe the information is important to them, they may read your report even if it’s poorly written. If it’s poorly organized, they won’t.

That’s why warm-up paragraphs can usually be deleted (or at least moved from the beginning of a memo, report, or letter). Frequently, the warm-up paragraph presents background material that, while relevant, does not contain the main news or item of interest and therefore is unessential.

Background material may be valuable, but don’t lead with it or you’ll lose your reader. Your first paragraph should engage the reader by arousing curiosity or presenting important news in a clear, compelling fashion. This means (1) starting with what’s important to readers, not what’s important to you, (2) organizing the material like a newspaper article--in order of most important to least important, and (3) knowing the way your reader thinks about the subject. All of this also means, of course, knowing your audience.

How do you organize your writing according to the way your reader thinks about the subject? By putting yourself in the reader’s shoes and asking, What about this subject concerns my readers most and would gain their interest?

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