Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

• Write quickly
. Don’t ponder over words. Keep going. 
Leave gaps if necessary. Aim for a natural flow. 
• Write in your own voice
. Expressing yourself in your own 
way will help you to say what you mean more exactly.
If your reader can ‘hear’ your voice, reading will be 
easier. 
• Write without interruption
. Try to find a time and place 
where you can think and write without distractions. 
• Write without editing
. Don’t try to get it right first time. 
Resist the temptation to edit as you go. You will tend to 
get stuck and waste time. 
• Keep to the plan of your outline
. Use the sentences from 
your outline to focus what you want to say. If you find 
yourself wandering from the point, stop and move on to 
the next sentence in the outline. 
3. Distribution costs would decrease by at least 7 per cent if 
centred on Gatheringham. 
3.1 The area is centrally located for our markets. 
3.2 The local infrastructure is well developed.
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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152 Improve your Communication Skills
Navigation aids 
Effective documents contain navigation aids to help the reader 
find their way around. The most important of these are: 
• summaries; 
• introductions; 
• headings; 
• bullet points. 
All of these elements will help you ‘sell’ the document to your 
reader. 
Summaries and introductions 
Don’t confuse these two essential items. 
The
 summary
is the document in miniature. At its heart is 
your message. Place the summary at the very start of the 
document – immediately following the title page. Your outline is 
a ready-made summary. 
An
 introduction
explains how the document came into 
being. At its heart is SPQR: background information including the 
problem addressed by the document and the question it answers. 
Introductions might expand to include: