Top tips for setting an effective objective

All documents must be created for a known purpose, and objective setting ensures writers always have a rigorous, audience-focused communications objective in mind. Setting an objective upfront gives you the chance to step back and consider your writing – and your work more broadly – strategically from the very beginning.

How many words have you written before reading this today? Hundreds? Thousands? How many emails have you sent? How many documents have you worked on or reviewed?

Every day, we all add more words to the world. We are all writers, whether or not we think of ourselves in that way. It’s the one core activity that everyone in an organisation is involved in, and its impact on everything from client relationships to brand perception is profound.

And yet how many how many of us start writing without full, considered knowledge of what we want to say and why we want to say it?

The answer is to take a step back and instead spend more time thinking about your objective before you start writing.

To set an effective objective, you need to answer three questions:

1. Who are you writing for?
   This focuses your attention on your audience: who they are, what they care about, how you can engage them and any concerns they may have.
2. What are you trying to communicate?
   This forces you to be single-minded, because a clear objective needs a clear focus. Try and cram too much in and your writing – and your reader – will be confused.
   
3. What do you want your reader(s) to do when they have finished reading?
   And this asks what action you want to inspire. Do you want your reader to agree with you, or give you something, or buy something, or change their behaviour? This, after all, is why you’re actually writing in the first place.

So how do you answer these questions?

Our Structured Writing Method™ explores each question in detail, enabling employees to spell out a communications objective in this single, very powerful sentence:
I want [my reader] to know that […] so that […]

Crystallise your thinking in this format and you’ve taken the first step towards more efficient, more compelling and more persuasive writing. And the relevance of this approach has applications far beyond writing too, as an effective objective becomes the basis for clearer thinking and better working.

Let’s look at an example. Maybe you need to write a case study. You might think your objective looks something like this:

I need to write a case study.

But that’s not an objective. It’s a task. Objectives should never include words like ‘write’ or ‘produce’ or ‘do’. They won’t give you enough of a steer about why you’re doing something or what you want to achieve.

Instead, aim to include active verbs like convince, or encourage, or persuade in your objectives. It’s a simple change, but can affect everything that follows – your messaging, the structure of your document and the whole tone of your writing.

With the example above, your approach would change completely if you created an objective like:

I need to convince [known prospect] that our new product meets the needs of start-up businesses so that they consider it seriously alongside more established products.

Equally, you might end up with an objective like this:

I want to show [named prospects] how we can solve a [specific business problem] in order to nurture the relationship between our organisations.

Those two objectives would result in completely different case studies. If you were interviewing a client and knew that you actually wanted to create both documents, you could ensure you asked two different sets of questions. Your objective becomes a central part of the writing process.

It’s a simple example, but gives a sense of how an effective objective enables effective thinking and effective working. And only once you have that objective in place should you move on to the second stage of the Structured Writing Method: messaging.

Kristel Brown is the Operations Director at Writing Machine.