Think First, Write Better: The Art of Communication That Everyone Knows, But No One Practices

Whereas most books on business writing focus on improving grammar and punctuation, Think First, Write Better teaches an explicit yet universal system for identifying your key message in any communication and developing a persuasive argument to support it.

The approach explained in Think First, Write Better has been used for over 65 years to teach communication skills to professionals at leading American companies. The book shows how to apply the principles of effective communication to organize and express your ideas.

You will learn to tailor any message to the needs of your audience. Special chapters show how to compose effective e-mail, prepare presentations that are conceptually clear and visually appealing, and write documentation that people actually read. Think First, Write Better also presents nine simple principles for editing—all you need to ensure that your paragraphs and sentences are easy to read and understand.

A companion volume, Business Writing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, illustrates with before-and-after examples how to apply the principles in Think First, Write Better to improve the clarity of all types of business documents.

Think First, Write Better is a major refresh of the approach to business and technical writing originally presented in Organizing Ideas: The Key to Effective Communication, also by Matthew Spence.