THE HOWE WRITING INITIATIVE & LAWS, HALL & ASSOCIATES

The Howe Writing Initiative is a collaborative project between Miami University’s Department of English and the Richard T. Farmer School of Business Administration that is designed to enhance the quality of student writing in the School of Business Administration. This initiative marks the RTFSBA as a national leader in its commitment to undergraduate education. The HWI is a unique, innovative response to the increasing public and professional demands for improved writing skills. The HWI assists both SBA professors in the teaching of writing and SBA students in the improvement of their writing skills.

During the past two years, the HWI has acted as writing consultants for Laws Hall, offering advice on all of the writing tasks, from the print ads to the text for the final presentation. However, most of our energy is concentrated on helping you produce the final book. For several reasons, the campaign book is the most important document that the client reads.

• It is the only text that remains in the client’s possession, thus serving as a compelling reminder of the material contained in the presentation.

• It often provides crucial and/or imaginative details that could not be included in the presentation due to time constraints.

• It frequently functions as a "guidebook" with regard to the client's orientation during the Q/A session the day after your presentation.

The Howe Writing Initiative is available to help you with this book and any of your writing for the campaign this semester. If you would like us to look at drafts of your work, please bring a hard copy of your draft and meet us during our office hours, or email one of the Howe Team members to make an appointment.

THINKING CAREFULLY ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE FOR THE CAMPAIGN BOOK

The most important piece of general advice we can give you is this: consider your audience carefully. Our experience with the LHA project tells us that the better you’re able to imagine/know your intended audience, the better you’ll do in the competition. This is not a simple task. Here is some advice about building the book, the only document focused specifically at your target audience—the client.

· Don’t confuse the target audience for the campaign with the reader of this document. Your readers are the executives within the company who will be making the critical decision about the quality of your campaign via the book you’ve created for them. In the case of Ford Racing, you will be writing to the marketing team as opposed to racing fans.

· Know everything you can about your reader’s values. Know the general company philosophy. Know how they want to present themselves as an organization. This is different from the research you’ve done on the target market. View your client as your audience. What language/jargon do they use and repeat? Some of this information will have to come directly from published materials, literature, web sites, and so forth. Some will come from inferences you make about the material you find. Some will possibly come from what other people say about your client.

· Review and analyze your notes from the client’s presentation to LHA. Your campaign must address the client’s specific wants/needs, as originally communicated. Ask yourselves, “Does our campaign square with our client’s larger organizational ethics, goals, structures, philosophies?” In the case of Ford Motor Racing, you’ve focused your campaign on racing fans and encouraging membership in the Club. Now, you’re writing a book to a readership whose ultimate goal is to sell more cars and trucks.

· Regard the book as an opportunity to “hook” your audience and relate facts, display important graphic information, fill in details, and explain nuances that you weren’t able to cover completely during your oral presentation. REMEMBER: the campaign book represents you in your absence and is the last document your client will examine before making the final decision.

· Throughout this process, keep in mind that you are not writing to an academic audience in order to display knowledge. Therefore, you need not tell the client absolutely everything you’ve done, everything you’ve learned, nor how hard you’ve worked. Carefully consider what this client needs to know, when they need to know it, and how you want to communicate with them. In other words, you should pay special attention to the overall organization/sequence of the book itself and remain mindful that where the information is presented implies its relative importance for the reader. Regarding the final book as a “whole” consisting of many parts will help you make important rhetorical decisions, like whether or not a particular piece of information should be included in the body of the book or reserved for an appendix.

WRITING AS A TEAM

It is critical that you communicate with one another during all phases of the composing process:

• Invention: Work together to articulate your goals for the campaign and the book, and always take notes during your brainstorming sessions.

• Drafting: Out of necessity, most writing teams require that different people write different sections. To ensure consistency between sections, be sure you agree about the formality, directness, and other style issues in advance.

• Revision: Agree upon procedure for responding to work in process and for revising/editing. Be sure to allow enough time to read several drafts of the book. Read for consistency of style, organization, and thoroughness. Set aside an entire meeting to discuss final revision efforts.

• Editing: You may want to designate one group member as the final editor. When you edit a document, you are editing for stylistic effectiveness such as word choice, smooth sentence structure, and consistency of voice and tone.

• Proofreading: Proofreading means making sure that your document is error-free. Pay close attention to correcting spelling, punctuation, and typographical mistakes. Ideally, each member of the team will be proofreading throughout the composing process since the entire team's credibility depends on a professionally prepared text. Proofreading a section that someone else has drafted is the best strategy for “catching” easily missed errors.

HELPFUL HINTS AND ALL AROUND GOOD ADVICE ABOUT CAMPAIGN BOOKS

· Start Writing NOW! For every task: write as you go.

· Write in groups and use a peer review process.

· Try to think like the client, not just as a writer when you write.

· Take advantage of this writing opportunity to tell your reader any important information that you were unable to include in your presentation.

· Use strong verbs (avoid to be verbs): “We invite you to lunch” is more effective than, “We are inviting you to lunch.”

· Challenge your use of “big” words. Overblown words can distort your message (Weak: utilize, subsequent to; Stronger: use, after).

· Use “active voice”(“the dog guarded the house” not “the house was guarded by the dog,”)

· Practice consistency throughout: layout; headings; sentence structure; style of tagline.

· Don’t be afraid of white space. Text shouldn’t dominate the page – less really can be more.

· Check for “readability”: look carefully at both the overall organization of the document and the local organization of the headings, subheadings, and text.

· Spellcheck and Proofread!