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10.6 Reading and Analyzing
Learning Objectives
- Understand different types of reading and analyzing that business documents encounter.
- Demonstrate how to write for skimming and for analytical reading in at least one written
document of each kind.
When you read, do you read each and every word? Do you skim over the document and
try to identify key terms and themes? Do you focus on numbers and statistics, or ignore
the text and go straight to the pictures or embedded video? Because people read in many
diverse ways, you as a writer will want to consider how your audience may read and
analyze your document.
Ever since Benjamin Franklin said that “time is money,” [1] business managers have
placed a high value on getting work done quickly. Many times, as a result, a document
will be skimmed rather than read in detail. This is true whether the communication is a
one-paragraph e-mail or a twenty-page proposal. If you anticipate that your document
will be skimmed, it behooves you to make your main points stand out for the reader.
In an e-mail, use a “subject” line that tells the reader the gist of your message before he
or she opens it. For example, the subject line “3 p.m. meeting postponed to 4 p.m.”
conveys the most important piece of information; in the body of the e-mail you may
explain that Wednesday’s status meeting for the XYZ project needs to be postponed to 4
p.m. because of a conflict with an offsite luncheon meeting involving several XYZ project
team members. If you used the subject line “Wednesday meeting” instead, recipients
might glance at their in-box, think, “Oh, I already know I’m supposed to attend that
meeting,” and not read the body of the message. As a result, they will not find out that
the meeting is postponed.
For a longer piece of writing such as a report or proposal, here are some techniques you
can use to help the reader grasp key points.
- Present a quick overview, or “executive summary,” at the beginning of the document.
- Use boldface headings as signposts for the main sections and their subsections.
- Where possible, make your headings informative; for example, a heading like “Problem
Began in 1992” is more informative than one that says “Background.” - Within each section, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence that indicates what the
paragraph discusses. - When you have a list of points, questions, or considerations, format them with bullets
rather than listing them in sentences. - The “bottom line,” generally understood to mean the total cost of a given expenditure or
project, can also refer to the conclusions that the information in the report leads to. As
the expression indicates, these conclusions should be clearly presented at the end of the
document, which is the place where the time-pressed reader will often turn immediately
after reading the first page.