3.9 Sailing the 7 C’s
Sometimes, when business communicators talk about “style and tone,” we say business communication should have the 3 Cs: clear, concise and correct. This was expanded on in the book Effective Public Relations (Cutlip et al, 2006) into 7 Cs:
- Clarity
- Completeness
- Correctness
- Concision
- Concreteness
- Coherence
- And courtesy.
This is good advice. Sometimes, however, miscommunications happen because the writer forgot to consider their audience. What seems clear and coherent to a nuclear physicist might not seem that way to a general audience. What seems concise to someone passionate about a topic might seem long-winded to those just looking for basic information. So, to understand style and tone, we need to apply communication models and constantly ask what our audience needs.
In most workplaces, the biggest constraint is time. Almost 400 billion emails are sent daily (Ceci, 2023). One study found that the average office worker received 121 daily emails (Tschabitscher, 2020). If every email took just an extra minute to read because it was confusing, each person would waste 2 hours daily.
So, how can we ensure that we help our audience save time? Plain language.
Attribution
“Sailing the 7 C’s” from Business Writing For Everyone by Arley Cruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
