Defining Effective Writing at the Bank

This course follows a few core assumptions that will help you to become an effective writer. You have already encountered these assumptions in the activity you just completed. Let’s explore these ideas more thoroughly.

The following points represent the Bank’s definition of effective writing:

• Effective writing is well organized. Effectively written documents have a clear purpose and main message. They provide information in manageable sections or groupings, and there is a logical hierarchy of ideas. A single idea is expressed in each paragraph.
• Effective writing is reader focused. Effective writing answers a reader’s questions and satisfies a reader’s expectations. For example, if you say you are going to recommend a printer to purchase, your reader will expect to find your recommendation up front, not after a lengthy, step-by-step description of the research you did. An effectively written document meets the expectations that it sets up for the reader. The document must also satisfy these expectations in a logical way. Finally, the tone and style must be appropriate for the reader.
• Effective writing demonstrates good mechanics. It uses correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It uses formatting and visual techniques to emphasize or make obvious the logical structure of a document. These features allow readers to focus on the message that the document conveys.

Refer to these assumptions to help guide your thinking when you analyze texts in this course or when you are planning and composing documents at work. Later in this module, you will consider various techniques that you can use to support these assumptions.