One-Minute Communications Tips Archive
August 2009

How to Achieve Accuracy

Worse than being verbose, worse than being unclear, worse than sloppy grammar, is the business-communication crime of being inaccurate.

Inaccuracy leads your reader to make poor decisions and damages your credibility.

To ensure accuracy in your messages:

• Be careful about what you say and what you don’t say.
   
• Collect and present all the facts, not just the ones that bolster your position. Answer who, what, where, when, why and how.
   
• Verify your facts. Get information from independent sources if possible. If a piece of data doesn’t look right, question it and research it further.
   
• Double-check names, dates and numbers.
   
• Watch for words that signal your bias, e.g., "market crash" vs. "market decline."
   
• State any assumptions you made and how you arrived at them. Present best- and worst-case scenarios that could be achieved under alternative assumptions.
   

© Arun Sinha, Access Communications. Access Communications is a marketing communications and technical writing firm based in Stamford, Connecticut, USA. Sign up for Access Communications's One-Minute Communication Tip at http://www.AccessConsultingInc.com. Once a month, you'll receive an actionable idea or technique on an aspect of business communications, distilled into about 150 words.

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