In his book Writing for Results, author David W. Ewing uses a metaphor of a wagon wheel to illustrate nine qualities that blend together in good business writing. It’s a meaningful set of qualities you can use to evaluate the writing that’s being created by your organization. A condensed version follows.
Ewing places the writer’s message at the hub of the wheel. The nine qualities of writing are the spokes that hold the hub and the wheel’s rim together. The message doesn't reach readers unless the wheel turns, and the wheel doesn't turn unless it is sound.
1. A Strong Start
A beginning that points to the main findings, recommendations, or ideas to follow is important for two reasons. It increases the depth of readership by arresting attention and engaging readers. It also increases the quality of readership. When readers know what to look for, they can proceed more intelligently to read the rest of the report, letter or memorandum.
2. Appropriate Persuasion Strategy
Before you write, you’ll want to appraise the attitudes and desires of your audience. Try to look at your message through their eyes. Think about your relationship with your readers. Then (and only then) decide how to play the cards in your hand – which facts and arguments first, what points last.
When you’re communicating in writing, sizing up the writer-reader situation is similar to, and as important as, sizing up the buyer-seller situation in marketing, the lawyer-judge situation in a court case, or the doctor-patient in a medical setting.
3. Effective Organization
Whether your report or memo is long or short, technical or general, personal or impersonal, you need to help your readers to see how the thoughts relate to one another. Facts should be grouped logically. First points should be separated from second points. Changes in direction or emphasis should be indicated, just as sharp curves in a road are indicated by signs that let drivers know what to anticipate.
On a related note, you can help guide readers through your communication by inserting simple devices such as section headings and subheadings.
4. Convincing Analysis
Put your finger on the key problems and their main dimensions; specify their causes; outline alternative ways of coping with them; argue most for the solution you consider best. If action must be taken, specify who should take it.
5. Appropriate Tone
Examine the writer-reader situation in much the same way that you did in planning your persuasion strategy. Choose words that will be heard in the way you intend—friendly or challenging, warm or cold, and so on.
6. Coherence
See that the first sentence of each paragraph indicates plainly what the rest of the paragraph is about. By the same token, see that the first paragraph in a long series fulfills a similar role. Use pronouns and demonstrative adjectives to keep the viewpoint clear in a paragraph. Use conjunctions and transitions to clarify relationships between people and things.
7. Clarity
You can also gain clarity by working over each sentence in your document. Are there unnecessarily abstract or long words? Does the writing display solid logic? Are the subjects and verbs reasonably close together? Do the pronouns have clear antecedents? Are modifying words and phrases placed so readers can connect them easily?
8. Correctness
Correct usage is important because it enables you to be more precise and because it reassures readers that you regard them highly enough to devote time to the “little points” of usage. Since so many readers have been taught to look for errors in grammar and usage, they may take sadistic glee in finding mistakes. Sometimes, in fact, such errors give them the reason they want for repudiating some of the substance of your letter or report. So, this particular spoke can weaken almost any of the other spokes. It can cast doubt on the most carefully worked out argument.
9. Effective Style
Your style should reflect you—the way you talk, the way you think, the way you look at situations. Also, your style should reflect something of your regard for your readers. If you want to whet their interest in your material, if you want to relieve some of the burden of evaluating your letter or report, there may be much you can do by putting life in the verbs and nouns used, getting rid of jargon, and adding color and vitality.
Some thoughtful observers feel that style may even have a magnetic effect, throwing a whole letter or report in a more auspicious light for readers, so that they seek merit in it, and are glad to take time with it.
So, now you have an introduction to the nine spokes in Ewing’s wheel, we’d like to reinforce one idea that deserves emphasis. The Writer’s Wheel reveals the need for a “situational approach” to writing assignments.
In other words, every message, every hub, is different in size and makeup from other messages. It is different because of its intended audience and timing as well as because of its makeup of fact and opinion. And every writer’s wheel is slightly different in size from other wheels. Therefore, each message must have its spokes made to fit. Though the wheel may benefit from your knowledge of how spokes are set in other wheels, it doesn’t work to insert spokes that were created for other wheels.
Source: Writing for Results in Business, Government, the Sciences, and the Professions (2nd ed.) by David W. Ewing