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Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of others. For a writer, that means writing for your audience, not for you. In order to effectively communicate with your audience, we need to put ourselves in their shoes. Imagining life from their perspective. This only take a few minutes to do and will greatly increase the quality of your communications. Remember, great communication is never about you, the writer. Writing for yourself or writing to make yourself look good is self-indulgent and, frankly, rude.

Good communication is always about the audience and the outcome you want to achieve, whether that’s to elicit an emotion, spark an action, or shape an opinion.

There are 3 simple ways to immediately make your communications more empathetic to the reader. While these tips are mainly focused on a business context, they can be applied to many other parts of our lives.

1. Brevity is a gift. Give it freely.

Like a child trying to explain to a parent why they did something wrong, delivering difficult news often results in people using more words then they need to. Communication normally results from a change. In a business context, change is often tough. “There’s a more strict company expense policy in place”. “Bonuses are canceled this year”. “You’re all being let go and this is your last day”, etc.

Good communications cuts to the chase. It doesn’t do it rudely, or callously, but it also doesn’t hide the truth. Tip-toeing around the key information indicates a lack of courage and empathy on the part of the communicator. If the decision was made with integrity and clarity of thought, don’t be ashamed of it. Own it.

Most communications can be improved by cutting the word count by a third. Edit, then edit again. This will help remove the chaff, jargon, and guff from your hesitant first draft.

The sooner people understand news, the faster they can begin to adapt to it. Give them the courtesy of being direct and save everyone time.

2. Your communication should not be a narrative of your process

Even if you spent 6 hard months working on a project, worked weekends, held several focus groups, and managed to get through a tough exec approval process, leave it out. Nobody cares but you. Don’t make the communication about the process you went through. Make it about the ‘so what?’ for the audience.

People might ask how did you come to this decision or how was the decision made, but that can come in paragraph 4-5 or leave it for the FAQ.

Making the main point hard to find among your self-justification (in other words, “burying the lede” in newspaper jargon) doesn’t help anyone. You’ll get more confusion and questions. Confidence in the communication—and therefore the change—will be harmed.

3. Put out sign-posts for your audience

If you’ve followed tips 1 and 2, then you now have a concise and useful piece of communication. You can improve it even more by adding headings that will lead your audience through the copy. A few examples include:

What’s happening?

Why are we making this change?

What do I need to do?

What’s next?

Including a few subheadings like these in bold can help people ‘skip to the end’ or avoid missing key information if they’re in a hurry or reading on their mobile (the default experience you should be optimizing for).

What tips did I miss? Please share your suggestions in the comments.