1 Writing to the Point 9 Writing to the Point "The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean." --Robert Louis Stevenson W RITING IN BUSINESS HAS NEVER been more difficult and more stressful. We live in an age of information overload thanks to e-mail, voice mail, cell phones, and pagers. Although all these wonders were designed to make life and communication easier and faster, they have also created added demands on our time. Writers are expected to respond quickly to an endless flow of e-mail messages. What results is that readers complain about an increasing lack of clarity and abundance of mechanical errors. Supervisors and managers express bewilderment at em- ployees' inability to simply state the essence of what they need to express or neglect to apply appropriate tone and sense of decorum. The best and brightest of technical professionals have difficulty communicating clearly with their peers and non-technical readers whose software glitches, system prob- lems, and changes they must address daily. They often experi- ence frustration whenever writing to readers with little or lim- ited understanding of their technical expertise. The challenge for technical writers is how to bridge that gap when writing for readers with limited technical expertise. It's no wonder an "information gap" frequently exists between technical and 9