The best ideas can come from anyone and anywhere. We believe that a culture of writing promotes systematic thought and reasoned arguments. They also go a long way in fostering operational efficiency - avoiding meetings for meetings sake, not waiting to meet before making decisions etc.

It removes the influence of the loudest voices in the room, and creates a culture where teammates of all personality types are comfortable to share and collaborate. Writing, often considered an individual exercise, just maybe the most effective collaboration tool we have.

Writing helps us to break down silos, escalate and resolve conflicts quickly, and work together to achieve our goals (even when others’ goals are not directly tied to our own). Ultimately, success should not be defined by individual victories, but by promoting the best ideas, working together to overcome obstacles, and then celebrating your team as they win alongside you. After all, at Talented, the best idea always wins.

A historic side-effect (especially in our line of work) of working alongside copywriters is assuming you don’t need to write well, since you’re not the one ‘being paid for your words’. At Talented, assume that all of us are being paid for how well we write. We expect our mails summarising minutes of a meeting, our SOPs and our briefs to be as engaging as our award write-ups. This does not mean we avoid in-person interactions; some topics are better to discuss in person with documenting during and after.

Clear writing requires clear thinking, meaning our talent will need to invest more time shaping their ideas before sharing them. Our bet is that a culture of better writing will lead to a culture of better thinking. Internal Tech Mails, one of our favourite Twitter pages, validates this!

Here’s how you can get started:

• There’s no such thing as ‘writing out loud’. At least 50% of the time you spent writing the first draft, should be spent in re-writing and editing.
• Aim to engage the reader but feel free to make your writing ‘skimming’ friendly: bold, underline, italicise important points.
• Make your writing look good. For instance, do not put a full web link in the middle of your mail body. Hyperlink it within a relevant sentence.
• Send your writing to a colleague whose writing you like & request feedback.

We encourage writing, especially when you’d like to confront a colleague/client about their shortcomings, or provide tough feedback. Your learning curve to write for clarity and action will radically improve in situations where the cost of being misunderstood is higher. The flip-side to this is risking everyone shooting off angry mails to each other (jk) & folks spending inordinate amounts of time in drafting emails instead of actual work. We’ll trust you to decide which approach works best on a case-by-case basis.

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