Logical writing skills taught by Japan's top communication expert!
How do you write to persuade others and achieve the results you want?

In the business world, writing is an essential skill that everyone, from new graduates to mid-level executives, must possess.
When people meet in person and communicate verbally, the situation can be understood through the other person's questions or facial expressions, allowing the communicator to provide additional explanations or corrections.
However, when expressing one's thoughts in writing, the document is everything, so writing must be done with much more precision and care than speaking.


In social life, we often suffer losses due to poor writing skills.
When my report, which took me days to prepare, is rejected, someone else gets praised for a two-page report.
Even overall work ability is undervalued.
What exactly is the difference? How can I accurately express the arguments I've organized in my head? How can I write to persuade my counterpart and achieve the desired outcome? Many businesspeople struggle with these concerns.
The refreshing solution lies in the 'logical writing technique' of management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, or 'Logical Writing'.
It is a technique that allows the writer of a document to convey the message as quickly and accurately as possible, allowing the other person to understand the writer's intention.

"Logical Writing" is the practical version of "Logical Thinking," which became a bestseller and created a huge sensation in Korea and Japan.
This book teaches you how to write effective business documents using logical writing techniques, with clear expression and logical organization.
If 『Logical Thinking』 covered the techniques for logically organizing thoughts, 『Logical Writing』 is a book that explains how to apply this to writing and is a workbook for practical practice.
"Logical Writing" contains the logical writing know-how of Hanako Teruya, a communications expert who worked at McKinsey for many years.
Tom Peters, known as the 'founder of modern management,' called McKinsey 'the world's greatest knowledge merchant.'
McKinsey is a collection of top talents who possess outstanding business knowledge, who can appropriately convey that knowledge, and who can achieve desired results.

When checking readers, be aware of the existence of 'undisclosed reviewers'.
When the proposal is submitted to customer C, the person who reads it directly is the person in charge, C.
However, if Mr. C evaluated the proposal positively, it is highly likely that the proposal will be forwarded to his supervisor, Manager D, or the relevant department for review.
Therefore, to elicit the desired response from the customer, the sender must write the document with the recipients behind Mr. C, such as Manager D or the decision-makers in the relevant department, in mind, that is, the unseen reviewers.
--- From Chapter 1, 'Preparation for Composition'

There's a So What?/Why So? training method that anyone can do right now.
Do not use words like 'as below' or 'as follows'.
Let's say your presentation explaining your sales strategy includes a detailed schedule of the strategy.
When explaining that schedule, doesn't it say 'The schedule is as follows'?
Also, doesn't the report note state, "The tasks to strengthen the sales power of our branch are as follows," and doesn't it list the tasks in eight different items below it?
In this way, the important core is not clearly stated, and the explanation is vague with terms such as 'below' and 'next', making it impossible to clearly understand 'what is the schedule in the end' or 'what is the task in short?'
--- From Chapter 2, "Structure of the Main Text 1 - Introduction to Logical Thinking"

Specifically, the basis for So What? is to clearly present the subject, object, and predicate in the structure of 'who, what, and how'.
Therefore, when writing business documents, you must be especially careful about using noun endings.
Noun-type endings are those that end a sentence with a noun or a nominalized word, such as 'emphasis on independence'.
Although the expression of summarizing sentences briefly is not wrong in itself, in business documents, if the subject, predicate, and object are unclear, it may be difficult for the other person to clearly understand the content.
When doing So What?, you should focus on specificity and draw out results rather than just summarizing them briefly.
After that, I recommend writing in the order of deleting any unnecessary elements.
--- From Chapter 3, "Structure of the Main Text 2 - Practicing Logical Thinking"

In the introduction, before the main topic, let's organize the overall communication in an easy-to-understand flow.
If possible, put the underlying topic and expected response of the introduction up front.
That is, after describing the topic, the background of the topic setting, the expected response, and the benefits of taking that response, if other elements are needed, the location of the explanation is determined by considering the compatibility with the topic and the expected response.
After explaining the topic, state the purpose of the main text and then place the expected response to make the flow natural.
Elements that reveal the writer, such as the company's performance, can be explained in the previous stage of the introduction as background for setting the topic.
Meanwhile, regardless of the background of the topic, when a writer introduces himself, he can avoid the risk of it becoming self-praise by putting it towards the end of the introduction.
--- From Chapter 4, “Introduction”

Visualizing a structure allows a person scanning a document to grasp the entire structure at a glance.
Visualization is not just about creating a striking surface.
The goal of visualization is to logically organize the text and inform the reader of the content and its order.
Organizing a document by visualizing its structure is also the task of revising the structure so that it becomes a logical and understandable text in terms of expression.
--- From Chapter 5, “Visualization of Composition”

When you ask people, “What is important when it comes to writing in business documents?” the most common answer is “conciseness.”
While brevity is certainly important, focusing on keeping things short can easily lead to insufficient explanation.
However, you should not write documents that make people wonder, 'What on earth does this mean?' when they read them.
And some people overuse trendy economic terms or foreign words, thinking they are using cool language.
No matter how nice the expression is,
What good is a document if the reader cannot properly understand its meaning?
A writer must express what he wants to convey in a way that the reader can understand accurately and quickly.
This is the most important point in the sentence expression of business documents.
If such a sentence expression is possible, it can also be used in speech.

--- From Chapter 6, “Message Sentence Expression”