In poker, I'm told, it's important not to think of any of the money in the pot as your money. If you put $10 in the pot before the draw, you just have to forget that fact. If, after the draw, you keep thinking of that $10, you'll be betting to protect your investment. And you'll make bad decisions. There's even a common phrase expressing that advice: "Don't throw good money after bad."

In writing, the principle is the same. If you think of the time and effort you've invested in a piece of writing, you're bound to be reluctant to change anything. To be an effective business writer, however, you simply have to lose that reluctance. As poet John Berryman said, "One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be."

Management consultant Bill Jensen wrote in his  book Simplicity, "About 80 percent of your internal communication—meetings, teleconferences, presentations, emails, etc.—consists of

• Sharing information that does not require action, and/or
• Communicating something for which there is no discernible consequence if the recipient ignores it

"In other words, a lot of communication you thought was helpful may be seen as unfocused noise or just 'FYI' junk mail by your teammates."

This week, while you plan each piece of writing, put yourself in your reader's place and ask "WIIFM?—What's In It For Me?" When you can answer that question for your reader, you'll write more effectively.

This week, each time you've drafted something, go back and choose a word you've written beginning with a letter from the first half of the alphabet. Replace it with a more effective word beginning with a letter from the second half of the alphabet.

OK, there's nothing special about the second half of the alphabet. But the exercise trick will help you learn that you never have to settle for the first word that occurs to you.

In my "Welcome" message, in the left column of this blog, I use the term knowledge economy. I prefer that term to the terms information age and information economy because information by itself has no value. To be valuable, information must be organized and communicated and thus turned into knowledge. As knowledge management guru Thomas A. Stewart wrote, "intelligence becomes an asset when some useful order is created out of free-floating brainpower."

So this week, before you draft each piece of writing, ask yourself, "How can I best organize this information to turn it into knowledge for my reader?" By asking that question, and acting on your answer, you'll be creating value in a knowledge economy

Once, while training at a manufacturing site of a Fortune 100 company, I had trouble persuading my trainees to stop revising and editing while they were drafting. They insisted, "Here, we work hard to get it right the first time."

I realized that these managers saw me as just a crazy consultant who was clueless about their strong quality-oriented corporate culture. But for once, I knew what to do. The plant where I was working made printers, so I asked the managers to tell me the story of how their company developed and manufactured a new printer model.

They proceeded to describe an elaborate planning process, culminating in the building of a prototype. At this point in their story, I interrupted. "And you make sure to put the company's nameplate on that first printer?" I asked. "And you make sure to have the color of the finish just right? Because you're eventually going to sell it, right?"

The managers laughed. "Of course not," they said. "That printer is a prototype. It's not built to sell; it's built just to test."

"Ah ha!" I gloated. "So you don't do it right the first time. Because you know you won't sell the prototype, it doesn't have to be perfect. Making it perfect--with the right nameplate and paint and all--would be a huge waste of time and would distract you from the more important features that have to be tested."

Please understand; such flashes of insight are rare for me. But that day my trainees had given me a powerful new metaphor. A draft is a prototype. It's not the final product. It's not written for the reader. It's written for the writer. It's "quick and dirty." It's written to test. It's written to see if it does what it was designed to do.

This week, when you write, make sure you build a prototype. By doing so, and by then testing it, you'll be sure of having a better final product.