Purposeful purpose statements

You were probably introduced to the purpose statement during high school and college composition courses; that sentence at the start of the paper that tells what the paper is about. And chances are that you’ve continued to use them for some of the documents you write at work.

But do purpose statements serve any purpose?

Yes. Sometimes.

First off, the reason for including a purpose statement is to tell your readers what they can expect to learn if they continue reading the document. That’s a useful bit of information for longer documents, like reports and whitepapers. Readers like to know up front whether the document is something they need or want to know, whether they should keep reading or not.

But for a single-page letter or an email message? Better to just say what you need to say. Instead of “The purpose of this letter is to inform you of new technical training opportunities,” cut to the chase with something like “New technical training classes are available to all employees.”

Second, if you decide your document does need a purpose statement, be sure that it does the job. A good purpose statement is:

• Specific—Include particulars to reduce ambiguity. If you have a longer document explaining new training classes (instead of just a letter), something like “This document outlines XYZ Company’s new training classes” would be too general, too vague. Is it management training, new employee training, HR procedures training, or something else? Adding “technical” lets people know what type of training has been added. If it’s more than one type, include the main categories.
• Concise—Cut out excess baggage. Purpose statements that begin “The purpose of this document is to…” begin with a bunch of wasted words. Just say what the document is for, using this model: “This [type of document: report, whitepaper, article, or whatever] [action verb: describes, discusses, outlines, and so forth] [your topic].” For example: “This whitepaper describes the four main causes of employee absenteeism, and provides six strategies to help reduce it.”
• Targeted—Identify your audience. You’ll often accomplish this by being specific, embedding your target audience in the statement: “This whitepaper  demonstrates how IT departments can reduce server hardware expenses by using virtual servers.” Other times, you may want to add a sentence that explicitly states who the document is aimed at: “This report is written for property owners in the proposed flood abatement zone.”

Whatever you do, avoid emulating this model, written by technical writer Bill Swallow with his tongue firmly in cheek:

This email provides information that is hopefully insightful enough to help you understand that statements like these in white papers are not necessary but rather are inventions of the over educated who have learned how to pepper their writings with meaningless expository text in order to boost word count while sounding intelligent.