Yesterday I was sitting in my office, rewriting a sales proposal for a client. Nothing unusual about that. That’s what I do for work, so I do it pretty much every day.

By the way, when most people hear the word “writing,” they think fingers on keyboard, eyes glued to screen. But for me, writing is more like 70% staring out the window, 30% fingers on keyboard.

You see, writing isn’t really about words, it’s about figuring out what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it, and when I need to do that, I like to stare out the window or go to the park or to a cafe, anywhere I can watch objects moving against a fixed background. In this case, outside my office window is a street, so there are cars and pedestrians moving in relation to fixed objects like buildings and trees. For some reason, that relaxes me and brings out the creativity.

As my mind wandered, I got to thinking about the second-most common problem I see in my clients’ business writing, the lack of seemingly-unrelated detail.

It doesn’t take much to add detail. You don’t have to spend 8 hours telling your life story or anything like that. A little bit is all you need.

Here’s an example: “I went to the grocery store” becomes “I walked across the street to the Şok to buy some tomatoes for dinner.” That’s all. You’ve added just a few words, but now your customer has at least 5 things they can ask about if they want: There was walking involved, I live across the street from a grocery store, I live in Turkey (that’s where the Şok chain of grocery stores is), I wanted tomatoes, and the tomatoes had something to do with dinner.

At the time that you mention these things, you don’t know which of them your customer is going to grab onto, and you don’t know why they are going to grab onto those particular ones. The details are there because your customer, being human and knowing that you are too, wants to see how you respond to the world around you. The details you include are basically a toggle switch labelled “expand/collapse,” with all of the switches initially set to “collapse” by default, but the customer knows that if he/she asks a question about one of the details, the toggle for that detail is going to slide to “expand,” and he/she is going to learn something about you.

Now, you’re not going to have room for details if the communication is really short, like a tagline, where you might only have 6 words for the whole thing.

And if your original presentation is 15 minutes and the customer, due to time constraints, makes you bump it down to 3 minutes, you’re probably not going to have a lot of room for details. You’re going to have to get right to the core of the story.

However, if you do have a few minutes to relax into conversation, like for a one-paragraph case study, here’s how you can include the details we’re talking about:

For example, if you’re giving a case study about building a factory, you mention what city the factory was in (Manchester, not just “the UK”). You mention that the permitting process in Manchester is particularly challenging. You mention that most of the machines were sourced from the UK, but one had to be imported from the Netherlands, and getting it through Customs required a lot of paperwork.

For some reason, many of us think business writing requires the complete removal of details we consider irrelevant. However, those details are what your customer will latch onto in order to learn about your company and how it operates, and to distinguish you from the competitors of yours that he/she is also considering.