Tips to Hone Your Professional Business Writing Skills
Those who have gotten used to writing academic papers could find business-writing rather challenging. Their formats are different.
The main purpose of business writing is to communicate with the target audience, both external and internal.
Memorandums, official emails, statistic reports, various proposals demand professional business writing skills. That’s why a person needs some guidelines to master professional business writing.
Have a look at the distinctive features of professional business writing and master the style as you journey into a new writing terrain.
What Is the Main Purpose of Professional Business Writing?
Business writing provides useful information and suggests instructions for plan realization. It motivates, persuades, and is transactional.
Each type of writing serves a concrete purpose. Business writing aims at:
- Sharing important information with the target audience as seen in memos and reports.
- Distributing news about recent changes in the company or upcoming events.
- Giving instructions to the staff.
- Explaining complicated decisions or justifying the undertaken actions in case there is ever such a need.
- Making individuals take a step and stimulating workers to take action (this is especially important for businesses who need to sell a product)
As such, the language of business writing must be easy to understand because the data is audience-oriented.
Style and Peculiarities of Business Writing
Transactional papers are recognized due to some grammatical norms and stylistic peculiarities. As a rule, they depend on a number of issues.
- Target audience
The tone of the message should reflect the chosen reader. Scientific proposal usually differs much from the business letter.
- Regional restrictions
Today gender inequality conflicts exists in business writing. As such, writers should be careful in language selection.
It is better to avoid sexist lexical units like “businessman” and words like that. These words are non offensive in some regions, so take not to follow the rules of engagement.
- Lexical units.
A writer should apply more active words and less passive voice constructions. Thanks to that, the message will make the audience react quickly.
Active verbs stimulate execution of orders while passive one is rather complicated for understanding.
One more essential tip is to get rid of jargon, arrogant collocations, and dull colloquialisms.
- Generalization and facts presentation.
If you need to provide a message with some facts, it is better to select words carefully.
For unsupported data, it is better to apply the appropriate words like ‘suggest’, ‘suppose’, ‘consider’.
If you are sure that the data is 100 percent relevant and reliable, there should be such words as ‘prove’, ‘100%’, etc.
How to write like A PRO
Here are seven tips from a team of advanced writers to help you communicate professionally in business writing.
- Converted pyramid method. Hammer on the point at the beginning of your message. Sometimes you need to use retrospection to remind the readers about the main message and prepare them for the next portion of information.
- Simplified language. If you compose your business text with long complex sentences which combine huge paragraphs, the reader will feel uneasy and ultimately get bored. It is better to use simple words and brief sentences and paragraphs.
- The fewer the clever words the better. Jargon and technical terms make the message sound heavy and complicated. If you need to use any of them, stick to the few common words
- Communicate using ‘we’. The reader likes to be involved in the conversation. Use words like we to give a sense of belonging.
- Call to action. The business sphere aims to buy or sell something. That is why each writing must have a call to action.
- Watch your grammar. Inversions are welcomed if this makes the reading easier. One can’t say the same about unfinished sentences, missed commas, misspelled words, etc.
- Do not mix many fonts. Experts warn that it is better not to overload the text with different types of font because the reader might get confused.
How to Improve Business Writing Skills
A writer, especially a beginner, needs to hone his/her business writing skills systematically.
» First of all, a writer should forget about emotions. You don’t connect writing with a bad school or college memory.
That is why one should set emotions and worries aside and think only about the benefits that can come from writing.
» Then it is time to systematize the information you present and the language you use to convey it.
Be sure that your writing is logical, clear and contains all the necessary data.
Then analyze the words you use and access whether you need to expand your range of rvocabulary or improve your grammar in order to make the message sound better.
» Look for tools which can help diagnose and correct your language mistakes.
If you have someone who can do that – great! In other cases, Grammarly and OWL at Purdue University might become your perfect assistants for self-improvement.
» Reading successful business articles should become your hobby.
There are so many blogs, manuals, magazines, newspapers which present high-quality business writing.
Use them as examples to hone your business writing skills regularly in your journey to becoming a true professional.