Business writing is used by professionals to convey the key pieces of information. Business writing communication helps businesses to make contact with people in a professional as well as effective way. Business writing is a broad term that comprises many kinds;
- Emails writing.
- Sales materials.
- Marketing material.
- Administrative information.
- And so on…
Improving your business writing skills can help you reach and convey any message to professionals, in an efficient and clear way.
To help you improve your writing for business we’ve covered 14 powerful tips in the following section of this post. Let’s grab the skill of business writing with our tips.
1. Think Before You Write
One of the beneficial tips for creating effective business writing material is to think before writing. So, you should think about the pain points, needs, or questions of the target audience.
This will help you convey a message that will relate to their needs. After knowing the wants of the target audience, it is useful to create a list of key points to be included in your writing or message.
For example: If you are going to write about the enchanting colorful outlets. And your target audience is women. Then, you should first know the styles and colors most admired/liked by the women. Doing this will make you communicate effectively as well as grab the attention of your audience.
Related: AI Writing Assistants vs. Human Editors: Striking the Right Balance.
2. Get Familiar with Different Types of Business Writing
Business writing is not always written in a single tone or style. To improve writing for business you should be efficient in writing different tones/styles to effectively draft your message in order to achieve your objective.
Following are the four categories in which business writing generally falls;
Informational:
Information writing of a business is done to convey the provide recipients with relevant details/information about your business. For example, “This type of business writing can be used to explain the progress of a business, ensure compliance, make decisions, convey the designation of the business, etc.”.
Persuasive:
This type of business writing is used to influence and convince recipients. For example, “Project Proposals, sales patches, etc.”.
Instructional:
In this kind of business writing, you are required to instruct recipients or target audiences about how to complete a particular task or procedure. For example, “memos, user manuals, etc.”.
Transactional:
It includes covering recent/daily workplace news or information and gathering reactions from the recipients. For example, “invoices, emails, official letters, etc.”.
3. Be Concise in Conveying a Message
Business writing should be concise and clear. There is no need to put in extra details or wordy sentences. This can bore or detract your audience. So, you should condense the large information into as few words and sentences as you can. This will definitely make your readers/recipients engaged as well as save their precious time.
For Example: Rather than writing, “We truly enjoyed our gathering with you on Wednesday”. You can say, “It was nice meeting with you Wednesday”.
4. Prefer Active Over Passive Voice
Active voices are easier to understand than passive voices. This is because active voices are clear and straightforward to the subject whereas, in the case of passive voice subject is not obvious. So, passive voice can leave the reader in a confusion.
For example: In passive voice we say; “The funds will be distributed on February 12”. This leaves the recipients in question “By Whom”?
However, active voice makes it clear by answering the question, “We’ll distribute funds on February 12”.
5. Avoid Jargon Words
One of the goals of every business writing is to make readers better or easily understand the message and communication. However, using jargon or slang words or phrases (with which readers are not familiar) can make them confused and ultimately exit the message.
In business writing your focus should be on informing not impressing the audience. Moreover, your writing should be descriptive, not complex for readers.
So, you should avoid jargon words throughout the writing and make it rich with simple words.
However, in a scenario, when you’re unable to avoid jargon you can use an online rewording tool. A rewording tool is handy at automatically removing the jargon words and making the writing language plain. Moreover, the reword generator will not cause any harm to the actual intent of your writing.
For example:
We have a piece of text with some jargon words i.e.
“Our project is resource-intensive to be accomplished”
The tool reworded it as;
“Our project requires a lot of resources to complete”.
6. Maintain Professionalism
To do business writing effectively, it is useful to maintain a professional style throughout your message. This is because a professional tone will make you easily win the trust as well as the loyalty of recipients or audiences. However, you may not know how to give your writing a professional style. Let’s explore it.
To maintain professionalism throughout the writing, you should make use of words and phrases that best fitting with your brand’s voice. Additionally, you should be concise, brief, and straightforward with the details.
For Example:
“I don’t know why you spoke such derogatory things”.
Let’s write it in a professional style;
“This organization does not accept unfair remarks”.
7. Ask for Feedback
You should get feedback from professionals or experts regarding your business writing. Their feedback will let you know about the areas that need improvements. This can accelerate the process of improving your business writing.
Moreover, at a time, you should be focused on getting feedback about the specific aspect of your writing.
For example: You may be focused on improving the tone and wording of your business writing. In this case, you should get feedback about the weak or strong points of the tone and wording. This tip will help you improve all the areas step by step.
8. You Should be Straightforward
Business writing demands getting straight and clear to the main intent. This is because the first thing your readers want to know is what is purpose of your message is and how it is useful for them.
As recipients are mostly busy at their work, they can be disengaged and leave your message if they don’t find its purpose quickly.
So, before writing it is useful to draft a summary containing all the key points of your message. Include the summary at the top of your message or writing communication.
Moreover, in the case of writing documents comprising multiple paragraphs. You should embed the main point in the first sentence of every paragraph.
For Example: If a paragraph is about the importance of marketing strategies for business. Then, you should write the first sentences similar to this;
“Marketing is important to uplift a business”
See also: 10 Excellent Content Writing & Analysis Tools for SEO Blog Writers.
9. Practice a Lot
You may have heard the famous phrase “Practice makes a man Perfect”. It better fits here. In order to improve your business writing, a lot of practice is required. However, while practicing, you should follow some guidelines or make it consistent.
In the meantime, you should compare the current writing with previous ones to track your progress.
For example: If you are doing business write in a persuasive tone. Then, you should follow the guidelines of any expert in the field and practice accordingly. For this, you can find a number of experts on the internet.
10. Check for Facts and Figures
After writing the first draft of your business writing it is useful to check the correctness of facts and figures in it. Incorrect facts or figures will negatively affect the trust and authenticity of your writing.
Furthermore, relying on inaccurate facts can make you lose hard-earned trust which can be hard to earn back.
So, it is beneficial to ensure all the facts and figures. For this, you should first double-check them. Moreover, you should ask someone to investigate and correct them for you. Doing this will make your writing credible as well as reliable.
For example: You claimed in the writing that social media is the largest landscape to contact audiences. Then, it is necessary to research that argument and check if is it correct or not.
11. Boost the Clarity
Clarity determines how smooth it is to understand a writing. Writing with high clarity will put readers at ease and engaged. So, after creating your first draft of business writing, it is useful to edit its clarity. The following are some tips for boosting the clarity of your business writing:
- Remove redundant details.
- Make sentences short.
- Create coherence between sentences.
For example: Consider the following sentences with low clarity;
“We ought to, like, do something like that at a certain point, or not, relying on how it is concerned, I guess?”
Let’s boost its clarity.
“We should like or dislike things based on their uses”.
12. Include CTA (Call to Action)
If the goal of your business writing is to urge the reader to take some actions. Then, it is a useful tip to add CTA (call to action). It may be a phrase or sentence.
For a call to action, you should be specific in order to make it easier for readers to understand what to do next.
For example: Following are the different examples of “CTA” based on different types of business writing:
- Sales Piece: It should ask your recipients to test or purchase your products or services.
- Emails: For emails your CTA would likely ask readers for a reply.
- Presentation: In this case, your call to action line will probably ask recipients to agree with your arguments.
13. Be Impartial
To improve your business writing it is important to be impartial or biased. Being impartial doesn’t mean that you can’t embed your own thoughts. However, those thoughts or arguments shouldn’t led by emotions.
So, whenever you put in an opinion it is beneficial to add a reason for that. This will maintain your credibility and reliability.
For example: If you are extremely passionate about a particular subject. You should try to explain the reasons rather than just telling it. So, you should not explain like, “I recommend it”, I’m passionate about it, etc.
This is because different people have different opinions. However, facts and figures are understood by everyone in the same manner.
14. Proofread Your Writing
Proofreading is the process of detecting as well as correcting errors and mistakes in writing. This is an important step for improving your writing. So, prior to making a final decision about your business writing, it is useful to proofread your content.
In proofreading, you should look for the following errors and correct them;
- Grammatical errors.
- Spelling mistakes.
- Punctuation inaccuracy.
- Readability.
- And so on…
Doing this enhances the reliability of your writing. Furthermore, these mistakes will make you alert about them in the next writing. Additionally, it will make you efficient at catching mistakes as well as correcting them easily.
Conclusion
For effective professional communication, it is useful to improve your business writing. Having a strong grip on business writing will make you at ease in conveying and convincing recipients.
If you search on the internet for tips for improving your writing, you will be overwhelmed by the suggestions of different tips from multiple sources.
To make you easily improve it, we conducted research and came up with 14 powerful tips. In the above sections, we explained them with their examples. We hope these tips will make you proficient at business writing.
