Thursday, January 15, 2009
7 Steps to Better Business Writing
Sales letters. Web pages. Memos. Reports. While people and net income thrust business, the written word is its road. Bashes your authorship take you where you necessitate to travel or are you lost without a map on the incorrect side of town? Follow these stairway to do your concern authorship shine.
Consider your audience. Who will read what you're writing? Your workforce? Your prospects? The public? Different audiences name for different styles of writing. If you're writing a procedural manual for your employees, see their instruction level. Line workers in production will have got got one vocabulary; your gross sales associates will have another. If you're marketing to prospects within your industry, they will understand (and expect) industry-specific terms and jargon. The general populace will not. Press releases and other written documents for public ingestion must incorporate apparent linguistic communication or clearly define industry-specific terms.
Know your purpose. What make you desire to say? What consequence make you desire to obtain with the written document you're writing? As you're making notes, state your end for the work at hand. Type it out at the top of your written document or in a header. You can take it later, before anyone sees your work. Mention to this end frequently as you sketch and compose and your authorship will remain on target.
Organize your thoughts. Business authorship is about producing results. Pulling a response, shutting a deal, selling units of measurement of product. Form your cardinal points in an lineation prior to drafting your written document and your finished merchandise will be stronger. Outlines don't have got to be the Roman-numeral-and-capital-letter formatting you learned in school, though they can be. They can also be bulleted listings or just a series of short letters in a given order. They can even be non-linear. If you're familiar with head maps, these tin be an effectual outlining tool as well.
Write like you talk. Bash you have got got a co-worker whom you understand just good when you speak human confront to face, but when she seeks to pass on with you in authorship you have no thought what she's saying? A batch of people have got the thought that authorship is a completely different word form of communicating than speech. They try to formalize their written discourse, spruce up it up with gratuitous multi-syllabic words, or work around the points they desire to do without ever making them. As a concern writer, your first end should be clarity, and the best manner to be clear is to compose like you talk, plainly and to the point. The people you wish to pass on with volition give thanks you for it.
Re-read and revise. While authorship is like address on paper, unlike address you have got the opportunity to redact authorship before anyone reads it. You can get rid of awkward passages, ill-defined statements, and digressive points. After you've drafted your document, read it over. Are what you desire to state clear to you? Read it out loud if possible. Are there transitions that are hard to verbalize? They will probably be hard to read as well.
Get feedback. It's a great thought to cultivate a authorship ally, person who can take a expression at your work and give you some constructive feedback before you print or otherwise administer it. This tin be a coworker, your boss, a friend outside your company, even your spouse. When you compose about a subject you pass your years immersed in, sometimes you bury that footing or conceptions that are clear to you might necessitate further explaining to person else, and your ally can convey these to your attention. He or she can also flag parts of your work that are confusing or alert you to a tone of voice of voice you didn't recognize you were using.
Proofread. Check your work. Slowly. Then check up on it again. Then have got person else check up on it. It doesn't substance if you have got an Master in Business from Harvard University and a rack of salesmanship awards. Distributing work with misspelled words or other mistakes will harm your credibility. It's a mark of carelessness, and who desires to swear person who is careless? Your word processor's enchantment bank check helps, but it won't catch every error. Check it yourself. There's nothing worse than spotting a error after your authorship is distributed.
Whether you compose to sell, to inform, or to pull off others, your words should pass on clearly and effectively. Follow these seven stairway and maintain your authorship on topic, on task, and on target.
Labels: business writing, business writing service, communication, writer