Fundamentals of Business Writing
There are some fundamentals of business writing that you should know and use to make sure your writing is a suitable standard.
No matter what type of business writing you’re doing these fundamentals will be useful. You can use them with all types of business writing such as:
- Business letter writing
- Business email writing
- Business memo writing
- Business report writing
- Business plan writing
- Business proposal writing
- Business contact writing
Of all the fundamentals of business writing the most important is to be clear and concise. Your aim in business writing is to convey information to someone else. To do this they need to be able to understand what you’ve written as easily as possible.
You might have to do international business writing where the reader isn’t a native English speaker so the clearer your writing is, the easier it’ll be for them to understand you. You should chose to use simple well known words and use sentence structures that aren’t too complex. Of course add some bigger words and complex structures in but don’t let them dominate the piece of writing. Use words that you’d use when talking to someone rather than a big complex word that you might only use in writing and never in conversation.
Another one of the important fundamentals of business writing is to use a fairly formal style and avoid informal language. This means that when you select words don’t use slang or language that might only be known to a small group of people. Also don’t use contractions: such as ‘don’t’, use the full phrase of ‘do not’.
As part of business writing one of the fundamentals you’ll have to deal with is when to use technical terms and when to use a less technical term. The business report that you’re writing will probably be read by other people with the same background knowledge as you, so they should know the technical terms you use. But too many technical terms can make a piece of writing disjointed and hard to read, so use them sparingly.
Another fundamental part of business writing is the use of concrete language and the active voice. Concrete language and words are stronger and represent a specific thing. They have a specific meaning that’ll be clear to the reader; so, use them as much as possible and avoid unclear words.
The active voice is the opposite of the passive voice that is used in scientific and academic writing. In the active voice the person doing something is as important as what they did. So use the active voice in business writing as you, or the person that did something, are as important as the thing that was done or achieved.
The final and most important of the fundamentals of business writing is to make sure that there aren’t any mistakes left. This can be done by proofreading the document. The English proofreading section as well as the business proofreading page offer help with this.
Proofreading is where you make sure that there aren’t mistakes left in the spelling or grammar of the business writing. This is very important as your business writing will be read by many important people and you need it to be perfect to make a good impression on them.
If you need professional help with your business writing you can use my proofreading service. Come to the contact me page to ask any question you might have or visit the Excellent Proofreading and Writing Facebook page.
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