5 Helpful Tips to Improve Your Business Writing Skills

Effective business writing is more than just the ability to express yourself clearly. It’s about understanding your audience, remembering to use the appropriate tone and knowing when to use each part of speech.

Implementing the aforementioned goals to become an effective business writer is easier said than done. But we are here to help you with this blog post.

This blog post will share five helpful tips from expert content writers to help you polish your business writing skills.

A Brief Introduction to Business Writing

Business writing refers to written communication or a form that involves crafting documents for a professional setting or organization. The documents in business writing can be in the form of emails, memos, letters, reports, business plans, presentations, contracts, etc.

Generally, business writing aims to communicate, inform, or persuade internal (employees) and external (partners and customers) audiences. This way, the organization can build a goodwill relationship with internal and external audiences.

5 Business Writing Tips to Improve This Skill

1.    Learn to Get Straight to the Point

An ideal business document addresses its main talking point as soon as possible. Therefore, when it comes to writing business documents, you should implement the same strategy. But how can you do that?

Well, you can straightaway inform your readers with the required information by writing the content in a direct and clear manner. This way, your readers won’t have to hunt for the needed information. Let’s understand this through an example.

Suppose you want to inform your employees about a meeting. In such a case, your meeting note should look like this:

As you can see in the above picture, the highlighted sentence directly conveys the entire message of the note without any fluff content. So, to maintain the quality of your business writing, you should do the same.

2.    Stick to Brevity and Conciseness

As the previous tip indicates, the key to successful business writing is to be clear and direct while writing the content. So, to achieve this purpose, sticking with brief paragraphs is ideal. And how can you do that?

Well, you can use short sentences to make your paragraphs brief. And to use short sentences, you must learn the art of addressing the purpose of each sentence as soon as possible. (This is more or less what we discussed in the heading above.)

Anyhow, to keep your content concise, here are some tips that you can keep in mind:

1. Use active voice
2. Use descriptive words
3. Add full stops instead of joining clauses with commas (except where necessary)
4. Summarize longer bits while capturing their main concept

If you naturally cannot stick to brevity yourself, you can take some help from technology. When we say “technology”, we refer to using automated summarizing tools for the job.

A summarizing tool can shorten the content they are given and provide an output that encapsulates the main idea. You can use this functionality to your benefit by shortening lengthy paragraphs.

Let’s look at this with an example. We have taken a sample text containing fluff information.

Sample Text: Market research is an integral part of any business and can provide invaluable insights into consumer behavior, trends and preferences. Companies of all sizes can benefit from performing market research in order to understand their target market, identify and analyze opportunities and develop sound strategies for success. Market research can be conducted through surveys, focus groups, interviews and more, providing valuable data that can be used to inform decision-making, shape marketing efforts and more.

Now, we’ll run this sample text into any AI-based text summarizer tool.

Source: https://www.summarizer.org/

As you can see in the above pictures, the tool we used shrunk the input content to almost one-third of its length.

By using brief paragraphs and short sentences, the entire content will be easy-to-read and eventually easy to remember. This way, readers can easily focus on the main point instead of getting distracted by fluffs.

3.    Learn to Make Your Writing Compelling (Hint: Use CTAs!)

As we’ve discussed earlier, business writing involves several documents, such as emails, letters, reports, business plans and contracts. So, most business writing documents need a call to action (also known as CTA). Therefore, to improve your business writing skills, you must develop the art of writing natural CTAs.

A call-to-action (or CTA) is a piece of information that instructs and encourages a response from readers. It basically informs the readers what they should do, where they should go, etc.

However, let’s see how you can naturally incorporate a CTA in business writing through an example:

In the above picture, we have highlighted the parts where we have naturally added two CTAs. So, that’s how you can naturally incorporate the CTA in your business writing.

4.    Keep Your Writing Polite and Offer Courtesies

As mentioned in the beginning, it’s essential to write the content of business documents in a professional tone. And for that, you can take assistance from brief greetings while writing the content of business documents.

But besides using a professional writing style, it’s also necessary to keep your writing style polite. And for that, you can offer courtesies by writing ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ in business writing.

Now, let’s see the practical implementation of this trick in an example:

We’ve highlighted the usage of courtesy words in business writing. So, to improve the quality of business writing, you can implement the same tip in your case.

5.    Always Keep Your Business Write-Ups Clear and Readable

You can come up with a sophisticated business document with a lot of visuals and professional formatting, but it’s not going to be very effective if it’s not readable. You have to keep your business write-ups readable and clear.

For this, there are a lot of different things that you can do. For one, you can be careful about keeping your sentences short (which we discussed in the first heading). You can also try to avoid complex words and lower the usage of passive voice.

Another way in which you can increase the readability of your content is to paraphrase it once you’re done writing. You can basically look for any hard words and phrases that may be present, and then replace them with easier synonyms and alternatives.

You can also do this with the help of an online paraphrasing tool. These tools do the same job as a human writer i.e., they replace words with synonyms and alter the sentence structures to change the look of the text without disturbing its actual meaning.

Conclusion

Business writing is a skill that takes a lot of practice to develop. That’s because you must be clear, concise, and direct while writing content for a business document. But staying clear, concise, and straightforward doesn’t mean you should avoid a professional tone.

In fact, maintaining a professional writing tone is one of the most crucial aspects of business writing. But if you use an unprofessional writing style, this will destroy the essence of business writing.

As you improve, you will process a precious job skill. So, read the above-discussed tips and implement them practically to become an effective business writer.

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