Business writing is becoming popular and many people are considering it as a money-making option.
Although there are thousands of people doing this kind of writing, very few are actually good at it because they lack the right skills and experience that gives business writers the extra edge.
For this reason, I will be sharing with you the most effective tips for business writing that will help you improve your skills and knowledge in the long term.
With that said, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Tips for Business Writing
Understand different types of business writing.
You should seek to know the different types of business writing and then master the ones you feel are good for you as well as the ones you are required to know for you to complete the work the client you are working with has offered you. The following brief list will help you familiarize yourself with some of them:
Emails
These are the most common type of business writing and are slowly replacing one on one communication in a lot of business interactions.
It’s significant that you present yourself professionally in emails when in business writing, to avoid providing messy messages to clients.
You should know how to properly salute and introduce yourself to ensure that there is respect between you and those you are addressing.
More greatly, proofread your work before you send it.
Memorandums
Also called memos, they are succinct messages sent to people to communicate your opinions on an issue.
You may compose a memo to show gratitude to someone for something that they have done well or keep them on tabs on a project.
Memos can be a bit complicated because they’re a bit casual than most types of business writing. However, you should ensure that you stay as proficient as possible. Also, a lot of practice will be very rewarding here.
Handbooks
These offer instructions to employees on how to do something. Their writing style isn’t something special or creative so you will be writing something pretty simple.
As a writer, you must elucidate all the necessary instructions so that even the most oblivious employee will understand what a company expects of them.
Reports
these describe a project or event in a business. When writing reports, the most vital part is learning how to write without being biased so, avoid saturating the report with your opinions because you don’t want to come off as amateurish.
Newsletters
Each company has a specific time when they release newsletters.
Some do it weekly, monthly, or yearly.
If given this project, you will be writing about projects that a company has finalized, important events that are coming up as well as about the employee of the month.
They are a bit informal so you can have a little fun with them as you write.
Press releases
This entails making an official announcement about the products or events that a company is about to inaugurate.
They are mostly published either online or in newspapers so you can adopt a journalistic approach when writing them.
Make sure that you stay professional when writing but with some companies, it’s not a requirement.
Proposals
You write these to give potential clients details on a product such as costs, benefits, and any other important information. Make sure that you have all the required facts needed because with proposals you cannot afford to present false information.
Know who your audience is
This helps you take a specific direction that your content will follow. You get to know what your reader is looking for and through that, you get a feel of what your content should look like.
The kind of tone, style, and vocabulary that you use should align with the topic as well as the audience, so make sure that your content effectively indicates this from start to finish.
Also, when it comes to headings, write them for the key sections of your work just so that they are well organized.
Come up with an outline
Here you create a list of the elements that you are going to address in your work. Basically, this step helps plan out your work so that you are not missing on anything important and also that your work is well organized.
Know the style and format that your article should have
As much as some clients might share with you how they want their work to look like, some will not, and so you can check their previous articles on their website to check on the style commonly used.
Consult as much as possible with the client and avoid working on any document from your perspective.
In other words, don’t do things from your head.
Check on your content
First things first, you have to thoroughly research your work to have the relevant information needed by your audience. You don’t want to look blunt to your clients neither do you want to provide false information.
Next, do not make the mistake of diverting from what you are supposed to be talking about. In business writing, each work serves a clear purpose so you want to avoid having your readers go in circles.
You have to go straight to the point with your work because none of your audience has the luxury of looking for information within your work.
The following tips can help make it easier for your readers to get the information they are looking for in your work easily;
~ Stick to the topic at hand.
~Use short words as much as possible.
~ Avoid coming off as ambiguous.
~Use a compelling tone to provide facts to your readers to enhance credibility in your work.
~ Make it easy for your readers to scan through your work by using bullet points, bold and italics, numbering, coloring as well as good headlines because they break down your work.
~ Don’t suffocate your readers with too many adverbs and adjectives.
~ Start writing the easier sections of your work and then progress to the difficult ones. This will help you flow naturally and make your writing task a lot easier.
Make use of the active voice
This helps in avoiding wordiness as well as enhancing clarity in your work. In this voice the subject performs the action for example, “Mary hit the car”.
Such a sentence is much easier to put across than a passive one that looks like, “The car was hit by Mary”.
Make sure that your readers can easily grasp what you are talking about without having to break a sweat.
Adopt a conversational tone as you deliver your content to your readers.
Avoid being too formal as you communicate to them because you want your content to have that personal touch.
Otherwise, unless a client wants you to write professionally, avoid being too serious.
Make your work as inviting as possible and a good way to do this is to pretend that you are talking directly to a customer so that you deliver perfectly for the rest of your readers.
Most importantly, convey your message confidently. This makes your audience more likely to act on whatever you are providing them and they could, for example, buy the products you are talking about.
Keep off the jargons
You want to ensure that even someone that doesn’t have enough knowledge of the business can read your work and learn a thing or two.
Thus you want to ditch business jargon such as “dynamism”, ” impactful”, “contextualize” and instead use simpler words that are meaningful.
Save templates for future use
Since there is a high possibility that you will be writing another memo, email, or letter you want to save your template to save time the next time you’re writing on the same.
However, make sure that you remember to change information such as address or name to avoid embarrassing typos.
Have a good conclusion
Make sure that you conclude well without repeating information word for word as well as introducing new information.
Keep it simple and straight to the point that indeed you are done writing on a specific topic.
Revise! revise! revise!
Now that you have finished putting together your ideas, it’s time to check for the errors that you made. This process should be thoroughly done to avoid confusing your readers with murky work.
Ensure that you check for any errors in the line of, spellings, grammar, and syntax and if you cannot do this alone, ask your friend to go through it just so they can point out to you what they feel is off or missing.
You can also make use of online spell checkers to polish up your work of any spelling and grammatical errors but use them with caution because in the case that you used the word “here” when you meant ”hear”, they will not alert you on such an error because the words are both correctly spelled. Therefore, it’s always wise to read your work again to correct such an error.
Read other business articles by better writers
The reason why this is important is that you get to see how you can improve your work and generally, you get to see the direction that you should take when writing certain business pieces.
Overall, it’s a great way to learn and you should embrace it if seeking to be a better writer in this niche.
Read books that can help you in business writing
This is also key and a book like, “Business Writing Tips” by Robert Bullard will help you cover 17 helpful topics for a business writer seeking to polish up their skills.
In the book, you get to discover the following writing tips;
~ How to write fast and easily
~ How to grab your readers’ attention
~ How to increase and improve the impact of crucial business communications such as blogs, press releases, reports, case studies as well as websites
~ How to persuade customers
~ Proofreading your work
~ How to master tone of voice and a whole lot of other writing content that you don’t want to miss.
The book is essential for a writer because the author himself has experience of 10 years in the field of writing so he is in a good position to provide you with what you need in this journey.
All in all, just look for a similar book that meets your needs, read and internalize it carefully and with no time, you will be a pro in business writing.
Keep practicing
Just like anything else in life we know that the more you practice something the better you get at it. Therefore, the more that you write business articles the more you will eventually write well. Try writing as many different business articles so that you are versatile and can write on any one of them.
You won’t get better just by sitting down so you have to invest in yourself by working hard to be better.
There you go!
These are the crucial tips to keep in mind and do lots of practice on, to become a competitive business writer.
Aim to understand and master each tip properly and most importantly, keep working on your writing to grow and improve every day.
I wish you all the best as you do that and also welcome any questions you might have on the topic, feel free to ask and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
