If you work as a professional in any corporate capacity, you’ve probably heard of business writing skills as a popular buzzword in the office. Business writing refers to any form of writing intended for corporate correspondence. So whether you write white papers, business emails, reports, or any formal correspondence for B2B partners, you can safely call it business writing.
Developing business writing skills is just as much about practice as learning its principles. You don’t want to misrepresent your company or yourself by writing poorly worded documents or emails filled with formatting errors. Instead, you want to take a more calculated and thought-out approach to any texts you may be in charge of writing as a representative of your company. Here’s how you can work on your business writing skills and elevate your business copy’s quality in the readers’ eyes.
Benefits of Working on your Business Writing Skills
To learn more about business writing, you need to understand why these skills are so valuable for you as a professional. Their value goes beyond simply making you look more professional. You can add real benefit to your company and improve its reputation simply by becoming a better business writer. Here are a few perks of focusing on developing your writing skills.
- Communicate your Ideas More Clearly
Being a project manager can be difficult for many reasons, most notably, the need to communicate effectively. Your project team will always depend on your instructions, job delegation, and management for success. As an effective writer, you’ll be able to clearly and concisely communicate what needs to be done, how, and when. This will dramatically elevate the end quality of the projects you work on, leading to higher team satisfaction. In addition, as an effective communicator, you’ll become a more effective project manager and a team leader, especially if you work with your team remotely.
- Influence the Readers’ Decision-Making
Being a project manager will mean that you’ll often have to ask for more resources, tools, or workforce to work with. As a better writer, you’ll be able to argue for those things far more effectively with your managers and stakeholders. You’ll be able to explain why you need certain resources or tools in your project and how they’ll contribute to the project’s overall success. This will directly affect the decisions of your readers, whether you write in-house or B2B correspondence. Knowing how to argue for your points and come out on top is an amazing perk of learning how to use business writing skills to your benefit.
- Showcase your Knowledge and Expertise
Most importantly, developing your writing skills as a business person will lead to a better reputation among your peers. You will become known as the person who knows how to write great business letters, documents, emails, and other correspondence. This will make your colleagues and managers ask your professional opinion on business-related matters, even outside of writing. In addition, you can use grabmypaper.org to outsource some of your editing and formatting needs to an expert writer when you’re too busy. Finally, good business writing skills will showcase just how much of a specialist you are in your field, greatly expanding your career prospects.
Ways to Develop your Business Writing Skills
You can apply several techniques to your business writing skills to build upon the foundations you already have. Everyone is good at writing, whether it be short-form or long-form writing. Your task as a project manager is to recognize your writing style and play it to your advantage. Here’s how you can do that in several intuitive ways:
- Recognize the Main Types of Business Writing
There are four types of business writing commonly used in corporate correspondences. Different types of writing are necessary depending on what you are trying to accomplish with your copy. Knowing the difference between them will make or break your copy as a project manager – here’s how to differentiate them:
- Instructional Writing
Instructional writing is intended to communicate certain instructions or tasks to the reader. This type of writing is used in project briefs, memos, manuals, or project specifications. It can also delegate or split up work among your team members to make your project’s goals clearer to everyone.
- Informational Writing
Informational writing is meant to be informative and doesn’t take the form of orders or tasks to be done. This can help you create helpful guidelines, how-to documents, meeting agendas, and reports for your team. Informational documents are used as guideposts in project management and can be written anytime during project development.
- Persuasive Writing
Persuasive writing is typically used when pitching projects and offering sales to stakeholders. You can use persuasive writing in your emails, project proposals, PR statements, and various forms of sales documents. Persuasive writing isn’t used top-down and for project management purposes, only for bottom-up writing for your managers or clients.
- Transactional Writing
Transactional writing is somewhat confusing because transactions aren’t necessarily monetary – they can involve the exchange of data. Nevertheless, you can implement transactional writing in your corporate emails, B2B letters, invoices, letters, and other documents intended to share certain information. It can also be used in writing monetary-related documents for charging clients, requesting funds, or pitching prices to stakeholders.
- Tailor your Writing Style to the Audience
Beyond recognizing the different business writing styles, you’ll also need to tailor your approach to writing based on who you write for. Writing business letters or emails to clients or your project team will differ in tone, style, and formatting. You’ll always want to think about “who” will read your copy before writing it. This will help you focus your message and be more informative for your reader, who has different expectations from you as a project manager. Your team will want more information on how to proceed with the project, apply changes, and split up the workload, for example. A client might wish for a comprehensive report with data and demo files that will help illustrate your points. Using a different vocabulary, writing style, and approach to information delivery will be crucial to how persuasive your copy is.
- Always Be Concise in your Writing
A great way to be successful as a project manager is to communicate your messages concisely to all stakeholders. Avoid being wordy and instead, try to filter your thoughts into more cohesive business writing. A good way to do this is by writing a freestyle document with your thoughts and ideas on a blank piece of paper. Then, start restructuring your thoughts when you’ve included all the information you want to communicate on that paper. Which sentences are unnecessary and add nothing to your argument? How can you make your messages as simple and understandable as possible? Aim for concise writing instead of long-form content in all business writing types, and you’ll be a much better project manager for it.
- Use Facts and Findings to Persuade Readers
Business writing is all about objective and informative facts. What better way to tick both boxes than by using statistical data, findings, and publications to your advantage? As a project manager, you’ll often have to refer to certain data sets or publicly available information to make your point. Specific studies and academic resources can also make your point clearer. Using numbers, percentages, and certain types of visualized data can help your business writing considerably. This will add credibility and trust to your business writing, especially if you pitch projects or ask for more resources. Make sure that you only rely on truthful and verifiable information instead of embellishing information or misinforming the reader. When you’re caught in the act, your reputation as a project manager and business writer will suffer greatly.
- Make It a Habit to Proofread your Writing
It’s always a good rule to proofread your writing, whether it’s business writing or article writing for online publication. As a project manager, you’ll always want to dot your i’s so that nothing is left unsaid or uncertain. The same applies to business writing, from corporate emails to reports or project briefings. When you’re done writing, make it a habit to read your writing aloud and look for discrepancies. Next, proofread your writing by hand and use a reliable online tool to ensure that everything is in order. While it won’t necessarily lead to problems in understanding your writing, repeat proofreading errors can reflect poorly on your reputation. Finally, showcase how professional you are by always spellchecking and formatting your writing before sending it to the intended readers.
Business Writing Mistakes to Keep we’ve
We’ve looked at how you can develop better, more competent business writing as a project manager. Avoiding common writing mistakes is an important part of learning how to do something better; business writing inclHere’sHere’s what you should not do in your writing to be a better project manager or business writer overall:
- Being Overly Casual in your Business Writing
The odds are you’ll become familiar with your team over time. Working with the same stakeholders for some time will lead to you bonding over work-related topics and becoming more relaxed as a team. However, it doesn’t mean you should neglect the basic principles of business writing and revert to a more casual writing approach. Always write your business correspondence as if a neutral third party would someday reason. Don’t write casually, and maintain a sense of professionalism and objectivity throughout your business writing.
- Being Vague and Wordy at the Same Time
Business writing isn’t about how much you can say without saying anything – it’s about being direct and informative. Unfortunately, many project managers fall into the trap of adopting flowery language filled with niche abbreviations without focusing on what matters most. Your team, clients, and other stakeholders want clear instructions, reports, and requests from you. You don’t want to sift through and discern what you wanted to say in your several paragraphs-long emails. Instead, keep your copy short, on-point, and focused on a single goal you’re aiming for.
- Not Editing your Writing Before Sending It
We can often get carried away when writing emails or digital documents. This is why editing is a great way to amend any unnecessary sentences you might have written. Editing your business writing is an excellent way to keep things professional and keep your texts free o” any “train of t” ought” sentences you wrote accidentally. Again, this keeps your texts focused rather than disjointed and unclear. Assume that someone with no prior knowledge of who you are or how you write has to read your business writing – will they understand you? If not, edit, reformat and reread your copy; you’ve cleaned it up to a satisfying level.
In Summary
Business writing is what you will do most of the time as a project manager. You’ll need to communicate with your team, write reports, pitch ideas to managers and stakeholders, and otherwise write different emails and documents. Business writing is at the core of outstanding corporate leadership, regardless of whether you work on a small remote project or a sizeable multi-department venture.
Most people make a mistake when managing projects because they rely on their charisma for leadership. Won’t work most of the time and will lead to poor writing, which will look unprofessional and lower trust in the pr manager’s abilities. Avoid coming off as a pretender and acting like the professional you are. Instead, start developing your business writing skills and properly implementing them so that your projects and coworkers can benefit from your foresight.
