Business Writing

Brainstorm first to make your business writing more concise and professional

Business Writing needs to be creative and well written just like other writing. In fact, poor writing in business can have a disastrous impact on your company's reputation. Business writing needs to be clear, concise and error-free. Brainstorm to be sure you have all the keywords and ideas organized for understanding and completeness. When a prospect or customer receives a document that is well written, their impression of you and your company is reinforced. Business majors have not always studied writing in school nor seen themselves as proficient writers. Some of the ideas below may help get you past "business writer's block."

How clear and concise was your last business proposal or letter?

Look at some proposals, letters and emails that you have written lately and be honest with yourself about the quality of writing. If it could use some improvement, here are some ways to approach your next writing effort. Brainstorm about the purpose of the document. A clear purpose helps you focus your writing and makes the result easier to read and understand.

Use either mind-mapping or clustering to get down all the key ideas and keywords first in a flowing natural way and then organized by sub-topics. Clustering is more free form letting your mind guide your hand to jot down all associations and connections to the main topic. Then using those keywords you can write a concise and organized document. A great book on the topic is Writing the Natural Way, by Gabriele Rico

If you feel a more structured method fits better, you can use mind-mapping. With mind-mapping you organize as you go by choosing the appropriate topics and subtopics, adding keywords based on the topics. There are lots of mind-mapping hints, ideas, and tools on the page on mind-mapping. If your document is to be short, a quick hand drawn mind-map is best. If you are going to do an extensive document such as a proposal, and especially if you are collaborating on the project, you may prefer an online version of mind-mapping that can be saved, updated, and shared. There are many mind-mapping software programs available.

Email has become a wasteland filled with poor grammar, misspellings, other typos, abbreviations, emoticons and other unbusinesslike shortcuts and carelessness. Here, too, a few moments of brainstorming your purpose and key ideas before writing, and sticking to the result, will make your emails effective and to the point.

If you are developing a presentation, you might find screen writing methods and tools helpful. Take a look at brainstorming specifically for screen writing. It's a guide to screenwriting software, books andsupplies on the net. Reviews, resources,retailers, articles and more.

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