[guitar music] Hi, everyone! Welcome to Effective
Business Writing. This workshop is developed to help you become more
effective business writers as a student, current, or future employers. This
presentation is created by the Writing, Reading, Speech Assistance located in the
Learning Commons at College of DuPage. So, before we start, there are a few things
we should ask ourselves to get a better understanding of business writing. First
of all, why do we do it? Why is business writing so important? Well, in my opinion,
in any professional or academic setting, you are always being evaluated on
whether you can communicate effectively. Effective communication skills and
writing show a few things to your employers or to your instructors. First,
it shows that you are articulate (able to express your thoughts clearly), that you
are (organized able to develop a thought-out argument), and competent (able
to demonstrate logic and reason). Second, we should consider: when do we use it? A
lot of people may give specific examples to when professional business writing is
used, but I think business writing is used every day. In fact, the steps we take
to write a business draft or a business writing draft is the same when we are
writing an email to an instructor or write up a report at work, a personal
statement to transfer to a four-year university, or a follow-up to a job
employer after an interview. So as you can see, business writing is used in many
different ways that we didn't realize, and a lot of us probably realize that
we're conducting business writing even now as students at College of DuPage or
at any point in your employment at a job. So, for the purposes of this workshop, we
will focus on three main business writing forms: first, emails. An email can
be either a follow-up to a report, a request to a superior, or serve a
completely different purpose--as you know, there are many emails and types of
emails out there. Second, letters, which can come in a form of a cover letter,
external letters to a client or prospective client, or a business-wide
address. Finally, a report can be many things; a few examples are: serving as a
detailed summary of report or analysis, or something as
simple as a basic meeting overview where you are responsible for taking notes for
that meeting. When writing in a professional setting, you should always
consider three components, two of which should be considered before you start to
write. First one is audience, knowing who you are writing to; purpose, what and why
you are communicating; and clarity-- are you being clear and concise? These three
considerations are important to think about as you start to draft your writing.
It will help you to stay more organized and focused, not to mention you should
always be checking throughout your writing to ensure that you are
addressing these components, especially audience and purpose. Clarity is also
something you can develop or take a look at after you have completed the writing,
which I will show you later on in this workshop. So first, we will discuss
audience. "Audience" seems very general; there's a lot of things people might
think you need to consider for audience, but it's easy to determine your audience
when you break it down simply. First, consider: is your audience member and
internal or external member of your company? In other words, is your audience
within your company, school, organization, corporation, or is it an outside member?
If it is internal (or as in someone who works within your company or
organization), you should break down your audience member a little further: are
they a subordinate, someone who reports to you? A co-worker who has a similar or
equal position to you? Or a superior, someone you report to? Once you've
determined that, you should also think about, is the audience member or members
a team or group you were writing to, or is it a specific individual? Even if the
specific business writing is intended for an individual, remember that writing
has the potential to be circulated, forwarded, or shared within the company,
so ensure that not only is the writing appropriate, but you are okay with it
being seen from many different people within your company.
If your audience member is external, you should consider a few things. Consider:
are they a vendor or consultant, as in someone who works for you, or are they a
prospective or an existing client? Determining your audience for this will
help determine how to approach your writing. For example, how you write to a
prospective client may be quite different than how you write to an
existing client. For a prospective client, it may provide a lot more information
about your company to give them a little bit of an introduction about what your
company does and who you are, and it might be a little bit more formal. If you
are working with an existing client where you've established a close
professional relationship, it might be a little bit more casual; you might end an
email with "thanks" rather than "thank you" or "See you at our next meeting" compared
to "I look forward to speaking with you." These are some distinctions that might
occur when you start to think about how to address a prospective versus an
existing client. When addressing your audience member, you must always
contemplate: why does my audience care about what I'm
writing? What do they need to know? Always think "WIFM," which stands for
"what's in it for me?" The catch here is, the "me" is not you, the person who is
writing. Always try to think about your writing from the perspective of the
person who will be reading it; what is in it for your audience member? You never
want to have an audience member read your writing and think at the end of it,
"So what?" You never want them to think, "What do I need to do with this?" or "Why
was this written to me?" Everything needs to be clear and concise, and that starts
with considering what your audience member needs to know and why it's being
directed to them. Let's practice this. First, let's think about how would you
write to a superior versus a colleague versus a subordinate. What vocabulary and
verbs would you include for the specific audience? An example that some may
encounter when writing to an, a superior--if yours is like mine, they may
respect enthusiasm and not like the word "problem," so instead
of "problem," we can use words such as the "opportunity for improvement." It can be a
"challenge for success." "Problem" has such a negative connotation that oftentimes, our
bosses don't want to hear that. Another example is, if you are working in
community outreach and you are work-- talking to a superior or even someone
within the realm similar to you, you may want to use keywords such as "inspire,"
"collaborate," "unite." These are words that superiors or even colleagues might
appreciate as trying to motivate or instill change within a community. Going
back to the scenario of how you would write your superior versus colleague
versus subordinate, we might simplify that a little bit and think about if you
are writing to a colleague, you might say "Here are our next steps" compared to
writing to someone who reports to you, you might say, "What are your next steps?"
And then when you're talking to your superior, you might state, "Here are my
next steps." Do you notice that distinction? It's all about the
perspective of who you're writing to. Next, we will discuss purpose. Before you
start writing, you must always consider why you are writing. This may seem so
simple that it falls at the wayside but is equally as important to consider and
take the time to think about. It's as simple as considering, is your purpose to
argue, persuade, inquire, propose, request, explain, announce, follow-up, thank?
Considering this already starts to focus your writing, and it's very important
because a simple word or a simple purpose will help to give direction to
your writing. Hopefully, it won't leave your audience thinking "So what?" Once you
have started to determine your purpose, think more about the following: what
information needs to be communicated? What important questions need
to be answered? And also, what vocabulary and verbs can I use to get my point
across? Let's practice this by combining both our purpose and audience: how would
you write a request to your boss to reschedule a meeting?
Say, for example, you needed that meeting rescheduled so you had more time to
prepare materials that you wanted to provide your boss or more time to
practice a presentation that was given to not only your boss but other
superiors. How would you get this information across? First, "what
information needs to be communicated?" is the first thing we should consider. I
would think you would first of all need to communicate that you want the
meeting to be rescheduled for a specific reason. Now, if you were that audience
member, meaning if you were your boss reading this letter or email, they would
want to know, why does it need to be sche--rescheduled and how about when
and where? So, these are three important questions that you need to make sure you
are getting across immediately in your email. And finally, what vocabulary and
verbs can I use to get my point across? Well, you can use words similar to your
purpose: if your purpose is to request, you can also use that as a verb and say,
"I would like to request a reschedule to the meeting." Words that are appropriate
to your specific purpose. Next, think about how would you write to inquire
about an ad to an external marketing manager? A lot of these things will be
situational. For example, if you were to ask about the ad, what about it are you
inquiring about? Which specific ad are we talking about? Now, if this is an external
marketing manager, you might need to spend some time talking about who you
are and what your company is and why you're asking about this. Seeing this,
kind of the bare-bone structure, "inquire about an ad to an external marking
marketing manager," helps you to kind of brainstorm the types of things that will
need to go into that email, letter, report, etc. Finally, we need to consider clarity. So, are you being clear and concise in your
writing? Oftentimes, we will save this to the end and use this to evaluate or edit
our writing. Now, I know there's a lot of things that need to be considered in
order to be clear and concise, so hopefully, I can break it down a little
bit more for you so you know the type of check points or the, the checklist you
need to look at when you're starting to edit your writing. First, when practicing
clear and concise writing, it is important to get to the point immediately. State
your purpose, which is what we just discussed how to distinguish, and then
immediately address the supporting detail. Your supporting detail will be
the five W's: who, what, where, when, why and also how. All these will be required for
your writing. A good check for this is, once you have your writing, go through
even with a highlighter or mental check and see if you've addressed all
those questions. If you have a lot of extra detail, you most likely will not
need that, and it can be removed. You need only the questions and details
that will be relevant to your specific audience member. Once you have your
purpose stated with your supporting detail, you will end with your call to
action. Your call to action can be as simple as who is expected to do what by
when. So, let me repeat that: you will start with your purpose; your first sentence
will be exactly the reason why you are writing to that audience member. You will
then go into your supporting detail answering who, what, where, when, why, and
how, and any other detail can be eliminated. And finally, you will end with
a call to action, something along the lines of "who is expected to do what by
when?" Now, visually, this should be all digestible information. What I mean by
that is, someone who takes a look at this email or letter can see that one, it is
easy to read, and they will be able to refer to a specific
point in that writing without getting lost. I have an example on the following
slide. The first example I have is an email that is pretty long. You can tell
it's a block or one paragraph of a lot of information ending with a couple
lines with their name. This is not an example of good, digestible information.
If I want to find where page 8 is, I'm gonna have to scour through sentences
and sentences til I finally find it four sentences later. An example of an
email that is digestible and that your audience member can read with ease is
this one. As you can see, we broke up the block paragraph so it has more space, it
has bullet points so I can find on bullet 2 page 8 is what I need to pay
close attention to; not only that, all three of those page call-outs are bolded
so my eye goes directly to them, and it's just more aesthetically pleasing and
much more easy to read and digest. You have to consider a lot of times that the
person you are writing to, your audience member, may not have a lot of time. As
you're busy, so is this audience member. If they can't understand what you are
writing right away and understand the purpose, chances are, it will get lost in
their inbox or lost in a stack of papers on their desk and never seen again. Now,
let's practice how to write clear and concise. Once you know generally the
structure of your business writing in order to write clear and concise, you
should then take a look at your individual sentences and see, is each
sentence saying in a clear and concise way exactly what I want it? In order to
evaluate that, there are a few checks you can look at that involve grammar,
mechanics, punctuation that will help you to distinguish when you are not writing
too clear or concise. An example first is learning how to avoid adjectives and
adverbs. "I anxiously your decision." This first
sentence has an adverb that we may not need. "I await your decision" is very
direct and easy to say. You can also change it to something simpler: "I look
forward to your decision." The second sentence: "I would like to suggest a
slight revision to your proposal." As you notice, that is a long sentence, kind of
breathy, and hard to speak out. I know what it is saying, but I know it can be
said in a lot simpler of terms if we get rid of an adjective and then break it
down a little bit into simpler terms. "Here is a revision to your proposal." Next,
use active and power verbs when you are writing to your audience member. This
first example is passive voice: "The proper process is to be executed when
editing manuscript." Keep in mind, passive voice often uses the verbs "to be" and
usually, it is an inanimate object doing an action. "The proper process" is a thing
but is not someone who can do an action, and as you notice, we also have "is to be"
as our verb of this sentence. Let's change it to active voice--something
along the lines of, "Use the proper process when editing a manuscript," which
is a request for someone to do that rather than the process to be doing
something or doing the action within a sentence. The second sentence: "I got their
attention with our new advertisement." Now, there's nothing horribly wrong with the
sentence. It's clear, direct, and arguably to the point. However, verbs like "got," "have,"
"take" are weak and oftentimes considered lazy, as there can be a verb that better
describes the purpose of that sentence. Instead of "I got their attention with
our new advertisement," let's try, "I captivated their attention with our new
advertisement." See how that now becomes a power verb, something that has
a positive connotation, something that's a little bit more uplifting, exciting,
inspiring--better than "got." Next, avoid generalities. The first sentence: "The
conference took place in our training room. It was well prepared." Now, nothing
wrong with this. Oftentimes, we will not see there's an error in this example...except, what does "it" stand for? We have our second sentence in this example, "It
was well prepared." Is "it" referring to the conference that was well prepared, or our
training room that was well prepared for the conference? To avoid this type of
confusion over making general statements, let's try, "The conference took place in
our training room and was well prepared." Now, we have no confusion as to what was
well prepared--it was the conference. The second example: "It was a good
presentation with a very good speaker." Now, "good" is also similar to our weak
verbs; it's also a weak adjective. It also can be very general. What is good?
"Good" can often mean a good or a positive thing, or good can also mean--be similar
to "fair," which means it was average but not...horrible. So, to avoid something like
this, an, an example for revision is, "The presentation was informative and led by
an engaging speaker." Now, avoid jargon and cliches. Jargon is something--for any of those who are unaware--is the type of language or rhetoric we use within a
company. It's phrases, words that a company may understand the meaning behind, but
outside companies may not. Um, and cliches are just general phrases that we use
rather than thinking a little bit more about what we're trying to say. An example: "We'll connect later regarding the interview." "Connect": kind of general,
also borderline cliche, but it also does not tell us how we are going to connect.
Are we going to connect via phone, face-to-face, in a meeting? We can clear up
that confusion by being concise and clear and stating, "We will schedule a
meeting to discuss the interview." Second example: "You are pushing the envelope
with that client." That is a pretty common cliche that we hear around the office;
"pushing the envelope," sometimes, though, can mean different things. Does that mean
we commend you for taking the initiative and going above and beyond what you
would with the client, or is it saying you are taking a risk with that client?
To avoid that confusion, we say, "You are taking a large risk by signing that
client." Make sure to be specific with what you are talking about. Finally, "Make
sure to keep your supervisor in the loop." "In the loop" is a cliche that we want to
avoid using as well; instead, say, "Make sure to keep your supervisor updated on
your progress." See how that gives much more specific information about your
plan of action. Next, take a look at your writing and look at common grammar
mistakes that might exist in your writing. The first one being "me" versus
"myself." "Me" versus "myself" is oftentimes hard to catch because we may not know
how to best use "myself." I think a lot of the time in business writing, we think
"myself" sounds a little bit more professional and formal, so we put it in
a sentence even when it should be "me." This example: "The document needs to be
signed by both Jeff and me." The correct answer is "me." "Me" always serves as the
object of your sentence. "Myself" can be used
if someone is already doing something at the beginning of the sentence, our
subject is acting, and there is no object. An example of this is, "I signed the
documents myself." As you notice, there is no object needed following our verb; we
already have our subject who's doing the action, and that's why "myself" can be used
at the end. When we are talking about people or things that are doing actions
or being acted upon at the end of a sentence, that is when we need "me." Similar
to this example: "The document needs to be signed by Jeff and me." Two people. "Myself"
can never be used instead of a person or their name. "Affect" versus "effect." "Affect"
is a verb; we use it as a verb in the sentence. "Effect" is when we use that as
an adjective or a noun. It is important to understand the difference between
"effect" and "affect." "Effect" is often used as a noun. "The effect of global warming
is catastrophic." The "effect" in this sentence is a noun. "Affect" is your verb:
"Global warming was affected by human causes." "Affect" is your verb. So, as you can
tell, in this example, we need a verb: "The entire corporation was affected by their
most recent layoff." Finally, another common grammar mistake is the apostrophe-s ('s) vs s-apostrophe (s'). When we do s-apostrophe, that means we're referring to
more than one person. When it is apostrophe-s, it means we're referring to
one individual. Depending on whether you are talking about your boss or bosses,
this, this sentence might go a little bit differently, but if we're talking about
one individual boss, it is, "It was developed at my boss (apostrophe-s)
suggestion." Okay, so we've reached the end of the workshop, and in hopes to apply everything you've learned, we have provided you with an example of an email.
This was written by a student hoping to schedule an appointment with an advisor
at a four-year university. The student wants to know more about who they can
get in contact with to discuss this career change, if they would be suited
for a specific program, and how to go about that. First, consider: is a student
addressing his or her particular audience? Is his or her purpose clearly
stated? Do we know what the student wants from this email? And third, is it written
in a clear and concise way that we know what the student wants? The next email
provided is a revised email. Keep in mind, there is no one correct way to write an
email, and there's many different preferences and styles that go into how
we write, but for the purpose of providing an example, this is the one we
suggest. As you can see, we have changed "Dear College Admissions" to stating a
specific college. The first sen-- sentence, the student states the specific
college they want to transfer to rather than just saying "I would like to go to
any four-year university." The next few sentences of the paragraph, the student
tries to make their request more concise, clear, and to-the-point by also
addressing any questions that the admissions may have first of all. When
are they going to be on campus, why are they going to be on campus, and what they
want to do. As you can tell, those are addressed now more clearly.
The second paragraph, the student gives a little bit more information and insight
into them to give the Admissions more information on how they can best help
the student. The student wants to go into their business and marketing
program and learn more about that and how will help them become a data analyst.
Giving specifics like this now gives the Admissions more information on how and
or who they can reach out to for the student. And then the student continues
to end the email. More concise: instead of saying "I anxiously await your response,"
we say "I look forward to." Instead of a more casual "Thanks," they add Thank you,"
and rather than just stating their first name, they state their first and last
name. Thank you for taking the time to watch this workshop on effective business writing. I hope it helped you to think more about what needs to be done when you start to write professionally. There's a lot of things to consider, but
with this, hopefully we gave you a checklist of the best things to first
think about and to evaluate when you have that writing completed. If you have
any questions or would like to see this workshop in person, you can come to the
Writing, Reading, Speech Assistance in the Learning Commons. We are also available
to help you with one-on-one appointments for 45 minutes durations and any
writing, reading and speech needs, and online appointments are available to you
as well. And if you would like to access more information about the Writing,
Reading, Speech Assistance, you can go to our College of DuPage website listed
under Academics in the Learning Commons tab. Thank you for watching the workshop,
and we hope you learned a thing or two about how to write effectively. Thank you! [guitar music]
