10 Practical Tips to Improve Your Business Writing Skills

Writing is quite important when it comes to businesses. It is used for both internal communication within a company and for reaching out to clients and other business partners.

An important use case of business writing is content marketing, which is really effective for lead generation and conversion. Convincing your superiors through proposals and reports is another important use case.

This means that as a businessman, you have to be able to write well in order to effectively communicate and get your required results from other people.

If you are not confident in your own writing skills, then don’t worry. In this article, we will check out some tips that will help you improve your business writing skills.

10 Guidelines for Enhancing Business Writing Skills

These 10 tips will help you improve your writing skills and make you better at communication.

1. Research Your Audience

In business writing, your audience should be your focus. You need to know what kind of people they are, as that will help you write in a way that resonates with them.

You also need to keep the circumstances of your audience in mind. Let’s say you are going to propose a new plan or project. Typically, such a proposal is pitched to the executives. Now, executives are very busy people and they don’t have the time to read lengthy documents. That is why your writing should be very concise and to the point. 

If your audience is just another colleague and you want to delegate a task to them, then your tone should be friendly, and the length should be just long enough to cover all the details of the task.

When reaching out to clients, your writing should include their interests that somehow relate to your business. That way, you will be able to grab their attention.

The point is that your writing needs to cater to your audience so that they are able to engage with it better. 

2. Plan out What to Write

Knowing your audience is the first step, but after that comes the planning part. You should never start writing anything without properly planning it out. 

We already know that most people don’t have enough time to read lengthy emails or proposals. That’s why conciseness is very important. You should not add anything in your writing that is not strictly related to the core subject. 

Sometimes, you may have to add some details that are required for context but they aren’t directly related to the theme. In that case, you need to decide exactly how much you can discuss without making the text too long.

Such details are worked out in the planning phase, and you can even create an outline that helps you stick to the plan later on.

3. Learn To Write in a Clear and Straightforward Manner

We touched upon the importance of conciseness and keeping your writing to the point in the heading above, but you should know that writing in a clear manner is just as important.

If you are using confusing words, lengthy phrases, and advanced vocabulary, there is a high chance that your audience will not be able to understand your message. This is antithetical to the very purpose of business writing.

To avoid this kind of problem, you need to ensure that your articles, proposals, and plans are written in a clear and straightforward manner. This doesn’t mean that they have to be like that in the first draft. It is perfectly fine to rewrite any confusing parts later as well.

To rewrite article without changing its meaning, you can do a few things. The most straightforward method is to simply rewrite the content yourself while taking care to use simple wording. 

Another method to rewrite an article is going online and utilizing an automated method of rewriting. Typically, this takes the shape of an online tool that can modify some given text in a simpler manner.

You can rely on any method that you find easier to implement, as long as you make your text easy to understand.

4. Get Help from Online Resources

Nobody can deny the usefulness of the internet when it comes to providing resources for learning skills. 

There is no reason why you shouldn’t use online resources as they can help you out immensely. All it takes is a bit of web surfing to find the right places to learn from.

There are plenty of online courses that teach people business writing. You can find practice exercises, lectures, and even a community surrounding a particular course that can help you out.

You can even find tools or services that can help you write well.

5. Add CTAs that State What You Want from Your Audience

CTA stands for “Call to Action.” These are basically parts of your write-up that ask your audience to take a particular action.

Now, why do we need to add CTAs to our writing? That’s because when you write an email for correspondence or for pitching a proposal/plan, you are looking for a specific response from the recipient.

If the email is for asking a colleague to do a task, then you need to add a CTA that clearly states what task the colleague needs to do and when to do it. 

In a proposal or a business plan that is pitched to your superiors, you want to add a CTA that asks them to provide the relevant resources that are required for the contemplated project.

If your audience doesn’t know what you want from them, they won’t be able to take the required actions. By adding CTAs, you can tell them what you need them to do. This removes confusion and makes your audience more likely to take that action as well.

6. Edit Your Work

Editing is your greatest friend when it comes to improving your write-ups. You should know that anyone can make mistakes. It is a natural part of being human. But that doesn’t mean that you should leave them there. 

By proofreading and editing your work, you can find many mistakes that you accidentally committed during the writing process. Sometimes, you can even find issues that are not grammatical in nature, such as plagiarism.

To check for plagiarism, online plagiarism-detecting tools can be a great solution. They can quickly and efficiently find duplication in your work, and provide you with an accurate percentage of the same.

This is necessary as plagiarized writing is not acceptable anywhere in the world. Since most plagiarism checkers are free, it is not difficult to make sure that your business writing doesn’t have any duplication in it. 

7. Get Your Work Proofread by Others

Proofreading by yourself is not enough sometimes. That’s because our brain is wired to ignore the mistakes that we make ourselves. So, sometimes you may overlook things even during a proofreading session.

To solve this problem, you can get other people such as your colleagues, or a professional editor to check your work. People are naturally more perceptive when it comes to finding mistakes in another person’s work.

By getting others to proofread your work, you will be able to identify problems like difficult passages, confusing explanations, and grammar errors. 

If you get an editor to do your proofreading, they will also be able to guide you on how to avoid the mistakes as well.

8. Read Other People’s Work for Learning

Before you begin writing for any purpose, you should first do some research and find out if other works similar to it have been written. 

If the answer is yes, then you should read them to get a feel for how you should structure your write-up, what kind of tone you should use, and the general word choices that you should opt for.

Apart from that, you should also check the type of information that was provided so that you can write something along the same lines. 

You can get some much-needed information about how much you should write, and what should you emphasize, just by reading the works of other people.

9. Always Maintain Professionalism

In business writing, you cannot use colloquial terms, slang, and any other kind of unprofessional wording. 

Maintaining propriety in a professional environment is a necessity and it should be enforced even in your writing. Just think for a second…would your boss like to see some “hip” and “cool” wording in a project proposal? The obvious answer is “no.” In fact, you could even lose some respect in their eyes.

Another aspect of professionalism is to never let any kind of bias seep into your work. If you have to write a report on something that you do not personally like, then using wording and phrasing to paint it in a bad light is very unprofessional.

So, always maintain neutrality, and give an unbiased opinion in your writings.

10. Always Fact-Check Your Information

Fact-checking is an important aspect of business writing. If the information that you provide in your work is not accurate, it will reflect badly upon your credibility.

This can hurt your chances of getting promotions and better opportunities in your workplace. 

If you don’t fact-check any proposals and plans, then they will not be entertained by your superiors as well. That’s because proposals and plans need to cover how many different types of costs and project how much revenue could be made on these investments.

If these figures are wrong, then the proposal/plan will not be accepted. So, if you want your work to be accepted, provide the most accurate data that you can.

Conclusion

Business writing is an important aspect of working in a corporate environment. Having good communication skills can lead to better opportunities and getting various other benefits. That is why improving your business writing skills is very important.

With the 10 tips we have discussed in this post, you can begin working on improving your writing skills. With time and practice, you will become an expert at business writing.