Business Writing

Create and use templates

In the last tip I talked about using style guidelines to help make your documents look professional.

When you’re writing for business you have to think about two things: the content and the layout.

One of the best ways to increase your productivity, and to ensure a consistent look and feel, is to design and use templates for types of documents that you have to produce repeatedly.

A good template serves as a prompt to make sure you’ve included all the information you need. It also frees up your thinking so that you can focus on expressing your thoughts well.

You can develop templates for any regular writing job. Or you can often find templates on the web that you can adapt to your purposes.

Just some of the documents you can use templates for include:

  • Business plans
  • Project plans
  • Meeting reminders and calls for agenda items
  • Proposals and quotes
  • Sales letters
  • Newsletters
  • Approval letters
  • Reports
  • Meeting minutes

Remember that you can also set up email distribution lists to use when you regularly email the same people.

Rubriky