Business Writing

Following last week’s tip about redundancy I thought it might be useful to provide a list that includes some more, commonly-used, redundant expressions.

Have you noticed that when we’re speaking, whether we are giving a presentation or carrying on a conversation, we often repeat ourselves, using different words. We say things a number of times in different ways. Like I’ve just done. When we say the same things in different ways we call it ‘redundancy’.

Do you know there are over 100 prepositions in English? This means there’s plenty of scope to get them wrong.

In this post we’ll look more closely at two of the determiners—some and any. These two words, which can be used with both countable and uncountable nouns, express an indefinite quantity or number.

I was thinking today about the differences between writing and speaking. In emails we often write informally, as though we are speaking to the person. Emails are seen as an informal communication method in most instances, and writing as we speak is usually okay—although if you’re writing to a boss or a client, you may want to be more formal in your writing.

When you look up ‘expletive’ in a dictionary you will find at least two definitions. In this post I’m not talking about the definition that includes swearing and profanity. Of course swearing and profanity don’t belong in business writing so it would serve you well, and may possibly save your career, to avoid using them.