Business Writing

In my last post I talked about pre-writing—two stages of the writing process that involve thinking up your ideas and deciding on the structure. Spending time on these steps will help you write. You won’t need to worry about thinking up ideas at the same time as you are worrying about whether something should be in a new paragraph. Your idea thinking is done.

I use a process when I write. It has three steps. In this post we’ll explore the first steps –
pre-writing.

Have you ever received an email asking you to attend a meeting, but it didn’t provide all the information? It’s frustrating, and involves extra work for everyone as you check and ask for the missing data.

Previously I’ve emphasised how important it is for us to be clear in our emails. While we can control our own writing, we can’t always guarantee that the other person is going to be clear too.

Do you participate in any online forums? If you’re doing any online study, it’s likely that you do. Or you may participate in an online networking group. Just as there are ‘rules’ for emailing, there are ‘rules’ for posting on these forums.

Continuing on our theme of wordiness, it seems to be a problem that many of my blog readers recognise.

In my last tip I talked about some common causes of wordiness and how to fix them.

I’ve been reading some academic and business writing lately. It’s been frustrating, mainly because many writers use unnecessary words.
Do you use more words than you need to?

Last time we looked at using ‘much’ with uncountable nouns and ‘many’ with countable nouns.

The words “much” and “many” regularly cause problems for non-native English speakers. They even cause problems for native speakers.