Business Writing Skills

I attended a professional development conference today. While some of the recommendations were very good, they were drowned by jargon.
Let’s discuss this offline some more. You should talk about that offline. That’s an offline conversation. (A variation of this was stated seven times in one hour. Ugh.)
We were all physically gathered together, so the discussion [...]

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Redundancy is very common in business writing. Trim bloat by omitting modifying words that merely echo the primary word. There is no need to repeat yourself:

Replace: free gift with gift (if it’s not free, it’s not a gift)
Replace: basic fundamentals with fundamentals
Replace: absolutely necessary with necessary
Replace: forward planning with planning
Replace: after the conclusion with conclusion
Replace: [...]

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Net Insight developed a fun and clever tool which illustrates the meaningless business-speak that is so often used in a corporate mission statement.

Click on the “play” button in this Corporate Mission Statement Generator, and watch business jargon phrases spin randomly into an automatically created statement.
I ran the generator twice, and received these results, full of [...]

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Bestselling authors and management consultants Tom Peters and Seth Godin spoke about the importance of decency and grace in business and business communication at the American Express Open Business Forum.
Peters was  eloquent when he stated he was “deeply in love with the word decency.”
I so agree with him when he stated, “the business place should [...]

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Recent college graduates often struggle with the difference between academic and business writing.
The University of Houston’s Academic Center recently published a good article that delineated key differences:

Writing at work focuses on problem solving.
Work-related writing targets multiple audiences with different perspectives.
Writing at work may be read by unknown readers.
Writing produced at work can be used indefinitely [...]

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Clare Lynch of DAC Creative commented wisely on my last post that improving one’s vocabulary is laudable, but not with the intent of peppering our business writing with complicated words.
I’ve long admired Richard Lederer’s writing on language. In his 1991 book, The Miracle of Language, Lederer sings the praises of the short word:
When you speak [...]

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Business writers are buried in information: email, web searches, reports, telephone conversations, television, text messages, and news updates wash over a business person throughout the workday.
And yet, overwritten, bloated business writing is epidemic. Business writers need to streamline narrative, so it is concise and lively, for readers suffering from information overload to absorb.
Hemingway once wrote [...]

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