The Business Writing Course

Plan audience-centered business writing with pre-writing analysis, task estimation, and time management using Gantt charts or tables to meet deadlines.

Start with your reader by identifying their expectations and tailoring tone, length, and content to meet each department's needs.

Define a clear goal for every workplace document by choosing one aim—inform, persuade, instruct, or record—and tailor content to guide the reader's understanding, behavior, or actions.

Define your key message and outline major points before drafting. Use the 5 W's and 1 H to brainstorm and organize with headings for a focused, logical flow.

Choose the right writing style by assessing your audience and context—internal or external—and balance colloquial, casual, and formal tones to ensure clarity and professionalism in business communications.

Project a tone and persona that readers trust by using factual, collegial, respectful, and friendly language in business emails and proposals, avoiding condescension and jargon.

Learn to guide your reader from departure to destination by crafting paragraphs that combine topic sentences, supporting sentences, and concluding sentences, with transitions that link ideas.

Learn to strengthen business writing by replacing fancy, multisyllabic words with plain, concise language that improves clarity and reader understanding, using practical examples from scientific reports.

Energize your business writing with strong verbs, replacing weak verbs and adverbs, and eliminating nouns that are verbs in disguise to achieve concise, precise communication.

Keep related words together to prevent ambiguity and improve clarity in business writing, by placing related phrases closer and avoiding misplaced modifiers and relative pronouns.

Be specific in business writing by using precise subject lines, verbs, numbers, times, and nouns suited to your audience. Know the general, more specific, and exact levels.

Be concrete in business writing by replacing abstract nouns with concrete nouns, boosting clarity with tangible examples like Harvard University and one more widget per hour.

Avoid ambiguity in business writing by arranging words clearly, choosing precise terms, using proper punctuation, and clarifying pronouns; learn why ambiguous recommendations undermine trust and efficiency.

Understand how the active voice creates direct, concise, and definite business writing. Avoid the passive voice, which sounds patronizing or dishonest, unless the subject is unknown or unimportant.

Improve business writing by avoiding five common sentence mistakes: maintain a single tense, use parallel structure, prevent run-on sentences, ensure correct participle reference, and avoid double negatives.

Eliminate six clarity killers—buzzwords, jargon, initialisms, abbreviations, acronyms, and clichés—to sharpen business writing and ensure your meaning is clear.

Master five steps to effective business emails by keeping messages brief (100–200 words), crafting specific subject lines, placing key requests at the start, and maintaining a professional yet approachable tone.