Business writing typically falls into one of four buckets: informational, instructional, transactional, and (every marketer's favorite) persuasive. And unlike in storytelling, where descriptive words help paint a vivid picture, the goal of effective business writing is to communicate clearly and concisely to ensure that your message is delivered. Join Rachel West and Wendy Simmons as they highlight the differences in writing styles and share 10 tips for better business writing. It's business time!
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we're chatting with Rachel West.
Hello, Rachel.
Hello, Wendy.
Are you ready to talk about business writing?
Oh, yes, I am.
We couldn't tell if this is gonna be like terribly boring or very helpful.
We're hoping the latter, of course, will do what we can.
You talked to us a couple episodes ago about storytelling and the arc of a telling a compelling story and the parts and pieces and how to get those messages across.
And now we're gonna go to the other end of the spectrum here and say, what about when you just need to be efficient in your communication and get what you need from people?
Also, can we just together like seeing it's business time?
Because we definitely want that in here.
So this brings us into some tips and tricks for the types of professional communications where your clear and concise language is key.
There are instances where you're.
Your message should be understood clearly when read quickly.
The message should be well planned, yes, strategic, simple, clear, and to the point.
Rachel, do you have buckets for these different types of communication, business writing, or how do you categorize those?
I do.
There are four main types of business writing communications.
The first one is instructional business writing.
And an example of instructional business writing, it's kind of exactly how it sounds.
You're conveying information and instructing someone on how to do something, how to accomplish a process, or what to adhere to for a maintenance manual.
You can even, you know, you see instructional business writing with your IKEA furniture.
Oh, yes.
So fun.
Oh, gosh.
Constructing an IKEA bed is just...
If you've ever built a kitchen from IKEA, you'll never want to do it again.
Oh, I can't even imagine.
Or a whole office.
Oh, I've done both.
Oof.
But you're right.
You have to be clear, and you follow those instructions in the order because a little variation or a comma in the wrong place will mess you up big time.
So true.
The next type of business writing is informational business writing.
And an example of this, again, you're conveying information and you're not necessarily eliciting a response with informational business writing such as report writing or publishing a white paper.
You want to be really specific and targeted with your content.
You know your audience and you want to provide the main messaging and convey information on a topic.
This is where your technical writing, and this is where it shows up most often as informational is this technical writing.
And it's important to be very precise.
It could almost even be contractual, so you need to watch your words, watch your language very carefully in this type of writing.
The next type of business writing is transactional business writing.
Yeah, transactional where you need a response from someone.
It's going to be pretty brief.
You're respecting their time and you need their answer and you want them to be clear responding back to you.
Exactly, that's a great point.
You really want to be clear and succinct in your messaging.
Ooh, and persuasive.
Persuasive is a spot we live in all the time as marketers and we kind of lean on that most often, but it's an important category of these four.
This is my absolute favorite type of business writing because it gets a little bit creative and you have an opportunity to be really strategic in your ability to persuade someone of something's value.
In our work, this comes into play so frequently when we're working with clients on proposals and we're aiming to really highlight the differentiators and drive home the value that this architecture firm or interior designer or builder would bring to this new project.
So a few weeks ago, we talked about stories and we talked about how stories can be these really powerful mechanisms for conveying complex ideas in a way that people remember.
Today, we're talking about business writing.
This brings us into some tips and tricks for the professional communications where, again, the clear, concise language is key to success.
Yeah, Rachel, you put together a pretty long list of these topics we could kind of run through, and I'm sure I'll have some examples or maybe a few questions as we go through it.
Do you just want to hit your list?
Strategy is key here.
Start your business writing by understanding what your goal is and who your audience is.
Remember, guys, this is results-oriented writing that we're doing here.
The text is conveying information, of course, but it's also tailored to a very specific audience.
Right.
We're talking about email communication or maybe even more formal communication that could be in a letter or something related to a proposal, right?
That's kind of where you find the business writing most often.
Exactly.
And when you're thinking, I mean, we always, as marketers, think who's your target audience, what's your strategy?
We use those same terms for business writing, but with a different take on those items.
Who's your audience, you know?
Are you speaking to a technical audience?
Are you speaking to a non-technical audience?
And you need to convey some information, but with better definition of what you're asking for, you know, sharing in that way.
So just understanding that your expertise may come at a certain level and who are you speaking to?
You don't want to just, you know, miss the target totally by not being clear on what your message is or just being over their head or maybe even too little information.
That's something to consider.
Another tip for business writing is that you want to ensure that you're really clear in your messaging.
You want to put your main points first.
State exactly why you're writing this correspondence up front.
With an email, we recommend, you know, with a subject header, you want to be explicit with the contents of the email.
What are you trying to say?
Who are you trying to reach?
What is your call to action?
Yeah, and how this might show up in your day-to-day email conversation is paying attention to that subject line.
Have you experienced a thing where you're in a conversation, it's specific to, I don't know, site logistics planning and kind of thinking through a strategy on that, and everyone's on message related to that piece, and then it changes to, oh, by the way, we got heads up on the interview now, so let's start thinking about that piece of it.
And all of the e-mail communication is still linked to site logistics plan.
Well, that can be confusing.
So think about, is it the right time to kind of adjust that subject heading so that people can compartmentalize the different topics and even find, you know, stay organized in their e-mail and search for the information a little bit better.
That subject line is an important piece of effective communication.
It is.
It would be such a travesty if a key member of the team missed information about an interview.
Oh, I know.
You know, we've been working with a few clients, and I hadn't really practiced this before, but I think it's worth mentioning for others who might be interested or who just haven't done it either, creating a subject line that's XYZ pursuit, and then 100% of the communication goes under that e-mail chain.
And when someone is out of the office for a day or so, they can just kind of go to the top of the e-mail when they come back and see every bit of communication.
At first, that sort of stressed me out a little bit.
I was like, oh, I don't know if I would do that.
I have a different approach to how I put together the information.
But I've seen it work really effectively.
So that could be another way, instead of being as specific with the little details of here's the, I don't know, addenda to information, but just keeping it all within that one pursuit or bigger topic that you're looking at.
And then folks could get to their e-mail and potentially actually delete quite a bit of the back and forth because they always know at the top, e-mail has all of the information for them.
Different strategy there, but worth considering and I've seen it work pretty well.
Back to our tips and tricks.
Another key component of successful business writing is, I mean, words are so important here.
Language is so important here.
Don't use complicated words when short, simple ones will do just fine.
Using words such as about rather than concerning, expect rather than anticipate, and part instead of component will make your writing feel less stilted.
If you need a little tip on that, speak your email aloud, and if it sounds disjunctive, take another pass.
Absolutely.
When we're reading proposals, a lot of our edits may include removing the word utilize and using use.
It's so much easier, and I'm not sure why utilize feels like it needs to be put in there, but it's overly complicated and harder to read.
So, you know, that's one option.
It's so true.
The last thing we want is to stop the flow of the reader and the message that we're trying to convey.
Stilted language is going to detract from this message.
For any of our listeners who are looking for a great read related to business writing, and this is going to get back to Rachel's point about the using simple everyday words, I'd just like to recommend the book, Kyle, Get the Dump Button Ready Here, because the book is called Writing Without Bullshit, Boost Your Career By Saying What You Mean, and that's by Josh Bernoff.
I've read it and I've purchased it for my team to read and pass around our group.
It's excellent, provides lots of examples of how to use simple language and to cut out the jargon and the fluff.
And getting to Rachel's point about the everyday words, and thinking about and respecting, like a key point of that book is respecting the reader's time.
Value it more than your time is like a mantra.
So how that links back to the everyday words is don't add a bunch and those little beginnings of sentences in order to do this, or doing the preamble before you get to the meat of the content, like cut that out, make it simple.
You don't need to have them interpret your email so that they can get the message.
So I definitely would recommend that, and it's actually a great book to just have on your desk and kind of provide a little shock to people that there's a giant swear word on the cover.
It's effective in that way.
People will stop and, hmm, is that a good book?
Yes, it is.
One of the very few times you can probably get away with that in a professional setting.
Yeah, like it will show what kind of person you are.
If you like to be an exhibitionist and put it right out there in the front, that's my style.
Oh, another example here of knowing your audience.
You want to cut down on that technical jargon.
As we talk about time and time again, we know there are so many buzzwords and technical words in our industry that may not resonate with the outside world.
Jargon is a double edged sword.
I love it and I hate it.
Here's something or an example I always think about is the word collaborate.
You know, we have overused it so, so much.
But at the same time, it's powerful and it's really effective when you want to describe a whole paragraph of activities in one word.
Collaborate means so much.
Just try not to overuse it.
I think being selective of where you put in words like that, and that's not technical jargon by any means, but it's something that shows up a ton in our proposal writing and other places.
So if you're going to use a word like collaborate, be thoughtful about it.
And then depending on the space you have and what you're trying to describe, you may need to expand on it or exercise yourself a little bit more and decide when you want to describe the process rather than just get to the short version of it.
When I write a draft of something, I like to read aloud or share it with a colleague or friend to QC, obviously for a lot of other reasons.
When you read aloud, you can really hear the cadence and the flow of the sentence and the content that you're speaking about.
And if you get held up at a certain point, then it may be a good place to take another pass.
You don't want your reader to feel that the writing is really disjointed, and you want the information to be digested and understood as simply and as clearly as possible.
Well, that's good advice.
Read it aloud.
I'm sure it engages a different part of your brain, so that you're listening to it differently, kind of related to this.
But if you're having to proofread your own work, reading it actually backwards from the bottom of the page up is an interesting technique.
And so even though those are different, but you need to get your brain out of the rut it is in when it's writing the content and into more of a reviewer's brain.
So those are some ways to make sure you're just not using the same words or having a sentence that's a whole paragraph long.
You know, how can you break that up and make it more digestible?
Moving on to our next tip, use contractions when appropriate.
Business writing has undergone a tremendous shift from more formal to a lot more accessible style.
So if using were and not we are or we've and not we have is the way to go to enhance the flow of what you're writing, do it.
It just feels more comfortable and a little more human and breaking down that barrier of being super formal.
Of course, Rachel, you started at the top talking about the different buckets of business writing and sometimes the instructional or the informational will need to have that level of formality.
Right.
But use your judgment when it's an area that you just want to be more clear and not communicate in that formal way.
And you can mix it up too, right?
You know, you don't have to use only we are and we have, you can have the variety.
I feel like when we used to edit things, we'd pick a way and be consistent, but that's not really as strict of a rule anymore.
All right, Rachel, what's next on your list?
We have verbs.
The wonderful world of verbs.
Love this one.
This is something that I think we see all the time in proposals, and we have to make choices about when we're writing them or reviewing them.
We want to typically use active rather than passive verbs in our persuasive writing.
They enhance the clarity of the words, allowing a reader to comprehend quickly and to understand what you're saying more completely.
As an example, we are doing versus we have done.
And sometimes these are great methods for human resources communications as well.
If your company is going through some significant change to structure or has something exciting in store, you want your employees to feel valued and as if they're part of this decision making process.
Yeah, I think that it's pretty clear when you're reading something that active component will shine through in a proposal when you are being persuasive and wanting to show that enthusiasm for what your plan is, what you are going to do.
This is a little bit different than the verb piece of it, but instead of we can, you know, saying we will or being more emphatic.
Decisive.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's make a statement here.
Sometimes project teams can shy away from that, want to want to shy away from it.
Field leadership can fall in this group because they just know and they've seen it so many times how the plan doesn't go as planned, you know, or like we need more information before we can be definite about what we're saying.
And of course, depending on if you're writing a contract or something very technical compared to the persuasive side of things where you're showing what you would do.
There are nuances, but I'd say err on the side of being a little bit more direct and bold.
It'll be powerful and stand out compared to the other documents that folks are reading.
I see the next item on your list is consistency.
This is one of my favorite things, and as someone who QCs a ton of stuff here at Middle of Six, that's often my kind of eagle-eye is for just consistency.
We have this rule of thumb where a lot of times there are multiple right answers.
So what we go for is consistency.
Consistency is so important on so many levels.
With your brand, you want your voice, your tone, your messaging to be as consistent as possible to enhance brand awareness and recognition.
Looking at brand guidelines is something that we always do when we start working with a new client.
Brand guidelines are a really useful tool in understanding the tone, the voice, the messaging, the values of a firm you're working with.
And our job is to maintain consistency and cohesion across all brand touch points.
Yeah, for in-house marketers, what they'll run into is that they're asking a variety of people to contribute to their proposals or a blog post or whatever it might be.
And so there's a variety of writing styles, and there's a difference of voice between the different people, probably based on their own experience or just their comfort level with writing.
I know sometimes I just request, hey, give me like five bullet points and I'll fill this in.
But again, that's going to provide another level of inconsistency that as the marketing team you want to bring back together.
So if your firm has some guidelines related to the writing, that can be really helpful, can be helpful for your marketing team and then potentially beyond if your technical staff is open to kind of digesting that and looking at that for guidance in the writing.
All right, before we leave this topic of consistency, if I review a proposal, there's a chance that maybe there's going to be 75 comments and it's on this one item, the serial comma.
Are you using it?
Are you not?
We don't care, but your firm probably should have a standard and AP style, which we follow most of the time, does not use a serial comma.
So there's the exception that we have, we follow AP style, but we use a serial comma.
We think it's really helps with clarity, especially in technical writing.
But it's okay if you don't want to use a serial comma.
Great.
Just make that your standard so that in a document, you're not seeing it go back and forth.
It can be confusing if you actually are trying to follow kind of that list of items and understand what goes together or not.
So when I look at a proposal and look at the cover letter, I use that as my guideline.
Okay, here's how we're going.
Let's make this consistent throughout the proposal.
Oh, the infamous serial comma.
Well, which camp are you in?
It feels like there's usually a very strong divide.
If you have a degree in communication, we know what side you're on.
No serial comma.
But I have a degree in graphic design.
So there you go.
Well, those were a lot of really good tips.
I don't know, like maybe 10, maybe more.
I'm not sure, but let's kind of run through them for quick reference for our listeners here.
first of all, you started with, think about who you're speaking to and what do you want to accomplish.
Start with the end in mind.
Put your main points first, so it's really easy for people to see and understand.
Do not use complicated words, and be selective about when you would use jargon or not.
I'm not going to say you can't, but just think about that.
Read your draft out loud and listen for places that are clunky.
Contractions are okay.
You don't have to fear them.
Use active verbs.
Consistency is king.
Create writing and style guides to help your team, and consider visuals and formatting to help improve clarity.
All right, switching gears here, Rachel.
Let's talk a little bit about design in your business communication.
Does business communication even have design?
Absolutely.
Not in every case, but there are definitely applications for design in business writing.
Yeah.
Where do you start?
What's the basic stuff related to design?
Well, what I think about with design, going back to your strategy for your business writing, what is your purpose in conveying this message?
And would that purpose be supported by graphics and visual components, or might those detract from your message?
So like something very simple, like in an email where you need to communicate, maybe taking a screen capture, sticking it right into the email with a little red circle drawn around the item, makes it clear no one has to go back into that PDF and look at page 37 and find where that question is.
You've isolated it right there for them.
Generally speaking, we always want to make it easier for whoever's reading our emails and communication to respond, like bring those barriers down.
Does it even count as a graphic?
I guess so.
Yeah, I would say that's definitely a graphic element.
You wouldn't want to overuse visuals.
Definitely not.
That can detract from your message.
For example, when you're writing an email, it might be really effective to highlight certain text in maybe red or bold to emphasize that call to action for your email.
But if everything is bold, pink, highlighted, you know, check boxes, where do I start?
Oh, disaster.
Or like, I don't actually even want to read this email.
I think I'll wait till someone else responds.
Or all caps and the reader thinks that you're yelling at them.
You can probably imagine I send a lot of emails with summaries that might have very important details, like pricing and action items and things that need to happen.
My style of communicating, and I know this is influenced by that book about writing without BS, is that I keep that first sentence really short, like basically a status update.
Here's where we're at.
Looks like the next draft will be on this date.
Here's a summary of what are the most important things we need.
And then I bullet them out, and I usually, if I'm referencing an attachment or a link to something, I'll say, here's cover letter, page one, two, three, and note out what the sections are that people should pay attention to.
If I include an action item for a person, I bold their name and potentially highlight it depending on how complicated this email is, but I'm aiming for very short, and then making it very clear that someone could scan this email and see what their piece is and make action on it, as opposed to really having to kind of digest and be a detective.
Like, what does she need for me and when and what's most important?
I've already made all of those choices, and the formatting of it helps communicate that.
You know, no one wants to read a narrative about what you feel is like the next thing we might want to do.
I don't know.
It's like, cut that out.
Who cares?
Tell me what I need to do and let's go from there.
Yeah, my gosh.
Thinking about how many e-mails we receive in a single day.
We just want to ensure that our audience catches the importance of what we're saying, the call to action, the information that we need to procure as quickly and clearly as possible.
Cool.
Well, those are a lot of tips.
Thank you so much, Rachel, for putting those together.
I'm sure that there are a few things that people hadn't tried out or maybe some things that they could put on to their list to see if they can test and get more response from their team members or get a better reaction from their clients.
I think that's all really good.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Thanks so much for having me, Wendy.
See you next time.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
Our producer is Kyle Davis with Digital Marketing and Graphic Design by the team at Middle of Six.
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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.