Adopt the “you” attitude by

• Replacing terms that refer to yourself and your company with terms that refer to your audience
• Empathizing with your audience sincerely and genuinely
• Avoiding the word you when its use would be impolite or accusatory
• Following company style regarding the use of personal pronouns

Maintain the highest standards of etiquette:

• Be courteous to members of your audience.
• Control your emotions and communicate calmly.
• Be even more tactful in written messages.

• Soften the blow of negative news.
• Criticize constructively without dwelling on a person’s mistakes.
• Emphasize audience benefits rather than your own.
• Use euphemisms to avoid words that are hurtful or offensive to your audience—but don’t use them to sugar-coat unpleasant news.

Use bias-free language by avoiding words and phrases that unfairly and even unethically categorize or stigmatize people in ways related to

• Gender
• Race and ethnicity
• Age
• Disability

Establishing your credibility and projecting your company’s image are two vital steps in building and fostering positive business relationships.

• Establishing Your Credibility

Credibility is the measure of your believability based on how reliable you are and how much trust you evoke in others.

To establish your credibility, emphasize

• Honesty
• Objectivity
• Awareness of audience needs
• Credentials, knowledge, and expertise
• Endorsements
• Performance
• Sincerity

Credibility can take a long time to establish—and it can be wiped out by a single careless or foolish mistake.

Projecting Your Company’s Image

Project the proper image for your company by subordinating your own views and personality if necessary and mastering your company’s style.

Observe more experienced colleagues to see how they communicate, and never hesitate to ask for editorial help.

Style is the way that words are used to achieve a certain tone (the impression made by your words).

To achieve a conversational tone, try to

• Understand the difference between texting and writing
• Avoid stale and pompous language
• Avoid preaching and bragging
• Be careful with intimacy
• Be careful with humour

Plain language is a way of presenting information in a simple, unadorned style that your audience can easily grasp without struggling through specialized, technical, or convoluted language.

Plain language can make companies more productive and more profitable simply because people spend less time trying to figure out messages that are confusing or aren’t written to meet their needs.

Plain language helps non-native speakers understand your messages.

In active voice, the subject performs the action and the object receives the action.

• The subject (“actor”) comes before the verb
• The object (“acted upon”) comes after the verb

In passive voice, the subject receives the action.

• The subject comes after the verb
• The object comes before the verb
• Combines the helping verb to be with a form of the verb that is usually similar to the past tense

Use the active voice to

• Produce shorter, stronger sentences
• Make your writing more vigorous, concise, and generally easier to understand

Generally, avoid the passive voice because it

• Is cumbersome
• Can be unnecessarily vague
• Can make sentences longer

However, the passive voice is best in some cases to demonstrate the “you” attitude:

• When you need to be diplomatic
• When you want to avoid taking or attributing the credit or the blame
• When you want to avoid personal pronouns to create an objective tone

As you compose your first draft, you

• Can improve on your outline by rearranging, deleting, and adding ideas (as long as you don’t lose sight of your purpose)
• Try to let your creativity flow (don’t draft and edit at the same time)
• Try to overcome writer’s block

You can jog your brain to overcome writer’s block by

• Skipping to another part of the document
• Working on nontext elements such as graphics
• Switching to a different project
• Starting to write without worrying about what you’re writing or how it sounds

As you create and refine your messages, learn to view your writing at three levels:

• Strong words
• Effective sentences
• Coherent paragraphs

If you have questions about grammar and usage, be sure to consult handbooks or online guides.

The words you choose to use must be correct:

• Grammatical or usage errors cause you to lose credibility with your audience
• Poor grammar implies that you’re uninformed and your audience may not trust you
• Poor grammar can imply that you don’t respect your audience enough to get things right

Successful writers and speakers take care to find the most effective words and phrases to use.

Rich languages such as English provide you with a variety of options when choosing words.

Selecting and using words effectively is often more challenging than using words correctly because it’s a matter of judgment and experience.

Reading widely is the best way to expand your vocabulary and thereby give yourself more options when it’s time to choose words in your own writing.

Words may have two meanings:

• The denotative meaning is the literal or dictionary meaning.
• The connotative meaning includes all the associations and feelings evoked by the word.

In business communication carefully use words that have multiple interpretations and are high in connotative meaning.

A word may be

• Abstract (expressing a concept, quality, or characteristic)
• Concrete (standing for something you can touch, see, or visualize)

Concrete words are often more effective than abstract words because they are more precise, but that isn’t always the case.

Blend abstract terms with concrete ones to be as effective as possible.

Even though they’re indispensable, abstractions can be troublesome.

• Abstract words tend to be fuzzy and subject to multiple interpretations
• Abstract words seem less “real” and pose a challenge to getting readers excited

To find the words that communicate, think carefully about the right words to use for each individual situation:

• Choose powerful words
• Choose familiar words
• Avoid clichés and be careful with buzzwords
• Use jargon carefully

 

To make every sentence count, you

• Arrange carefully chosen words
• Select the optimum type of sentence

Four types of sentences are

• Simple: one main clause (single subject and single predicate)
• Compound: two main clauses that express two or more independent but related thoughts of equal importance, usually joined by and, but, or or
• Complex: expresses one main thought (the independent clause) and one or more subordinate, related thoughts (dependent clauses that cannot stand alone as valid sentences)
• Compound-complex: two main clauses, at least one with a subordinate clause

When constructing sentences, choose the form that matches the relationship of the ideas you want to express.

• Use two simple sentences or a compound sentence if you have two ideas of equal importance
• Use a complex sentence if one of the ideas is less important than the other

To achieve the clearest writing possible, strive for variety and balance by mixing all four types of sentences.

You can emphasize key ideas through sentence-style by

• Describing an important element with more detail
• Adding a separate, short sentence to augment the thought
• Making a thought the subject of a sentence
• Placing the key idea either at the beginning or the end of a sentence

In complex sentences, the placement of the dependent clause hinges on the relationship between the ideas expressed.

• Put the dependent clause at the end of the sentence (the most emphatic position) or at the beginning (the second most emphatic position).
• Put the dependent clause within the sentence if you want to downplay the idea.

A paragraph organizes sentences related to the same general topic.

Readers expect each paragraph to

• Be unified and focus on a single unit of thought
• Be coherent and present ideas in a logically connected way

A paragraph is made up of several elements:

• Topic sentence—introduces the topic, gives readers a summary of the general idea that will be covered in the rest of the paragraph, and reminds audiences of the purpose of each paragraph
• Support sentences—explains, justifies, or extends the topic sentence with specifics; are more specific than topic sentences; provides another piece of evidence to demonstrate the general truth of the main thought, and are clearly related to the general idea being developed
• Transitions—words or phrases that tie ideas together by showing how one thought is related to another, help readers understand the connections you’re trying to make, and smooth your writing

• Using connecting words
• Echoing a word or phrase from a previous paragraph or sentence
• Using a pronoun that refers to a noun used previously
• Using words that are frequently paired

• Serve as mood changers
• Announce a total contrast with what’s gone on before
• Announce a causal relationship

Signal a change in time

Use transitions to help readers understand your ideas and follow you from point to point:

• Inside paragraphs to tie related points together
• Between paragraphs to ease the shift from one distinct thought to another
• Between major sections or chapters

Develop a paragraph in one of five ways:

• Illustration
• Comparison or contrast
• Cause and effect
• Classification

Problem and solution

In practice, you’ll occasionally combine two or more methods of development in a single paragraph.

Think through other alternatives before accepting your first choice.

Writing and publishing software provides a wide range of tools to help you compose your business documents:

• Style sheets, style sets, templates, and themes
• Boilerplate and document components
• Autocompletion and autocorrection
• File merge and mail merge
• Endnotes, footnotes, indexes, and tables of contents

Try to learn enough about word-processing features to be handy with them, without spending so much time that the tools distract from the writing process.