Having great communication skills in business and knowing how to make your words shine are important. In business there are countless skills that are highly important and that we need to develop in order to ensure that our companies thrive and that we personally are a success. These include things like forward planning, organization, teamwork, leadership and all the other things that you will often see on a job listing or in someone’s personal statement. However one of the very most important things of all if you want to excel in the cutthroat world of business is to develop amazing written communication skills – after all personal statements and job descriptions would hardly exist if it wasn’t for written communication.
Uses of Written Communication in Business
There are countless different uses of written communication when it comes to business. Of course we write as a form of communication more today than ever before thanks to the ubiquity of the web – we use it to communicate with other businesses, with our staff and colleagues, with our clients and more, and in every case it’s highly important that our communications be accurate and easy to understand to ensure that unnecessary mistakes are not made, and even more importantly to ensure that we don’t end up damaging our reputation.
On top of all this written communication is also highly important for a range of creative endeavours in business – from designing the content on websites, to other copywriting duties, to coming up with marketing campaigns, to writing leaflets and instructions, to crafting press releases. We will seek to impress stock holders with our annual reports, we will attempt to summarise what our business does when we come to sell it and generally whether or not our writing shines and reflects well on our company will affect whether our business excels or flounders.
Some Quick Tips to Make Your Writing Pop
So how do you make sure you write well in business? Well first of all you need to make sure that your writing is concise and to the point. In the world of business time really is money and everyone you communicate with is likely to be in a rush the majority of the time. In other words then it’s important to get to the point fast and to do so with no unnecessary vocabulary and no unusually structured sentences.
While you don’t want to be unnecessarily verbose however, what you can benefit from is using the best possible vocabulary. People associate good vocabulary with high intelligence and that means that you can use it to impress potential clients or employers and this way make yourself seem more capable and more of a valuable asset. Of course using the wrong words in the wrong situations, or making grammatical errors can have the precise opposite effect so make sure to check, check and check again.
At the same time though that doesn’t mean that your writing needs to be ‘dry’. This is a mistake that many people will make when writing for businesses and will mistake ‘professional’ for ‘boring’. You still need to engage your audience and if you can show a little bit of personality then you will be more likely to be remembered and more likely to charm your audience into wanting to hire your services. To accomplish this then, you should aim to write as you might speak – try to listen to the monologue in your mind and to write this down exactly how it comes out as you hear it. You can tweak it later, but if you use this approach then you should find your writing is naturally easy to read and follow.
To help improve your abilities in all these areas it is very important to practice reading and the more you do this the better you will become at writing naturally flowing text quickly and easily.
Charlie is a business blogger and provides tips related to business and education. His comapny offers brand strategies, concept and design development, report design and much more.