Improve business writing skills to increase overall productivity.
At your organization, you may have a few employees who go by the title of “Copywriter” or “Technical Writer.” But these aren’t the only writers at your company. In truth, every single one of your employees is a business writer at work.
That’s because everyone at your company is constantly communicating: writing business emails and direct messages to keep work moving, drafting memos and reports to inform team members, and crafting business proposals, company brochures, statements of work, presentations, and other business documents for work both within and beyond your organization.
All of these genres, and the dozens of others you and your team use to get work done, require writing. By improving the business writing skills of employees across your organization, you can drive expect a few stellar outcomes like:
- Improving the focus and efficacy of presentations, reports, business letters, and more
- Reducing writing time by up to 25%
- Empower your employees (and reap the retention benefits)
Prioritize your writing and reap the rewards.
Professional communication through writing is a valuable asset for your organization. Here are the key areas that highlight the value of improving your business writing and how our courses can help you improve:
Communicate with lasting impact
Through focused assignments, we teach writers from all specialties to improve the efficacy of their writing by increasing both the clarity of their ideas and the tone they craft those ideas in to meet their readers’ expectations.
Through focused assignments and business writing exercises, we teach writers from all specialties to improve the efficacy of their writing by increasing both the clarity of their ideas and the tone they craft those ideas in to meet their readers’ expectations. A key element is that our expert instructors also offer individualized feedback to focus on specific areas for growth that can drive impact—fast—for even the most complex documents.
We can also hone in on specific genres, like sales presentations and reports, to make sure your team is equipped with genre-specific skills that will make their work stand out in your industry—whether they’re writing to peers, busy professionals, senior management, etc. Our courses are full of business writing tips, editing tools to avoid grammar and spelling errors, a step-by-step guide on how to approach business writing, and more.
Reduce writing time by up to 25%
Think, for example, of the last time you had to send an important email or communicate a difficult message. How long did you sit and stare at the blank screen, unsure of where to start?
Our courses offer practical, actionable advice for overcoming writer’s block and for decreasing time spent writing. In addition to soothing the pains of writer’s block, our courses focus on efficiency habits—like outlining, drafting, and smart revision practices—that lead to an overall reduction in time to project completion.
Stronger employee writing will also reduce unproductive and frustrating revisions. Managers will no longer need to deeply review—or worse, rewrite—important client or reporting documents.
Empower every employee — while boosting ROI
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t really work in the world of writing and communication. That’s because we all have a unique perspective and vocabulary that gives us a personality and style.
Rather than push everyone into the same robotic business tone (an approach that governed so much of business communication for decades), our courses value the independent voice and field expertise that every employee brings to their writing. We’ll help you learn how to shape your voice to communicate confidently and clearly—as well as professionally and respectfully—without resorting to tired business jargon.
When your employees feel like their skills matter and their time is valuable, they tend to stick around (instead of job hunting on their lunch break). Use our ROI calculator to estimate the potential savings and impact of better writing training at your organization!
When everyone at your organization can communicate more clearly, be it in a post-mortem report, a proposal, social media posts, or a suite of marketing materials, everyone you work with stands to benefit.
- Your employees feel that their growth and upskilling are valued by the organization—and are therefore much more likely to stay with your organization and bring their evolving skills to work each day. This will lead to increased both employee satisfaction and retention and business growth.
Level up your company’s business writing skills
Our writing courses are designed to help everyone become a better writer—fast. At the end of our courses, learners repeatedly tell us that the skills they gain in our courses are immediately applicable. Rather than waiting for the right moment to apply new skills, they can start applying them at work, without delay. By the end of the class, they’ll be ready to take their skills, and their team’s outputs, to the next level.
So when is the best time to become a better, professional writer? Right now! Writing is the primary communication pathway for business. Strong writing is the communication lifeblood that drives everything else you do. So, if you want to improve your business outcomes, start by improving your employees’ writing.
Where to start?
All too often, articles on how to improve your business writing start immediately with suggestions like ‘use the active voice’ or ‘write simply and clearly’. That’s fine, but you need something more than that if you’re actually going to improve.
Make the reader the centre of everything you write. The better you understand and anticipate the reader’s needs, wants and concerns, the better your writing will be.
Have a writing process. Opening Word and diving headfirst into Untitled.doc is rarely the best approach, especially for longer and more complex documents. Breaking your task into logical, manageable steps will make life easier for you and greatly improve the chances of your document meeting its objective.
Pay attention to the main problems that writers have. These include not being clear, being too wordy or long-winded, poor or illogical structure, using incorrect grammar and punctuation, and being dull.
Get feedback from your readers (and professional feedback if you can get it). All writers can benefit from feedback – though some examples of feedback are much more useful and actionable than others.
Business writing: it’s about your objective
A board report might aim to get the board to take action and increase a department’s budget. Or it could simply aim to keep them informed and happy that a project is proceeding to plan, so they don’t feel compelled to act to change anything.
Getting your objective clear is the crucial first step before everything else that follows. Once you understand your objective, you can work on every other problem, from getting to the point to being persuasive – because you understand what objective any part of your document is working towards.
Avoid being ‘kind of’ sure about why you’re writing what you’re writing. In our experience, this state of not really knowing exactly what you’re doing is a stressful place to be and one where you’re most likely to procrastinate. Unless you’re certain, writing itself will probably be very heavy going too.
The easiest way to get clearer about your document’s objective is to write down what you think it is and compare it with your reader’s understanding. The best scenario is if you can ask them directly (for example, if it’s your line manager). In this case, you could say: ‘Here’s what I think you want from this document – does this seem right to you?’. If you’ve already begun, ask them to review whatever you have for the broad structure and content. (If you can’t ask your readers, the next section will help.)
Having a clear objective is just as important if you’re contributing to a document. It’s easier to knit together pieces of writing from different people if everyone’s written with the same objective in mind. And if you’re responsible for putting together a big document, such as a bid or tender, it’s the same story: make sure contributors know why they’re writing what they’re writing.
Source:
https://www.instructionalsolutions.com/blog/what-is-the-purpose-of-improving-your-business-writing
https://thegoodeyknot.com/2022/05/10/what-is-the-purpose-of-improving-your-business/
https://www.writing-skills.com/how-to-improve-your-business-writing