Jan 20: Letters, Memos and Clear Messages

Business Letter Basics (OWL at Purdue University)
Business Memo Basics (OWL at Purdue University)


Making Your Writing Easy to Read

Good style in business and administrative writing is less formal, more friendly, and more personal than the style usually used for term papers.

To improve your style,

• Get a clean page or screen so that you aren't locked into old sentence structures.
• Try WIRMI: What I Really Mean Is. Then write the words.
• Try reading your draft out loud to someone sitting about three feet away. If the words sound stiff, they'll seem stiff to a reader, too.
• Ask someone else to read your draft out loud. Readers stumble because the words on the page aren't what they expect to see. The places where that person stumbles are places where your writing can be better.
• Write a lot.

Use the following techniques to make your writing easier to read:

As you choose words

1. Use words that are accurate, appropriate, and familiar. Denotation is a word's literal meaning; connotation is the emotional coloring that a word conveys.
2. Use technical jargon only when it is essential and known to the reader. Eliminate business jargon.
   As you write and revise sentences,
3. Use active verbs most of the time. Active verbs are better because they are shorter, clearer, and more interesting.
4. Use verbs-not nouns-to carry the weight of your sentence.
   Don't make an adjustment - adjust
   Don't make a pament - pay
   Don't make a decision - decide
5. Tighten your writing. Writing is wordy if the same idea can be expressed in fewer words.
   a. Eliminate words that say nothing.
   b. Use gerunds and infinitives to make sentences shorter and smoother.
   c. Combine sentences to eliminate unnecessary words.
   d. Put the meaning of your sentence into the subject and verb to cut the number of words.
6. Vary sentence length and sentence structure.
7. Use parallel structure. Use the same grammatical form for ideas that have the same logical function.
8. Put your readers in your sentences.
   As you write and revise paragraphs,
9. Begin most paragraphs with topic sentences so that readers know what to expect in the paragraph.
10. Use transitions to link ideas.

• Readability formulas are not a sufficient guide to style. They imply that all short words and all short sentences are equally easy to read; they ignore other factors that make a document easy or hard to read: the complexity of the ideas, the organization of the ideas, and the layout and design of the document.
• Different organizations and bosses may legitimately have different ideas about what constitutes good writing.

---

Content attributed to Locker, Kitty O. and Donna Kienzler. Business and Administrative Communication, 8/e. McGraw-Hill Higher Education. 2008.