Plan, before you write Thinking and planning before writing, will help your writing appear effortlessly put together. Planning out your writing beforehand reduces the amount of time you have to spend on editing, as it gives you a clear mental picture of what you’re trying to get across. It helps you break down a large message into more straightforward, transparent terms.
Do your research Work reports and documents often require thorough research and clarification. While writing marketing copies or creating sales proposals, you might encounter a few things you don’t know a lot about. In situations like this, your ability to conduct thorough research and pick up relevant information is vital for smooth communication.
Make an outline Creating an outline before you start writing can help you organize your thoughts and simplify the daunting task. When it comes to detailed business documents, you often need to approach them from different perspectives to ensure everything aligns well. So, making a linear outline will see to it that you don’t leave out any critical information.
Understand your readers Before starting work on any report or document, you need to identify the people you want to address. Whether you’re writing a business document or a simple text message, you need to get into the reader’s perspective. Is there enough context for you to understand the text? Is the language coherent and straightforward enough? These are the questions you should be asking as you write.
Write as you would speak When you’re writing up a document for work, it’s easy to get carried away by formal language and lose sight of what you truly meant to convey. To avoid suffocating your writing with unnecessarily complex terms, try to write as you would normally speak in a business setting. This helps your readers understand the text quickly and leaves little room for doubt or confusion.
Keep it simple I mentioned in the previous point, that keep your writing simple and to the point. Focus on presenting the information in as direct, concise, and accurate a way as possible. Analyze the data and try to express only the most relevant details, in short, concise sentences that get the message across easily. You want to provide enough information without overwhelming them with minor details.
Improve your word choices Try to be as precise as you can with your word choices. Avoid words or phrases that imply vague or informal meanings, such as “incredibly” or “not really”. Additionally, adverbs that end in -ly can often be replaced with more impactful words. For example, “we worked carefully” can be modified to “we were meticulous”.
Avoid contractions and abbreviations Using multiple contractions and abbreviations in your writing makes it appear unprofessional and informal—that’s not what we want. A contraction is a form of combining two words into one, shortened word, such as “shouldn’t,” “isn’t,” and “don’t.” Instead of using these, stick to their expanded, two-word versions.