What are the 7 principles of business writing?

Answer 1

3. The language, style and tone of business writing is very different from general writing. Therefore, we will examine these aspects in some details.

Tone: In written communication, tone refers to the way a statement sounds, which in turn, depends on the choice of words. A sentence or statement may be grammatically perfect, but may convey a negative message, if the choice of words is wrong.

For example:

"I am sure you will agree that our company has the best reputation for quality and service.."

Instead, something likes "we shall try to live up to our reputation for quality and service." Would be more appropriate.

Another aspect of tone is to sound courteous and sincere. This builds goodwill and good relations and increases the likelihood of a message achieving its objectives.

Finally, the tone of business writing should be non-discriminatory. This means that the language that is used should not be offensive, irrespective of gender religious or race.

One way of ensuring this is to avoid "sexist language" by using neutral job title, or title that do not imply that a job is held only by a man.

Emphasis and subordination: A business writer can be compared to an artist or a musician tries to make certain elements stand out and others to get little attention, so too with the business writer. An important principle of business writing is to emphasize important ideas and to downplay unimportant ideas, so as to make understand what you consider to be significant. Generally, pleasant and important thoughts are emphasized, while unpleasant and insignificant thought are subordinated or de-emphasized.

Several techniques for emphasis may be used by the business writer.

» Place the idea in the first paragraph or in the last paragraph, in order to get attention

» put the word that wish to emphasize first or last in the sentences.

Example: John made the presentation. (Active).

The presentation is made by john. (Passive).

» Use words such as "primary", "major" and "significant" to lay emphasis.

Another point to be remembered regarding emphasis in business writing is to stress what is known as the "you attitude", rather than the "me attitude."

This means explaining the benefits to the reader, understanding his situation and answering his unspoken question.

Write at an appropriate level of readability:

A third very important rule of business writing is to tailor your writing to your audience and to make it simple enough for even a layperson to read and understand.

Readability is determined by the length of words and sentences. Robert Gunning developed what is known as the "Fox index" or a readability formula to measure the readability of a piece of writing. According to this formula, the appropriate reading level in business writing should be between 8 and 11.

Calculation of the Fog index involves the following steps.

• Select a written passage of approximately 100 words.
• Calculate the average length of a sentence by dividing the total number of words in the passage into the number of sentences
• Find the number of difficult words. A word may be defined as difficult if it contains three or more syllabus (e.g. "communication"). Determine the number of difficult words per hundred, by dividing the total number of words in the passage into the number of difficult words, then by multiplying this figure by 100.
• Add the number of difficult words per hundred and the average sentence length.
• Multiply the figure obtained in step 4 by 0.4, to calculate the reading grade level for which the passage was written, or the fog index.

Ideally the fog index should be between 8 and 11 for most business writing, indicating that a reader between the eighth grade and the eleventh grade should be able to understand it without difficulty.