The business writing tip you’ll use every day
Mine was the quintessential college experience complete with a sprawling and beautiful campus, football Saturdays, and sorority life (shout out to my ASA sisters!). Oh yeah, and an education. While studies have shown correlation between college major and profession can be as low as 37%, I'm part of that minority. I have a BS of Business Administration in Marketing and I am a product manager responsible for creating strategies to drive client acquisition and loyalty. That's a pretty good match, but I must admit that I can't recall the specifics of my business course curriculum and certainly can't claim to use any learnings in my day-to-day work life. With one exception. Written communication in business.
The one thing I learned in college that I use every day:
If you can take a word out of a sentence and it means the same thing, take it out.
Work email and presentation documents aren't literary fiction. There are no bonus points for using interesting adjectives or SAT words. The average office worker gets 121 emails a day according to a study by DMR. You need to get to the point… nobody has time for allegory. This one rule is the yardstick by which I measure every sentence I write from 9-5. As a result my written communications for business tend to be shorter and more effective.
The best way to explain is an example:
Bad: I spoke with Joe earlier today about the presentation and I think he is sufficiently prepared for any financial questions that we may get from executives about the sales figures that he put together. [34 words]
Good: Joe is prepared to answer questions about sales figures during the presentation. [12 words]
This is an extreme example and some will claim that these two sentences don't have the exactly the same meaning because, for example, in the second it's not explicitly stated that I spoke with Joe. However it would be assumed by the reader that I connected with Joe, otherwise how would I know that he is prepared? This rule can be strictly literal "Joe is sufficiently prepared" and "Joe is prepared" have the same meaning with one less word. Beyond the literal, this is rule is also applied to cull the information down to what the reader really needs to know. It removes the unnecessary information to convey the same thing with fewer words.
Runner-up learning (from the same class): Never use the words "I think" in an email. It is by default your opinion based on the fact that you are the author of the email. Using "I think" significantly reduces the impact of your statement. After all, declaring that Joe is prepared is materially more comforting to the reader than just thinking Joe is prepared. This is a crossover tip that applies to verbal communication as well.
I'm closing with a disclaimer. A blog post is not business writing. It has been written for your entertainment and as such must contain some thread of interesting color so that you'll read to the end and learn the helpful information available to you here. So please, don't send me your redlines!