Business Writing Info Blog

As a business writing company, information flow is our business, yet we've struggled in the past to streamline our own information flow. Client comments and questions and information is sent to, and shared with, multiple people in our company, from multiple sources. Clients often share important information informally while chatting with me. Our entire team needs this information in one centralized location for our instructors to review, to provide focused and relevent business writing critiques, and plan business writing courses.

During business writing courses, we always discuss how to effectively manage the huge amount of information that floods all of us in business email, documents, and websites. This article provides business writing tips to manage your web content:

I am a big fan of 37 Signals products. We use their Basecamp product to collaborate with our clients for all business writing training projects. We chose it because it is clean and simple, with the functionality we need and no clutter. In short, it encourages easy communication flow. Just like good business writing should.

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On July 28, managers presented second quarter sales reports. Greg Cavalos and Daniel Stein discussed the customer service issues that caused the sales decline. Evan Dupont addressed Greg and Daniel’s report, and I agree with him.

The Readability Measures feature in Microsoft Word and Outlook are helpful tools to measure words per sentence, passive voice percentage, the Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level in your documents. Together, they offer a measure of the clarity in your business writing.

I am often asked which sources I use for business writing style and grammar guides. These are my most trusted sources:

Do you want to test your documents to see if you are prone to using jargon and gobbledygook? Gobbledygook Grader is a very helpful tool. It gives you a score based on how many overused gobbledygook phrases you included. I tested two pages on Instructional Solutions’ website, and it did a good job flagging one overused term.

Here are four websites that will help you build your vocabulary, in order of value to business writers:

Instructional Solutions just launched a new better business writing support option: our company page on Facebook.

Brian Clark, author of the wonderful Copyblogger blog clarifies 27 commonly misused words.