VIDEO: BEST BUSINESS WRITING TIPS
View this video for suggestions on how to improve your written communication skills immediately. Customer service professionals may spend lots of time writing reports and memos. This video discusses six tips on how to do it much better.
VIDEO NOTES
The day of a marketer is full of writing — memos to colleagues and bosses, critical communications with clients, advertising copy, brochures, reports, social networking, emails, phone messages, ad abundum.
So much of our success is simply determined by how well we clearly communicate, that we owe it to ourselves and our readers to buff up our abilities, preferably with minimum pain and maximum gain.
Here are six sure-fire ways to liven up your marketing copy and keep your reader engaged. Even better, not a single writing suggestion mentions the words grammar, spelling or punctuation!
- Tip 1) Use resonant flesh-and-blood characters rather than boring old nouns. If I was writing a memo about sales, my characters would be clients and customers, rather than projections and results.
- Tip 2) Use action words that propel your readers along. We love to see verbs that power us visually from one place to another, rather than just sit there.
- Tip 3) Perform the 8-word test. Keep your characters and actions within 8 words of each other, so your reader can easily follow who is doing what. The fewer words between the nouns and verbs the better.
- Tip 4) Link complex sentences and phrases with connectors to help your reader navigate through the text. Good connecter words, for example, are however, because of this, therefore, thus, and so on.
- Tip 5) Lead your readers from old information (first) to new information (second). Establish common ground in your message development, gently nudging your audience from comfortable familiar territory into the strange and new.
- Tip 6) Use the Problem-Solution-Action paradigm. One of the most common writing complaints I hear from my students is they don’t know where to begin. If you start with a problem statement, followed by a solution proposal, and wrap it up with an action plan, a memo can write itself!
There you go — give the tips a try your next time writing an email, and see if your message doesn’t come through easier and more effective.
Resource: The Elevator Speech
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Resource: Personal Presentation Skills
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