General Tips for Business Writing

GENERAL TIPS FOR BUSINESS WRITING

OBJECTIVE:  Tell your story to your audience in a succinct and persuasive manner.

RESPONSIBILITY:  It is your responsibility to make sure that your audience understands what you are communicating.

ENGAGEMENT:  If you can develop an engaging writing (and presenting) style that captures the attention of your audience, then it will be much easier to communicate your message.

STYLE:  There is no one perfect style of writing.  You need to develop your own.  However, you can learn from others and incorporate elements you like best into your own style of communicating.  The following suggestions can be considered:

• Brevity -- Communicate your points as briefly as possible while providing sufficient content for credibility.
• Headlines -- Think headlines to introduce your key points and then elaborate as necessary.
• Sections -- Break up your content and keep paragraph length short.
• Bullets -- Bullets or numbering can “be your friend” to cover a list of factors in a more readable manner.
• Highlighting -- Use bolding, italics, underlining and CAPS to highlight key words or phrases.
• Graphics -- Supporting tables, charts and graphics can effectively break-up a lot of narrative.
• Spelling -- Check your spelling and grammar.  Mistakes undermine your professional credibility.

MESSAGE FLOW:  Your communication needs three basic elements – an opening, supporting points and a close.

1. Opening -- State what you are wanting to communicate overall.  Make sure to start a new section after your opening point.
2. Supporting Points – Develop supporting points in a systematic manner using the style points above to establish a structure.
3. Close:  Refer back to the original opening objective and state a summary of your message based on your supporting points.

August 24, 2016        

To:        MKTG 465/SCM 425 Class

From:        Jay Dittmann

Re:        Class Objectives

Welcome to the Fall semester 2016 and your Customer Relationship Management course.  CRM is a very important area of focus for most companies today and is becoming a crucial element in the overall marketing investment mix.  As you head toward graduation and seek to begin the journey of your career path, my hope is that what you learn in this class will be practical and applicable to most any job you take.