Writing continues to be one of the most important skills in a business environment to communicate, to sell, to market, to propose, to explain, and to report. In all of these capacities, the quality of my writing had significant impact on my ability to affect change, to implement programs, and to demonstrate my knowledge and competence. I have learned that the quality of my writing is an essential component of my ability to motivate a group of people to influence, to win contracts, and resolve conflicts.

I'll provide information about the use of high impact words, avoidance of jargon and colloquialisms, and how to write documents with some technical complexity. Other purposes might justify more verbose or literary style content, but not when you are striving to inform, which is typically what you are doing in a business document. There are several activities in this module which give you an opportunity to think about the concepts presented and a quiz at the end to check your understanding.

Remember, you're not trying to impress your high school language teacher with your ability to write vivid description stuffed with adjectives. An unusually large number of orders arriving this morning has many of our customer service department extremely busy. Many people find that writing an angry letter can be helpful in order to work through frustrations but they don't send it.

I will talk about current best practices in language, style and format, and I'll give you some specific strategies for achieving brevity and clarity in your writing. Regarding the issue of jargon, by all means, use the commonly accepted language for your industry, but avoid words or phrases that are unique to certain job functions or activities. I'm referring here to the business words and phrases that we often see in form letters, such as at your earliest convenience, which tend to make your document appear to be using boilerplate text or that you aren't taking the time to clearly state what you're trying to say.

But in proposals, reports, and memos, you do not want any reader to be unsure of the meaning of a word or an acronym. Instead, you might say, the machinery we saw on the tour of the manufacturing facility was the latest computer controlled technology and highly efficient. Take the time to edit your writing and remove excess wordiness and padding, and change colloquialisms and acronyms to more commonly used terms.

Garner then recommends that the writer use the raw ideas and form them into complete sentences, which are then organized into sets of main points and those are put in a logical order. The Judge is the quality control manager who does the cleanup and the polishing, everything from tightening language to correcting grammar and punctuation. Forcing oneself to just write, ignoring rules and conventions allows us to get words on paper, which we can then modify, move, expand upon, and revise.