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"The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components." - William Zinsser

                How to improve business writing.

        It goes without saying that good business writing skills are very important in contemporary, fast-paced business environment. The company needs to be competitive on each level of its activity. That’s why every business entity has to pay a lot of attention to business writing and develop different programs and strategies for improving business writing skills. To achieve the remarkable results in writing business documents, forms, reports etc., writers should be concise, clear, grammatically correct in their papers and be excellent time managers, since time is money.

        Time management is extremely popular nowadays. According to the Julie R. Linkins, M.A., M.S., (20/FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin) we can divide entire writing process into several steps. The authors are recommended spend 12.5% of all writing process for preparation to clear up the essence of their messages. Clear writing is very important in business. It does not matter if we write for our partners, bosses or clients. First of all, we should clear understand what we want to write about. Authors have to clarify the idea they are going to put on the paper. Clarity will help our readers understand the message correctly and take right actions. How can we make our writing clear? First of all, a good writer has clear understand the point. To do that, he has to do a good research about the subject. The writer has to know exactly what he is writing about. A good writer should base his work only on proven and creditable sources. After considering some outside ideas, a good writer should generate some of his/her own thoughts. Brainstorming goes to get as many ideas as possible without evaluating them. This step takes 25% of all our time. Next step takes 25% as well and includes organization of our ideas depending on types of document. Good organization will bring clarity in our papers. When we have a big project to write, the best way of organizing is: making a list of main points about the subject. Definitely, it is much easy to read the paper when we work in such format. This strategy will help our readers get to the point of what we want to say to him. And he will have a clear idea of what’s going on and what we expect from him. 

        Definitely good business writing has to be concise writing. You are not supposed to write a long essay in your reports. It is very important to make the paper as brief as possible. Good writer should estimate each word and choose only the words he/she needs to explain the main ideas. It was estimated by some editors that a third of the words in a typical paper are wasted. We shouldn’t repeat anything, other than for specific emphasis. When reader sees a lot of words, he/she will not pay attention to the part you want him to look at. That will bring him to misunderstanding of what he is expected to do.  How can we do our papers concise? This is a good strategy: when you are done with writing, take some time and then read your papers again. When you are reading them this time, try to think what words you can avoid. The writers are strongly recommended avoiding clutters, jargons, ambiguity, and bias in their papers. Business paper should be written by business language. The writes will not look professionally using that entire inappropriate stuff. Here we should spend 25% of our writing time.

         Finally, a good writer should spend 12.5% of his/her time to check spelling, punctuation, and grammar. It is very important to use proper English in the papers. That means the author should be very careful with spelling, punctuation and grammar. Microsoft Word could be very helpful in recognizing the misspelling words. It's a really good idea to check yourself twice when you are finishing your work. I have heard about really good idea from my English Professor Charles Nelson (Kean University, October 4, 2005) of how to find the mistakes in our papers: we should read them in loud. Sometimes, we read what we want to read, but when we do that in loud, we can hear our mistakes. Definitely, knowing the rules of English grammar and punctuation is vital for good business writing. How can we dramatically improve our grammar and punctuation? There are some ways like taking English classes or getting a personal tutor.

        The whole idea of being a good business writer is to write clear, concise, correct papers, and be a great time manager. Having good business writing skills is extremely important in the contemporary business. The more professional someone sounds, the more people take them seriously. Good business writing skills open great professional opportunities.