Business writing should be clear, simple, and direct. Or that’s what the ideal business writing would be like if business people had great writing skills.
However, we have all had the experience of encountering businesspeople who have enormous trouble stringing together a sentence, let alone crafting a press release that effectively conveys the importance of a new product or service.
Because business writing is so important to the success of a business, understanding how to write better in a business context is a must. Here, we’ll take a look at five books that will help to improve business writing skills.
The following books were selected by a team of professional freelance writers from online writing service considered to be one of the leading academic writing companies on the market. If you write business communications or know someone who does, these books can help you or your favorite business writing professional to develop better writing skills.
- Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by Brian Fugere. Although this book is almost 15 years old, its key lessons continue to hold true. Business writing is loaded down with buzzwords and jargon that can make it difficult to understand. In this book, Fugere takes us through the bizarre parallel world of business-speak to understand why business people become obsessed with jargon and have difficulty communicating clearly and effectively with their internal and external audiences because of the challenges of their language. Fugere identifies four strategies that business writers can use to cut through the buzzword bloat and deliver simple, clear, and effective writing to their audiences.
- Writing That Works: How to Communicate Effectively in Businessby Kenneth Roman. This volume is a guidebook to business writing that will help business writers to create effective communications more easily. It offers strategies for explaining what you mean in a clear way and writing with more confidence. The effectiveness of this writing guide can be seen in the fact that it has gone through three editions and demand for the book has yet to decrease. The most recent edition takes a fresh perspective on electronic communication, particularly email, where many business writers tend to crash onto the rocks due to the challenges of writing both quickly and well in an online environment.
- Words that Sellby Richard Bayan. Who hasn’t tried to improve business writing by using Microsoft Word’s thesaurus function? And who hasn’t been baffled by some of the strange choices that computer-aided thesauruses offer? In this book, the author offers an enormous variety of adjectives that are designed to sell products. You’ll find the perfect word for any occasion when you peruse this thesaurus designed squarely for the marketing market. Here you’ll find 100 synonyms of “exiting” and 76 synonyms for “appealing,” for example. This book will show you how to use words to make your marketing copy compelling.
- Business Writing for Dummiesby Natalie Canavor. The For Dummiesseries is internationally recognized for providing introductions to a wide variety of topics from experts in the field. The series’ business writing book is no different, and despite its vaguely insulting title, it’s a great guide to help those just starting out in the business writing field develop strong business writing skills and to help those with more experience improve. The book covers the basic principles that apply across all types of business writing, and it also has a useful section on what not to do to avoid repulsing your audience or causing them to reject your message.
- Business Writing Today: A Practical Guideby Natalie Canavor. If you are a little more advanced that the For Dummiesseries, the same author has a practical guide to today’s business writing that covers a wide variety of business writing types. In a user-friendly way, the author goes step by step through the creation of business documents with an eye toward writing strategically to help you achieve a specific goal, such as getting hired, selling a product, or delivering an effective report. The author looks at both printed and electronic communication and focuses on many types of new media such as blogs, email, and social media that have transformed the business writing field in the past two decades.
Business writing can be a surprisingly challenging field, but these five books will do wonders in helping business writers at every level of experience to become sharper writers and to put their audience first.
