Help with writing
The menu on the left provides guidance on how to develop your writing style and technical skills for business document writing. There is also an overview of important techniques to adopt when writing business documents below.
This site also provides templates for planning documents, proposals and policies.
It is important to understand at the outset that there are some differences between academic and business writing. The advice given here may not be appropriate for university assignment writing.
This help centre for writing provides some anonymous extracts of real student work to demonstrate common issues in writing style.
The following advice on writing might be a good place to start to get an overview of important techniques to adopt for business document writing.
- Write in sentences of 15 words or less. Long sentences are difficult to understand and more likely to contain grammatical errors.
- Each sentence you write must be structured with the subject before the verb
- Avoid starting sentences with a preposition (with, to, from, at, by, etc)
- Avoid starting a sentence with an -ing word e.g. believing, seeing, understanding
- Avoid using personal pronouns (I, we, you, they, etc)
- Try not to repeat words in the same sentence
- Remember you are writing for a reader. Don't waste their time and cause them to read irrelevant material.
- Make sure the document you write has a good structure
- Good layout and presentation significantly aids the readability of the document.
- Present information graphically when possible (e.g. charts, diagrams, illustrations, etc)