Business writing is a vital skill for any public relations professional, especially when dealing with a crisis situation. You need to communicate clearly, concisely, and persuasively with your stakeholders, media, and customers. How can you improve your business writing skills and craft effective crisis communication plans? Here are some tips to help you.
Before you start writing, you need to understand who you are writing for and what they need to know. Different audiences have different expectations, preferences, and levels of knowledge. For example, your internal team may need more details and technical terms than your external customers. Your media contacts may want more facts and quotes than your social media followers. Your audience will also influence your tone, style, and format of your writing. You should tailor your message to suit your audience and their needs.
Understanding the audience is crucial for our responses. We can consider factors like target audience, prior knowledge, and purpose of communication to tailor our responses in terms of complexity, tone, style, and information level, ultimately aiming to be informative, relevant, and engaging for the user.
A well-structured document or message will help you organize your thoughts, present your information logically, and guide your readers through your key points. A common structure for business writing is the inverted pyramid, which starts with the most important information and then provides more details and background as needed. This helps you capture your readers' attention and answer their questions quickly. For crisis communication plans, you may also want to use the STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. This helps you explain the context, the goal, the steps, and the outcome of your response to a crisis.
We are organizing our responses effectively to prioritize key information, ensure a logical flow, and adapt to different situations to provide clear, concise, and user-friendly responses.
- Don't succumb to client or team pressure. Give yourself a minute and think about what you want to say on behalf of your client. The basic take away from this exercise is asking yourself "what should my audience know after reading the write up?" - Make your writing to the point when writing for business clients. By presenting sharp writing to the audience, it will increase your chances of delivering the main idea and sharpening your argument becomes significantly higher. - Cut the fancy jargon and make use of relevant industry specific buzz words that fit the article. Your write up must not be diluted in creativity.
Business writing should be clear and concise, meaning that you use simple words, short sentences, and active voice. This helps you avoid confusion, ambiguity, and jargon that may alienate or frustrate your readers. You should also use transitions, headings, and bullet points to break up your text and make it easier to scan and understand. You should also proofread and edit your writing to eliminate any errors, typos, or redundancies that may undermine your credibility or professionalism.
Prioritizing clarity and conciseness to ensure accessibility, efficiency, and professionalism, in this case, we can achieve this through using active voice, simple language, and concise sentences, along with proper formatting for improved readability. Ultimately, our goal should be to provide clear, concise, and informative responses that effectively serve our users.
Contrary to some, my best lessons from learning to write, was to speak on stage and in presentations. Writing convincingly and persuasively needs to feel conversational and relatable to your audiences. If your writing feels like it is conversational, you can immediately engage your audiences more than a "script". So, get on stage to present, get in a radio studio and be interviewed or co-host a segment with a program host. The experience will change how you relate to your audiences, and how you write.
Business writing should also be persuasive and positive, meaning that you use techniques and words that appeal to your readers' emotions, values, and interests. You should also show empathy, respect, and honesty to build trust and rapport with your readers. For example, you can use stories, testimonials, or statistics to support your claims, show benefits or solutions to your readers' problems, or use words like "you", "we", or "us" to create a connection. You should also avoid negative words or phrases that may trigger anger, fear, or resistance, such as "no", "never", or "but".
Finally, one of the best ways to improve your business writing skills is to seek feedback and practice. You can ask a colleague, a friend, or a professional editor to review your writing and give you constructive suggestions on how to improve it. You can also read and analyze examples of good business writing from your industry or field and learn from their strengths and weaknesses. You can also practice your writing skills regularly by taking online courses, joining writing groups, or writing for different purposes and audiences.