9 hard-won tips for writing long-form business communications

My freelance writing business serving professional firms, institutional organisations and government agencies in the UK’s architecture, engineering and construction sectors* is 10 years old.

To celebrate, I’m writing a short series of posts that I hope is useful and interesting to my wonderful clients.

This post is about the demands of long-form writing such as reports, articles, blog posts, case studies, manuals, standards, and books.?

If you’re not used to writing, communicating effectively in anything longer than an email can be surprisingly difficult.

The effort – and it does take significant effort – is doubly worth it though. Not only does it result in a useful output, it also clarifies your thinking.

Writing is rule-bound and linear and so forces you to focus and impose a structure on thoughts. In doing so, it reveals non-sequiturs and logical gaps. This is immensely useful: it tells you where your argument is weak, highlights where you need more evidence, and alerts you to fatal flaws in your reasoning, saving you from embarrassing errors.

If you’re grappling with a complex issue, attempting to summarize it in writing could help you to resolve it, or at least see it more clearly. The act of writing will help you in problem-solving and balanced assessment, skills that are at the core of professional life.

Here is some hard-won wisdom about what to expect when writing more substantial pieces – and what it takes to do it well.

1/ The things that make writing ‘good’ depend on understanding who will read it. You communicate more effectively when you know who you’re writing for and what their needs are … and then catering to those needs.

If you’re writing marketing copy, it should engage with the concerns of your target market and offer ways to address those concerns. If it’s a stage report, it should be organized by the milestones that matter most to your client and make it as easy as possible for them to sign it off. If it’s a set of instructions, it should be crystal clear and pre-empt likely questions.

The point is to consider and respect your target reader. By making life easier for them, you will make life ten times easier for yourself. Put yourself in their shoes, use their language, and structure your writing to their point of view.

2/ Definition matters. Have you ever read a piece of writing and wondered whether its content applied to you? Were you left uncertain about the limits of its scope? Did it irritate you because important concepts or terms were not defined or, worse, seemed to vary from instance to instance? If so, the author failed you.

When it’s your turn to write something, don’t repeat their mistakes. Be explicit about who your piece is for, what your piece does (and, if there is any lingering doubt, does not) cover, and what, exactly, is meant by your key concepts.

How you do this is a matter of choice. If appropriate, set it all out under headings: target readership; scope; key definitions. If this is too stiff and formal, provide the detail mid-flow, conversationally – as I do at the start of this post. Whatever you do, don’t leave the reader to guess.

3/ Accuracy and honesty matter. Knowingly presenting unsubstantiated opinion as uncontested truth is a well-rehearsed rhetorical device and, indeed, can be effective in contexts where the truth is uncertain and you want to win an argument. However, using it carries reputational risks of bluster or bullying – especially if in fact the weight of evidence eventually shows your opinion to be wrong.

Presenting opinion as truth out of sheer ignorance or laziness, on the other hand, is unforgiveable. It has no place in professional business communications, where you are meant to be the expert and where integrity, honesty and technical accuracy are important.

Therefore, I recommend that you actively guard against biases and overstatements. Research your topic. Check your facts. Attenuate your bluster, acknowledge counterarguments, and if something is just your opinion, say so.

4/ Good writing is time-consuming. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that writing is just the spoken word belched onto paper or a screen. It’s really not, and if you want proof, try making sense of a verbatim transcription of a Teams meeting.

Writers don’t have the luxury of gesticulating, making funny faces, or altering their pitch, volume and tone to compensate for inarticulacy. Nor can they adjust in response to verbal and non-verbal cues from their listeners or interlocutors. They rely solely on words, spelling, grammar and punctuation to communicate meaning. It’s an unforgiving discipline and doing it well is painstakingly slow.

Lesson: if you think a piece of writing will take you a day, allow a week. You won’t be writing all that time, but your brain will be percolating, brewing a better result.

5/ Your message is more important than spelling, punctuation and grammar. I’m not saying that spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPG) aren’t important – they are – but they are less so than what you say and its composition.

In short, good SPG can’t redeem a pointless piece of writing, whereas you can easily forgive poor SPG if the writing is making good, well-structured points.

Business writing is a tool for communication, not an end in itself: focus on what you want to say and then say it. If necessary, rely on your software package’s in-built grammar nazi to knock your SPG into shape.

Of course, SPG does matter, sometimes critically. If so, don’t rely solely on digital assistance: call on the help of a friend or colleague or, if you can afford it and your objective in writing is worth it, hire a proofreader or editor – see point 9 below.

6/ Good writing is iterative. The longer your piece of writing, the more you’ll need to go back and adjust what came before. This isn’t inefficiency but a natural consequence of the way writing organizes your thinking. Your plan for what you want to say at the start of a piece of writing almost always changes as you go, so accept gradual back-and-forth refinement as part of the process. Astute readers will see parallels with how building designs progress – the same principles apply.

7/ When information has an order, use that order to improve your communication. Information often has a hierarchical or sequential order. For example, sustainable design strategies can be divided into passive and active systems, which in turn can be broken down into separate technologies, which in turn can have consequences for other areas of building design. These nested bits of information all relate to each other, but you only know if you understand the hierarchy, i.e., what the common ancestors are.

Similarly, most people’s experience of buildings is sequential: as they approach, they get a sense of their local context and orientation. Once there, they can appreciate the fa?ade and outward appearance. Then they enter and follow a route through the building, noting the layout and ‘feel’ of the spaces. The buildings’ various systems – for environmental control, security, or fire safety, for example – are noticed last of all.

For plain, failsafe communication (useful in bids, case studies, and reports, for example), use these hierarchies and sequences to structure your writing and dictate its flow. This does not mean always starting with the high-level point and burrowing in, or moving from exterior to interior: that would be dull. But it does mean taking care to explain how information fits together; otherwise, the reader is left confused.

8/ State your main message upfront and complete it last. The battle for readers’ attention is fierce. They only have so much time and so, if they are rational, their discretionary reading for business-related writing will be filtered for stuff that is interesting, useful, or valuable to them professionally. Everything else will be ignored.

For non-discretionary reading, i.e. reading that readers must do contractually or for reasons of compliance or conformance, they will be grateful for clarity and efficiency of communication.

Either way, both needs are served by your stating your main message upfront. Although you will know what you want to say when you start, you will only know its nuanced detail once you’ve finished. So, to make sure that your opening message packs its maximum punch, update it last.

9/ Writing always benefits from proofreading and editing. Because writing is hard and takes a long time, first drafts usually have an unbalanced structure and are full of clumsy sections and errors.

Always build in time to review your first draft before issuing it so that you can root out these problems.

Wherever possible, I sleep on my writing. Coming to it fresh the next morning or, better, the next week, often reveals glitches. A pause is particularly useful if you’ve a nagging feeling that the flow isn’t quite right. Fresh eyes often allow you to pinpoint a fix, leading to a much better outcome.

The best advice I ever received about proofreading was that you must be prepared to ‘kill your babies.’ The phrase is deliberately shocking. It means deleting pet turns of phrase that you resist changing even though they obstruct communication. Stop resisting: in business communications, clarity always trumps authorial elegance.

You might be lucky enough to have access to a professional proofreader or, better still, editor. If so, embrace them. Their input is worth its weight in gold.

In the spirit point 3 above, I should stress that these are just my thoughts after successfully earning a living from writing for ten years. I claim some expertise but concede that I am far from perfect.

Nonetheless, I think the points are useful and, perhaps, less commonly talked about than the usual advice you find online.

Do you agree or disagree? Would you add anything? I’d love to know, so please don't hesitate to get in touch.

* I’ve worked for a few organisations in biomedical and other kinds of technological R&D, too.