Improve Your Business Writing Skills With These Easy Tips and Tricks

Over the years, I’ve helped countless students and professionals—from New York Times bestselling authors to colleagues at publishing houses and universities—improve their writing. Sometimes I break out the red pen and line edit, but other times I simply share broad-stroke ideas and tips. Even simple tricks, like encouraging my students to read their work out loud and mark passages that sound clunky, help eliminate awkward phrasing and fine-tune prose.  

The truth is, no matter your skill level or profession, writing is important. Think of how many times you could have deescalated, expedited, improved, simplified, or solved a situation through a simple exchange of emails—if only you had the right words.

For job seekers, the importance should be clear. Career opportunities can be won and lost on the strength of your resume and cover letter. At the crux of each application is professional experience, but you have to know how to sell yourself with words on a page first or all that hard work goes unnoticed. I could dedicate an entire post to cover letters alone, but won’t belabor the point except to say— tailor each one to the specific job posting and proofread like mad.  

Whether you’re actively looking for a job or not, one easy way to improve your writing and professional profile at the same time is to start posting on LinkedIn or contributing to an industry newsletter. Think about topics of interest to you and the people in your field and add value to the conversation. Once you’ve selected a topic, decide on a style and tone that fits your personal brand. If you’re at a loss, read others’ work you admire and decide what appeals to you most about their writing. Does she vary her sentence length, hitting you with a short zinger after a string of long descriptive ones? Does he use flowery language and alliteration or is he straight and to the point, a no frills kind of guy?

We’re all busy people, but one of the best things you can do for your own writing is to be a more well-informed person. At the end of the day, it’s important to make your work your own, but it’s also okay to admire and learn from others—to observe the world around you—and then to take those observations and build a personal style that works for you. Take the time to peruse the New York Times or Wall Street Journal in the morning. While you’re having lunch, read your favorite blog or, and I’m a big proponent of this, a physical book. It’s no surprise that I ask every speaker who visits campus at Brandeis International Business School to share a favorite reading recommendation with the students.  

For my LinkedIn connections who work in a communication-based field and employ these tactics already, maybe it’s time to finally enroll in that copyediting or writing course at the local university. Contact your manager or HR to see if your company offers tuition reimbursement. If the course directly applies to your job, it may be fully covered, since your employer will benefit from your newly-developed skills. If your company won’t pay for a college-level or continuing education class, ask if they subscribe to an online learning platform, like Lynda.com, and explore those options instead. The point is – we can all improve, even those of us who pride ourselves on being strong writers.

Which leads me to my last point: no matter what profession we’re in, from communications to finance, one easy way we can all be better writers, is to be more thoughtful about the way we email. Each work email is an extension of your professional brand so think about how you want to come across to people—friendly, efficient, professional— and channel that in your writing. Drafting an important email to a client? Have a colleague proof it. Caught in a heated email exchange? Step away and re-read your response before you press send. Notice people aren’t reading your emails from start to finish? Learn to edit yourself more. Have a big presentation due in the morning? Look at it with fresh eyes after getting some sleep or, better yet, print it out. The act of reading it on the page instead of the screen might make you notice a typo or interact with the words in a whole new way.

Now none of this is to say verbal communication doesn’t matter—that big presentation will undoubtedly be to a room full of people—but verbal and written communication go hand-in-hand. The ability to express yourself in both forms will be the thing that sets you apart.

Curious – what tricks do you use to make your professional writing pop?