Practical Grammar for Better Business Communications

Clear, concise, and consistent content is easy to read and comprehend and creates easy communication. In professional and technical industries, content is often complex and methodical. That’s why it’s so important to create succinct and engaging content.

When creating technical and business content or communicating professional information, maintain the following guidelines to get your message across effectively.?

Keep Communications Brief!?

Good writing style involves not only using proper punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure, but also reader-friendly content. It’s difficult for readers to concentrate on your message when they have to struggle through unnecessary words and rambling sentences. This is true in technical and business writing, as well as professional communications such as emails.

When writing technical content or professional communications, keep it as brief as possible. No one wants to read a long-winded e-mail, or a technical report filled with useless and unnecessary details. Summarize the point of the email. DO NOT provide a play-by-play narrative outlining exactly what happened unless it’s required.

For instance, if you are communicating client feedback and the recipient doesn’t need to know the client’s name, age, or position, don’t include it. If they don’t need to know how long you waited for a response, don’t tell them. If they don’t need to all options explored, don’t provide them.

Only include essential information. Ask yourself:

• Does the recipient need to know this?
• Are my sentences concise and easy to follow?
• Have I included any unnecessary information?

Examples of unnecessary information may include:

• Personal information
• Train of thought or stream of consciousness: Avoid telling the recipient information such as how you arrived at a certain thought, idea, or guideline. “I was thinking about it, and…” or “First I went to the store, and then I drove to the office, after which I went home…”
• Strategies or unfinished plans: “Maybe we could…” or “Perhaps we might…”
• Extra Details. If details are essential to the main point of the email, include them. If not, leave them out. Unimportant or useless details bog down communication and decrease efficiency. The recipient is usually only looking for the main point of your email. Further detail is often futile and can create confusion and frustration and weaken your message entirely.
• Any other excess information beyond the main point: “She didn’t seem happy and honestly if I were her, I wouldn’t be either, especially considering she’s the store manager. She feels we provide too much information.” This sentence could literally say “She feels we provide too much information.”

Create Concise Sentences!

Remember, a strong, clear sentence includes a subject (noun) and verb (action). It may be followed by other parts of speech such as direct objects, subjective compliments, etc., when these parts of speech provide essential information.

Many professionals make the mistake of using too many words and phrases, thereby burying the subject and verb. If a sentence seems confusing or difficult to follow, find the subject and verb and other words that are essential to meaning. This allows you to focus on [those] meaningful words first instead of trying to spot weaker ones.

If the subject and verb are difficult to locate or buried under a lot of text, re-write the sentence in a clearer manner. Start by locating the subject and verb, followed by the most meaningful words in the sentence.

Consider the following example:

• “I will provide you with suggestions and help you with your performance to overcome the challenges you encounter every day while working for a difficult client, so you can feel less stressed.”

Find the words that contribute the most meaning to the sentence (including subject and verb):

• “I will provide you with suggestions and help you with your performance to overcome the challenges you encounter every day while working for a difficult client, so you can feel less stressed.”

Now, remove unnecessary or weak words and re-write your sentence clearly and concisely.

• “I will help you overcome the daily challenges of working for a difficult client, so you feel less stressed.”

Notice we only kept the most important parts of the sentence and cut any unnecessary filler (including the word “provide” in the verb). This resulted in a clearer message and far fewer words.

Use Clear Grammar!

The following are important grammar tips that will help you create concise and effective content that is reader friendly and easy to follow.

1.) Less is more! Never use many words when fewer will suffice.

• Instead of “Take them out” use “Remove them”
• Instead of “After this is accomplished” use “Then” or “Next”
• Instead of “At an early date” use “Soon”
• Instead of “In the absence of” use “without”

2.) Use simple language instead of eloquent speech. Fancy words are unnecessary.

• Instead of “Facilitate” use “Help”
• Instead of “Utilize’ use “Use”

4.) Just say no to Metadiscourse!

Metadiscourse is considered “writing about writing” and is almost always unnecessary. Examples of metadiscourse are: “to sum up,” “candidly,” “I believe,” “note that,” “it has become clear,” and “I would like to point out.”

Example 1:

Metadiscourse: “I would like to take this opportunity to extend to you a hearty congratulations.”

The metadiscourse here is basically the entire sentence. There’s no need to tell the person what you’re about to do. Just do it. Your whole point is to offer congratulations to someone. Don’t bury it under a bunch of filler.

Correction: “Congratulations!”

Keep your sentences simple, clear, and direct.

Example 2:

• Bad Version: “It is my opinion that we should cut taxes.”
• Okay Version: “I believe we should cut taxes.”
• Better Version: “We should cut taxes.”
• Best Version: “Cut taxes.”

The final version cuts the word count from nine to two and gets the point across quickly and clearly. If you’re the one saying we should cut taxes, then anyone reading already understands that you believe we should cut taxes (because you’re the one saying so). If you’re confused about the subject in that sentence, remember, command sentences such as “Cut Taxes” are complete sentences because the subject (You) is inferred.

5.) Avoid run-on sentences, nominalization, redundancy, and narrative writing.

Run-on sentences

Run-on sentences often include multiple articles and interjections such as, “I found the document, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and I have to move other documents around to make sure it’s filed correctly, but that’s really difficult if things aren’t where they belong, so if we could return things to their respective folder that would improve organization.”

This sentence is too long, and it provides a lot of unnecessary information. Consider saying, “The document was in the wrong folder. Let’s ensure we’re saving files correctly to stay organized.”

Prepositional Phrases

Sometimes prepositional phrases aren't necessary, especially when used instead of an apostrophe + s (i.e., “the employee’s writing” vs “the writing of the employee”) to denote possession of an object OR when a single modifier would suffice (i.e., institutional regulations vs. regulations of institution). Furthermore, too many prepositional phrases in a single sentence can obscure the main subject and action. (More examples below.)

?In some cases, a prepositional phrase may make the sentence clearer or may even be unavoidable. Use your best judgement. (See the next section—Noun Chains for more information on using appropriate prepositional phrases for clearer sentences.)

Examples

• Unnecessary phrase: The opinion of the manager
• Correction: The manager’s opinion
• Unnecessary phrase: The obvious effect of such a range of reference is to assure the audience of the author’s range of learning and intellect.
• Correction: The wide-ranging references in this talk assure the audience that the author is intelligent and well-read.
• Unnecessary phrase: It is a matter of the gravest possible importance to the health of anyone with a history of a problem with disease of the heart that they should avoid the sort of foods with a high percentage of saturated fats.
• Correction: Anyone with a history of heart disease should avoid saturated fats.

Noun Chains ?

Although unnecessary prepositional phrases are unclear and confusing, noun chains just as difficult to follow. A noun chain is a string of nouns usually acting as modifiers followed by one finally serving as the noun function (subject) in the sentence. Nouns can modify other nouns in English, but three or more nouns in a row can obscure the meaning. In these cases, prepositional phrases are useful and even necessary.

You can fix a noun chain easily by moving the noun that performs the role of the subject to the front. Then, add any necessary prepositional or verbal phrases.

Noun chains are often found in poorly written technical and business writing and communications. Unfortunately, they abound in administrative writing.

Examples

• Departmental expenditure increase review
• Investment income deferral advantage
• Post-selection feedback session
• Employment insurance premium rate increases

It is easier for the reader to understand the message if some of the nouns are linked by prepositions such as “of, for, to, and in.”

The first example could be reformulated as "a review of increases in departmental expenditures." Although the revised version uses more words, it is clearer and simpler to read.

Example

• Noun Chain: Noun chains create noun chain reader strangulation problems.
• Correction: Noun chains create problems that tend to strangle the reader.

Although we want to keep professional writing and communications as brief as possible, clarity is the most important function of strong writing. In the example above, the corrected sentence is far less confusing and doesn’t require the reader to wait to the end of the sentence to find out that “noun chains create problems.”

?Adjectives and Adverbs

Most adjectives/adverbs are unnecessary. Instead of using “can really make a difference,” use “can make a difference.” The word “really” doesn’t imply enough emphasis to be useful in professional communication.

Nominalization

Nominalization is best avoided. People often use nominal case because they mistakenly think it makes their writing sound smarter. This is not the case. Using simple, concise, easy to read sentences is ALWAYS best. This is true for all professional, business, and technical writing. Understanding nominalizations and how to avoid them is tricky. Here are some tips to help:

Nominalization is (ironically) usually (not always) the “-ion” version of a verb. Check out these examples for more clarity.

• Nominal: Conducting an investigation
• Strong Verb: Investigating
• Nominal: Giving a reaction
• Strong Verb: Reacting
• Nominal: Revision of nominal verbs
• Strong Verb: Revising nominal verbs

When avoiding nominal writing, you are not only getting straight to the point, but you’re also using fewer words. In some cases, nominal verbs require prepositions and other parts of speech that can weaken sentences and create run-on sentences.?

More Examples of Nominalization:

• We should take into consideration several factors. (7 words)
• He must make a decision about what to do. (9 words)
• They gave us information about the new research program. (9 words)

What’s wrong with the above sentences? Grammatically, they’re correct. But they’re less powerful because they use nominalized verbs. That is, instead of using strong verbs, these examples use weaker noun versions of those verbs.

Above, we highlighted the nominalizations in red. For each of these examples, we can delete the prepositions and articles and reduce the phrases to one word.

Example of Revised Sentences:

• We should consider several factors. [5 words]
• He must decide what to do. [6 words]
• They informed us about the new research program. [8 words]

As you can see, eliminating these grammar constructions helps maintain concise sentences and improves clarity.

Another issue with nominalization is that it often creates passive voice. Let’s look at the following example:

• The analysis of how X-factor impacts B gene expression was conducted. [11 words]
• We analyzed X-factor’s impact on B gene expression. [8 words]

By shifting the nominalization to a strong verb, we establish an active voice and remove prepositions.

If you examine the most common nominalizations, you’ll notice a pattern. Phrases using “make” and “take,” gerunds (verb+ing), or nouns typically ending in -tion, -sion, -ment, -ence, and -ance usually have strong verb counterparts.

So, when you edit your documents or re-read your professional emails, use the search function in your word processing software to locate these specific endings and verbs. Then revise, accordingly!

Understanding these common bad habits and practical grammar tips will improve your communications and help you revise other people's work more effectively.