Communicate Better

The fast pace of office environments and the prevalence of casual e-mail is no excuse for sloppy communication. Effective business writing demands at least a little prior planning. Before jumping into a business document, you need to keep three basic principles in mind: understand your purpose, know your audience, and decide the outcome and how to get there.

Understand Your Purpose

Before you start writing, it's important to ask yourself what you intend the document to accomplish. In determining your purpose, ask yourself what action you want the reader to take in response to your message. This will have an impact on how you decide to get that message across. If you can sum up your purpose in one sentence, you're in good shape to proceed. If not, you should take a step back and plan a little more.
TIP
After you've figure out your main point, state it as early as possible in the document.

Know Your Audience

The audience makes all the difference. People subconsciously tailor their conversation to different people, and same rule applies to writing. Just because you may be on the same payroll as the rest of your fellow coworkers doesn't mean they'll be any more receptive to what you have to say -- working to make your message relevant to readers can get your points across much more effectively. The following factors all play a role in what you write to your audience:

Who they are: Consider your audience's age, career, ethnicity, culture, socio-economic status, education level, and gender. And most of all, make sure you understand their relationship to you. Are they supervisors, subordinates, or equals? It all makes a difference.
What they know: Determine whether you need to debrief your audience with additional background and history on the subject you're covering.
How they feel about the subject: Knowing any prejudices or preferences your reader may already have for the subject at hand will help you shape your message.
Why they want to know: You can't deliver what your readers want or need unless you know their motivation for reading your document in the first place.


Decide on the Outcome and How to Get There

Although a quick e-mail memo takes less planning than a 20-page report, the same basic principles are in play with both forms of business writing. Both require that you take some time to think about the conclusions you'd like your readers to reach by the time they finish your document. In general, your document will either inform or persuade, and you should have one of these two approaches in mind as you prepare your thoughts.

If you aim to inform: In informative documents, you likely won't be able to cover everything relating to your subject, but you should be able to hit the highlights. Figure out the key points you want to get across about your subject and stick to them.
If you aim to persuade: Persuasive documents should identify three things: the problem, who cares about the problem, and the solution to the problem.
After you have the approach in mind, determine which facts and arguments support your message and help convey what you want your audience to know, understand, or feel. Throw out anything that doesn't support these facts.

Now you're ready to write. No matter what the length of your document should be, it generally includes the same basic elements:

Opener: Depending on the length of your document, you may want to briefly summarize the points you came up with here.
Body: This is where you'll flesh out each point in greater detail and build the evidence that supports it. If you don't think you can give a point the time it deserves, consider throwing it out.
Conclusion: When you've run out of points, it's time to wrap things up. The conclusion is the last thing you tell readers and what they'll take away from your document. So as you summarize what you've said, leave the audience with a final overall message. You don't want to introduce any new thoughts here. Instead, restate the purpose of your document.

In Effective business writing the single most important driver of success is rooted the writer's ATTITUDE;Take a good look at yourself and ask, "What am I trying to achieve:

…am I trying to just get by or do I want to really get better?"

…do I see learning to write more effectively as a cost or an investment?"

… am I targeting excellence or expediency?"
" the prevalence of casual e-mail 'and why it went sloppy is when
writers actually gets into trouble when they write like they speak!

I find that brain storming has always been very effective.

Very useful! You just satisfied me to the request i put on another post!

That's what i need in my work, where i can improve myself! Greatly appreciated!

In Effective business writing the single most important driver of success is rooted the writer's ATTITUDE;Take a good look at yourself and ask, "What am I trying to achieve:

Especially when we have a good example and here we seem to have got one!
[:481:]

That's right!

We are not only learning from the content of your input here, but also the ways you express your ideas!

thank you ,very useful!!
"Before jumping into a business document, you need to keep three basic principles in mind: understand your purpose, know your audience, and decide the outcome and how to get there."
i appreciate it!!

don't last yourself in the way of life!!!the chance don't all fit your coat,and learning to leave it to others is essential capital to success!

And (quotes) "if you aim to persuade: Persuasive documents should identify three things: the problem, who cares about the problem, and the solution to the problem..."

Once the problem is identified, you need to answer the quesiton of "who cares about the problem," which is a prerequisit for you to preceed to the last point: formatting your solutions. My personal experience told me that it is hard to over emphasize the importance of this second preparation step for "business writing." You have to take time to think carefully to find out those (that are) truely relevant. Actually, this often can't be done at once and you may well need to go back and forth to determine the final candidates. In practice, I often find myself processing the second and third steps as a loosely combined single step. The difficulty here with the second step is that you need to know your audience well enough to go after and persuade them.

to discuss with 亥俄密友:

…am I trying to just get by or do I want to really get better?"

…do I see learning to write more effectively as a cost or an investment?"

…am I targeting excellence or expediency?"

Just can't agree more with you on that the self attitude is the single most important driver for the excellence of business writing, or any writing with a serious purpose. I have thought for awhile and now I try to express what I have understood in the following:

Here are three test stones as you give. The first one is like a getting-started question "Are you really interested?" which one will be asked to answer in the first place in order to decide if the negotiation of a business deal is necessary. If one's answer is "just to get by" then nothing will happen. The second test stone determines, to a large extent, the active life span of one's enthusiasm in following all the instructions designed for achieving writing excellence. Only when one sees it as an investment for the benefit of the rest of his life will he be motivated to accept all the pains involved along the way. The third test stone is somehow like a revolving door that provides one with two passages. It is always his choice to go either way as long as he feels fit.

I find that brain storming has always been very effective.

May I ask what "brain storming" is?

Hi everyone, really appreciate having so many reponses, and my apologies for the delay; and for all that matters-
brain storming simply means gathering thoughts and just pencil it in on any piece of paper, so it will always be there for you when you needed it.