How to Write for Business

by Daniel F O'Connor

Sitting down to write something for your business, whether a press release, newsletter, web page or plain old letter, can be pretty intimidating. You can zing off emails to friends without a second thought, but once it concerns your livelihood - money, in other words - it's easy to find other things to do that suddenly become much more important. Making another cup of tea and seeing if Wikipedia lists the ingredients of Birds Custard*, for instance.

And there's so much bad writing out there! So many websites going on and on and on and on and on about blue-skies solutions, outside the box thinking and stakeholder management. It's sometimes hard to stop yourself from screaming "Get to the point!" before ripping your monitor from its wires and throwing it, and yourself, out the window. And you'd hate to add to all that bad writing, wouldn't you?

Well, you don't have to.

Here's a simple checklist to follow whenever your cursor is winking at the top of a blank page. I'm not saying that following these rules will win you awards and make your company the next Google, but it will help. Honest.

1. Benefits, not features

Your customers don't care about you, your 50 years of experience or cutting-edge client management technologies. At all. They want to know "What's in it for me?" Tell them how you can make their lives better. Let's say you sell drills. That sexy chrome finish on the Hyper Electron 5mm Deluxe, is it a benefit? Not really, no. It's a feature, no matter how cunningly designed. The super-accurate holes it drills are benefits.

2. Write like you talk

Don't be stuffy. Use regular words. Read aloud what you've written. How does it sound? Corporate and impersonal, or a conversation between two human beings?

3. Lose the weak words

Don't describe how your company may, might or should help customers. Talk about how it will.

4. Every word is gold

Take out anything not pushing the message forward. Your customers will not read waffle. They only want to know: Can you help me? Yes or no?

5. Invisible text

The message, not your writing style, is everything. Don't be self-indulgent. Don't distract from the message by making the way you say things more important than what you're saying. Bursting with Wildean repartee and wit? Start a blog.

6. Rhythm

Some sentences are long. Some short. Mix it up and keep things interesting.

7. Re-read what you've done

Edit, edit, edit. It's so easy to make mistakes that you, as the writer, don't notice the first time through. You can bet your customers will and they'll think you're unprofessional. Check your grammar, your spelling and, yes, your spacing. If you've done something like a numbered list, make sure the numbers follow each other. Seriously! Some people really are stupid enough to mess up basic stuff like that.

*It doesn't. I checked.

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