Business Style:
A) Tell It Like It Is
Avoid jargon, big, fancy-pants words, use simple, declarative sentences and avoid pointlessly complex grammatical constructions. You are not trying to impress your audience; you are trying to inform them.
B) Words Are Evil, Avoid Them
Academic reports and essays focus on thick, dense writing to impress and convince readers. As a rule of thumb, in essays, more is better: more facts and figures, more info, more pages, fatter paragraphs, more, more, more.
Business writing focuses on clear, concise writing to help readers. As a rule of thumb, in business letter, less is more: letters are skimmed, not read, and excess info buries the main ideas.
So: Essays: Complexer is gooder because it shows you is way smart! Business Documents: Simpler is gooder because it shows you are efficient.
C) Format For Effect and Efficiency
Make business documents graphically, visually easier to read by doing the following:
1) Use subject headings that summarize content. Make those headings stand out by using bold print.
The reader should be able to glean the main content simply by skimming the
headings.
2) Use shorter paragraphs (fewer sentences per paragraph). People are lazy
and don't want to read whatever you wrote; they will read a two sentence
paragraph but tend to ignore the big, fat ones.
3) Use "white space" (don't fill up the page; leave empty space) to emphasize main points. Ideas in the middle of
paragraphs get ignored. Ideas surrounded by empty page get read. For
emphasis, use lists:
· Use bulleted or numbered lists. Only use numbers when sequence matters,
such as "step 1, step 2" etc.
· Edit lists for
parallel construction; that is, all phrases in the list should
be in the same grammatical form.
4) Use varied paragraph lengths (short and shorter; single-sentence paragraphs ok).
5) BREAK CONVENTION only for added emphasis, and
only occasionally.
Too much fancy stuff is overwhelming!!!!!