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3 Ways to Improve Your Business’s Writing

Improve Your Business Writing

Studies indicate that corporations lose upwards of $400 billion annually because of poor writing. That’s over $1 billion daily. This staggering figure points to the losses in sales, productivity, staff, morale, and branding that are directly connected to unclear or careless writing.

As a business leader, you might think that coaching your team in writing skills is outside your core responsibilities. However, investing time and energy to develop this vital skill in your workforce will pay off in the long run.

Here’s what you can do to improve writing in your organization.

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How to Write Emails That Get Responses

the right subject line

You work hard to write the perfect email to a prospective customer. You hit the send button full of hope that you will get a positive response. Then, the waiting begins. A day goes by. Then another. Then another. Crickets. It is frustrating when our recipients do not respond to our emails.

First, the bad news: If your recipients do not want to respond, they won’t. They will probably ignore your email if they are uninterested in your offering. We cannot control other people’s behavior.

However, you can get a reply if you have strong credibility and a compelling subject line. If your subject line and content resonate with a recipient’s emotions, you can even overcome the resistance to entertaining a message from an unknown sender. So, there is hope.

If you want your recipient to respond to your email, three things have to happen.

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3 Essential Writing Tasks That AI-Assisted Writing Programs Cannot Do for You

maintaining logical flow

Many people seem to believe that they no longer need to learn to write because the AI genie has popped out of the bottle and is granting their every wish about drafting their documents. I smile when I hear this because I’ve seen what AI can and cannot do. It can generate a serviceable first draft, yet you cannot rely on its veracity. AI sometimes fabricates statistics and citations. Its tone swings from obscure to trite. It repeats itself. It is wondrous in its ability to clean up bad writing but not so adept at preventing bad writing in the first place. To manage AI’s output, you need to know how to write.

Artificial intelligence programs are like devoted servants. You give them a prompt and they dutifully polish it and send it back. However, they don’t think. Here are three essential writing functions that artificial intelligence cannot do–and that you must do yourself.

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Use Reflective Writing to Distill the Lessons of the Past Year

your year-end review

Year-end is an ideal time to reflect on what we have learned and achieved during the past year. In addition to your quantitative review of profits, conversions, and sales trends, take time to reflect on your professional and personal life.

Consider where your business has been and your vision for the new year. Writing reflectively – a form of journaling – enables you to pause, ponder, and process the work of the past year as part of your year-end review. Reflective writing involves critically analyzing or exploring an experience you’ve had, noting how it affected you, and what you plan to do with your new knowledge.

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7 Ways to Avoid Stress-Induced Brain Freeze

brain fog world events

In times of extreme stress, the sense of blanking out is common. We all have limited reserves of cognitive focus, and when too much is going on behind the scenes, our minds do not function as they ordinarily would. “Your past, your body, and your personal traumas, and who you are set the stage for how you will respond to events in the Middle East, Ukraine, or other trouble spots in the world,” says Jacques Jospitre Jr., co-founder of SohoMD, a nationwide network of biological psychiatry providers.

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Want to Gain Respect? Write Respectfully

Phrases to avoid in business emails

We’ve all been on the receiving end of emails that make us feel condescended to or disrespected, and it’s never a pleasant experience. What’s unfortunate is that the writers of such emails may not have intended any harm. They might have thought they were being direct and straightforward, or perhaps they were in a hurry and didn’t consider the impact of their words and punctuation choices. They might have even thought they were being respectful.

To prevent being the source of someone else’s online suffering, we must be careful with our language choices. Writing messages with a demeaning or passive-aggressive subtext is counterproductive to achieving success.

To retain the goodwill of your readers, steer clear of these phrases:

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5 Ways to Cut Through the Noise and Write to Distracted Readers

Write to Distracted Readers

Interruptions plague today’s business readers more than ever before. Between notifications, emails, text messages, voicemails, and physical interruptions, most people find it challenging to sit down and read through a written message. Research indicates that our brains carom off in another direction about every 44 to 50 seconds when we are engaged with a screen.

Yet as business writers, we want our readers to read through our messages and comprehend them. An important project may depend on everyone reading a report. A major sale may hinge on the prospect reading our proposal.

To defeat digital distraction, we need to understand it and work around it when we write.

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Take Your Leadership Beyond Words Through Body Language and Nonverbal Communication

body language workplace

As somatic coach Thomas Rosenberg points out, the congruence between a leader’s actions and words reflects their level of authenticity and trustworthiness. Rosenberg explains that somatics holds that we are what we practice (how we sit, stand, walk, breathe, carry tension, the language we use with ourselves and others) and the way we hold our bodies in everyday activities.

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Einstein’s Advice to Writers: “As Simple as possible but no simpler”

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” This quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientists in history, yet it relates to business communication as much as science. When we strike a balance between simplicity and accuracy, we reach the golden mean where we communicate successfully. In a

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How ChatGPT Can Rescue You From Writer’s Block

overcome writer's block

Feel free to use generative A.I. for what it’s good for — brainstorming, rough drafting, and proofreading — but keep your hand on the tiller at all times. This technology can rescue you from writer’s block, but it will not save your neck if you give it insufficient or inadequate prompts and check all the facts it provides. In a way, that’s good news: If your input is still necessary, the robots have not yet taken over the world.

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Does Every Email Need a Subject Line? Yes, Every Reader Appreciates a Heads-Up About the Content of Your Email

hook reader's attention

Your subject line is your opportunity to hook the reader’s attention. If you are a marketer, you are forcefully aware of the subject line’s power. According to HubSpot Research, 65 percent of surveyed marketers say that subject lines have the greatest impact on open rates. For morale’s sake, for courtesy’s sake, and for the practical benefits that come from including a subject line in every email — not just the ones whose open rates we are measuring — it pays to always include a subject line.

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Inclusive Communication Builds Both People and Profits

We live in an age of great sensitivity to language–some might even say hyper-sensitivity. While being too “politically correct” might cause some people to roll their eyes, you ignore individual sensitivities at your peril. Words referring to gender, race, creed, sexual orientation, physical ability, mental health, gender identity, and the like have the potential to make some people feel excluded–and that is the last thing we should want to do. No one can write a list of words you can and cannot use because each audience has its own sensitivities. Nevertheless, here are a few principles to remember.

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Aristotle’s Advice for Marketers

business communications

Aristotle taught his students the art of persuasion. Today’s business people use persuasion daily. Managers must persuade employees to follow through on projects, entrepreneurs convince investors to fund their start-ups and sales professionals persuade prospects to buy. In short, the ability to persuade is a core element of business success.

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Idioms Gone Wild

An idiom is a phrase that fluent speakers generally understand and that would not make sense if you looked at its component parts. For example, what does it mean to say, “It’s raining cats and dogs”? We’re not feeling fur fall from the sky, but we know what the phrase means. Most of us use idioms all

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Who Cares About Grammar Errors?

Who Cares About Grammar Errors? During Worktalk’s business writing trainings, people often ask me whether grammar errors still matter in the age of text and Twitter. I tell them that grammar still counts, even with the advent of emojis. Grammatical writing is vital because it contributes to clear writing, and clear writing helps us get

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7 Commonly Misused Word Pairs

Sets of words that sound similar often confuse writers. My book, Get to the Point, 2nd edition, contains an extensive (or was it intensive?) list of these words. Several Writamins subscribers have requested that we review a few classics. Affect versus Effect AFFECT (verb or noun) in its verbal usage means to act on; to

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Lying Low or Laying Low?

A friend recently told me that she was laying low until after New Year’s. Alarm bells went off in my head as I wondered, “Doesn’t she mean she is lying low?” Many of us are perplexed about the difference between lying low and laying low. The problem arises from a deeper confusion about the difference between lie and lay. In my book on

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How Long Should Your Emails Be?

[4-minute read] When I was in my 20s, I worked for a Japanese import/export company in San Pedro, California. My boss was the son of the founder, a solid, successful Japanese-American businessman. One day, he asked me to write a report on the sales prospects for an item they were planning to import. I asked,

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Managing the Inner Critic

[4-minute read] Do you edit as you write? If so, your writing process might go something like this:  Dear JohnA little voice in your head pipes up, “You can’t call him John! Call him Mr. Cuddy!”Another voice inside says, “OMG! You’re right! I need to change that!” So you change it to Dear Mr. Cuddy and continue, It

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Do Emojis Belong in Business Writing?

Hi! It’s nice to see you. 😃 What do you think I meant by that happy face?  Lacking the precision and nuance of language, emojis are wide open to interpretation. Along with the inherent informality that comes from inserting cartoonish faces in your emails, this fact raises questions about whether emojis are appropriate in business documents.

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Woulda Coulda Shoulda

“I coulda been a contender!” While this plaintive cry worked well for Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”, it falls flat in business writing. Careful writers cringe when they see sentences like If I would of known they were good prospects, I would of tried harder. I should of known he was a rascal. I could

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If Lincoln Had Used Grammarly

5-minute read] If Abraham Lincoln had used Grammarly when he wrote the Gettysburg Address, he might have doubted himself. Running his text through the grammar checker, he would have received suggestions like: Rewrite the sentence Choose a different word Rephrase sentence Choose a synonym Would Grammarly’s ideas have yielded a tighter, more concise document? Probably.

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Acronyms and Apostrophes

Monthly Writmains: Acronyms and Apostrophes

[4-minute read] Several Writamins readers have asked me how to use apostrophes with acronyms. An acronym is a word made up of the initial first letters of a group of words. For example, NATO, OPEC, and other pronounceable first initials are acronyms. Initialisms are words that are made up of the initials of core words; they differ from acronyms in

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Get to the Point

Work Talk Writamins: Get To The Point

Eight seconds. That’s about how long you have until your reader decides whether to keep reading or flip forward to the next message. If you’re still reading this Writamin, I’m in luck! Given the deluge of messages your readers are bombarded with and their tenuous attention span, the only way you can be sure to

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amid the pressures of constant communication.

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