Business writing is something we all do without necessarily thinking about it. It’s the writing we do as part of our day-to-day work: emails, memos, proposals, reports and anything else we use to communicate with our colleagues, clients or customers.

Good business writing matters. We spend a great deal of our working time reading, so waffly writing is a waste of that time. Vague communications don’t inspire trust from colleagues or clients. Proposals that are not persuasive won’t get the green light. Brochures full of buzzwords will leave potential customers cold.

Unfortunately, a lot of the business writing we all receive isn’t as good as it should be. Our inboxes overflow with jargon-heavy reports, emails that take forever to get to the point and memos that need to be read four times to work out what on Earth the writer is on about.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

WHY BAD WRITING IS BAD NEWS

Bad writing is bad for productivity. When Harvard Business Review surveyed 547 business people about their reading habits, it found that they averaged 25.5 hours per week reading at work. That was mostly email. Eight-one per cent of them said that bad writing was a massive waste of their time, because email was often ‘too long, poorly organised, unclear, filled with jargon and imprecise’ (Bernoff, 2016). The senders might as well have sent pictures of bears wearing top hats. At least that would be funny.

Business writing gets a bad rap because so much of it is awful. Sometimes that’s deliberate, the corporate equivalent of a politician refusing to answer a straight question. But often it’s because people simply haven’t been given the tools to do it properly.

You wouldn’t sit somebody down in front of a PC and expect them to write code without any training or experience, yet every day businesses do just that with business writing. Just because somebody’s an expert in their field doesn’t mean they have been given the tools they need to communicate their expertise and enthusiasm in the best possible way.

That’s what this book is here for.