29 Strategy: Business Writing Best Practices

Audience:

An audience in business writing is about the individual or group of people whom the writer seeks to address. It is a critical consideration in planning, writing, and reviewing a document. It is important to identify your readers’ characteristics, interests, and expectations before making decisions about what to write. Considering audience allows you to adapt your writing to meet the needs, interests, and background of your intended readers.
Think about your audience of readers for any given assignment and consider these anticipated audience analysis topics:

• Background: knowledge, experience, training. How much experience, training, and knowledge do you expect of your readers? Knowing this will allow you to make choices about your writing and the content of your message.
• Needs and Interests: As part of this planning-to-write phase, think about what your audience is going to expect from your message. How will they want to use your document and how will they respond?

Tone:

Tone in business writing has a lot to do with the attitude toward the potential reader as well as the subject of the message. The tone of a message reflects the writer and ultimately impacts how the reader will perceive the message. In most cases, business communication should work toward a confident, courteous, and sincere tone.

• Use active voice
• Use nondiscriminatory language
• Stress the benefits for the reader
• Write at an appropriate level of difficulty

Purpose:

Every piece of business-like communication has some sort of purpose. It could be to inquire, to change something, to inform, and so forth. In order to write the message, you should definitely know the purpose of it. What do you want your message to do? What do you want your audience to do?