Why Learn Business Writing?

This article is all about the very good reasons for learning business writing. Few skills are as necessary for the workplace today, and few skills upon which advancement in an organization depends. It belongs on the resume of any serious professional. Here, you’ll learn more about the careers that benefit from business writing and how it can enhance your professional life. Regardless of your goals, learning business writing is a valuable and impressive skill to add to your resume. 

What is Business Writing?

Business writing is a specialized writing style for written communication, both internal (inside your own company) and external (as with a client.) It’s a very different discipline than academic writing (let alone any other writing in which personal style is paramount), substantially limited in the creativity department, and designed to make practical points as quickly and straightforwardly as possible.

The qualities upon which business writing today most depends are concision and clarity. Learning to express oneself within those confines is an invaluable workplace skill, given that email has become the preferred inter-office communication method. There’s no office worker who doesn’t have to read and write emails; a study quoted by GreggU calculated that the average businessperson has to deal with a whopping average of 80 emails daily. And that’s just email: there are business letters, memoranda, reports, and proposals that all need to be written in business language as well.

Read more about what business writing is and why you should learn to do it.

What Can You Do with Business Writing?

Business writing is, in today’s commercial landscape, inescapable. Consider its most frequently encountered application, the email. A generation ago, people made internal calls for quick inter-office communication. They used to have secretaries who could return calls at the recipient’s convenience. Today, those calls have all but been replaced by internal email. Whether or not you perceive that as faster or slower, it’s an inevitable fact of life. Suddenly, people must be able to write in the language of business.

Above and beyond, emails, memoranda, reports, and client proposals all call for business writing that can impress the recipient. Little can make you look better today than being able to write well in the idiom of commerce. Learning how to write a good piece of business English has several other advantages. It will teach you how to organize your thoughts, which, in turn, will help you when it comes to oral presentations. You’ll also become a better writer in general: your social media posts will improve in quality and correctness, and who knows? You may even be able to write a convincing love letter that will capture the person of your dreams.

Common Professional Uses for Business Writing

Business writing can’t be called a career per se, but there is nary a career today in which you won’t increase your chances of success by being an accomplished business writer. Writing skills are needed for everything from emails to memoranda to elaborate corporate reports and sales proposals.

“Writer” is also a job title in its own right. Writers often freelance, but many companies keep full-time writers on staff to take care of the more elaborate writing assignments that come the organization’s way. Another field in which professional writers are involved is the writing of blogs and content. Although content writing isn’t the same as business writing, the skill sets are related. If you distinguish yourself as a writer by some well-crafted emails, you may find that you’re given more writing responsibilities. You should also be aware that “copywriting” jobs are not the same as jobs that require you to write copy: copywriting is a term used to denote writers who specialize in marketing and PR or, perhaps more accurately, marketing professionals who specialize in writing.

Professionalism Helps Advance Your Career

Because so much business communication consists of emails that course through your company’s network at 186,000 miles per second, co-workers, supervisors, and upper management (if you correspond with them) will come to know you from your writing as much as from direct interaction. You need to confine yourself to business writing conventions, but you’re also putting a foot forward, and you’d do well to ensure it’s your best one. You’re not going to get very far if you’re That Guy who writes rambling, illiterate emails. On the other hand, you stand a much better chance of garnering positive attention if you’re That Guy who writes readily intelligible and professional emails that are grammatically correct. It paves the way towards further writing assignments or, even better, a more advanced role that involves writing more than emails.

Good business writing skills are a must for advancement in nearly every organization on the planet. It’s very simple: if you want to get somewhere beyond where you are now and you’re working in an office setting, you will have to rely on business writing to make the necessary good impression. Maybe you can’t write your own ticket, and maybe you can’t write yourself straight to the top, but you will end up writing your way up your company’s chain of command flow chart.

Write an Impactful Cover Letter

Perhaps advancement in your current role isn’t possible: you’re a lone employee in a small organization, or maybe you’re currently between jobs altogether. In these cases, you’re going to be looking for work, and looking for work involves a large amount of writing these days. Whereas sending out cover letters and resumes is nothing new (resumes used to be printed professionally and mailed out using the US Mail), today’s job applications can also involve a great deal of supplementary writing. Your cover letter shows whether or not you can write, particularly for business, especially if the role you’re applying for requires a great deal of that type of writing.

Thus, a solid grounding in business writing will stand you in good stead when seeking work. It can well be the difference between landing that job you want and having your resume disappear into the black soul-sucking darkness of Indeed. 

Improve Organizational Skills

You can learn a great deal by learning to write. And some of what you learn can spill over and assist you in other areas, too. One of the things for which business writing calls is the ability to organize your ideas. That means ensuring that anything you write has a beginning, a middle, an end, and, more importantly, a clear line connecting the three. You’ll learn how to create a rigorous outline that makes sense and how to stick to it.

That’s not just a skill that’s useful in written communication. It will serve you well when it comes to making presentations. Writing, especially when it’s well taught, can teach you to think in a logical and organized fashion, and those lessons correlate directly to things like PowerPoint presentations. Business writing training will prepare you to make effective presentations and make the most of those big moments when you first stand in the corporate spotlight.

Improve Writing for Your Personal Life

Although highly circumscribed in terms of vocabulary and syntax, business writing should still be good writing. Good writing skills have their uses elsewhere in life, including situations in which the confines of business writing do not bind you. Business writing training can make you far more secure in your writing abilities, which can be used elsewhere in your life. If you’re a journaler, you’ll be able to express yourself in your journal better and more lucidly. Suppose you’ve always wanted to write creatively. In that case, business training may give you the impetus to experiment with short stories and, one day, maybe even a novel.

And, who knows? You may even want to undertake a corréspondence amoureuse at some point in your life. While business writing training won’t teach you how to write verse, the ability to express yourself in the written word is invaluable. It can get you everything from a promotion to a Pulitzer to your very own happily ever after.

How to Start Learning Business Writing

The ways to learn to become an effective business writer break down into two categories: synchronous and asynchronous. Those two fancy words (probably too fancy for a business email) distinguish between classes with a real-time teacher and self-paced classes. Class with a real-time teacher is the type of class you’ve been attending since kindergarten: students and instructors in the same place at the same time, exchanging questions for information. In-person business writing classes are a time-proven teaching modality. The advent of the internet (and the recent pandemic) have opened the way to another approach to teaching: business writing classes that use the internet as the classroom. These classes have proven very effective for busy adults, and live classes can now be followed from anywhere, with the same level of student participation as in an in-person class.

For their part, asynchronous classes have their share of advantages, especially for highly busy people with schedules into which they can’t manage to cram a live class. With asynchronous learning, you’re working with business writing videos and written materials provided online for you to follow at your own pace. Some classes offer quizzes and teacher supervision, while others don’t. A further form of asynchronous class is the instructional videos that abound on YouTube, although these leave students completely to their own devices. 

Read the full guide on how to learn business writing.

Learn Business Writing with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

An excellent way to learn business writing is to take an in-person course such as those offered by Noble Desktop, a tech and IT school in New York City that offers in-person and online classes. Noble provides its students with expert and experienced instructors who are always ready to answer students’ questions, whether they’re posed in the physical classroom or online. 

Noble Desktop’s classes offer several features, including small class sizes that guarantee you’ll receive ample attention from the instructor. The curriculum is hands-on, meaning that you’ll be making practical use of what you’re being taught while you’re still in class with exercises that allow your instructor to check on your progress. There is also a free retake option that enables you to repeat the class at no charge within a year of your first taking it. Far from just a means for those who fell behind to catch up, the free retake option makes it possible to cement what you’ve learned firmly in your mind. Classes are fast-paced, and you’re likely to discover that there’s some handy detail you missed the first time around.

Noble offers a Business Writing Bootcamp that begins by reviewing key points of grammar over which people are wont to stumble today. The course then delves into the hows and whys of written business communication in the contemporary world, be it for emails, reports, or other essential documents. And be aware that business writing is only one aspect of the business training classes offered by Noble Desktop.

Key Insights

• Business writing is a specific kind of writing, distinct from expository or academic writing.
• It is expected to be straightforward and clear.
• Good business writing skills are essential for anyone working behind a computer.
• Business writing lies at the heart of your chances for professional advancement; employees today are judged as much by their written communication abilities as anything else.
• Noble Desktop teaches business writing classes that can help you succeed in all aspects of the discipline.