Your guide to business writing:

Bids and proposals

Letters and emails
Readable documents
Punctuation
Proofreading
 Business Writing Skills

Contents

What makes good business writing? Page 3

Writing bids and proposals Page 5

Structuring letters and emails Page 7

Making your documents readable Page 12

Punctuating properly Page 16

Proofreading Page 20

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What makes good business writing?

There are two main aspects to business writing: structure and style. Structure is all about the
order, what you put in and what you leave out, while style is about the words you use and how
you use them.

One of the best ways to learn about business writing is to think about the letters, reports, faxes
and emails that you receive:

 What makes them useful?

 Which ones are the hardest to follow?
 Which are the most frustrating or annoying to read?
 Whose letters and reports do you dread and why?

The best documents are the ones that never lose sight of their readers; with that in mind, you
need to start by thinking about your readers.

What are you trying to tell them?

Even the shortest pieces of writing respond well to planning. You will write better documents
when you decide what it is you’re trying to say before you start writing.

So don’t start writing until you’ve asked yourself what your key message is for your reader.

If you’ve seen The Apprentice recently, this is the same as ‘the elevator pitch’, where you get in
the lift on the ground floor and have until floor 7 to persuade your reader why they should
bother to buy into your product or service, or in this case, read your document.

What do you want them to do?

The last thing you need to think about before you start writing is what you want to achieve
with your document.

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What will it give your readers to take away?

 If you’re writing a news piece for the company intranet, do you want your readers to feel
informed or entertained?
 If you’re writing a user manual, do you want your readers to understand the steps they
need to take to make something happen?
 If you’re writing a Board paper, do you want to persuade your readers to take a
particular course of action?

Planning your documents

It’s easy to spend ages trying to decide which order to say things in and what needs saying.
Some of the documents you receive need reading two or three times to make sense, so you
know how important it is to get it right.

After you’ve got all your ideas down on a piece of paper, you can then think about where the
information is going to go in your final document and what order you’re going to put it in.

To ensure you’ve covered everything in your document, ask yourself whether you’ve considered
all these aspects:

 What?

 Where?

 When?

 Why?

 How?

 Who?

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Writing bids and proposals

Many business proposals and presentations are intended to sell something and this is as true of
writing internal proposals as of proposals to customers. You may not be selling a product, but
you are selling an idea.

There is a useful formula known as the 4Ps, which you can use to structure a piece of
persuasive writing, such as a bid or proposal to sell your product or idea.

Position
The first thing to do when you start your proposal is to state the present situation, so that
everyone is starting from the same place.

For example, let’s say you want to persuade your Board to change a supplier.

Position: We’re locked into a contract with supplier X for the next three years.

Problem
The next thing to do is to establish the problem, in other words, the reason why something has
to be done. This needs clarifying, so for the benefit of anyone who can’t see the need for
change or is open to it but doesn’t understand the reasons for it, you need to clearly state the
problem.

Problem: We’ve discovered that supplier X is charging us well above the market rate.

Both the ‘position’ and ‘problem’ sections form an introduction. This is essential but need not
be lengthy; the remainder of the presentation contains the real meat of it.

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Possibilities
This section does not appear in every proposal; sometimes there is no choice of options – you
either do something or you don’t. In this case you move straight on to the final stage – the
proposal.

But often there are a number of options and you need to explain what they are and the pros
and cons of each. The key to doing this is to keep it as brief as you can.

Possibilities:

 We should break our contract with supplier X.

 We should stick with supplier X until the end of our contract, then find a cheaper supplier.
 We should try to renegotiate our terms with supplier X.

Proposal
Now is the time to explain which of the possibilities you recommend and why.

Proposal: We should stick with supplier X as the costs of switching and breaking the contract will exceed
the benefits we get from purchasing at market rates from a new supplier.

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Structuring letters and emails

Many people feel inundated with emails and this isn’t helped by the forwarding culture.
What’s worse, all too often you can get to the end of an email without understanding whether
you need to do anything or whether it’s just for your information.

This is something you don’t want to inflict on your readers. There’s a simple formula you can
use to help you structure your letters and emails and that formula is SCRAP:

 Situation
 Complication
 Resolution
 Action
 Politeness

Situation
The first thing to do is to state the current position, so that your reader knows what your letter
or email is about and understands the starting point. You’re simply stating what you’re writing
about.

So, if you’re emailing a colleague to ask when they are available for a meeting, the situation is:
We need to meet with John and Sarah to discuss the Olympia exhibition.

Sometimes you need to explain the situation – perhaps your email is going to someone who
doesn’t know about the exhibition yet – but you can still be brief: We’re running a big stall at
Olympia next June to promote our latest water saving products.

At the moment you’re simply explaining the reason for the email – the situation – you haven’t
yet reached the main point, which is about setting up a meeting.

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Complication
The next step is to explain what is complicating the situation so that you have to write. If there
were no complication, there’d be no need to write; you’d simply send an email to say the
meeting is on Wednesday at 10am.

However, in the example of the meeting about the exhibition, the complication is that
everyone is busy filing end of year results and John is away for the whole of the second half of
March.

So the complication is: Everyone has a busy schedule and John is away for the second half of March.
That’s all you have to say – it’s the reason you’re writing.

Resolution
If you have a complication, you need a resolution to it. So, in the resolution you simply need
to explain how you’re going to resolve the problem:

I’m therefore suggesting that everyone gives me a list of available times between now and 15 March when
they can spare a couple of hours. I will fix a meeting date as soon as possible and will email you back.

Action
It’s a good idea to include this step to ensure that you remember to state what you want the
other person to do or what you need to do, so that you are both absolutely clear about who
should do what.

It’s always good to give a deadline too: Please can you get back to me by the end of today so that I can
confirm the date for the meeting before the end of the week.

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Politeness
The written word is can always seem more brusque than face-to-face conversation, so make sure
you finish your letter or email on a polite note. This can simply be a matter of saying Many
thanks or Best wishes, but it is a lot friendlier than just signing your name.

Example of an email written using SCRAP:

From: Hugh Stevens

To: Simon Jones

Date: 14 March 2017

Re: Meeting about installing broadband cables in sewers

Dear Hugh

As you know, the government announced a consultation this week on installing broadband
cables in sewers.

We need to schedule a meeting to work out our strategy on this so that we can present some
different options to the Board later this month.

Please can you suggest some dates when you’re available in the next week to brainstorm some
ideas.

In the meantime I’ll draw up an agenda for the meeting which I’ll share in advance so we have
a starting point.

Many thanks

Simon
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Using the Pyramid Principle

Let’s imagine we were back in our science lesson at school and we were writing up an
experiment; we would do it in this order: method, results, conclusions.

This is also the structure that a lot of academic and business writing follows: the writer starts
with their findings, then draws their conclusions, ending with their recommendations.

However, the problem with this is that your readers don’t want to have to wait right until the
end of a document to get your main message. Most readers are much more interested in what
the answer is than in how you got to it.

So it’s better to put your main message right at the top of your document and this is what the
Pyramid Principle, developed by Barbara Minto, does.

When you’re presenting your pyramid, you start with your main message and then present
your supporting arguments. It follows a vertical structure where each point summarises the
ones below and supports the one above.

Points should have two or three supporting sub-points so your argument doesn’t fall down if
your reader disagrees with one of your points.

However, when you’re compiling your pyramid, you work from the bottom up. You start with
your data, then summarise your points in simple language, then group them logically to arrive
at your supporting arguments.

So you sweat the data to find a higher level of insight. You need to make sure your points are
mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE). Put simply, MECE means that nothing
overlaps and that you’ve covered everything.

The next step is to draw a conclusion from your summary statements to arrive at your main
message.

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Grouping the data to find the higher level of insight

When you present your main message, you don’t just state it, you need to provide some kind
of context so your readers can absorb your ideas more easily. There’s a formula to help you do
this, which can be used to structure executive summaries:

 Context
This is background information that provides context for the reader. Keep it short – a
couple of lines is usually enough.

 Trigger
This is the reason for writing the document. It tells your reader why they should be
interested.

 Question
The question you ask here is vital because it expresses the heart of the issue: Why should
we do this? or How should we do this? or What should we do? The question may not make it
into the document itself, but it’s essential that you know what question your document
is answering.

 Answer
The CTQ should be brief. It should simply provide the context for your main message -
the Answer to the question – and help the reader absorb it.

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Making your documents readable

Even once you know what order you want to say things in, it is still possible to become tongue-
tied over the words you use.

When we speak, we use a great deal of body language, which we are mostly unaware of. It only
really becomes evident when it is missing: when we write.

We all have a tendency to worry about how we come across in writing despite the fact that few
of us worry about how we come across when we’re speaking – we just get on with it. And that’s
the technique for writing: just get on with it as if you were speaking.

We’ve got some rules that will help you do this; they are loosely based on George Orwell’s
rules for concise writing:

 Address your reader.

 Never use the passive where you can use the active.

 Never use a long word where a short one will do; if it is possible to cut a word out,
always cut it out.

 Never use a foreign phrase, cliche or jargon if you can think of an everyday English
equivalent.

 Watch your sentences.

Address your reader

People relate to people, so put them into your writing. Address your reader directly, by using
the words you or I or we.

Bring your writing alive by using case studies, anecdotes and testimonials to make them
relevant.
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So, instead of Clients benefit from our services, it’s better to write You benefit from our services.

Never use the passive where you can use the active
Your choice of words will affect the readability of your report. Use active rather than passive
verbs because they are easier to read and keep the pace moving.

When you write in the active, you always start your sentence with the person or thing that’s
doing the action (sometimes called the agent), then you say what they did, then what they did
it to.

James read the report.

In the passive you start with the person or thing that had something done to them, then you
say what was done to them, then by who or by what.

The report was read by James.

When you write in the active, it forces you to put the people into your writing and you can
often see a shorter way of saying something; it’s also a more accountable way of writing.

Most of the time, make your writing active. There are instances, however, where writing in the
passive is justified:
 when you don’t want to blame someone: Mistakes were made.
 when you don’t know who or what did something: A man was mugged on his way home
from a nightclub.
 when the what’s happening is more important that who’s doing it: Three hundred
thousand new homes are being built in the North.

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Never use a long word where a short one will do

Our language generally gets its words from two different sources. Some of our words come
from Latin (for example, words ending in -ion); others come from Anglo Saxon. So,
remuneration comes from Latin, while the Anglo Saxon equivalent would be pay.

These -ion words have a name: nominalisations. A nominalisation is when you take a verb
(doing word) and make a noun (naming word) out of it. So the nominalisation for
‘demonstrate’ is ‘demonstration’.

Try to avoid using -ion words as they attract lots of other words around them. Instead of saying
we made a decision, say we decided. Instead of writing, we carried out an investigation, write we
investigated.

By the same token, use concrete nouns rather than abstract nouns. A concrete noun is one
which you can attach a visual picture to: communication is abstract, email is concrete.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out

Some people love to fill their writing with big words and convoluted sentences. They seem to
think it will impress people and make them appear more important than they are (the people
who are really important almost never do this). So they will say, for example:

It has been brought to our attention that certain employees have been availing themselves of vehicular
parking facilities that have been allocated to the sole use of visitors. It is requested that all recipients of
this missive terminate this practice with immediate effect.

What they mean – and what they should say – is:

Some people have been parking in the visitors’ spaces in the car park – please don’t.

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Never use a foreign phrase, cliché or jargon if you can think of an everyday English
equivalent
Make sure your reader can understand and take in everything you write. Don’t use jargon –
which you can define as anything your readers don’t understand – or unexplained
abbreviations or acronyms.

Avoid clichés too because they slip past the reader without any meaning being absorbed. We’re
all so used to seeing phrases like meeting customers’ needs that they no longer mean anything to
us.

Avoid foreign phrases also. The word ‘milieu’ is shorter than locality, but it’s not so easy to
take in.

Watch your sentences

Sentences are most effective when they get straight to the point.

Due to signal failure, the train was cancelled.

This sentence starts with a subordinate clause. By its nature it’s not as important as the main
clause. It’s better to put the main clause first. Start by telling the reader what happened first,
then why.

The train was cancelled because of signal failure.

Be careful with the length of sentences too. If you’re writing on a sheet of A4 and your
sentence goes on for longer than two and a half lines, you need to ask yourself: would this be
better off being split into two sentences.

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Punctuating properly
Apostrophes (’)

We use apostrophes:

 to show an omission, when letters are missing

It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?

 to show possession
In the singular, the apostrophe comes before the 's'. The bank’s Board must make a decision
(the Board of just one bank).

In the plural it comes after the 's'. The banks’ Board must make a decision (the Board of
more than one bank).

In names that end in ‘s’, you can either add an ‘s or just ‘ after the name.

St James’s Park and St James’ Park are both correct – it’s a style choice.

 to express periods of time

We’ve been given one week’s notice.

We have twelve years’ experience in this sector.

Brackets ()
Round brackets (or parentheses) are used to:

 add an aside from the writer to the reader

He believed (wrongly) that she was innocent.

 provide additional information or an explanation.

Our water saving tips (which we first published in 1982) save our customers money each month.
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Colons (:)
Colons are used for:
 introducing lists
There were a number of risks associated with this policy: legal, operational and statutory.
 introducing speech
 showing that what follows is an elaboration or explanation of what precedes it.
The choice was clear: to invest or pull out of the project altogether.

Commas (,)
Commas are used to:

 join words in a list of items

The actors involved were Richardson, Gielgud and Olivier.

With a list, you only need a comma before the final ‘and’ if the meaning would be unclear
without it:
The actors involved were Richardson, Gielgud, and Mortimer and Reeves

 replace the word ‘and’ or ‘or’: He had a long, dark coat.

 join two complete sentences together when accompanied by a joining word, (and, but,
or, while, yet)
A return ticket covers only two journeys, while a travel card covers multiple journeys.

 add additional information within a sentence. Use a pair of bracketing commas here;
remove the additional information and the sentence would still make sense.
Richard, who is married to Sam, lives in Oxford.

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But in a sentence like this, beware where you put the commas:
He put on his coat and, being cold, added a scarf as well.

Often people put the first bracketing comma between ‘coat’ and ‘and’:

He put on his coat, and being cold, added a scarf as well.

However, removing the additional information between the commas shows that this is wrong.

Exclamation marks (!)

Only use these when you are exclaiming something. Resist the temptation to use them, except
in speech:

Help!

Be quiet!

Full stops (.)

Put a full stop at the end of a sentence. Do not connect two statements with a comma.

Hyphens (-)
Hyphens are used to join two or more words to make a single expression.
happy-go-lucky

They also join two or more words that together describe a noun.
long-term plan or low-cost airline

They are useful when avoiding ambiguity

a six-foot man-eating shark is different from a six-foot man eating shark.

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Dashes (–)
Dashes are for adding extra information (a bit like bracketing commas or brackets).
He believed – wrongly – that she was innocent.

They’re also for commenting on something, paraphrasing it or for showing a number range
(where they don’t have a space on either side).
He was Chairman from 2009–2016.

Question marks (?)

Use a question mark at the end of a direct question:
Have you seen Robert’s report?

Do not use one at the end of an indirect question:

She asked if I’d seen Robert’s report.

Semi-colons (;)
Semi-colons are used to join two complete sentences when they are too closely related to be
separated by a full stop.
Some journalists do their best writing in the morning; others work better at night.

They are also used to separate items in a list, where one of the items in the list already has a
comma.
Twenty doctors attended the seminar: Dr Smith, Professor of Medicine; Dr Jones, Professor of Biology; Dr
Raymond, Professor of Chemistry; …

If we just used commas in this list, it would be confusing and we wouldn’t know whether Dr
Raymond was Professor of Biology or Professor of Chemistry.

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Proofreading
Try and give yourself some time between finishing your documents and sending them. This is
the proofreading stage. Otherwise your eyes will see what they want to see rather than what’s
actually on the page.

It’s always best to proofread in the morning when you’re fresh and alert, not last thing in the
afternoon when you’re tired. Always consider printing a document before you make any
changes as reading copy on screen is always much harder; if it’s a particularly long document,
make sure you at least proofread the executive summary and conclusion on paper.

Things to look out for:

 Is it directed at your target readers?

 Does it follow a logical structure?
 Is anything missing?
 Is it clear?
 Is it too long or short?
 Does it flow?
 Does it make sense?
 Is the tone right?
 Is the grammar and punctuation correct?
 Is it consistent with your house style?
 Is it accurate?

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Some commonly misused words

Affect = to have an influence on

Effect = to bring about

Effect = result

Biannual = appearing twice a year

Biennial = happening every two years

Compare to = to show the similarity between things

Compare with = to show the difference between things

Complement = something which completes, balances or contrasts

Compliment = praise or approval

Contagious = passed on by personal contact

Infectious = passed on without personal contact

Discreet = inconspicuous, careful not to cause embarrassment

Discrete = separate, distinct

Disinterested = impartial

Uninterested = showing a lack of interest in

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Draft = a rough version of a document

Draught = a current of air

Fewer = used for numbers

Less = used for quantities (if we have fewer customers, we will make less money)

Licence = is a noun, meaning an official document or permission

License = is a verb (without a TV licence you are not properly licensed to watch TV)

Loose = not tight

Lose = to mislay, to be defeated

Meter = a measuring device (water meter)

Metre = unit of measurement

Practice = a noun and means a procedure or custom (he goes to rugby practice twice a week)

Practise = is a verb and means to exercise for improvement (he practises rugby skills twice a
week).

Stationery = paper, envelopes, etc

Stationary = standing still, not moving

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Style guides
Style guides are a great way of establishing some common principles in writing across an
organisation, so that there is consistency in written communication. If your company doesn’t
have a style guide, it’s worth having a look at the style guides of The Economist, The Guardian
and Reuters.

For further support with business writing, including formulating an in-house style guide for
your company, please email [email protected] or call 01962 774766.

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