7 Writing Style

In business writing there is always an easier way, always a clearer way, always a more accurate way of saying something. Unfortunately, they are not the same way.

— William Horton

The most effective way to communicate with your readers is usually the most straightforward. Many people think that to be a good writer, you must have a big vocabulary. And they remember their high school English teacher telling them to use a thesaurus so they wouldn’t have to use the same word twice. In class, we wrote to impress our teachers with our growing mastery of the complexities of written English. Unfortunately, some people still write this way.

In business writing, we are seldom writing to impress someone with our command of the English language. Our purpose is usually to communicate important information to all members of our audience as quickly and unambiguously as possible. Readers don’t use our manuals for the joy of reading our writing. They read because they have a problem, a question, or need instructions to do a job. They want to find that information fast, they want it clearly laid out, and they want it to be concise.

There is a growing movement across North America toward the use of plain English. While it began in the legal field, it has become the accepted and preferred writing style in virtually every field of business and government.

In this chapter, we’ll look at:

what plain English is
sentence length and structure
choosing your words
choosing your verbs
avoiding inappropriate references to gender
organizing information
level of detail
writing generically
capitalization
consistency and parallelism
the importance of punctuation
writing for online reading
using styleguides and style sheets