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Legal Writing

Business Writing

By Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, founder of Syntax Training in Seattle, Washington, and a fan of business writing.

Post Frequency: 3.2/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 02:31:44

Capitalizing Hyphenated Words in Titles

Posted on August 05, 2010
In a recent business writing class, a careful editor questioned me about capitalizing up in Writing Tune-Up for Peak Performance. In a hyphenated compound word, shouldn't a little word like up be lower case? As usual, the answer is that...

Being Real in Business Writing

Posted on August 02, 2010
Before I specialized in business writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer, and I spent many years trying. One of the books I read to help me develop as a writer was Brenda Ueland's classic If You Want to...

Smiling at My Inbox

Posted on July 31, 2010
This week I received an email from someone who wanted to write for this blog. In the five-sentence message, I noted these little blunders: No words were capitalized, not even my name. The phrase "clients website" had no apostrophe. The...

Help Customers Think Positively

Posted on July 25, 2010
Yesterday I wrote about the effective personalized email I received from IX Web Hosting. But the personalization was not the only strong point of the message. The email was a fine example of leading the customer-reader to think positively by...

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Personalizing a Mass Mailing--Yes You Can!

Posted on July 24, 2010
In my business writing classes, attendees often state that it is virtually impossible to personalize their mass mailings--both in print and in email. But I send my e-newsletter, Better Writing at Work, to more than 10,000 subscribers each month, and....

Editors: Here Is Data to Support Your Job

Posted on July 19, 2010
Susan Daffron of Logical Expressions gave me a link to an excellent article-blog post "How to Measure the Value of Editors," by James Mathewson. Mr. Mathewson is editor in chief at IBM.com. IBM conducted a study in which they measured...

Job Seekers: Start Out Strong and Persuasively

Posted on July 14, 2010
I received an email from a man who was interested in working with me as a business writing teacher. I could not consider him as a colleague because his message and his attachment started out wrong. The email started this...

What's Wrong With This Excerpt?

Posted on July 12, 2010
Wanting to improve my skills in Spanish, I picked up a book about Spanish verbs to study. In the introduction, the writer makes two stylistic mistakes that business writers must avoid if they want to engage their readers. Can you...

Lesson from Slow-Talking Guatemalans

Posted on July 08, 2010
Having returned from a 15-day vacation in Guatemala, I have been thinking about what I experienced that relates to this blog and business writing. Here is what I realized: Throughout the trip, I prided myself on speaking Spanish, with no...

Ending Sentences for Email

Posted on June 23, 2010
Email beginnings and endings are the biggest challenges for people. So I wrote about them in the latest issue of Better Writing at Work. This post is excerpted from that issue. The last sentence of an email is like the...

Passive Verbs in a Father's Day Card

Posted on June 19, 2010
Yesterday I bought a Father's Day card for my dear husband. Of course, I don't have to recognize him on Father's Day, but he is a wonderful father to our daughter and a terrific partner. So I wanted to get...

The Innocent Dropping of Ccs in Email

Posted on June 18, 2010
The other day in a class about writing more efficient email, we were talking about Ccs (courtesy copies) and the use of Reply to All. One attendee bemoaned the fact that people purposely dropped her boss off the Cc list....

What I Learned Thanks to Sunny, a Korean Writer

Posted on June 11, 2010
I was teaching The Keys to Error-Free Writing yesterday, when Sunny, whose first language is Korean, asked me about the use of articles in a series. Sunny wanted to know whether to repeat the articles a and an in a...

If You Have Always Done It This Way, Think Again

Posted on June 07, 2010
Today I ordered a prescription refill from my health plan through the automated telephone refill line. The line is normally easy and efficient. For nearly every choice, the user has to press the # (pound) key. This is a breeze,...

An Intriguing Spelling Error

Posted on June 03, 2010
My friend Margaret sent me an interesting error in a job description. What follows is the beginning of the job description for a custodian: The custodian performs a wide variety of tasks on a routine basis: Moping restroom floors. Do...

What's Wrong With This Writing?

Posted on June 01, 2010
Last week I wrote the flyer for a business writing class I am offering online for the first time: Writing Tune-Up for Peak Performance. In the flyer, I included brief examples of typical business writing that needs tuning up. Thinking...

Being Kind Even in Disguise

Posted on May 22, 2010
This week I deleted a comment left here. The meat of the comment made sense, but it closed with this command: "Get with the times and get down off your high horse." As a proponent of excellent, courteous business communication,...

Writing to Your Unemployed Friends and Acquaintances

Posted on May 15, 2010
I have written a lot about writing condolences to people who have experienced a serious loss--deaths in the family and environmental tragedies. But recently I caught part of a KUOW radio program The Conversation, which focused on Unemployment Etiquette...

Letting Them Sweat--How to Weaken Relationships

Posted on May 10, 2010
My friend Cindy, who runs a training company, told me about an apparent negotiating technique I was not aware of: letting them sweat. Cindy had prepared a proposal for a prospective client. Shortly after the client received the proposal, all...

Taining Opprotunities

Posted on May 06, 2010
Did I get your attention with that heading? It got mine. This heading was featured prominently in a marketing email from a well-known training company: Additional Taining Opprotunities Underneath the heading was a nice photo of the Seattle skyline and...

Outlook Preview Pane: It's Prime Space for Business Writers

Posted on April 30, 2010
Many business readers use the Outlook preview pane to decide whether to read an email, and when. If you are writing to promote a product, service, or event, you must use your first lines effectively, or your readers will never...

When Businesses Take Efficiency Seriously

Posted on April 27, 2010
Today I attended a fundraising luncheon for a fine organization called Wellspring Family Services. As always happens when I contribute, something came back to me--this time in the form of a quick but powerful example a man shared at my...

Turning Desire Into Action: Writing Well

Posted on April 23, 2010
This week I led a Meeting Notes Made Easy class online, and one of the participants wowed me with the extra effort she has put into taking successful meeting notes in a foreign language: English. To get her meeting notes...

A Reply vs. Reply to All Scenario--You Decide

Posted on April 20, 2010
I received an email from a reader that began like this: "Recently I was berated by a person for not continuing his Reply to All format." We should not be berating one another. We all have the goal of being...

Oops! Comments Deleted by Accident

Posted on April 19, 2010
My finger seems to have strayed and accidentally deleted all the comments posted here from April 1 through the afternoon of April 17. So if you commented and don't see your remarks or my response, you know the reason. Please...

The "Overuse" of Quotation Marks

Posted on April 16, 2010
Lately I have been seeing unnecessary quotation marks "everywhere." The quotation marks I just used in the previous sentence are unnecessary, as are the ones in the title of this post. Quotation marks are perfect when you want to help...

A Passive Verb to Change

Posted on April 13, 2010
I was reviewing an email today for our Email Intelligence online class, when I came across a good example of a passive verb to change. Here is the context: The writer, whom I will call Kelly, is emailing managers to...

I Am Not a Machine and Neither Are You

Posted on April 10, 2010
No, we aren't machines, and neither are the people who write to us. So how do we explain a message like the one I just received (below)? In fact, I received two identical messages. They came from a wireless Internet...

Words That Guarantee Better Meetings

Posted on April 09, 2010
In a communications class this week, I worked with some managers and directors who recognized their many meetings were not as productive as they should be. Part of the problem was that their meetings did not have a stated purpose...

Put the Ticket(s) in the Envelope(s)

Posted on April 06, 2010
Erik, a technical writer, wrote to me with a problem involving awkward writing. "I am hoping you can give me feedback on something I run across frequently in my job at a bank. Many of our procedures and forms use...

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