Business Writing

This writing checklist will help you produce professional documents that are clear, concise, considerate, and correct.

The "you attitude" is more than a matter of playing with pronouns or even of playing nice. It's good business.

Whether we're composing a blog or a business letter, an email or an essay, our goal should be to respond clearly and directly to the needs and interests of our readers. These ten tips should help us to improve our writing whenever we set out to inform or persuade.

Most online reading is actually skimming and scanning. So to grab and hold our readers' attention, we can't afford to waste words. The trick to writing lean on our blogs and websites is to keep the meaning and cut the rest. Here's how.

Email is one of the most common forms of written communication in the business world--and the most commonly abused. Follow these ten tips to keep your messages clear, concise, professional, and polite.

Here's a project that will introduce you to brainstorming and give you practice in group writing. You will join with three or four other writers to compose a letter of complaint.

In the article "Compose a Letter of Complaint," we considered the characteristics of an effective claim--one that's likely to lead to a satisfactory resolution. Here you'll find a letter that ignores our good advice.

Three weeks after submitting their proposal for a class project, a team of three students turned in this draft of a progress report. Read this sample report, and then respond to the questions at the bottom of the page.

Three weeks after submitting their topic proposal for a class project, a team of three students turned in a progress report, which was accompanied by this sample questionnaire. Read the questionnaire, and then respond to the questions that follow.

In this sample letter of recommendation, a college professor recommends a student for a place in a graduate program.

You can make your working life a little easier by editing your writing with these principles in mind: be clear, concise, considerate, and correct. Here are ten quick editing tips for on-the-job writers.

Here in our Glossary of Usage you will find more than 200 sets of commonly confused words--with links to definitions, examples, and practice exercises that should help you to keep these words straight.

Hear what Mark Twain had to say on the subject of proofreading, and then consider our ten tips for proofreading effectively.

Business writers are often called on to compose special kinds of projects (such as memos, letters, reports, and proposals) that follow distinctive conventions. To learn more about those conventions, visit one of these outstanding web sites for business writers.

Copyediting is the work that an editor does to improve a manuscript and prepare it for publication. Here we reveal some of the jargon of the copyediting trade: 140 terms and abbreviations used by editors in their efforts to produce copy that is clear, correct, concise, consistent, and comprehensible.

For answers to questions about some of the finer and fussier aspects of the language, visit these three question-and-answer sites--all of them hosted by publishers of major style and usage guides.

The five websites described here focus on the most common errors in English: how to recognize those errors and (more importantly) how to correct them.

Here are four superior websites for students and teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL).