Chapter 5 - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Chapter 5

Writing Business Messages

Adapt the “you” attitude –messages using an “I” or “we” attitude, they risk sounding selfish.

Emphasizing the Positive: there is a big difference between delivering negative news and being negative.

• Establish Your Credibility: a measure of your believability based on how reliable your are:
• Honesty
• Objectivity
• Awareness of Audience Needs
• Credentials, knowledge, expertise
• Endorsements
• Performance
• Confidence
• Communication style
• Sincerity

• Achieve a conversational tone by following these guidelines:
• Avoid obsolete and pompous language: ask yourself if you would say this if you were talking “face-to-face”.
• Avoid preaching and bragging: don’t appear to know everything.
• Be careful with intimacy: most business messages should avoid intimacy.
• Be careful with humor: humor can backfire.

• Plain English is a way of presenting information in a simple, unadorned style so that your audience grasps the meaning.
• “We continually exist to synergistically supply value-added deliverables such that we may continue to proactively maintain enterprise-wide data to stay competitive in tomorrow’s world.”
• The above sentence is complicated and difficult to understand.

• Active voice is used when the subject performs the action and the object receives the action:
• “John rented the office.”
• Passive voice is used when the subject receives the action:
• “The office space was rented by John.”
• Active voice sound less formal and are easier for your audience to understand.

• In general, avoid passive voice in order to make your writing lively and direct:

• Passive voice is helpful when you need to be diplomatic or focus attention on problems not people:

• Simple sentence: one clause.
• Profits increased in the past year.
• Compound sentence: two main clauses that express two or more independent but related thoughts(always related by a , or ; in which case the conjunction is dropped).
• Wage rates have declined by 5%, and employee turnover has been high.

• Complex Sentence: expresses one main thought (independent clause) and one or more subordinate thoughts (dependent clause) related to it.
• Although you may questions Gerald’s conclusions, you must admit that his research is thorough.
• Compound-complex sentence: has two main clauses, at least one contains a subordinate clause.
• Profits have increased in the past year, and although you may question Gerald’s conclusions, you must admit that his research is thorough.

• When constructing a sentence, choose the form that matches the relationship of the ideas:
• If you have two ideas of equal importance, express as two simple sentences.
• If one idea is less important than the other, place it in a dependent clause to form a complex sentence.
• When you make one thought subordinate to the other, you establish a cause and effect relationship.

• Elements of a Paragraph include:
• Topic Sentence: an effective paragraph is unified and deals with a single topic.
• Support Sentences: these are the sentences that explain the topic sentence. Support sentences are all more specific than the topic sentence.
• Transitional elements: effective paragraphs are arranged in a logical order so that the audience can understand the train of thought.
• Transitions are words that tie ideas together by showing how thoughts are related.