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Chapter 5

Chapter 5. Writing Business Messages. Being sensitive to Your Audience’s Needs: Adapt the “you” attitude –messages using an “I” or “we” attitude, they risk sounding selfish. Adapting To Your Audience. Maintain standards of Etiquette .. Try to express thoughts in a kind manner.

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Chapter 5

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  1. Chapter 5 Writing Business Messages

  2. Being sensitive to Your Audience’s Needs: Adapt the “you” attitude –messages using an “I” or “we” attitude, they risk sounding selfish. Adapting To Your Audience

  3. Maintain standards of Etiquette.. Try to express thoughts in a kind manner. Emphasizing the Positive: there is a big difference between delivering negative news and being negative. Adapting to Your Audience

  4. Using Bias-Free Language: avoid words and phrases that unfairly categorize people by race, gender, ethnicity, age or disability. Adapting to Your Audience

  5. Building Strong Relationships with Your Audience • 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

  6. Use a Conversational Tone • 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.

  7. Using a Conversational Tone

  8. Use Plain English • 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.

  9. Selecting Active or Passive Voice • 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.

  10. Selecting Active or Passive Voice • In general, avoid passive voice in order to make your writing lively and direct:

  11. Selecting Active or Passive Voice • Passive voice is helpful when you need to be diplomatic or focus attention on problems not people:

  12. Creating Effective Sentences • 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.

  13. Creating Effective Sentences • 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.

  14. Creating Effective Sentences • 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.

  15. Coherent Paragraphs • 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.

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