What can you do to make sure your writing reflects your personality?

1. Make it yours.  How?  By writing about your experiences, your background, your thoughts and your ideas, instead of seguing into someone or something else.   Employ your own words, communicating it such that your personality shines through, rather than that promoted by a bland and safe stylebook .
2. Be approachable.  Keep your writing style approachable by leaving out the difficult words and complicated language.  That may have worked for you for some courses in school, but that’s not helping your cause here.  Keep it classy, but approachable.
3. Show intelligence.  As a corollary to the above, you need to pair approachability with intelligence.  Everybody loves a smart applicant, they just don’t like it when you’re too smug for your own good.

One guaranteed way to ensure good style in your cover letters and application essays is to use a formal writing software.  There are many settings for these specialized types of program and they include tweaks that can really give your style the approachability it deserves, even while you’re looking to paint yourself as an intelligent candidate.

There are many ways you can format instructions.  You can use step-by-step lists, detailed narratives to illustrate what the user should do, diagrams, flowcharts and more.  Regardless of what format you use, they all share certain similar traits.  Keeping track of these should help you the next time you write your own instructions.

1. All instructions include ordered steps.  If you’re not giving the reader a series of things to do in a particular order, then you’re probably not writing an instruction.
2. Instructive sentences are best conveyed with an imperative tone.  Don’t hesitate to employ an imperative tone.  You’re not making a request or stating a fact – you’re giving directions about what to do.
3. Hazardous or difficult steps should come with corresponding cautionary statements.  Make sure to add special precautions for sensitive, dangerous or complicated steps.  If you want the reader to be take on a particular frame of mind when doing something, say so, instead of expecting them to figure it out on their own.
4. Examples and illustrations will help clear up potentially unclear instructions.   Use examples liberally, especially with steps which may be more difficult to understand.

As with all writing, make sure you revise and edit your work to be as clear as possible.   Remember to use a proofreading program, as well, to help you iron out every last bit of the piece.

Letters of inquiry. Written with the objective of conveying a request to the recipient, these types of letters will require you to be particularly clear and detailed.  If you don’t, it’s possible to be misinterpreted and you’ll end up not getting what you intended.

Complaint letters. The purpose of complaint letters is to bring up an issue or a problem, particularly one that’s a result of the recipient’s wrongdoing.   When writing one, it’s important to remove emotion from the equation, paying particular attention to remaining courteous, despite the nature of the message.

Order letters. Designed for ordering materials, these usually follow a standard format, since it’s a type of document that you’re likely to make regularly.

Acknowledgment letters. These types of letters aren’t mandatory, but they are appreciated.    Keep a formal and courteous tone throughout, with a clear reference to what specific message or communication you are acknowledging.

Response letters. Meant as a reply to a previous communication, the important thing here is to spell out your answer clearly, whether it’s in the affirmative or the negative.   Be direct, but courteous.

All business letters, of course, will benefit from being put through an effective grammar software.  While it’s always the core message that counts, the way you deliver it can have a bearing on how it’s taken and understood, after all.

However, communicating bad news is part of everyday business.   If you don’t, then you can’t refuse requests you can’t handle, turn down offers you can’t accept or inform clients when there are problems going on.

Some techniques can help soften the blow of bad news, though, and employing them in your writing should help ease the negativity just a little bit.

• Start with something positive.  Tell the good news first or pay the recipient a compliment, before delivering your actual message.  Keep it brief, though, lest raise their hopes up unnecessarily.
• Close positively.  After starting positive and delivering the bad news, close the communication in a positive tone.  This cushions the negative message in between two positives, effectively lessening its impact.
• Be empathetic.  Empathize with the recipient, understanding their position and keeping it in mind when you’re writing.  There’s nothing you can do about bad news, but you can show some sympathy to ease the negative effects.
• Provide reasons.  Never deliver a bad message without an accompanying reason.  People want to know why and, in these cases, they usually deserve to.

When delivering a negative message, you want it to come across clearly, all while managing to keep as positive a mood as possible.  To ensure clarity,  use an English grammar checker – skipping it might leave them thinking you meant something else.

When writing speeches, always keep these things in mind:

1. Write it for the way you naturally speak.  If you compose something too far off from your natural way of speaking, you’ll end up looking stiff and out of your element on stage.  As such, it’s imperative to use words and sentence structures that you’re comfortable enunciating.
2. Plan your pauses.  Use plenty of punctuation to plan for pauses during the speech.  Not only do pauses allow the listeners to process what you say, it helps you regain your breath while up there as well.
3. Use a tape recorder to get a better idea of how you sound.  Not only will this help you plan where to put stronger emphasis, it also lets you time your speech, so that you neither write too long nor too short a speech.
4. Keep to one idea per sentence.  This makes it easier for the audience to make out what you’re saying.
5. Use a grammar checker.  Check your speech for grammar and mechanical mistakes.  While you can get away with some form of errors, since the material is spoken, it pays to keep it as low in count as you can manage.
6. Avoid jokes.  That is, unless you’re naturally funny.  Planning a speech doesn’t magically endow you with a capacity for humor.  Take the less riskier road.

That doesn’t mean creative writing principles have absolutely no room in business.    In fact, you can implement certain techniques drawn from creative writing endeavors to aid your professional communication.

1. Allusion is an excellent way to clear up confusing information, by calling attention to something well-known.   Make sure the reader gets the parallel between the two things, though, lest risk confusing them even further.
2. Imagery, which refers to visually descriptive language, can also work in certain types of business writing, especially when trying to get the reader to picture a scene or an event in their heads.  If you can make your reader see the exact idea you have in your head, it can prove very beneficial for certain types of communication, such as proposed solutions to problems or when discussing potential issues you’ve identified.
3. Personification, that process of attaching a human characteristic to non-human things, might sound a tad too out of place in business writing.  However, a “product that leaps out of store shelves” says a lot about how well an item is selling that it’s likely a better way to express that idea than other alternatives.

As with all writing, your creativity is all for nothing if you don’t write with clarity and correctness.  For that reason, it’s imperative you employ an effective grammar software to help you out in all your business writing.

Have a strategy going in. Don’t just sit down and write from the seat of your pants.  Selling requires more work before you write than he actual writing.  Define who your audience is, what problems they have that your product can solve and how you’re going to communicate that in the most effective way possible.

Establish credibility. Persuasion requires that your audience respect your opinion.  If they don’t, no one will pay attention.  More than writing well with the help of your favorite grammar software, you’ll need to show them that you understand their problems and that you’re qualified to offer the solution.

Talk to your audience. Knowing your audience means being able to speak in their language.  Show them  you’re coming from the same place with your choice of words and phrases.

Always back up your claims. If you claim something, back it up with evidence.  Your opinion doesn’t matter.  Prospects want cold, hard proof if they’re going to trust you.  Give it to them.

You see this all the time in corporate language, especially during communication among people within the same organization. I’m not going to argue its effectiveness in cutting right through meetings or getting employees to understand the company’s goals, but it’s the type of language that can go bad when it spills over into non-closed communication materials.

Imagine referring to your customers as consumers or to your employees as resources in a company newsletter. That won’t go over well, would it? They’re individuals with multi-faceted lives, after all, not some digit you can tack on to a report.

Such limiting use of language can immediately turn off various types of readers, especially those for whom the labels are actually being used on. As such, we recommend avoiding them in your writing, even in situations where there might no backlash for their use. In case you want to watch out for them, some of the more customizable grammar checking software can actually be set to check for instances of such language, so you can include them as part of your final proofreading.

1. Learn to write super short and succinct for your slides. No need for full sentences if short phrases are clear enough. Elaborations are often best spoken, instead of forced to fit in your presentation materials.

2. Write consistently throughout your slides. If you write in short sentences, write that way throughout the rest of the presentation materials. It helps the audience when they know what to expect in the coming slides.

3. Write humor down before using. Improvising humor during presentations often turns up bad results.

4. Any part of the presentation you recite should complement information on the slides. Avoid surprising people with new, vital facts.

5. Don’t think in terms of word count. Think, instead, in terms of length. Since this is harder to get precisely, make sure you practice your speech and time it.

6. Give people time to think, just as you give them space to pause in written work.

7. Use a comprehensive writing software for your presentation materials. Sure, a large part of your grade will hinge on how you perform in front of the audience. Badly proofread materials, however, can cost you some points off. Make sure that doesn’t happen.

CLEAR is an acronym, of course. And the elements of writing it stands for are ones often employed in such marketing materials as white papers and case studies. In case you’re not familiar with it, the letters stand for:

• Clarify the problem. You want to create a detailed picture of the problem that your product or service will solve. Writing it in a clear manner will ensure that prospects who might have the same issues can easily identify.
• List the features of your product or service. What are the characteristics that define your solution? Shed particular light on those features that directly address the problem you defined above.
• Educate your prospects on your product’s benefits. Give a rundown of the benefits they stand to realize from employing your proposed solution, especially as it relates to the problem originally presented.
• Add points of proof. You can’t claim benefits without giving proof, so make sure to add that to effectively convince the reader of your product’s merits.
• Restate your case to make sure the reader remembers. No matter how good of a job you do in a paper, it won’t make its maximum potential if you don’t wrap it up nicely.