BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

MNJ275
SESSION 4
WRITING BUSINESS MESSAGES
 OBJECTIVES :
1 Identify the four aspects of being sensitive to audience needs when writ- ing
business messages.
2 Explain how establishing your credibility and projecting your company’s image are
vital aspects of building strong relationships with your audience.
3 Explain how to achieve a tone that is conversational but businesslike, explain the
value of using plain language, and define active and passive voice.
4 Describe how to select words that are not only correct but also effective.
5 Define the four types of sentences and explain how sentence style affects emphasis
within a message.
6 Define the three key elements of a paragraph and list five ways to develop coherent
paragraphs.
7 Identify the most common software features that help you craft messages more
efficiently.
 Adapting to Your Audience: Being Sensitive to Your
Audience’s Needs

 Martin Shovel and other successful communicators will tell you that audiences tend to greet incoming
messages with a selfish question: “What’s in this for me?” If your target readers or listeners don’t think a
message applies to them, or if they don’t think you are being sensitive to their needs, they won’t pay
attention. You can improve your audience sensitivity by adopting the “you” attitude, maintaining good
standards of etiquette, emphasizing the positive, and using bias-free language.
 You are already becoming familiar with the audience-centerred approach, trying to see a subject through
your audience’s eyes. Now you want to project this approach in your messages by adopting the “you”
attitude—that is, by speaking and writing in terms of your audience’s wishes, interests, hopes, and
preferences.
 On a simple level, you can adopt the “you” attitude by replacing terms that refer to your- self and your
company with terms that refer to your audience. In other words, use you and your instead of I, me, mine,
we, us, and ours.
 Maintaining Standards of Etiquette

 Good etiquette shows respect for your audience and helps foster a more successful
environment for communication by minimizing negative emotional reaction.
 Some situations naturally require more diplomacy than others. If you know your
audience well, a less formal approach might be more appropriate. However, when
you are communicating with people who outrank you or with people outside your organization, an
added measure of courtesy is usually needed.
 Written communication and most forms of electronic media generally require more tact than oral
communication. When you’re speaking, you can soften your words by your tone of voice and facial
expressions. Plus, you can adjust your approach according to the feedback you get.
 You will encounter situations throughout your career in which you need to convey unwanted news.
However, sensitive communicators understand the difference between delivering negative news and being
negative. Never try to hide the negative news, but look for positive points that will foster a good
relationship with your audience:
 Bias-free language avoids words and phrases that unfairly and even unethically
categorize or stigmatize people in ways related to gender, race, ethnicity, age,
disability, or other personal characteristics. Contrary to what some might think,
biased language is not simply about “labels.”
 To a significant degree, language reflects the way people think and what they
believe, and biased language may well perpetuate the underlying stereotypes
and prejudices that it represents.
 To establish a good relationship with your audience, you must also appear to be
fair. 4 Good communicators make every effort to change biased language Bias
can take a variety of forms:
• Gender bias.
• Racial and ethnic bias.
• Age bias.
• Disability bias.
 Adapting to Your Audience: Building Strong Relationships
 Successful communication relies on a positive relationship between sender and
receiver. Establishing your credibility and projecting your company’s image are
two vital steps in building and fostering positive business relationships.
 Audience responses to your messages depend heavily on your credibility, which
is a measure of your believability and is based on how reliable you are and how
much trust you evoke in others. With audiences who don’t know you and trust
you already, you need to establish credibility before they’ll accept your
messages.
 On the other hand, when you do establish credibility, communication becomes
much easier because you no longer have to spend time and energy convincing
people that you are a trustworthy source of information and ideas. To build,
maintain, or repair your credibility, emphasize the following characteristics:

Honesty; Objectivy; Awareness of audience needs; Credentials, knowledge, and

expertise; Endorsements; Performance ; Confidence; Sincerety.
 Projecting Your Company’s Image
Be aware that credibility can take days, months, even years to establish and it can be
wiped out in an instant. An occasional mistake or let down may be forgiven, but major
lapses in honesty or integrity can destroy your reputation.
When you communicate with anyone outside your organization, it is more than a
conversation between two individuals. You represent your company and therefore play
a vital role in helping the company build and maintain positive relationships with all of
its stakeholders.
Most successful companies work hard to foster a specific public image, and your
external communication efforts need to project that image. As part of this
responsibility, the interests and preferred communication style of your company must
take precedence over your own views and personal communication style.
 CONTROLLING YOUR STYLE AND TONE
Your communication style involves the choices you make to express yourself: the
words you select, the manner in which you use those words in sentences, and the
way you build paragraphs from individual sentences.
Your style creates a certain tone, or overall impression, in your messages. The right
tone depends on the nature of your message and your relationship with the reader.
The tone of your business messages can range from informal to conversational to
formal. If you’re in a large organization and you’re communicating with your
superiors or with customers, the right tone will usually be more formal and
respectful.
However, that same tone might sound distant and cold in a small organization or if
used with close colleagues. Part of the challenge of communicating on the job is to
read each situation and figure out the ap- propriate tone to use.
 USING PLAIN LANGUAGE
 An important aspect of creating a conversational tone is using plain language (or plain English specifically
when English is involved). Plain language presents information in a simple, unadorned style that allows
your audience to easily grasp your meaning—language that recipients “can read, understand and act
upon the first time they read it .”
 You can see how this definition supports using the “you” attitude and shows respect for your audience. In
addition, plain language can make companies more productive and more profitable because people
spend less time trying to figure out messages that are confusing or aren’t written to meet their needs.
 The choice of active or passive voice also affects the tone of your message. In a sentence written in the
active voice, the subject performs the action and the object receives the action: “Jodi sent the email
message.” In a sentence written in the passive voice, the subject receives the action: “The email message
was sent by Jodi.” As you can see, the passive voice combines the helping verb to be with a form of the
verb that is usually similar to the past tense.
 Using the active voice often makes your writing more direct, livelier, and easier to read. Passive voice is
not wrong grammatically, but it can be cumbersome, lengthy, and vague. In most cases, the active voice is
the better choice.
 COMPOSING YOUR MESSAGE

 After you have decided how to adapt to your audience, you’re ready to begin composing your message. As you
write your first draft, let your creativity flow. Don’t try to draft and edit at the same time, and don’t worry
about getting everything perfect. You may find it helpful to hone your craft by viewing your writing at three
levels: strong words, effective sentences, and coherent paragraphs.
 The nouns in your business messages can vary dramatically in their degree of abstraction or concreteness. An
abstract word expresses a concept, quality, or characteristic. Abstractions are usually broad, encompassing a
category of ideas, and are often intellectual, academic, or philosophical.
 Love, honor, progress, tradition, and beauty are abstractions, as are such important business concepts as
productivity, profits, quality, and motivation. In contrast, a concrete word stands for something you can touch,
see, or visualize. Most concrete terms are anchored in the tangible, material world. Chair, table, horse, rose,
kick, kiss, red, green, and two are concrete words; they are direct, clear, and exact.
 CREATING EFFECTIVE SENTENCES
When you compose business Arranging your carefully chosen words in
messages, look for the most powerful effective sentences is the next step in creating
words for each situation : successful messages. Start by selecting the
best type of sentence to communicate each
1. Choose strong, precise words. point you want to make.
2. Choose familiar words.
Sentences come in four basic varieties: simple,
3. Avoid clichés and use buzzwords compound, complex, and compound- complex.
carefully. A simple sentence has one main clause (a
4. Use jargon carefully. single subject and a single predicate), although
it may be expanded by nouns and pronouns
serving as objects of the action and by
modifying phrases
 FOUR TYPES OF SENTENCES

 A compound sentence has two main clauses that express two or more independent but related
thoughts of equal importance, usually joined by and, but, or or. In effect, a com- pound sentence is a
merger of two or more simple sentences (independent clauses) that are related.
 A complex sentence expresses one main thought (the independent clause) and one or more
subordinate thoughts (dependent clauses) related to it, often separated by a comma.
 The subordinate thought, which comes first in the following sentence, could not stand alone A
compound-complex sentence has two main clauses, at least one of which contains a subordinate
clause to make your writing as effective as possible, strive for variety and balance using all four
sentence types.
 In every message, some ideas are more important than others. You can emphasize key ideas through
your sentence style. One obvious technique is to give important points the most space. When you
want to call attention to a thought, use extra words to describe it
 CRAFTING COHERENT PARAGRAPHS

Paragraphs organize sentences related to the same general topic. Readers

expect every para- graph to be unified focusing on a single topic and coherent
presenting ideas in a logically connected way. By carefully arranging the
elements of each paragraph, you help your readers grasp the main idea of your
document and understand how the specific pieces of support material back up
that idea.
Paragraphs vary widely in length and form, but most contain three basic
elements: a topic sentence, support sentences that develop the topic, and
transitional words and phrases.
Most effective paragraphs deal with a single topic, and the sentence that
introduces that topic is called the topic sentence. This sentence, usually the first
one in the paragraph, gives readers a summary of the general idea that will be
covered in the rest of the paragraph.
 SUPPORT SENTENCES

In most paragraphs, the topic sentence needs to be explained, justified, or extended
with one or more support sentences. These sentences must be related to the topic and
provide examples, evidence, and clarification.
Transitions connect ideas by showing how one thought is related to another. They also
help alert the reader to what lies ahead so that shifts and changes don’t cause
confusion. In addition to helping readers understand the connections you’re trying to
make, transitions give your writing a smooth, even flow.
 You have a variety of options for developing paragraphs, each of which can convey a
specific type of idea.
Five of the most common approaches are illustration, comparison or contrast, cause
and effect, classification, and problem and solution
 Exercise 4

1. Identify the four aspects of being sensitive to audience needs when writing business 
messages. 
2. Define the four types of sentences, and explain how sentence style affects emphasis 
within a message. 
3. What functions do transitions as one of the three basic elements serve?
END OF SLIDE
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