Business · May 27, 2019

Principles of Good Business Letter Writing

Writing is the basic skill of communicating on paper for your business but unfortunately has been least studied and practices in industries. It is an active and productive skill. Writing depends on mechanical as well as the mental aspect. Mental aspect in writing includes an adequate knowledge of the language, grammar, vocabulary and usage. The mechanical aspect refers to orthography or drawing letters and alphabets and knowledge of what business or purposes you are going to write on. Businesses today focus on 7 C of communication that adds more value while communication orally or verbally within the business. 

3 Major Purposes of Writing

The first and foremost purpose of writing is to inform your reader. Your business letter should contain all the relevant information required by the reader.

The second main purpose of your business message is to persuade or convince the buyer or stakeholder to accept your proposal or offer. For this purpose, you try to create the desire of that product by giving guarantees, samples, brochures etc.

The third purpose of writing is to collaborate. Here you try to motivate your reader by telling him how he will benefit by taking this action. As a result of collaboration, he begins to buy your product.

Top 8 Principles of Good Business Writing

  • Before writing, the entrepreneur should determine the purpose of letter. It means that he should think about what and why he is going to write. Then he should organize his ideas.
  • Recall appropriate words and put them into sentences.
  • Before writing, should investigate or collect all the necessary information related to the topic. For this purpose, just jot down ideas that should be included in the message. The next step is to polish the document.
  • Mistakes always irritate the reader. So being proposal writer you should have sufficient knowledge of sentence structure. There should not be any mistake in sentence structure, spelling, grammar or punctuation.
  • All the sentences should be interlinked. Organize the ideas in the proper sequence. Each should be related directly to the other sentences.
  • The tone of the message should be conversational. To achieve a conversational tone, the writer should use plain language and try to avoid obsolete and pompous language.
  • The second last principle of good writing is the revision. Revision means adding necessary and deleting unnecessary information. The writer should evaluate its contents, organization and style.
  • The last principle is editing and proofreading. They are important to ensure that the document has no mistakes in grammar, spelling, punctuation or word choice.

The 3 Stages of Business Letter Writing

Manipulation is the psychomotor ability (muscular control of hands) to form the letters of the alphabet. This is the most basic stage in writing. And for second language learners, it does not pose much of a problem. Even for learners who use English as a second language, the task of learning to write letters becomes easier.

It is required to organize letters into words, the words into a phrase, the phrases into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. It may be comparatively easy if writing is preceded by intensive oral work.

Communication in writing like interpretation in reading is the ultimate goal of the writing process. Here the writer is able to select the appropriate structures and vocabulary, keeping in view the subject matter and receiver i.e. the reader.