If you fail to make an impression in your business writing, or if you fail to be informative, the stakes are often high. For this reason, many organizations today recognise the value of professional proofreading services in helping them to communicate effectively with customers, suppliers, and team members around the firm.
One quick way to improve your business writing is to hire an in-house writing team. Teams like this are in common use today, especially within technology companies that need to produce high-quality documentation, or in advertisers needing attractive, engaging copy. Freelance editors, proofreaders, and writers are also regularly used by the leading companies worldwide.
As a case in point, just as chefs need to write down their recipes carefully and accurately, this is also true for major technology companies. Interestingly, it highlights the need for clear, high-quality business writing in these settings, as well as the high degree of dependency of these firms on qualified writers and, in many cases, professional proofreading or paraphrasing services.
In these companies, such as Intel or Arm, it is necessary for the organizations to “document” their intellectual property (IP) products, which involves hiring technical writers and editors to write down and maintain sets of instructions about how to use the IP. Whether through in-house teams or professional proofreading services, the documentation that these companies and others in different industries produce depends on leveraging trained and experienced writers and editors.
Whatever perspective you are writing from in business, there are a few tried-and-tested rules you can apply – other than those discussed above, such as using an in-house team of writers or professional proofreading – to improve your business writing immediately. These include:
- Ensure you make an impression
- Avoid overuse of text
- Don’t be vague
- Don’t forget the reader
The first of these, ensuring you make an impression, tries to grab the reader’s attention. This guarantees that you will be able to communicate your point quickly and clearly, all the while engaging the reader.
It also leads to the second point: avoiding the overuse of text. Working with a proofreader or editor can ensure your text is as concise as possible – it’s always worthwhile since it helps you to achieve the previous point, thus ensuring you make an impression.
Third, being vague is to be avoided, and you should aim to quantify the statements you make wherever possible. When you use vague sentences, it reduces the impact of the text and can lead to misinterpretation. For example, avoid statements like, “It is commonly known that …” Instead, use an expression that indicates who precisely knows.
Finally, forgetting the reader leads to the worst consequences compared to any of the above-mentioned issues. If you can avoid doing just this in your text, it will have a substantial improvement. In particular, you can ask:
- How much information does the reader need?
- How much detail is the reader interested in?
- What format would the reader find useful?
- What is the main message I want to leave the reader with?
Working closely with a proofreader is a quick and affordable way to polish your latest document, ensuring you don’t make any of the above-mentioned errors. This can immediately and effortlessly improve your writing.
Professional Proofreading Services 