Think of how anxious you get before a meeting with a potential client, employer, or business partner to make a good impression. Online, your writing is often the first point of contact with the outside world and the key to making a good first impression. In this article, we’ll provide effective strategies to eliminate these errors and create better-quality English business writing.
What are the various types of English business writing?
While different types of business writing usually use a differing approach and style, the main point is to promote the business’ brand, products, or services:
- Website content: Content on a company’s website pages, usually to introduce the brand.
- Blog posts: Provide valuable information to customers, share industry news and trends, or showcase the company’s expertise.
- Social media content: Posts a company shares on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- Product descriptions: Written descriptions of a company’s products or services, with an eye on driving conversions.
- White papers: Detailed reports providing information about a particular topic to showcase a company’s expertise.
- Case studies: Detailed descriptions of how a company’s products or services have helped customers.
- Press releases: Announcements via media outlets about news or events related to the company.
- Email: For the purpose of communicating with clients or as part of marketing outreach campaigns.
Common grammar and punctuation English business writing mistakes
Most mistakes in English writing may seem benign in isolation. However, they can strongly impact how the outside world perceives your company. Here are some examples of the most common issues:
- Incorrect use of apostrophes, especially confusion regarding possessive and plural forms.
- Often misusing commas, either by using too many or too few.
- Incorrect Subject-verb agreement, for example, by using a plural noun with a singular verb or vice versa.
- The same goes for the incorrect use of Pronouns, as it should agree with any verbs, antecedents, gender, etc.
- Capitalisation errors when it comes to names, “I,” beginning of sentences, etc.
- Incorrect use of homophones, for example, confusing the dreaded “their” and “there.”
- Using the wrong tense is used in a sentence, leading to confusion about when something occurred.
Tips for improving English business writing for professionals
Luckily, there are many tried-and-tested strategies you can implement to improve your business writing immediately:
- Always proofread: You should reserve time to review your writing a second time. You will be surprised at what small errors you pick up, even as an expert writer!
- Use writing assistants: Text processing apps (like Word and GDocs) come with some error-correcting tools. However, you should also use AI tools, like Grammarly, to catch more potential eros and improve your writing.
- Invest in an editor: Having a second pair of eyes scrutinise your work can be invaluable in finding more mistakes.
- Create a style guide: A house style guide will help weed out small errors and inconsistencies by codifying some practices in black and white. For example, whether or not to use the Oxford comma or how to capitalise headings.
Conclusion
Ask any highly successful person involved in English business writing, and they will tell you that no matter how good you get, small mistakes will always find a way to slip into your writing. That is particularly apparent when working with large amounts of content or tight deadlines. The key is to put the mechanisms in place to help you catch, correct, and manage errors in an efficient and reliable way.
Explore our educational writing resources and blog posts to improve your business writing skills, or get in touch with us to discuss how we can help enhance the quality of your content.
