How to "jazz up" business writing

The most important criterion for business writing is efficiency. People are not reading it for pleasure or laughs, and in most cases not even to expand their knowledge or challenge their assumptions. They want basic, simple information and they want it fast, so they can finish your letter and the fifteen others that came in today, and still have time for their other job duties.

So in my writing classes I stongly discourage "creative writing" in a business context. Clichés and other standard forms are recognized and interpreted instantly. They require minimal semantic processing and other thought. They allow the reader to understand perfectly the message you are conveying, and to extract quickly the information they need.

Don't mess with the paradigm.

Discussion boards like SciForums are the place to practice creative writing. Sure, people come here for information, but they also want to be entertained and to build the new 21st-century kind of "virtual friendships." So they want your writing to express your character and they don't want to be bored by reading ten different posts from ten different members that look like they were generated by the same software algorithm. They want pleasure, they want laughs, they want their knowledge expanded. And a few of us even want our assumptions challenged.

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A good business writer does not want to stand out from the herd. She is thinking about the person who will receive her missive. She wants that person to be able to spend as little time as possible reading it and deciding what to do.

She has the same responsiblities at her desk. She does not want to have to stay late because all of her correspondents have taken classes in "creative writing" from professors who neglected to tell them where it is appropriate and where it is not, so it takes her 5% more time to keep up with her own job duties. She can envision this scenario so she does not want to impose it on others.

Business writing is not supposed to be entertaining. It's supposed to be full of trite phrases than can be read and comprehended in less than one second.

Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper regarding things you've read. You still need to be efficient because they often have a 200-word limit, but you also need to capture the reader's attention, so you have considerably more opportunity for creativity than in a business letter.

A good writer understands that every type of writing has its own appropriate tactics. She does not write a letter to her cousin in the same style as a legal document, and she does not write a business document in the same style as the lead editorial in her daily newspaper.

Really bad idea. You've taken a trite phrase and turned it into something that looks almost like a personal comment. If the recipient is a man--especially one who's a little weak on social graces and could write his dating history in a fortune cookie--he may start phoning you. This could cost your company a sale, and add a completely unnecessary complication to your life. We all automatically feel sorry for the socially impaired, yet we have no choice but to hurt their feelings in order to get rid of them.

Short answer: absolutely nothing. Long answer: I expect the event described in the next clause to take place and I am prepared to perform the routine tasks which I always perform when these events occur, yet if due to circumstances beyond our control the event is canceled, I won't give a shit.

In many languages, the rhetoric of business letters is more flowery and formal than in American English. Ours is short and to the point. Any vestiges of formality are simply the framework of much longer passages that have been torn apart and reassembled by minimalists who were not chosen for the job of reassembly because of their love of language.

We use spatial metaphors to describe time. The future is "forward," "ahead," etc. The past is "behind," "passed," etc. If we have two choices it's a "fork in the road."

It's even worse in Chinese, whose verbs have no tenses. You can't say "This will happen" or "This happened." The best you can do is "This happens next week" or "This happens last week." Since in actual dialog there is seldom any real ambiguity, you can just say "this happens" and everybody knows when, so they get along fine with this stripped-down grammar utilizing fewer words. It allows them to talk more slowly and to be understood more easily.

Save it for the assignments in your creative writing class. If you're not enrolled in one, well then it's time to do so. Doing this in your business writing will NOT advance your career.

Perhaps if you keep reminding yourself that the people who read your memos and letters will be annoyed by your non-standard rhetoric, you'll become motivated to do something much more appropriate and rewarding with it.

In other words, don't gold-plate your stapler.