Top three tips for workplace writing

It’s hard to avoid having to write at work, and whether it’s an official email or a weighty and important report, for many it’s quite a struggle even getting started, let alone finishing the job to an acceptable standard. These three top tips will help remove some of the pain and anxiety from workplace writing.   

Spend time thinking and planning 

Before you start writing, pause and consider your purpose. Why are you writing? Is it to simply convey information? To persuade someone to take a particular action? To respond to points raised in previous correspondence? Always have a purpose in mind. 

Be clear on your message too, before you put pen to paper (or more likely, fingers to keyboard). What are the main points you need to convey? Are there any secondary points? If you’re tackling a longer writing task, spend a bit more time thinking about this. Scribble thoughts, ideas and reminders for the content to help ensure that you don’t overlook something important when you come to write. Organise these into themes or topics, then put these themes into a logical arrangement – perhaps chronologically, alphabetically or in some other helpful order. 

Remember your reader 

Workplace writing is not undertaken for personal pleasure, the way that you might keep a travel or mindfulness journal, or write poetry in your spare time.  Rather, it serves an important function in reaching readers with information, advice or for some other purpose. Without readers, there’s really no point in writing at work. 

Remember your readers. Always use a writing style that will meet their needs. How much (if anything) do they know about the subject? How much time will they have to read and digest your communication? Where will they be when reading your writing? (At a desk? Eating breakfast? On a train or bus?) Will they read it on a phone, a laptop, or a piece of paper? These may have a bearing on how you write. 

Use accessible, easy to read, clear, concise, unambiguous and unpretentious plain English. Every reader, from those who struggle to read, to eminent Oxbridge professors, will thank you for it, because it saves time. Never hunt out long, obscure words. A fancy vocabulary won’t make you appear smart. Always write to express, not to impress. 

Draft and edit 

When you do come to write, don’t concentrate too much on style at the outset. Instead, draft something that will be edited and refined later. Just get words down on paper. It won’t be perfect, but it will be a good start. 

Re-read your draft after a suitable interval – which may be immediately, in the case of a short email. Edit to make it more readable, concise, punchy or persuasive. Consider whether you’ve varied the sentence length, checked the spelling and grammar, and avoided overuse of the same words or phrases. See if you can break up blocks of text into more readable chunks by using sub-headings, bulletpoints, and boxed text. 

Sometimes a change to the word order of a sentence can make your writing more active and direct. For example, it’s quite long-winded and passive to say ‘The mat was sat on by the cat.’ Rather, writing ‘The cat sat on the mat’ gives the sentence more energy and it’s also fewer words – which is another bonus. It’s easier to read too, for those who may struggle to read or to comprehend. 

Apply this to workplace writing: ‘The application was considered by the Membership Manager’ can be switched round so that the person or thing who is doing the action (in this case, ‘the Membership Manager’) comes first. The sentence thereby stops being passive and becomes active: ‘The Membership Manager considered the application.’ 

Simple tips and techniques like this can boost your style and confidence when you write at work.  

If you want to find out more about improving your writing at work, why not buy Moi’s book Writing for Work. The second edition was recently published. Learn more here.