Rules of Thumb for Business Writers

In the business world, limply written, badly organized documents can subtly but steadily downgrade your career. You’ve got to write clearly, concisely, and energetically--without meandering, repeating yourself, or sabotaging your ideas with poorly constructed sentences, stilted language, and embarrassing grammatical errors. Get the help you need--now--with RULES OF THUMB FOR BUSINESS WRITERS. Written by the author team of the best-selling RULES OF THUMB: A GUIDE FOR WRITERS, this new guide is designed especially to meet the real writing demands of daily business. Whether you’re composing a letter, preparing an outline for your next big report, or simply wondering whether or not that comma makes sense, RULES OF THUMB FOR BUSINESS WRITERS explains how to do it right. It’s packed with concise explanations of the most frequent problems in writing, bulleted lists of easy-to-read guidelines, and hundreds of practical guidelines that instantly illustrate each concept. Quickly and easily, you’ll learn how to find your focus, break up your thoughts effectively, format your documents for optimal readability, begin with an attention-grabbing bang, adopt a straightforward, conversational tone, and improve your style. And you’ll learn how to write succinctly, accurately, and persuasively, whether in formal business correspondence, more casual e-mail messages, memos, agendas, instructions manuals, reports, newsletters and press releases, proposals, or résumés. PLUS, you’ll learn to effortlessly adhere to the rules of punctuation, grammar, and usage, understanding when to capitalize, choosing the correct pronoun, avoiding fragments and run-on sentences, properly placing apostrophes, and more. There’s even helpful advice on tackling special topics, such as conducting research on the Web efficiently, using footnotes accurately, developing templates to simplify future tasks, planning and executing a long-term project, and editing the work of others. A valuable appendix of ready-to-use memos, letters, agendas, résumés, and more round out this handy book. RULES OF THUMB FOR BUSINESS WRITERS helps you take all those amorphous ideas and disjointed bits of information and record them in a way that is clear, logical, and action-oriented. It’s the on-the-job reference you’ll turn to again and again, for both a thorough overview of the essentials of great writing and for fast, easy lessons on key topics.