Tag
Business Writing
Writing that has to work at the office: emails people answer, updates people read, feedback people can hear, and the editing habits that get you there faster.
21 posts
Responding to an RFP: A Practical Guide
An RFP response is a document written under time pressure, by several people, to a format someone else chose, and scored by a process you cannot see. Most of…
Writing a Business Case
A business case is a document that asks for resources by making an argument. Most of them fail not because the idea is bad but because the document does one of…
Writing a One-Page Summary
The one-pager is the most-requested and least-taught document in business writing. Someone asks for "a one-pager on this" and what they usually get is the full…
Writing Release Notes People Read
Most release notes are a changelog with a nicer font: a list of things that changed, ordered by whatever order the tickets closed in, written for the team that…
Writing User Documentation That Helps
Documentation fails in a specific and predictable way: it describes the software instead of the task. A page titled "The Export dialog" listing every control…
How to Write a Project Brief That Prevents the Wrong Project
A project brief is cheap insurance against an expensive mistake: building the wrong thing, correctly, for six weeks. It's the document that forces alignment…
Using AI Writing Tools at Work Without Losing Your Voice (or Your Judgment)
AI writing assistance has crossed from novelty to default: drafting, rewriting, summarizing, and replying are now one shortcut away in most workplaces. The…
Plain Language in Business Documents: Clarity as a Competitive Edge
There's a persistent belief that serious documents require serious-sounding language — that "utilize synergies to operationalize the framework" signals…
How to Write an Executive Summary That Executives Actually Use
The executive summary is the most misunderstood document at work. It is not an introduction, not a teaser, and not the first section you write. It is the whole…
Message Templates: Stop Rewriting the Same Email From Scratch
Look through your sent folder and a pattern emerges: you write the same fifteen messages over and over. The meeting reschedule. The polite decline. The…
Writing Constructive Feedback: Hard Messages That Help
Written feedback is harder than spoken feedback and more consequential: it arrives without your facial expression, it can be reread in the worst possible mood…
The 60-Second Proofreading Checklist Before You Hit Send
The typo in the company-wide email. The client's name spelled wrong. The "please find attached" with nothing attached. Everyone has a story, and almost every…
Workplace Writing Tips for Non-Native English Speakers
A huge share of the world's professional English is written by people who learned it as a second, third, or fourth language — often better-studied in grammar…
Follow-Up Emails That Get Replies (Without Being Annoying)
You sent a perfectly good email and got silence. Now comes the harder message: the follow-up. Done badly, it reads as a guilt trip ("per my last email...") or…
Concise Writing: How to Say the Same Thing in Half the Words
Long writing isn't more thorough — it's less read. Every unnecessary word is a small tax on the reader, and the taxes compound: a 400-word email gets skimmed…
Email, Chat, Document, or Meeting? Choosing the Right Medium
Half of workplace communication friction isn't about what was said — it's about where. The decision made in a chat thread that nobody can find. The…
Self-Editing: How to Fix Your Own Writing When No Editor Is Coming
Professional writers have editors. You have five minutes between meetings and a draft that needs to go out. Self-editing is a learnable skill, and the core of…
Telling Customers About Delays: A Script That Preserves Trust
Every business eventually has to tell a customer something they don't want to hear: the shipment slipped, the feature isn't ready, the outage lasted longer…
Getting Tone Right in Workplace Writing (Without Overthinking It)
You wrote a perfectly reasonable message. The recipient read something else entirely. Tone is the invisible layer of workplace writing — and unlike…
Slack Etiquette: Writing Messages Your Team Will Thank You For
Slack promised to kill email and instead gave us a second inbox that never closes. The difference between a team where Slack works and one where it's a source…
How to Write Clear Professional Emails That Get Answered
Most work emails fail before the recipient finishes the first sentence. They bury the request, hedge the ask, or make the reader do the work of figuring out…