The 5 most common business writing mistakes are not knowing your audience, writing a wall of text, using too much jargon, sending a vague message, and skipping the proofreading. Each one is easy to avoid once you know it.
The workplace is not just the place where you spend your hours to make ends meet. It is also a good place to improve yourself, and one skill worth improving there is how you communicate.
Whatever your core expertise is, you need to be good at business communication. Once you master it, you stand out from colleagues who think business writing is someone else's job.
There are some things to keep in mind, though. The stakes are higher when you make a mistake in business writing than when you write an English assignment for school. Here are the most common mistakes to avoid.
1. Not knowing your audience
If you do not know who your audience is, you cannot focus on what appeals to them. Do they want to get more organized, cut costs, or stay ahead of their competitors?
If your boss asks you to email a client you have never written to before, ask first what the client likes and dislikes. Read earlier emails to and from the client so you can learn from them.
2. Writing a wall of text
Your high school teacher may have told you this already: a wall of text is hard to read. Break your ideas into short paragraphs and sentences.
Keeping things clean and simple makes your message easy to scan. Your readers can grasp it quickly, without squinting or tracing the lines with a finger.
3. Too much jargon and too many buzzwords
People are tired of being bombarded with pretentious and annoying business jargon. Avoid jargon and buzzwords as much as you can, and replace them with terms that are easy to understand. Instead of saying "we think outside the box," just say "we are creative."
And please never write "take it to the next level." People say that when they have no clear idea where things are going. Describe what the next level is. Is it more sales, a higher margin, more subscribers, happier customers, or something else?
When you avoid jargon, you look like someone who knows exactly what they are writing about.
4. A vague message
Make everything as clear as possible. Instead of sending your team a memo that asks them to finish a project quickly, tell them exactly how many weeks, days, or even hours they have left.
If you say that most of your customers prefer strawberry pudding to chocolate, show the numbers that back up your claim.
It is a good idea to scan your writing for adverbs and adjectives and see which ones you can replace with numbers and data.
5. Not proofreading
Do you hit the send button the moment you finish an email to an important client? Then you had better be very lucky. More often than not, an email, memo, or document contains typos and spelling and grammar errors that your eyes miss at first glance.
Read the document aloud, slowly, to catch misspellings and badly chosen words. Ask someone else to proofread it if you can, because a fresh pair of eyes always helps. If nobody is around, run the text through the Spell Checker, and go through this proofreading checklist before you hit send.
Those are the 5 common business writing mistakes to avoid if you want to communicate well with your partners and clients. Check your writing for each of them before you send it. For the next step, read how to write a business email.