Business Writing

Lesson 5: Extending your Writing Skills

This lesson teaches you how to use your writing skills to improve your performance in meetings and telephone conversations. It considers options for improving communication in the workplace and introduces issues related to the use of electronic media.

Extending your Writing Skills

The business environment includes many more areas where good writing is important than simply producing letters. Improving the quality of your written language can also help to improve your spoken language, especially if you take the time to plan out conversations beforehand. When you are going to make a telephone call or enter a meeting, make notes on what you intend to say. You don't need to write down precise lines (if you do, other people will quickly come to the conclusion that you're reading from a script), but a general outline will help you to keep your thoughts organized and avoid missing anything important. It will help you to go over matters in a sensible order, increasing your apparent professionalism. It will help you to maintain the initiative if other people interject and distract or confuse you. You should plan a conversation is much the same way as you would plan the contents of different paragraphs in a letter.

At most formal business meetings, somebody representing each company involved is required to take minutes. Even if you can delegate this task to a secretary, it's useful to know how to do it yourself, and to take your own notes where possible. Minutes of meetings provide a record for the government of how your business is operating, and they also provide recourse when people who were at the meeting later dispute what happened there. Minutes do not need to include a record of absolutely everything which was said. They should note all of the decisions which were arrived at during the meeting and all of the conclusions which were drawn and agreed upon. These items must be presented in order. Minutes must also record the names of everyone present at a meeting, and they should note when any of those people left the room or arrived late, so that it's clear who was present when decisions were made.

Rather than attending formal meetings, many people now make important business arrangements over the phone or via e-mail. In these cases, it's important that a proper written record of those conversations be maintained. Conversations should ideally be recorded, though in many places recording someone on the telephone without first getting that person's permission is illegal, so you should verbally establish that you're both aware of the recording at the start of the call. Phone conversations which are not recorded should be minuted by both parties in the same way that a meeting would be minuted, with the date and time at which they took place clearly noted. E-mail messages in which business decisions are made should be saved. Do not rely on your computer to do this. Computers are always vulnerable to malfunctions which can cause them to lose data. Ideally, you should print out important e-mail messages and store them with the rest of your paper files. A back-up copy on a DVD , CD or floppy disk is also advisable. E-mail messages must be stored with their headers intact. The headers are the technical information, usually appearing at the top of the message, which determine who sent it to whom, when, and via which machines. In case of dispute, this information will help to prove that your record is genuine.

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