Some businesses think that they can get away with bad business writing – and we don’t just mean grammar and spelling mistakes, we mean sloppy copy that is unenticing to read. Although startups and young entrepreneurs tend to favour the cheapest possible solutions, even well-established businesses can be forced to cut corners when budgets are tight. Are you guilty of bad business writing? What even is business writing and why does it matter? Join Wordsmith and let’s find out!
Business writing and its consequences
Business writing is defined as any form of written material used in a business/professional setting (e.g. emails, reports, presentations, memos etc.) with the intent to convey useful or relevant information to the reader clearly and concisely. The applications are extensive.
At the workplace, being able to write effectively is essential for getting communications and content across to colleagues and clients – boosting both work efficiency and efficacy.
When you apply the foundations of business writing to marketing and the material written for your audiences, you’ll find that you are much more direct with your motives and call-to-actions. Depending on how you present yourself and your work, you’ll also find that you are more persuasive across the board.
In a Harvard Business Review article by Bill Birchard, he analyses how poorly written financial writing can be very costly. “Researchers have confirmed that if you write simply and directly in disclosures like 10-Ks, you can attract more investors, cut the cost of debt and equity, and even save money and time on audits,” Birchard explains.
He points to an experiment by Cornell accounting professor Kristina Rennekamp, who worked alongside readers of corporate press releases to document results upon evaluating two press releases – one written with plain language as recommended by the SEC and the other an actual document from a soft drink company. Just as you’d expect, readers that had to sift through material with bad “processing fluency” (or readability in layman’s terms) would lose interest. When a document was well-written, Rennekamp found that it “acts as a heuristic cue and increases investors’ beliefs that they can rely on the information in the disclosure.”
Since Rennekamp’s experiment, other universities have conducted experiments of their own and the results are rather conclusive:
· Byoung-Hyoun Hwang of Cornell and Hugh Hoikwang Kim of USC found that annual reports with only a one-standard-deviation increase in clunky writing yielded 2.5 percent less market value;
· Hongkang Xu et al. of the University of Massachusetts, University of Illinois and University of Toledo examined the SEC form 10-Ks of 4,754 firms and found legibility and credit to have strong correlations – a hard-to-read document would result in less credit;
· Hatem Rijba et al. of the Paris School of Business confirmed the above and found SEC forms with negative or ambiguous tones were also associated with higher costs of equity
Due to regulatory and disclosure requirements, financial writing can be dry and difficult to read. Imagine if you were a potential investor or a shareholder who had to sit through a poorly written annual report – confidence in the business is probably not the first thing that comes to mind!
Write to save
Although the SEC’s guidelines are directed at financial writing, there are some takeaways that can be applied universally, namely what a “plain English document” entails:
“It does not mean deleting complex information to make the document easier to understand. For investors to make informed decisions, disclosure documents must impart complex information… Plain English means analysing and deciding what information investors need to make informed decisions, before words, sentences or paragraphs are considered. A plain English document uses words economically and at a level the audience can understand. Its sentence structure is tight. Its tone is welcoming and direct. Its design is visually appealing. A plain English document is easy to read and looks like it’s meant to be red.”
~ Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the SEC and author of the guidebook
In other words, your content should be designed to be read and absorbed by the average person.
This means avoiding:
Industry jargon and pretentious wording
Unless you are writing for specialists (like a financial report or a peer-reviewed paper), it’s stressful to come across content filled with unfamiliar vocabulary. For one, the reader will have to consider whether it’s worth Googling or asking someone for help – and secondly, it makes them feel alienated. By writing in plain English, you are making your content more accessible for people of all backgrounds (which is also very handy if you are trying to increase your overall viewership).
Even if the reader is an industry specialist, they’d probably appreciate being able to avoid seeing standard deviations, disruptions, paradigm shifts and other jargon for 5 minutes.
Keyword dumps for SEO placement
Some lazy writers do this because they think it’s better to write for AI instead of people. The worst offenders are those who shove a copy and paste list of keywords into their document and call it a day, but craftier corner-cutters will try to integrate these keywords into their sentences – these can be often identified by the writer’s unnatural vocabulary choices and their density within a paragraph, like so:
From the results of the experiment, we can observe that it takes only several standard deviations of misconstrued writing to disrupt consumer behaviour. To truly cause a paradigm shift that is both respectful to SEO and consumer mindset…
You wouldn’t talk like this in person, so don’t write like that either. The best way to integrate SEO into your copy is to do it naturally – you can still use your keywords, but just make sure you don’t use pretentious words and don’t stack them all in the same place!
Bland storytelling
Every piece of content you create is an opportunity for storytelling and to sculpt how you want your brand to be presented. Stories create an emotional connection with your audience and help them to associate your brand with said emotions, so when you put in little effort to your story, your audience will struggle to have feelings for your material (aside from boredom).
You don’t need to create stories of the same magnitude as Lord of the Rings, but you should aim for content that is relatable and relevant to your audience – common themes often include struggles and hardships that most will have experienced, followed by what they can do to get away from said challenges.
To say that business writing is an important investment would be an understatement. Given how key first impressions are in marketing, you should always strive to have content that is approachable and digestible to benefit both new and returning audiences. If you have any questions about business writing or need an extra pair of eyes to check your work, your friendly neighbourhood Wordsmiths would be happy to help!