6 things technical writing can learn from business writing
Published on October 20, 2024
My first serious encounter with writing
During my school days, I was asked to write "a 200-word eassy", "a 4-page report" or "10 paragraphs of text". Notice how there was always a lower limit. There was never an upper limit.
Transitioning to a full-time job
During my first years at my current full-time job at a US-based startup, I wrote maybe 40-50 google documents. These include engineering plans, architectural decision records, requests for comments and also problem statements. I used to be fairly confident in my writing skills as I never had any issues with writing text. What I found out was that my fellow colleagues often misunderstood the document and needed me to present.
I identified the following 5 reasons for that:
- they did not know what the main point was
- the main point was buried somewhere deep
- reading parts of the document did not convey 90% of the message
- my colleagues are too busy to read dense text
- different people need different things out of the document
Turning point: business writing courses
Once upon a time, I was too sick to go on my regular weekend hike. Instead, I snuggled at home and decided to get back to my side-projects. I really wanted to present them to a wider audience. I had a blog set up waiting for articles to come in. I was able to produce text, but I wasn't happy with it. It wasn't like the other blogs I read. It wasn't like the books I read. I didn't understand what was missing but I wasn't satisfied with it.
I took the leap of faith and searched for writing courses on LinkedIn Learning. I took 4 courses on business writing, each of them was 30-60 minutes. Here's what I learned.
Tip 1: Include executive summary
- reading time costs money
- help audience decide if they are interested or not
Tip 2: Writing to persuade
- if you need someone to do something, the call to action is in executive summary
Tip 3: Start writing with key sentence
- always define a key sentence for your document
Tip 4: Refine your key sentence
- refining the key sentence significantly increases quality of your text
- more key sentences = more documents
Tip 5: Write, Speak, Write
- speaking helps refine ideas before writing them down
- imagine yourself speaking your thoughts to someone else
- practice and "bounce ideas" before writing
Tip 6: Less is more
- writing time costs money
- it's easier to stick to key sentence with shorter text