Written communication is an integral part of any successful business, and it is specifically critical for Human Resources staff. These people have to come up with various manuals for the rest of the employees, partners, and stakeholders.
The reasons to improve business communication & writing skills include:
- Writing often plays the most significant role in the workplace.
- This activity is indispensable to the modern business.
- Increasing personal role in the company.
- Acknowledging the link with real professionalism.
- Making sure the communication across the company is clear and accurate.
If you are a part of HR team, polish your business writing skills to maintain excellent relations with all representatives of your company as well as interested third-party faces.
- Put the reader in the first place
Define the target audience before preparing a manual, guide, or informative article. Marketing specialists, web developers, content managers, designers – all of these people require various approaches. While technical specialists are okay with short and concise guidelines, copywriters would like to see detailed instructions.
- Come up with a powerful key message
Remember writing academic essays? A key message in business writing is the same as a thesis statement: it should contain the main idea of the text. It is better to spell out a key message in the opening paragraph. Add it immediately after the hooking sentence (attention grabber). The attention grabber could be a:
- Joke/Anecdote
- Simile
- Metaphor
- Famous person quote
- Statistics
- Fact
- Literary quote
- Involve some SEO
Every modern company has a SEO Department. Turn to them to get a helping hand when deciding on the size of your content, attention-grabbing introductions, headings, and call-to-actions. Your text will not sound business-oriented enough without including proper keywords.
- Stay concise and up-to-the-point
Never write more than you have to say. Wordiness is something that will distract the target audience from the subject of matter. Business people prefer brief, specific instructions on how some things work and why they need them. That is it – no need to write large essays. Leave that thing to content team.
- Improve your grammar and enrich vocabulary
Those HR reps whose native language is not English should keep on practicing by attending special courses or watching original movies. It is also important to check the grammar, spelling, and punctuation carefully to make people take your job seriously.
- Use online writing help
Surf the web to discover hundreds of available business, creative, and educational writing services. The prices vary depending on your purposes, volumes, complexity levels, urgency, and amount of pages, so keep it in mind. Usually, business writing services offer the following content:
- Resume/CV
- Cover letter
- Memo
- Business plan
- Landing page
- SEO content
- Company letter
- Professional guides & manuals
- Reports
It is up to you to choose which service meets your needs.
- Download & install various training apps
While some applications like games are just a waste of time, others may assist in improving any sort of writing skills. Business writings skills involve academic, creative, and technical writing, so focus on all three fields. The following mobile apps will help you to do so:
- Hemingway App
- Resumention
- Easy Word Count
- Grammarly
- Email Excellence
- Cite It in
- Get the facts right
Never tell lies in your papers. If you want to motivate some of the workers without being sure whether your CEO has some plans regarding increased salaries or social benefits, it is better to add some inspiring quotations and statistics form the recent newsfeed than lie about specific numbers. You can always offer some cookies instead.
- Do not send the final draft without proofreading
Proofreading & editing go hand-in-hand when it comes to the writing of any level. No matter how good you are, some tiny typos are always present in the draft. Besides, revising helps to notice more serious mistakes like a gender-biased language or missing words.
- Mind your tone and voice
Do not even think about using slang words in an official business report. Besides, such papers require the use of specific professional terms to prove your competence. What you can do is to include some slang words or funny jokes in a corporate newspaper read by the internal team only. Then, a friendly tone can take place.
The last thing to keep in mind is the important role of visualization. Always add images, graphs, tables, charts to illustrate the specific examples – it will help to deliver the key message as you see it!
The post 10 Expert Tips for Improving HR Business Writing appeared first on HR News.