Business writing | Clarity in business writing

By Anton Kelly

All living things communicate to some degree.  At the most fundamental level communication has something to do with survival, "The food is here" or "It's time to make babies". The higher the level of society, the more complex the communication.  Sentences such as, "The Chateaubriand at Blues is really excellent" or, "A university degree in economics is a pre-requisite in the lucrative financial consultancy world" communicate extremely complex and abstract concepts.  But at any level, communication is only successful if it is clear.  The message a male cockroach gets from the female sex pheromone odour is in no way ambiguous, but the words that we humans use very often are. 

One of the reasons is that words, especially in English, often have different meanings for different people and can be used in different roles.  We all know that nouns name things, places or concepts (cat, Durban, patience), that adjectives tell us something about nouns (blue sky, happy face) and that verbs are actions or descriptions of states (go, remember, have)  but there's plenty of room for ambiguity.  A simple word like round can play the role of a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or a preposition:

    You bought the drinks last time; now it’s my round. (noun)
    The tiger suddenly rounded on its trainer. (verb)
    The world is round. (adjective)
    He looked round, but still couldn’t see if he was being followed. (adverb)
    The Countess showed me round the house herself (preposition)

If we are to communicate clearly, and in honest business writing there is no need for obfuscation, then we need to know our Ps and Qs as well as to mind them. Clear communication is the key to success. After all, cockroaches are said to be able to survive nuclear holocaust.

Groups of words
Knowing our Ps and Qs is one thing.  Stringing them together so that they mean what we want them to mean is quite another.

Groups of words vary in length and can be named according to characteristics.  A phrase is a group of words without a finite verb.  A fragment is a phrase that begins with a capital and ends with a full stop.  A clause contains a verb but lacks the initial capital and full stop and a sentence is identified by having all three.  Sentences arranged together to convey an idea form a paragraph.  All of these groups of words need to have signals and spaces within and between them to successfully convey the speaker or writer's message.  And those signals and spaces are called punctuation.

Punctuation
Imagine driving in a city without traffic signals.  Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of our writing.

Question marks signal a query, exclamation marks some sort of emphasis.  Inverted commas identify a person's spoken words and the apostrophe indicates possession.  Spaces between words grow from the shortest, indicated by the comma, to the longest, shown by the full stop, with the semi colon and colon in between.  Some of them have other functions as well: lead into a statement by preceding it with a colon.  Know how to use punctuation.  Misuse can alter the entire meaning of a sentence.

    Gerrie said he had shot himself as a young man.
    Gerrie said he had shot, himself, as a young man.

Grammar
How we use our words says as much about us as the clothes that we wear.  Make a good impression!

Grammar is the set of rules that make a language work but those rules change and experts often disagree on them.    Some common grammatical errors are verbs not 'agreeing' with subjects:  the cats sits on the mat, the use of 'I' and 'me':  Jane and me found a dead seal on the beach, and the misuse of 'that and 'which': the taxi which nearly hit us at the robots.

Spelling
Mercifully, some genius invented spell-check and as we all write on computers these days, it's not the problem that it used to be.

Annoyingly, there are spelling mistakes that sneak by the Spellchecker because it doesn't know what you want to say.  I practice the piano for an hour every day.  We are lucky to have a vet's practise down the road from our house.  A principle is in charge of a school but a principal is a moral belief. "The spelling and grammar check is complete" Huh!!

All this sounds like a minefield of possible error but it is worth getting it right.  If you are stumped by which word, punctuation mark or sentence structure to use, remember that many of these problems, like income tax, can be avoided.  Just say it differently.  You can always rephrase your way out of a grammatical quandary.

Click here if you would like to learn more about the University of Cape Town (Law@Work) Business Writing and Legal Documents Course.