Foundation Principles
The difficulty is not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
EFFECTIVE BUSINESS WRITING rests on a few foundation principles. If you master them, you’ll know how to handle the many different writing tasks that come your way.
Clarify your purpose
When you set out to write a business document, the first thing you should ask yourself is, “Why am I writing this document?” Business writing serves many purposes.
- Explain or justify actions: “Because all of the bids we received from our current vendors were high, we decided to reject them and seek others.”
- Convey information:
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