“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” Edwin Schlossberg

Writing Well

At the heart of all good writing is the goal of persuading people to think. Whether that is through extravagant prose, such as when authors paint a scene for their readers. Or simple prose, like writing a speech. The writer’s goal is to provoke thought in their target audience. In business, this means encouraging your team to think about their work or customers to think about your product or service.

Writing well in business

Writing is a way for an organisation to connect with its audience. Any business writing is a chance to deliver a message to stakeholders. It informs, it provides people with choices and it keeps the audience up-to-date. As such, everything you write must be proficient, comprehensive and informative, so the receivers will clearly understand your message.

Ethos, pathos and logos

No, these are not the names of the three Musketeers. Although they are a powerful trio. They are, in fact, modes of persuasion used to convince audiences. When you write, you need to inform, inspire, persuade and connect with others. Much of that happens through these three ideals:

• Ethos informs the audience that the writer is credible
• Pathos appeals to the audience’s emotions
• Logos is the use of reasoning, such as facts and statistics

Though they might sound imposing, most of us use them in our everyday language.

Business is essentially about getting other people to do things, such as employees to be productive or customers to buy your product or service. Writing can contribute to this, as long as it is good writing. But good writing is not just about polishing up the words. You can’t just take bad writing and substitute each piece of jargon or boring phrase for a nice expression here and there. When you write well, your message is clear and you sound very convincing.

Typing Fast

The productivity of a business can depend on how fast things are done. To complete work faster, it is vital to develop your typing skills. Typing helps you to work easily on the computer and it assists in written communication.

Touch typing

Touch typing used to be a skill that only people wanting to join the administration industry needed. Now, for efficiency, it is a must in every other industry as well. A touch typist can type over 75-80wpm (words per minute), while a non-trained person is around 10wpm.

The fastest typist

The fastest typist in the world was Barbara Blackburn. She could sustain 150wpm for 50 minutes and 170wpm for shorter amounts of time. She even managed a peak speed of 212wpm. However, she used a Simplified Dvorak keyboard, which differs greatly from the QWERTY keyboard we use today.

If your speed is not up to par, practise, practise and practise. And eventually you’ll notice an improvement to your speed (and accuracy) in no time.

Enhance your professional development skills with courses at Odyssey Training. Our full-day online professional development courses are available in both face-to-face format aswell available in online training. Our online training is recorded live, which means that you can interact with our trainer or facilitator throughout the day. All courses can be customisable and tailored to each individuals needs.

As with any form of communication, the way you write is influenced by many variables including your unique knowledge, interests, skills, personality, and emotions. Our 1 day course Writing Skills for Business will help you plan, organise, and structure a range of business communication formats, whilst giving you the opportunity to expand your own personal writing style.