Business Writing Blog | Hurley Write

Expression, tone, and emotion play a pivotal role in whether communication is successful or not, even in projects that are technically-oriented. This fairly easy in verbal communication: we’re all naturals at using nonverbal communication to enhance and strengthen our words. It’s more challenge, however, in writing projects. In fact, it can take years and quite a bit of training to develop effective written...

Josh Bernoff's survey on the 2016 State of Business Writing found that writers spend limited time on rewrites. He surveyed 547 businesspeople who write at least two hours per week for work, excluding email. He discovered that while they spend 45% of their writing time on prep and research, they devote only 19% to rewrites.

Business writing is a targeted form of writing designed to facilitate clear communication within and between private organizations, their peers, and their customers in order to produce desirable business results. Business writing can include sales and marketing materials; training and educational content; communications like emails and memos; reports and presentations; administrative materials like Standard Operating...

U.S. organizations spend a lot of money on skills training: $83 billion in 2019, according to the 2019 Training Industry Report from Training Magazine. That’s a 19% increase just since 2016! Yet these same organizations often find corporate training to be ineffective, with no lasting skills improvement.

Language can make or break a document. We’ve all read documents that have been difficult to get through; often, the blame for this can be attributed to the use of expletives (aka lazy pronouns), overused phrases, buzzwords, too many words, needlessly pompous words, and the inappropriate use of verbs and active and passive voice.

The 7 Cs of effective communication are the crucial ingredients in business writing that gets the job done and supports improved business outcomes.

Writing best practices for active vs. passive: here’s how to know when to use active or passive voice in your writing for maximum impact and clarity.

Most writers work without any writing strategy at all and compromise the effectiveness of their work. These 5 pre-writing activities can yield powerful, compelling documents every time.

Here are the three persuasive techniques that can power up any business or technical document and ensure authors produce the most effective writing.

Maybe you’ve read an SOP that didn’t quite make sense. Or perhaps it was a report that was a bit too dense. Or a manual that was so poorly written it made reading the dictionary sound like fun. Regardless of the document you’re skimming or the industry you work in, there’s no escaping the truth: Effective writing is essential in the workplace and bad writing, well, it sucks for everyone.