Writing a business letter is one of the most commonly faced challenges of professional life. This is why business letter writing services are so popular these days. For those who don’t know, a business letter is a type of letter that is used as a means of communication for various commercial purposes.
From a complaint, notice, warning, declaration, notice, apology and information to business deals, a business letter can be used for any purpose involving corporate matters. Since there are so many businesses out there, business letters are the most popular and frequently written type of letters these days. Therefore, the need for business letter writing services these days is more than ever.
Business letters are important as they are sent to many authority figures of a company. So you can’t afford to make mistakes in a business letter. If you don’t want to take help from business letter writing services and prefer to write your business letters on your own, you would definitely need some tips.
To come up with the tips, we studied business letters from many different sources so that you don’t have to. From our research, we found the common mistakes that people make while writing business letters. With our findings, we were able to round up some things that must be kept in mind while writing a business letter. With these points and some basic writing skills, you won’t need to hire business letter writing services.
- Make Sure Your Writing Is To The Point
You must always keep in mind that writing for people in business is not the same as writing in social sciences, humanities or any other academic field. When you are writing for a business audience, you must try to keep things clear and concise. Even the best business letter writing services try to make their business letters highly accurate and specific.
Beginners often try to impress their higher-ups with business letters. This often makes their business letters a bit too creative and expressive. As a result, their business letters end up looking sloppy. This difference does not mean that business writing is superior or inferior to other types of writing. In fact, the difference shows that business documents have unique requirements and purposes.
To write a business letter like the best business letter writing services, assume that the receiver(s) of your letter is a busy person who’d most likely skim it rather than reading. Business letter receivers want you to come to the point quickly and tell what you need from them.
That being said, you must be careful while keeping things clear and concise. Many business letter writing services always make sure that their writers don’t sound blunt, amateurish and disrespectful while trying to keep things short.
So the owners of business letter writing services prefer writers who know how to write anything in a respectful and diplomatic way. You can easily end up sounding harsh by making your business letter direct, so a lot of care is needed to keep your tone balanced.
- Use The Right Style
There is no fixed writing style for business letters. Their style, however, is more formal than conversational, which is often found in ordinary emails. As a business document writer, it is necessary to find a balance between these two ends in order to write letters, memos or emails.
Taking writing style into consideration is important as it directly affects the reader’s impression of you. Being too formal in business writing can alienate your reader while an overly casual style sounds unprofessional. While creating business documents, you must know your audience. Although business writing has become less formal over the years, you must be careful and not overdo it.
- Use The Correct Pronouns
In business writing, personal pronouns (such as I, you and we) matter a lot. In business letters and memos, it is totally normal to refer to yourself by using I and to the reader by using you. Simple, isn’t it?
The problem, however, arises when you use the pronoun we in a business letter to refer to yourself. This is a common mistake. Actually, when you are using the company stationery to write a business letter, the pronoun we refers to the whole company—not just you. Therefore, use I when you’re stating your personal opinion; use we when you’re representing your company.
- Know When To Use Active and Passive Voices
You cannot afford to be misunderstood when it comes to business writing, so you need to convey your message as clearly as possible. According to the writers of the leading business letter writing services, one important way to do this is to minimize the use of the passive voice.
We understand the importance of the passive voice, so do not stop using it completely. Instead, try not to use it too often. The reason for this is that the passive voice can make your writing dull. More importantly, it can make your writing overly impersonal and unclear as well.
To make you understand the minutiae of the active and passive voices in a better way, we have prepared an example:
Active voice: Our finance team highly overestimated the net profit of the new project.
Passive voice: The net profit of the new project was highly overestimated.
You can clearly see that, in the example above, the active voice conveys the message in a clearer and more comprehensive way. In contrast, the sentence with the passive voice doesn’t even mention the person(s) who did the overestimation. Therefore, the active voice is preferred over the passive voice in most cases. That being said, you cannot make rules without any exceptions.
The passive voice is incredibly useful in a few cases as well. To understand this, consider the above-mentioned example. Which of the two sentences would you choose if you were the leader of the said finance team?
You would choose the sentence with the passive voice without a second thought. As the finance team leader, you would want to get your message across without attracting any extra attention to yourself. Otherwise, everyone would easily find out that the overestimation was your team’s fault. Hence, the passive voice allows you to cover a negative point, but still, you shouldn’t use it too frequently.
