Writing Business Messages

Readers and listeners want to know how your messages will benefit them. Providing the right information in the right format is essential, but it's not the only important apect of adapting to your audience. You may also need to adjust your writing or speaking style for specific situations, and idoing so requires a concerted effort for most communicators. Adapting to your audience can mean altering your natural communication style to match specific situations. To adapt to your audiences in a way that provides a compelling answer to the "What's in this for me?" question, (1) be sensitive to your members' needs, (2) build strong relationships, and (3) control your style to maintain a professional tone.

Being Senstitive to Your Audience's Needs 

• Using the "you" attitude
• The "you" attitude is best implemented by expressing your message in terms of the audience's interests and needs
• Avoid using you and yours when doing so:
• Makes you sound dictatorial
• Could make someone else feel unnecessarily guilty
• Goes against your organization's style
• Is inappropriate for the culture
• "You failed to deliver on time" vs. "the customer didn't receive the order on time"
•  Maintaining Standards of Etiquette
• By being courteous to members of your audience, you show consideration for them an foster a more successful environment for communication
• When experiencing frustration with co-workers, customers, or others, you may be tempted to say what you think in blunt terms
• Venting emotions rarely improves the situation and can jeopardize your audience's goodwill
• Demonstrate your diplomatic skills by controlling your emotions and communicating calmly and politely
• Using Bias-Free Language
• Bias-free language avoids words and phrases that unfairly and even unethically categorize or stigmatize people in ways related to gender, race, ethnicity, age, or disability.

Buliding Strong Relationships with Your Audience 
Successful communication relies on a positive relationship existing between sender and receiver. Establishing your credibility and projecting your company's image are two vital steps in building and fostering positive business relationships.

• Establishing Your Credibility
• Audience response responses to your messages depend heavily on your credibility, a measure of your believability, based on how reliable you are and how much trust you evoke in others. 
• To build, maintain, or repair your credibility, empahasize the following characteristics:
• Honesty
• Objectivity
• Awareness of audience needs
• Credentials, knowledge, and expertise
• Endorsements
• Performance
• Confidence
• Communication style
• Sincerity
• Projecting Your Company's Image
• When you communicate with anyone outside your organization, it is more than a conversation between two individuals. Most successful companies work hard to foster a specific public image, and your external communication efforts need to project that image.

Controlling Your Style and Tone
Your communication style involves the choices you make to express yourself: the words you select, the manner in which you use those words in sentences, and the way you build paragraphs from individual sentences. Your style creates a certain tone, or overall impression, in your messages. 

• Guidelines for Using a Conversational Tone
• Understand the difference between texting and writing. The casual language used in text messaging and IM between friends is not considered professional business writing.
• Aviod stale and pompous language. To achieve a businesslike tone, you might be tempted to adopt such phrases as "attached please find" and "please be advised that."While these phrases were once common in business, they sound stale and pompous to contemporary audiences. 
• Avoid preaching and bragging. Few things are more irritating than know-it-alls who like to preach or brag. 
• Be careful with intimacy. Business messages should generally avoid intimacy, such as sharing personal details or adopting a casual unprofessional tone.
• Be careful with humor. In most situations, you have little to gain from humor and potentially much to lose. Never use humor in formal messages or when you're communicating across cultural boundaries.

Relevant Websites to Explore:

• www.write101.com/businessletter.htm
• www.ezinearticles.com/?Effective-Business-Communication&id=1875157 
• www.business.com