For years, I’ve given every writer and journalist I work with this short guide to writing well for a business audience.
If you absorb and incorporate all 15 tips below, my experience tells me that your writing will be better than 95% of beginning nonfiction writers and journalists.
I’ve used variations of this guide as a senior editor at WIRED, as the editor-in-chief at VentureBeat, and as the editorial lead of Highwire PR, a tech PR agency. I share it with the freelance writers I work with when I’m doing bigger projects as part of Tweney Media.
When I’m working with clients — either writing for them, editing their work, or coaching them on their writing and storytelling — this guide is the foundation of my approach.
These tips move from the most basic to more advanced topics. Taken together, it is a collection of best practices for writing with clarity, precision, and ease. These tips make it easier to write well. They help you communicate more powerfully.
I’ll update this list and add posts with more detail continuously. Subscribe to my newsletter to get those posts as they come out.
Special thanks to Alicia Bonner and Danver Chandler for editing help on this guide.
1. Start writing the way you speak.
Imagine you’re describing something to an intelligent friend who is unfamiliar with the topic. Write down what you’d tell that friend.
Business writing, in general, has a tendency to be stiff, artificial, and use really long sentences with lots of lists, dependent clauses, extra verbiage and superfluous wording that, upon reflection, could be beneficially eliminated.
See what I mean? Nobody talks like that.
Writing tones vary, and an informal, conversational tone is not appropriate for every brand. A good place to start is to write directly, clearly, and informally without being aggressively casual. You will need to revise, but you’ll definitely be starting from a better place.
- Example: How Jeff Bezos writes.
- Go deeper: How to write - and how to avoid writer's block
2. Shorten your sentences.
Longer sentences are harder to understand. Shorter sentences are easier. The same goes for paragraphs, too — if they get too long, your copy becomes difficult to scan.
Variation in sentence length is nice (see tip #4). But most people tend to write way too long. It’s easy to overwrite, especially when you’re a new writer or new to a topic. Somehow, the uncertainty about what to say makes us write longer, more complicated sentences than necessary. That’s fine in a draft, but your writing will be stronger if you go back and shorten your sentences.
How? Two ways: Eliminate or consolidate repetitive clauses to shorten overall sentence length. And, if you find you use a lot of compound sentences, try dividing them into two (or more) separate sentences.
- Useful tool: Hemingwayapp
3. Cut the fluff.
Cut words that don’t add meaning.
Cutting meaningless words will help you shorten your sentences (see tip #2). But fluff is not the same thing as length. A sentence can be long but useful, and it will still be readable if every word counts. On the other hand, a short sentence can be meaningless if all its words are fluff.
Also, watch out for redundancy. If one sentence says the same thing as the sentence before, one of them has to go.
As William Strunk said: Omit needless words!
- See also: TL;DR: Your emails are too long
- But be careful: Even a short email can be vacuous
4. Cue the music.
Once you’ve learned to cut sentences down to size, start varying the length of sentences and paragraphs to emphasize important points and provide some variation in tempo.
This creates a powerful sense of “music” for your prose.
If all your sentences are the same length, the reader’s brain starts to tune out. It sets up a monotonous tone, and the reader will start skipping forward, looking for the good bits. But if you follow up a series of sentences that have roughly the same length with a much shorter sentence? That has impact.
Similarly, a bunch of long paragraphs of the same length start to look like a big “gray wall” of text.
Breaking things up by varying the length of paragraphs helps with pacing. It makes the page visually more interesting too — no small thing. Introduce some white space by breaking up paragraphs, and your readers will thank you.
Finally, if you’re repeating the same words and phrases too much, the repetition sounds grating — like someone banging on a cymbal through a whole song. Using a variety of words and phrases adds to the music.
- Example: This sentence has five words, by Gary Provost.
5. Always have a plan.
Before you start writing, take the time to write an outline. You don’t have to stick to it when you’re writing, but you’re way better off if you start with a plan. And the last thing you want is to start from a blank page.
A college professor of mine used to say that once you’ve written the outline, you’ve broken the back of the paper. That’s a bit violent, but it gets the point across: The hardest part is organizing your thoughts. Once you know how things should be organized, writing becomes a matter of filling in that pattern. It’s a lot easier when you know what pieces you need to fill in and where you’re going!
An outline doesn’t have to be complicated or detailed. Even a simple bullet list is better than no plan at all.
- Go deeper: Three ways to write an outline (plus one that’s better than all the others)
6. Edit everything.
Everyone needs an editor. After you’re done writing, take a break, then come back and edit what you just wrote. Before you file something to a client or share it with your boss for them to review, get someone else to edit your work.
There’s always something that can be cut out or made better.
It can be helpful to think of editing itself in two stages: Top edit (or structural edit) and copy edit (or line edit).
Top edit: In the first stage, read through the whole piece for narrative flow and reorganize if needed. This is when you make major changes like moving or cutting paragraphs, rewriting the lede, adding subheadings for clarity, etc.
Copy edit: Once the piece's basic shape is good, edit with a fine-toothed comb, looking for grammar and spelling mistakes, fixing punctuation, and revising sentences for greater clarity and impact.
- Go deeper: What an editor does.
- Genius-level editing in action: Read Gordon Lish’s Edit of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”.
- Also, see this example of an op-ed getting edits.
7. Write at least 5 versions of every headline or subject line.
Try to write 5-10 alternatives — and ensure that a few of them are wildly different from the others.
Headlines and subject lines are hard — yet so much depends on them. If the reader isn’t engaged by this short phrase, they won’t read anything else.
Brainstorming with a group of coworkers can help. This is also an area where AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can help. But you also need to develop a sense of what makes a good headline, and to do that, it helps to write a bunch of them. It may be hard at first, but you’ll ultimately get better results.
8. Slay the zombies
Passive voice is weak, and it obscures who’s doing the action. In most cases, it can be eliminated. (See what I did there?)
It's true that passive voice has its uses, but it’s almost always better to recast a sentence in active voice:
- “Mistakes were made” → “We made mistakes”
- “Passive voice can be eliminated” → “You can eliminate passive voice”
How do you identify passive voice? If you can tack on “by zombies” after the verb, and the clause still makes sense, it’s passive: “A new product was released – by zombies.”
9. Jettison the jargon.
Skip jargon unless it’s absolutely necessary. When you do use technical terms or abbreviations, define them the first time they appear in a piece, even if you think the audience already knows them.
For instance, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) always spells out “gross domestic product” on first use. Sure, most readers of the WSJ already know what GDP is — and the paper even uses it in headlines. But check it out: even in a story where GDP is in the headline, the WSJ still spells it out and defines it (“gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services produced across the economy …”).
In addition to the fact that this is AP style, there’s a good reason for this: How do you think readers of the WSJ become economic experts? By reading the WSJ.
10. Watch out for weasel words.
Eliminate words that fudge, hedge, or introduce wiggle room. Quoting Josh Bernoff:
A weasel word is an adjective, adverb, noun, or verb that indicates quantity or intensity but lacks precision.
This is a tough one in business writing, especially in PR and marketing, because nobody wants to be pinned down with exact statements. Resist that urge as much as you can. Weasel words weaken the writing and reduce its authority.
Examples: “usually,” “most,” or “generally.” Sneaky ones: “Research shows” or “experts agree”—these are weaselly because they don’t say which research, or how many experts. It’s almost always better to cite specifics.
11. Find the humans.
To make people care about your writing, you need to put people at the center — preferably people doing something relatable and challenging.
You need a main character for readers to care about. That’s as true in business writing as it is in novels.
Even if you’re writing about SaaS-based data pipelines or enterprise virtualization strategies, there is still a human somewhere, doing something. Maybe that’s the person deciding to use a new developer tool. Maybe that’s the person implementing a company’s AI strategy or working on defending their infrastructure from cyberattacks. Maybe that’s the salesperson required to fill out forms in Salesforce at the end of a busy day, or the coder figuring out a clever algorithm for optimizing deployment of container-based workloads. Somewhere there are people!
If you can find some way to bring your writing back to those people and their concerns, it will be more effective and more powerful.
I once interviewed the CEO of a company that provided software to big electric utilities. He talked about the “emotional and social requirements” for the products his company was selling. I stopped him: Was he really saying that emotion was an important design spec in software for monitoring power plant processes and electrical grids? Seriously? Yes, he said: It was very important to consider how the product makes customers feel. And he went on to talk about this whole generational shift going on, from old-guard power plant managers who grew up spinning valves and putting wrenches on bolts until they graduated into management, and a new generation who grew up playing video games, went to college and studied power plant engineering, and are now about to be running things. The new folks have a need for social capital: They need to get things done, to prove that they’re worthy of the top jobs, so they can earn promotions and better salaries. His company's software is how they accomplish that.
To quote a recent ad campaign, “The customer is always human.” Find the humans, and write for them.
12. Engage emotions.
Stories have immense power to change hearts and minds. But they start by engaging people’s feelings, not their brains. Once the heart is engaged, the mind follows.
Of course, this is how master fiction storytellers like Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Neal Stephenson work their magic. But stories are powerful tools in business writing, too, and stories start with feelings.
The best writers have a sense of what kind of emotion they want to engage. Or they may have a strong feeling of their own that’s powering their writing. They may not be able to articulate it in a simple way (“I want the reader to feel excitement at the possibility of becoming a better writer!”) but I guarantee you that the most interesting writing is animated by the writer’s own emotions, or their desire to stir yours, or both.
If you don’t know what emotion your writing is trying to evoke, you probably need to do some rewriting or editing — or you may need to go back to the planning stage and think about the core elements again. Which pieces are going to resonate, and why? How can you make the most of that?
- Learn more: Maya Angelou, Andy Raskin’s Greatest Sales Deck Ever, MarketSmith’s Six Tips for Writing Emotive Copy
13. Use conflict to generate interest.
The essence of narrative is conflict: desires thwarted, tension, chaos, and trouble. Don’t shortchange the conflict if you want your story to resonate with readers.
This is really hard to do in a business writing context, because companies only want shiny, happy stories! But if you can create a narrative arc with some conflict, your writing will be much more powerful and effective.
You don’t make a compelling story by skipping past the trouble and zooming really quickly to a solution. “Our AI-powered coding assistant makes developers 35% more productive” is a marketing message, not a story.
“Developers are suffering because they spend almost half their time doing boring, repetitive things that they hate. Have you ever stayed up past midnight trying to get a spreadsheet of data points into the proper format so your code could ingest it, while a code delivery deadline loomed the next morning, documentation on a crucial code library is missing, and you haven’t even started writing the function you’d been trying to work on all week? If so, you know the pain of a modern developer.” — Now that’s the start of a story.
Good story writers make trouble for their protagonist and then make the trouble worse. You really make it dire, and have them dive right into the throat of the trouble, like Luke zooming right up into the Death Star. That way, when the good guys finally triumph, the victory feels well-earned, and it’s satisfying and memorable.
14. Incorporate evidence.
Don’t just make assertions — back them up with data.
Specific numbers lend concreteness and credibility. Data is especially attractive if it includes charts or a series of specific data points.
Rather than writing, “A majority of corporate leaders feel pressure to adopt hybrid working models,” it’s more compelling to write that “71% of leaders feel pressure.” The digits and % sign stand out — and the fact that the number is so specific (71%, not 70% or 75%) also suggests precision, which lends authority.
Numerals help make headlines more click-worthy — and odd numbers work better than even ones, for some reason.
Always link to your sources (or, if you’re writing for print, add references in the appropriate format). This is important for avoiding plagiarism and for giving credit where it’s due. It also lends credibility.
Related: When you’re taking notes to prepare for a writing assignment, make sure you capture sourcing details along with each note. Don’t just copy a sentence you might quote — make sure you include a link to the source. That way, when you go to write, your notes will have all the information you need.
15. Let some personality peek through.
Humans like to hear from other humans! Even in business writing, there are opportunities to let the reader know that there’s a real person behind the curtain. What that means will depend on your topic, your personality, the brand’s guidelines, and your sense of humor. Here are a couple of examples:
- Sometimes, a little local knowledge and a wry sense of humor can add some color to an otherwise dry, technical piece about odor control in waste management.
- Or consider this bit from a Jeff Lawson byline: “I am a software developer, which is a unique type of builder. To me, the blinking cursor represents raw potential—a computer asking, nay begging, to be used to make the world different and better in some small way today.” This feels like the most real, authentic moment in the piece because he drops out of his “authoritative CEO” voice to talk about what he really loves.
Look for opportunities to inject a little personality. This is often the element of “surprise and delight” that takes ordinary business writing to the realm of the extraordinary.
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BEFORE YOU GO: Check out these 6 excellent writing resources
The following books have been crucial in my development as a writer and editor. I bet they’ll make a big difference to your writing, too.
- Strunk & White, The Elements of Style - a hoary, slim, priceless guide to writing well. It is essential reading, although much of its specific style advice is dated. However, Section II (“Elementary principles of composition”) and V (“An approach to style”) are timeless — I reread them every year.
- Stephen Pinker, The Sense of Style - a more modern guide, but much longer, with a compelling approach to writing lucid prose (what Pinker calls “the classic style”).
- Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools is a compendium of 55 (often contradictory) techniques for writing better. It's a useful grab-bag of approaches you can try in different situations. Very practical.
- AP Stylebook - Indispensable guide and question-answerer for anyone in the news and PR business.
- Josh Bernoff’s Writing Without Bullshit is an excellent guide to better business writing. Whether you’re writing an email or a research report, this book has solid advice on making your writing clearer, more understandable, and more believable.
Bonus recommendation: “Holy Writ” - A charming article from Mary Norris, a longtime New Yorker copy editor, on comma usage and more.
