When you’re writing business documents, it’s not enough just to avoid errors in punctuation and grammar. You need to communicate your ideas clearly: your documents should be clean, but they also need to be constructed logically.

Therefore, when you’re writing a report, memo, speech or any document, even an email message, use a structure that goes from the general topic to specific instances.

Here’s an example, in an email message (we’ll leave out the salutation and preamble ):

Regarding marketing, we need to consider other customer communications’ options in addition to email.

I’ve been looking at the stats which show that 80 of messages aren’t opened, and …

In the example, the writer introduces the general topic of marketing, then narrows the topic to a specific: email marketing.

She also leaves plenty of white space. Online, we scan, we don’t read. So use white space, headings and bullet points to make reading easier.

[tags]business writing, writing email, document structure[/tags]

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