THE PROCESS OF BUSINESS WRITING
Generally speaking, the process of writing business documents is similar to the process of writing any kind of publishable document. Business writers plan, draft, submit their work for review, revise, edit, and proofread before making their documents public.
In certain ways, though, the process of writing in business settings differs from the process of writing more academic papers. Consider these differences:
1) Any documents sent outside of a business to the public and various stakeholders, must be free of grammatical and syntactical errors. Internal documents are not held to as high of a standard, though, and are judged to be effective when they function to further the work and goals of the company.
2) When business writers writing on the job, they must often meet very immediate deadlines and sometimes do not have the luxury of reflecting on a task over a long period of time or of rewriting the document several times. Business writers learn how to write effectively as well as quickly.
3) Major documents, of course, go through a lengthy review process in business settings, often involving persons who read the same document from entirely different points of view: as managers, as engineers, as legal representatives, as stockholders, etc. The path a document takes through an organization from conception to production, to use, to storage, to organization memory, or to shredding, can be called the document cycle.
THE PROCESS FOR BUSINESS WRITING IN THIS COURSE
In BA101 and in BA199, we have constructed a short document cycle to give you some idea of the process effective business writers use in professional settings. Many researchers have studied what processes expert business writers use compared to novice business writers. All studies agree that expert business writers:
For these reasons, we require you, for the proposal and report assignments, to write:
In addition, we require you to store printed copies of all your work and submit your work in a final portfolio. You may revise your work as many times as you want before submitting your portfolio.