Professional Style
In the introduction to this textbook, we talked about how the 7Cs characterize a professional writing style that is strong. The 7Cs are:
- Clear
- Coherent
- Concise
- Concrete
- Correct
- Complete
- Courteous
However, often when we talk about “professional style,” we are also talking about tone. While these two terms are often considered interchangeable, there are some blurry distinctions between the two. This is because the 7Cs addresses both issues of style and tone. It is important to understand that style refers to elements such as active versus passive writing, varied sentence lengths, flow, variety of word use, and punctuation choices. Style gives your writing a type of personality when coupled together with tone. As with the audience and format, it’s important that the style you choose matches with the intended purpose of your message.
Developing an appropriate business writing style will reflect well on you and increase your success in any career. Misspellings of individual words or grammatical errors involving misplacement or incorrect word choices in a sentence can create confusion, lose meaning, and have a negative impact on the reception of your message. Which style you use will depend on your audience, context, channel, and the purpose of the message (among other reasons).
Similar in some ways to style, tone refers to the feeling your audience will get when they decode your document. Here you would ask yourself if your tone is formal, informal, positive, negative, polite, direct, or indirect. The purpose of asking yourself this question is to determine whether the tone suits or otherwise enhances the purpose of your intended message.
Chapter Learning Objectives
The chapters in this section will help you:
- Recognize how positive framing impacts your message and how to be intentional in choosing the appropriate frame depending on your purpose and goal.
- Understand the difference between writer- and reader-centered writing.
- Recognize the difference between informal and formal language and understand the context and audience-specific decisions professional writers must make.
- Incorporate sentence variety and length and and ensure you are using precise wording.
- Make appropriate language choices with your writing in terms of clarity, in particular with “plain language.”
- Write a “bad news” message with an appropriate organization pattern and incorporates the other elements of professional style introduced in this section.
Attributes
This chapter partly adapted from “Style and Tone” in Introduction to Professional Communications by Melissa Ashman under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.