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6 Chapter 6: Writing

“Although I usually think I know what I’m going to be writing about, what I’m going to say, most of the time it doesn’t happen that way at all. At some point, I get misled down a garden path, I get surprised by an idea that I hadn’t anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory.”

—Lewis Thomas

Getting Started

Introductory Exercises

1. Match each statement in the left column with the most appropriate mode of communication in the right column, and note why.

___ 1. Need the sales figures for the last month available in three days A. Text message or direct message (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams)
___ 2. Inform department employees of face-to-face (F2F) meeting next month B. E-mail
___ 3. International client requests price quote C. Video conference
___ 4. Assigned to investigate partnership with supplier to codevelop a new product D. Report
___ 5. Need to inform employee of a discrepancy in their expense report E. Proposal
___ 6. Need to facilitate meeting with two department managers from two distinct time zones. F. Face-to-face (F2F) meeting, interpersonal interaction
___ 7. Need to follow up with customer post sale G. In-person group meeting
___ 8. Need to contact new prospective customer H. Phone call

There are no right or wrong answers here, but every mode has its strengths and weaknesses. Does the information need to land right away? Will the document take real time and preparation? Will your result be comprehensive and need visuals to show data, trends, and relationships? Match each statement with the mode you think fits best, note why, and then talk through your answers with your classmates.

2. These sentences focus on some of the most common errors in English. Can you fill in the blanks correctly?

1. accept or except The office will _______ applications until 5 p.m. on the 31st. accept Attendance is required for all employees _______ supervisors. except
2. affect or effect To _______ the growth of plants, we can regulate the water supply. affect A lack of water has a predictable _______ on most plants. effect
3. e.g. or i.e. Please order 2,000 imprinted giveaways (_______, pens or coffee mugs) e.g. Charge them to my account (_______, account #98765). i.e.
4. its or it’s The department surpassed _______ previous sales record this quarter. its _______ my opinion that the new software will save us a lot of time. It’s
5. lay or lie Please _______ the report on the desk. lay The doctor asked him to _______ down on the examination table. lie
6. pressure or pressurize We need to _______ the liquid nitrogen tanks. pressurize It might be possible to _______ him to resign. pressure
7. principle or principal It’s the basic _________ of farming: no water, no food. principle The _______ reason for the trip is to attend the sales meeting. principal
8. regardless or irregardless _______ of what we do, gas prices are unlikely to go back down. Regardless _______ of your beliefs, please try to listen with an open mind. Regardless (irregardless is not a standard word; see your dictionary)
9. than or then This year’s losses were worse _______ last year’s. than If we can cut our costs, _______ it might be possible to break even. then
10. that or which _______ type of marketing data did you need? Which Karen misplaced the report, _______ caused a delay in making a decision. which
There are several kinds of data _______ could be useful. that
11 there their, or they’re The report is _________, in the top file drawer. there __________ strategic advantage depends on a wide distribution network. Their
__________ planning to attend the sales meeting in Pittsburgh. They’re
12. to too, or two Customers need _______ drive slower if they want to save gas. to After sales meeting, you should visit customers in the Pittsburgh area _______. too
In fact, the _______ of you should make some customer visits together. two
13. uninterested or disinterested He would be the best person to make a decision, since he isn’t biased and is relatively _______ in the outcome. disinterested The sales manager tried to speak dynamically, but the sales reps were simply _______ in what he had to say. uninterested
14. who, whom, who’s, or whose __________ truck is that? Whose __________ going to pay for the repairs? Who’s
__________ will go to the interview? Who To __________ should we address the thank-you note? whom
15 your or you’re My office is bigger than _______ cubicle. your _______ going to learn how to avoid making these common mistakes in English. You’re

 

If all the world’s a stage, then you, as a business writer, must be the scriptwriter, right? Not quite. The people who hire you, assign your duties, run the business, and hand you problems to solve—they’re the scriptwriters, directors, and producers. So what role does that leave you? Actor. You may never be seen “on stage” by the suppliers you write to, the departments you brief, or the customers you serve, but your writing stands in for you and your organization. Just as an actor learns the lines, you have to learn the role of a business writer inside your company’s world. Sometimes you’ll get room to improvise and create. Other times you’ll follow a standard template—a script that hands you your lines before you ever start typing. Either way, knowing where you stand on that stage is a part of business writing you can’t afford to overlook.

This chapter walks you through strategies for the creative side of writing, and the skills you build here will matter more and more as your responsibilities grow. Remember: every document lives inside a web of relationships. It never stands alone. And what you write today—especially anything you publish online—will be around for years. Think about how your words will represent you and your organization when you aren’t there to clarify, defend, or fix them. Your audience has expectations. Your employer does too. Meeting those expectations is one of the clearest paths to success as a business writer.

Creative writing for exposition, narration, and self-expression has its place, but business writing is different. You have a role, duties, and responsibilities both inside and outside your organization. How clearly and concisely you write will directly shape how your message is read—or misread. Your job is to cut down on misunderstanding through the effective, efficient use of words, and the old mandate to “omit needless words” still holds. Up to this point, you’ve been preparing to write. Now it’s time to perform.[1]

Opening Case Study: The Ninety-Page Promise

Anwuli Marchetti-Okonjo had been staring at the same sentence for forty-seven minutes.

Outside her office window at Bellweather & Associates Heritage Architecture, the late-March light caught the copper cornice of the Wheelwright Building across the street, and she thought—not for the first time this month—that she’d picked a profession where she spent most of her days indoors looking out at somebody else’s architecture.

She pulled her eyes back to the screen.

“The proposed scope of work shall include, but shall not be limited to, comprehensive rehabilitation of the 1907 Beaux-Arts structure in accordance with Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, with particular attention to the preservation of historically significant architectural elements including, without limitation, the limestone façade, the leaded-glass oculus, and the second-floor ceremonial courtroom…”

She read it again.

It said nothing.

Ninety pages of that would bury her.

The Huxley County Courthouse proposal was due in nine days. Two point four million dollars. The largest solo bid Theron Bellweather had ever handed her, and he’d handed it to her three weeks ago in his quiet way—folder on her desk, sticky note on top in blue fountain pen: You lead this one. I’ll sign when you’re ready. She was twenty-nine years old. She’d been a full project manager for eleven months. And she was about to write her first real proposal against Stanwick Continental.

Anwuli had grown up forty miles from Huxley, West Virginia, in a coal-camp house her grandfather had built out of scrap lumber and will. She’d gone to Virginia Tech on scholarship, taken her master’s at Penn, and come back to the mountains because Theron was the only preservation architect within three hundred miles who believed a Beaux-Arts courthouse in a county of twelve thousand people was worth saving. When the 2024 arson fire took the upper two floors of the Huxley courthouse, the county commission had split four-to-three on whether to rebuild at all. Stanwick Continental—the Charlotte-based corporate firm with forty architects on staff and a marketing department that sent glossy quarterly brochures—had been quietly briefing commissioners for months, pushing a “new construction with historical motifs” approach that would bulldoze the Huxley shell and put up a ten-million-dollar replica in precast concrete.

Theron thought that was a crime. He’d said so, exactly once, at the first commission hearing. Since then he’d let Anwuli do the talking.

She scrolled up. Three weeks of research and interviews sat in her document folder: historic photos from the county archives, masonry condition assessments from two structural engineers, oral histories from Henrietta Burkhalter-Dlamini—the retired county historian who, at seventy-two, had personally catalogued every surviving Beaux-Arts courthouse in the Appalachian coal counties—and a stack of her own handwritten notes from four walking tours of the ruined building. Somewhere in all of that was a proposal. The trouble was, she couldn’t find where it started.

Her phone buzzed. Theron, from the workshop two floors down.

“How’s it going up there?”

“Bad.”

“Specific bad or general bad?”

“I have ninety pages of nothing.”

A pause. “What have you actually written?”

“An introduction that says the courthouse is important. A table of contents that I keep reshuffling. And—” she scrolled to the bottom—”seventeen bureaucratic sentences I can’t read out loud without hating myself.”

“What does it need to say, Anwuli?”

“That we can save the building for less money than Stanwick is going to spend tearing it down. That the limestone is sound. That the roof is gone but the structural steel is fine. That the second-floor ceremonial courtroom is the only intact example of its kind in the state. That the county doesn’t have to choose between heritage and a working courthouse—we can give them both.”

“So write that.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is exactly that simple. You’re burying your thesis.”

She stared at the screen. She was burying her thesis. She’d known that for two days. But every time she tried to open with a clear sentence, her inner voice told her it sounded amateur, unprofessional, not the kind of thing a Real Architect would write in a proposal to a county commission. The winning proposals Theron kept in his file cabinet from 1994 and 2001 and 2012 all started with elaborate paragraphs about “the honor of being considered” and “the distinguished history of the firm.” They sounded, Anwuli realized now, exactly like Stanwick’s proposals. Exactly like the sample document Calista Rennfield had leaked to the county procurement office last week—Stanwick’s template, which Dr. Ilario Volkov-Sastre (the county’s analytical procurement officer, Huxley’s single non-elected fiscal watchdog) had quietly forwarded to Theron on Monday with one line: You should see what you’re up against.

Anwuli had read Stanwick’s template twice. It was polished. It was full of confident declarations. It also, she’d realized on the second read, cited a very specific 2019 condition-assessment framework for Appalachian Beaux-Arts courthouses—citing it as Stanwick’s own proprietary methodology. Problem: that framework wasn’t Stanwick’s. Theron had developed it in an unpublished white paper he’d circulated to three regional preservation groups in 2019 and never copyrighted because, in his words, “knowledge like that should move freely.” Entire paragraphs of Stanwick’s template, Anwuli was now certain, had been lifted from Theron’s paper with the nouns swapped and a couple of adjectives rearranged.

Patch writing. She’d learned the term in graduate school. She’d never seen it in the wild until now.

She hadn’t told Theron yet.

“Anwuli.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the argument you’re trying to make?”

“That restoring the 1907 courthouse is cheaper, stronger, and more valuable than replacing it.”

“Good. Now in one sentence, why?”

She closed her eyes. “Because the structural steel and the limestone façade are sound, because the ceremonial courtroom is historically irreplaceable, and because Huxley County can’t afford—financially or culturally—to trade the building its grandparents built for a concrete imitation.”

“Write that. At the top. On page one. Before anything else.”

“That’s too direct.”

“That’s exactly direct enough. The commission is going to read the first page and decide whether to read the second. If you bury your argument, Stanwick wins by default. You have ninety pages, but you have one sentence that matters, and your job is to write it so clearly Dr. Volkov-Sastre can’t misread it.”

She didn’t answer.

“Anwuli. What aren’t you telling me?”

She thought about it. About the four options lined up in her head like cards she didn’t want to play. Option one: write a standard proposal, cite Theron’s 2019 paper properly in her methodology section, and let Stanwick’s plagiarism pass without comment—winning or losing the bid on the merits alone. Option two: cite Theron’s paper in her methodology and include a quiet footnote noting that certain industry practitioners have reproduced portions of the framework without attribution, letting the commission draw its own inference. Option three: call Dr. Volkov-Sastre directly tomorrow morning, show him Theron’s original 2019 document, and let the procurement office handle whatever came next. Option four: something she hadn’t thought of yet—something that would let her write a clean, argument-first, ninety-page proposal that made Stanwick’s template look like what it was without turning Bellweather & Associates into the story.

She thought about Henrietta Burkhalter-Dlamini, who had been waiting three weeks for an answer about whether the courthouse would live. She thought about Theron, who had spent thirty years refusing to write puff, and who had never once in her memory asked for credit on anything. She thought about the 1907 ceremonial courtroom, with its oak paneling, its leaded-glass oculus, and the scorch marks climbing the east wall.

“I’m still figuring it out,” she said.

Theron didn’t push. “Call me when you do. And Anwuli?”

“Yeah.”

“Start with the sentence.”

The phone clicked off.

Anwuli looked at the blank page. She put her cursor at the top. She started to type, stopped, deleted, started again. Outside, the copper cornice had gone from bronze to dim. She had nine days. Ninety pages. One argument. And a decision—four of them, actually—she hadn’t made yet.

Before You Read: A Writer’s Diagnostic

Take ten minutes with these four questions before you start the chapter. Don’t reach for the “right” answers—reach for your honest current ones. You’ll return to this same prompt at the end of the chapter in the Self-Assessment.

  1. When you write something important, where does your thesis usually land—in the first paragraph, somewhere in the middle, or at the end? Why?
  2. Describe your default writing “voice” in three words. Is it the voice you want, or the voice you fall into when you’re tired and rushed?
  3. When you argue for something in writing, do you lead with evidence, with emotion, with authority, or with story? What makes that your default?
  4. If you found a paragraph that said exactly what you meant—better than you could say it yourself—how would you use it in your own document?

6.1 Organization

Learning Objectives

  1. Understand how to develop and organize content in patterns that are appropriate for your document and audience.
  2. Demonstrate your ability to order, outline, and emphasize main points in one or more written assignments.
  3. Demonstrate how to compose logically organized paragraphs, sentences, and transitions in one or more written assignments.
  4. Identify the classical appeals—ethos, logos, and pathos—inside your own drafts and explain where each one shows up.
  5. Select an organizing principle from a taxonomy of seventeen options and justify your choice for a specific audience.

The point of business writing is to communicate facts and ideas. To pull that off, every document needs certain key components so your reader can actually understand the message. These elements may seem so obvious that you wonder how any writer could forget them. But pay attention to how often miscommunication happens in written communication, and you’ll see it happens constantly. Sometimes the omission is intentional. More often, it’s not—the writer assumes (wrongly) that the reader will fill in the gaps. Between background, language, culture, and education, a lot of variables get in the way of clear communication. How well you handle these basics decides how effective your documents are. Every document needs to cover the following:

  • Who
  • What
  • When
  • Where
  • How
  • (and sometimes) Why

Keep these elements in mind while you draft, and deciding what to write—and in what order—gets easier. They’re also useful when you’re reviewing a draft before sending it. If you’ve missed one or muddled it, you’ll know exactly what to fix.

Another way to think about organizing your document comes from the classical proofs: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos, your credibility, shows up in the sources you cite and your authority on the topic. Logos, the logic of your argument, helps readers follow the connections among who, what, where, and when. If they can’t follow your logic, they’ll check out, miss your message, or stop reading. And pathos—your passion and enthusiasm—comes through in your design and word choices. If your document doesn’t sound like you care, why should your reader? Every document, every act of communication, carries some mix of these three.

Case Connection: Anwuli Stares at Section 3

Anwuli’s ninety-page proposal isn’t just long—it’s disorganized. She has the who (Huxley County Commission, Dr. Volkov-Sastre, the historical society), the what (a 1907 Beaux-Arts restoration), the when (nine-day deadline, eighteen-month construction window), the where (a fire-damaged courthouse shell on Main Street), and the how (Theron’s 2019 assessment framework). What she’s missing is why—not the factual why, but the emotional center that ties her credibility, her logic, and her passion together.

Look back at the opening scene. Theron asks her for the argument, and she rattles off five strong reasons in one breath: steel sound, limestone sound, courtroom irreplaceable, cost competitive, heritage nonfungible. That’s ethos (the structural engineers she’s cited), logos (the cost comparison), and pathos (the grandparents and the grandchildren). Her draft paragraph three pages in has none of that. It has a sentence about “historically significant architectural elements” and a dead space where her argument should be. Organization isn’t decoration. It’s the skeleton that lets a reader actually see what you know.

General Purpose and Thesis Statements

Whatever your business writing project is, it needs to land on one central idea. To make sure that idea is clear in your head and clear to your audience, write a thesis statement. A thesis statement—your central idea—should be short, specific, and pointed. Steven Beebe and Susan Beebe recommend five guiding principles for your thesis statement.[2] Your thesis statement should

  1. be a declarative statement;
  2. be a complete sentence;
  3. use specific language, not vague generalities;
  4. be a single idea;
  5. reflect consideration of the audience.

This one sentence can make or break your document. If your audience has to hunt for your purpose, they’re less likely to read on, be persuaded, or remember anything you said. State your point clearly in the introduction, refer back to it in the body, and circle back at the end. That repetition is what helps readers understand—and remember—what you’re trying to say.

Common Mistake: Burying the Thesis in Paragraph Four

Students and new professionals often treat business writing the way they were taught to treat a ninth-grade essay: ease in, set the stage, build suspense, and reveal the thesis somewhere around the third or fourth paragraph. In business writing, that’s a mistake. Your reader is busy. Your reader is skimming. Your reader may read only the first paragraph before deciding whether to keep reading. If your thesis is buried on page two, you’ve lost the argument before you started making it.

Fix it with a brutal test: delete your first three paragraphs. If the fourth paragraph contains a strong declarative sentence stating your central idea, your original opening was warm-up. Move that sentence to the top, rebuild forward from there, and see how much of the warm-up you actually need. Usually, less than you thought.

Organizing Principles

Once you know the basic pieces of your message, you have to decide the order to present them. A central organizing principle gives you a logical sequence to follow. One common choice is chronology: what happened first, next, now, and what’s expected next. Another common choice is comparison: the writer describes one product, argument, or course of action and sets it alongside another.

Let’s walk through an example. Imagine you’re a business writer in the transportation industry, and you’ve been assigned to write a series of informative pieces about an international initiative called the “TransAmerica Transportation System Study.” Just as the First Transcontinental Railroad once stitched the United States together east to west, and the Interstate Highway System reinforced that bond, the proposed TransAmerica Transportation System will tie the markets of Mexico, the United States, and Canada together north to south. Rail has long been central to moving goods across the Americas, and it will play a big part in this new system too.

As you decide how to organize your report, you have several angles to juggle. Part of your introduction will need a historical perspective—a look at the events that led from the First Transcontinental Railroad to this TransAmerica proposal. You’ll also want to compare the old rail and highway systems with the new ones and show the shift this brings to business and industry. You’ll need to acknowledge the complicated relationships and challenges that collaboration has already worked through, and highlight the shared benefits. You’ll be asked to write informative pieces for public relations, persuasive essays aimed at readers who prefer things as they are, and even speeches for dedication ceremonies.

Table 6.1 “Organizing Principles” lists seventeen different organizing principles and shows how each one might apply to the TransAmerica Transportation System. The left column names the principle, the center column explains how it works, and the third column gives you an example.

Table 6.1 Organizing Principles
Organizing Principle Explanation of Process Example
1. Time (Chronological) Structuring your document by time shows a series of events or steps in a process, which typically has a beginning, middle, and end. “Once upon a time stories” follow a chronological pattern.

Before the First Transcontinental Railroad, the events that led to its construction, and its impact on early America. Additional examples may include the national highway projects and the development of reliable air freight.

Now we can consider the TransAmerica Transportation System and the similar and distinct events that led us to today.
2. Comparison Structuring your document by comparison focuses on the similarities and/or differences between points or concepts.

A comparison of pre– and post–First Transcontinental Railroad America, showing how health and life expectancy improved with the increased access to goods and services.

Another example could be drawn from air freight, noting that organ donation in one part of the country can now save a life in another state or on the opposite coast.

In a similar way, the TransAmerica Transportation System will improve the lives of the citizens of Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
3. Contrast Structuring your document by using contrasting points highlights the differences between items and concepts.

A contrast of pre– and post–First Transcontinental Railroad America showing how much time it took to communicate via letter, or how long it took to move out West. Just in time delivery and the modern highway system and trucking may serve as an example for contrast.

The TransAmerica Transportation System will reduce customs clearing time while increasing border security along the distribution network.
4. Cause and Effect Structuring your document by cause and effect structuring establishes a relationship between two events or situations, making the connection clear. The movement of people and goods out West grew considerably from 1750 to 1850. With the availability of a new and faster way to go West, people generally supported its construction. Both the modern highway and air transportation systems may serve as examples, noting how people, goods, and services can be delivered in drastically reduced time frames. Citizens of all three countries involved have increasingly been involved in trade, and movement across common borders through the TransAmerica Transportation System will enable the movement of goods and services with great efficiency.
5. Problem and Solution Structuring your document by problem and solution means you state the problem and detail how it was solved. This approach is effective for persuasive speeches. Manufacturers were producing better goods for less money at the start of the Industrial Revolution, but they lacked a fast and effective method of getting their goods to growing markets. The First Transcontinental Railroad gave them speed, economy, and access to new markets. Highways and air routes have dramatically increased this trend. In a similar way, this new system is the next evolutionary step in the integration and growth of our common marketplaces.
6. Classification (Categorical) Structuring your document by classification establishes categories.

At the time the United States considered the First Transcontinental Railroad, there were three main types of transportation: by water, by horse, and by foot.

Now rail, road, and air transportation are the norm across business and industry.
7. Biographical Structuring your document by biography means examining specific people as they relate to the central topic.
  • 1804: Lewis and Clark travel 4,000 miles in over two years across America
  • 1862: President Lincoln signs the Pacific Railroad Act
  • 1876: The Transcontinental Express from New York arrives in San Francisco with a record-breaking time of 83 hours and 39 minutes
  • 2009: President Obama can cross America by plane in less than 5 hours
  • So why shouldn’t the ratio of time from import to consumer be reduced?
8. Space (Spatial) Structuring your document by space involves the parts of something and how they fit to form the whole. A train uses a heat source to heat water, create steam, and turn a turbine, which moves a lever, causing a wheel to move on a track. A package picked up from an office in New York in the morning is delivered to another in Los Angeles in the afternoon. From a Pacific port in Northern Mexico to a market in Chicago or Canada, this system unifies the movement of goods and services.
9. Ascending and Descending Structuring your document by ascending or descending order involves focusing on quantity and quality. One good story (quality) leads to the larger picture, or the reverse. A day in the life of a traveler in 1800. Incremental developments in transportation to the present, expressed through statistics, graphs, maps, and charts. A day in the life of a traveler in 1960, 1980, or even 2000, with visual examples of changes and trends may also contribute to the document. A day in the life of a traveler in 2009 compared to the relatively slow movement of goods and services, constrained by an antiquated transportation network that negatively impacts efficiency.
10. Psychological

It is also called “Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.”Ayres, J., & Miller, J. (1994). Effective public speaking (4th ed., p. 274). Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark.

Structuring your document on the psychological aspects of the audience involves focusing on their inherent needs and wants. See MaslowMaslow, A. (1970). Motivation and personality (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. and Schutz.Schutz, W. (1966). The interpersonal underworld. Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books. The author calls attention to a need, then focuses on the satisfaction of the need, visualization of the solution, and ends with a proposed or historical action. Useful for a persuasive message.

 When families in the year 1800 went out West, they rarely returned to see family and friends. The country as a whole was an extension of this distended family, separated by time and distance. The railroad, the highways, and air travel brought families and the country together. In the same way, common markets already exist across the three countries, but remain separated by time, distance, and an antiquated system scheduled for significant improvement.
11. Elimination Structuring your document using the process of elimination involves outlining all the possibilities.

The First Transcontinental Railroad helped pave the way for the destruction of the Native American way of life in 1870. After examining treaties, relocation and reservations, loss of the buffalo, disease, and war, the railroad can be accurately considered the catalyst for the end of an era.

From the lessons of history we can learn to protect and preserve our distinct cultures, languages, and sovereign territories as we integrate a common transportation system for our mutual benefit and security.
12. Example Structuring your document by example involves providing vivid, specific examples (as opposed to abstract representations of data) to support main points. Just as it once took weeks, even months, for a simple letter to move from coast to coast, goods and services have had a long and arduous process from importation to market. For example, the popular Christmas toy X, imported to Mexico from China in September, may well not be on store shelves by December 25 under the old system. Now it can move from importation to market in under two weeks.
13. Process and Procedure Structuring your document by process and procedure is similar to the time (chronological) organizational pattern with the distinction of steps or phases that lead to a complete end goal. This is often referred to as the “how-to” organizational pattern. From conception to design, manufacturing to packaging, to transportation and inspection, to sales and sales support, let’s examine how the new transportation system facilitates increased efficiency in delivery to market and product support.
14. Point Pattern Structuring your document in a series of points allows for the presentation of diverse assertions to be aligned in a cohesive argument with clear support. The TransAmerica Transportation System offers several advantages: security, speed, efficiency, and cost reduction.
15. Definition Structuring your document with a guiding definition allows for a clear introduction of terms and concepts while reducing the likelihood of misinterpretation. The TransAmerica Transportation System can be defined by its purpose, its integrated components, and its impact on the secure movement of goods and services across common borders.
16. Testimonial Structuring your document around a testimony, or first person account of an experience, can be an effective way to make an abstract concept clearer to an audience. According to Ms. X, owner of InterCountry Trading Company, it previously took 12 weeks to import, clear, and deliver a product from Mexico to the United States, and an additional four weeks to take delivery in Canada. Now the process takes less than two weeks.
17. Ceremonial (Events, Ceremonies, or Celebrations) Structuring your document by focusing on the following:

  1. Thanking dignitaries and representatives
  2. The importance of the event
  3. The relationship of the event to the audience
  4. Thanking the audience for participation in the event, ceremony, or celebration
 Thanking the representatives, builders, and everyone involved with the construction of the TransAmerica Transportation System. The railroad will unite America, and bring us closer in terms of trade, communication, and family. Thank you for participating in today’s dedication.

Pro Tip: The Ghost Outline Test

Here’s a trick that working writers use to diagnose a tangled draft. After you’ve finished writing—but before you revise—open a blank document beside it. Read your draft one paragraph at a time and, for each paragraph, write one short sentence describing what it does. Not what it says, what it does. “Introduces the cost comparison.” “Explains why limestone lasts.” “Hands off to the methodology section.” Keep going until you’ve reverse-engineered an outline from the draft.

Now read that ghost outline straight through. Does it follow one of the seventeen organizing principles in Table 6.1? Can you name the principle in one word—chronological, contrast, problem-and-solution, point pattern? If you can’t, your draft doesn’t have a structure. It has a pile. Rebuild the ghost outline into the structure you wish the draft had, then rebuild the draft around the new ghost outline. This sounds slow. It’s actually the fastest revision technique there is.

Outlines

You probably picked up the basics of outlining in your English courses: an outline is a framework that stacks main ideas and supporting ideas into a hierarchy of Roman numerals and letters. The right column of Table 6.2 “Outline 1” shows a generic outline in the classical style. The left column ties the three main structural elements of an informative document—introduction, body, conclusion—to that outline. Your job is to fill in the right column with the actual ideas and points for your project. Adapt it as you need, depending on the specifics of your report, letter, or other document.

Table 6.2 Outline 1
Introduction Main Idea
Body

I. Main idea: Point 1

Subpoint 1

A.1 specific information 1

A.2 specific information 2
Body

II. Main idea: Point 2

Subpoint 1

B.1 specific information 1

B.2 specific information 2

III. Main idea: Point 3

Subpoint 1

C.1 specific information 1

C.2 specific information 2
Conclusion Summary: Main points 1–3

Table 6.3 “Outline 2” shows an alternate outline that may fit better for shorter documents like letters and e-mails. Use it as a model or tweak it to your needs.

Table 6.3 Outline 2
1 Introduction General purpose, statement, or thesis statement
2 Body Point 1:
Point 2:
Point 3:
3 Conclusion Summarize main points

Try It: Ghost Outline Your Own Draft

Pull up the last document longer than one page that you wrote for school, work, or yourself—a cover letter, a project report, a long email, a proposal draft. Don’t edit it. Instead, read it paragraph by paragraph and build a ghost outline: one short descriptive sentence per paragraph, written in a separate document. When you’re done, read only the ghost outline. Answer these three questions in writing:

  1. What organizing principle (from Table 6.1) does my draft actually follow?
  2. Is that the principle I meant it to follow?
  3. If I were a tired reader with sixty seconds, would the first paragraph tell me everything I needed to know?

Bring both the draft and the ghost outline to class, or keep them for your portfolio. The gap between the structure you meant and the structure you delivered is where most of your revision work lives.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs are how we package information in business communication. The tighter the package, the easier the meaning is to deliver.

Think of each paragraph as a small essay inside a larger document, shaped by its own thesis and organizing principle. The classic five-paragraph essay format you learned in college term papers? Individual paragraphs work the same way. College essays often have word counts, but paragraphs almost never do. Each paragraph focuses on one central idea. It can run as long or as short as it needs to—just remember your audience, and skip the long, drawn-out paragraphs that lose attention.

A paragraph, like a document, has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Each paragraph holds one idea, thought, or purpose, and that idea shows up in the opening sentence. One or more supporting sentences follow, and a closing line wraps things up or hands off to the next paragraph. Let’s take them one at a time:

  • The topic sentence states the main thesis, purpose, or topic of the paragraph; it defines the subject matter to be addressed in that paragraph.
  • Body sentences support the topic sentence and relate clearly to the subject matter of the paragraph and overall document. They may use an organizing principle similar to that of the document itself (chronology, contrast, spatial) or introduce a related organizing principle (point by point, process or procedure).
  • The conclusion sentence brings the paragraph to a close; it may do this in any of several ways. It may reinforce the paragraph’s main point, summarize the relationships among the body sentences, and/or serve as a transition to the next paragraph.

Effective Sentences

We’ve talked about organizing documents and paragraphs, but what about sentences? You’ve probably learned in English class that every sentence needs a subject and a verb, and most sentences also have an object. There are four basic types: declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory. Here are some examples:

  • Declarative – You are invited to join us for lunch.
  • Imperative – Please join us for lunch.
  • Interrogative – Would you like to join us for lunch?
  • Exclamatory – I’m so glad you can join us!

Declarative sentences make a statement. Interrogative sentences ask a question. Imperative sentences give a command. Exclamatory sentences express strong emotion. The last two are easy to spot by their final punctuation—a question mark or exclamation point. In business writing, declarative and imperative sentences do most of the work.

You’ll also run into compound and complex sentences, which combine two or more of the four basic types:

  1. Simple sentence. Sales have increased.
  2. Compound sentence. Sales have increased and profits continue to grow.
  3. Complex sentence. Sales have increased and we have the sales staff to thank for it.
  4. Compound complex sentence. Although the economy has been in recession, sales have increased, and we have sales staff to thank for it.

In the simple sentence, “sales” is the subject and “have increased” is the verb. The sentence stands alone because it has both. The compound sentence has two independent clauses joined by the conjunction “and”—either one could stand on its own. The complex sentence pairs an independent clause with a fragment or dependent clause that wouldn’t make sense by itself. The fragment “and we have the sales staff to thank” leaves you asking, “For what?” because the subject is missing. Compound-complex sentences mix independent and dependent clauses, with at least one clause being dependent.

Writing clean, complete sentences is a skill like any other—it comes with practice. The more you write, and the more effort you put into grammar, the easier it gets. Business readers won’t waste time on sloppy writing; they’ll move on. Your job is to know what you want to say and then get it across—through words, symbols, and images—clearly and concisely.

Sentences should be specific, not vague. Each one should carry a complete thought. A vague sentence leaves your reader wondering what you meant.

  • Vague – We can facilitate solutions in pursuit of success by leveraging our core strengths.
  • Specific – By using our knowledge, experience, and capabilities, we can achieve the production targets for the coming quarter.

Good sentences also keep each thought narrow and avoid needless complexity. Some writers mistake long, tangled sentences for a sign of skill. They’re not. Clear, concise, and often brief sentences do a better job of communicating ideas than sprawling ones.

  • Complex. Air transportation features speed of delivery in ways few other forms of transportation can match, including tractor-trailer and rail. It is readily available to the individual consumer and the corporate client alike.
  • Clear. Air transportation is accessible and faster than railroad or trucking.

Good sentences are complete—subject and verb, both present. Incomplete sentences, or sentence fragments, show a lack of care. They invite the very misunderstanding we’re trying to prevent.

  • Fragments – Although air transportation is fast. Costs more than trucking.
  • Complete – Although air transportation is fast, it costs more than trucking.

Good business writing also ditches bureaucratic language and decorative phrases. Ritual phrasing has its place. If you’re a governor writing a resolution to declare HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, you can start with “Whereas” because tradition says so. If you’re drafting a legal document, you get “know all men by these presents.” But in standard business writing, skip the ritual words that distract from your meaning. If your customer, client, or supplier doesn’t get it the first time, every follow-up email costs time and money. Table 6.4 “Bureaucratic Phrases and Standard Alternatives” shows a few common bureaucratic phrases and the plain English versions you should use instead.

Table 6.4 Bureaucratic Phrases and Standard Alternatives
Bureaucratic Phrase Standard English Alternatives
At the present time Now, today
Concerning the matter of Regarding, about
Despite the fact that Although, while, even though
Due to the fact that Because, since, as
Implement an investigation of Find out, investigate
Inasmuch as Because, since, as
It has been suggested [name of person or organization] has suggested, said, or stated
It is believed that [name of person or organization] believes, thinks, or says that
It is the opinion of the author I believe, I think, in my opinion
Until such time as Until, when
With the exception of Except, apart from

In speaking, repetition can drive a point home. In writing, it just adds length and clouds your message.

  • Redundant – In this day and age, air transportation by air carrier is the clear winner over alternative modes of conveyance for speed and meeting tight deadlines.
  • Clear – Today, air transportation is faster than other methods.

When a writer calls something a “true fact,” says a group reached a “consensus of opinion,” or refers to the “final outcome,” that’s redundancy. A fact, a consensus, or an outcome doesn’t need a modifier stating the same thing. If it’s a fact, it’s true. A consensus, by definition, forms from diverse opinions. An outcome is already the final result, so “final outcome” is saying it twice.

In business writing, we want clarity that speaks for itself. The more complex a sentence gets, the easier it is to lose the thread. And remember that your reader may be translating English as a second language, which makes complicated sentences even harder. Effective sentences follow the KISS formula: Keep It Simple—Simplify.

Transitions

If you were going to build a house, you’d need a strong foundation. Could you set the beams for the roof without anything to hold them up? Of course not—they’d crash right down. The main ideas in your document work the same way. They need connections that hold them together so your writing doesn’t collapse.

Transitions are the words or visual cues that help your reader follow your ideas, link your main points, and see the relationships you’re building. They’re often called bridges—showing where you’ve been and where you’re going. Transitions guide readers from one idea to the next and show how your main point connects to your examples, support, and sources. Table 6.5 “Types of Transitions in Writing” sums up fourteen different kinds of transitions. Think about which ones fit your material, and make notes on your outline as you go.

Table 6.5 Types of Transitions in Writing
Type Definition Examples
1. Internal Previews An internal preview is a brief statement referring to a point you are going to make. It can forecast or foreshadow a main point in your document. If we look ahead to, next we’ll examine, now we can focus our attention on, first we’ll look at, then we’ll examine
2. Signposts A signpost alerts the audience you are moving from one topic to the next. Signposts or signal words draw attention to themselves and focus the audience’s attention. Stop and consider, we can now address, turning from/to, another, this reminds me of, I would like to emphasize
3. Internal Summaries An internal summary briefly covers information or alludes to information introduced previously. It can remind an audience of a previous point and reinforce information covered in your document. As I have said, as we have seen, as mentioned earlier, in any event, in conclusion, in other words, in short, on the whole, therefore, to summarize, as a result, as has been noted previously,
4. Sequence A sequence transition outlines a hierarchical order or series of steps in your document. It can illustrate order or steps in a logical process. First…second…third, furthermore, next, last, still, also, and then, besides, finally
5. Time A time transition focuses on the chronological aspects of your order. Particularly useful in an article utilizing a story, this transition can illustrate for the audience progression of time. Before, earlier, immediately, in the meantime, in the past, lately, later, meanwhile, now, presently, shortly, simultaneously, since, so far, soon as long as, as soon as, at last, at length, at that time, then, until, afterward
6. Addition An addition or additive transition contributes to a previous point. This transition can build on a previous point and extend the discussion. Additionally, not to mention, in addition to, furthermore, either, neither, besides, on, in fact, as a matter of fact, actually, not only, but also, as well as
7. Similarity A transition by similarity draws a parallel between two ideas, concepts or examples. It can indicate a common area between points for the audience. In the same way, by the same token, equally, similarly, just as we have seen, in the same vein
8. Comparison A transition by comparison draws a distinction between two ideas, concepts or examples. It can indicate a common or divergent area between points for the audience. Like, in relation to, bigger than, the fastest, larger than, than any other, is bigger than, both, either…or, likewise
9. Contrast A transition by contrast draws a distinction of difference, opposition, or irregularity between two ideas, concepts or examples. This transition can indicate a key distinction between points for the audience. But, neither…nor, however on the other hand, although, despite, even though, in contrast, in spite of, on the contrary conversely, unlike, while instead, nevertheless, nonetheless, regardless, still, though, yet, although
Table 6.5 Types of Transitions in Writing (continued)
Type Definition Examples
10. Cause and Effect, Result A transition by cause and effect or result illustrates a relationship between two ideas, concepts or examples and may focus on the outcome or result. It can illustrate a relationship between points for the audience. As a result, because, consequently, for this purpose, accordingly, so, then, therefore, thereupon, thus, to this end, for this reason, as a result, because , therefore, consequently, as a consequence, and the outcome was
11. Examples A transition by example illustrates a connection between a point and an example or examples. You may find visual aids work well with this type of transition. In fact, as we can see, after all, even, for example, for instance, of course, specifically, such as, in the following example, to illustrate my point
12. Place A place transition refers to a location, often in a spatially organized essay, of one point of emphasis to another. Again, visual aids work well when discussing physical location with the reading audience. opposite to, there, to the left, to the right, above, adjacent to, elsewhere, far, farther on, below, beyond, closer to, here, near, nearby, next to
13. Clarification A clarification transition restates or further develops a main idea or point. It can also serve as a signal to a key point. To clarify, that is, I mean, in other words, to put it another way that is to say, to rephrase it, in order to explain, this means
14. Concession A concession transition indicates knowledge of contrary information. It can address a perception the audience may hold and allow for clarification. We can see that while, although it is true that, granted that, while it may appear that, naturally, of course, I can see that, I admit that while

Real-World Application: Transitions as Reader Accessibility

Transitions aren’t literary decoration. They’re accessibility tools. A reader who’s skimming a report for one specific fact uses signposts and internal previews to find that fact without having to read every word. A reader whose first language isn’t English uses sequence transitions to track your argument without having to parse every sentence for logic cues. A reader with a reading disability or low vision using a screen reader depends on clear transitional phrases to mentally segment the document.

When Anwuli writes the Huxley proposal, Dr. Volkov-Sastre will not read it linearly the first time. He’ll skim for the cost section, the methodology section, and the risk section. If Anwuli writes strong signposts—“Turning now to the cost comparison,” “We can now address the methodology,” “To summarize the three structural advantages”—he’ll find what he needs and stay in her document. If she doesn’t, he’ll give up and compare prices. Transitions are how you meet readers where they actually are, not where you wish they were.

Organization is more than an aesthetic choice. When your document is structured well, your reader carries away your message the way you meant it. When it’s disorganized, your reader carries away something else—usually confusion, frustration, or a wrong impression. Before you move on to the Key Takeaways below, think about the last email or report you sent. Could a stranger open it, skim for thirty seconds, and tell you what it was about? That’s the standard.

Key Takeaways

Organization is the key to clear writing. Organize your document using key elements, an organizing principle, and an outline. Organize your paragraphs and sentences so that your audience can understand them, and use transitions to move from one point to the next.

The exercises below give you a chance to put the organizing tools from this section into practice. Work through them individually or with a classmate, and notice where your instincts pull you toward burying your thesis, padding with bureaucratic phrases, or skipping transitions your reader needs.

Exercises

  1. What functions does organization serve in a document? Can they be positive or negative? Explain and discuss with a classmate.
  2. Create an outline from a sample article or document. Do you notice an organizational pattern? Explain and discuss with a classmate.
  3. Which of the following sentences are good examples of correct and clear business English? For sentences needing improvement, describe what is wrong and write a sentence that corrects the problem. Discuss your answers with your classmates.
    1. Marlys has been chosen to receive a promotion next month.
    2. Because her work is exemplary.
    3. At such time as it becomes feasible, our department intends to facilitate a lunch meeting to congratulate Marlys
    4. As a result of budget allocation analysis and examination of our financial condition, it is indicated that salary compensation for Marlys can be increased to a limited degree.
    5. When will Marlys’s promotion be official?
    6. I am so envious!
    7. Among those receiving promotions were Marlys, Bob, Germaine, Terry, and Akiko.
    8. The president asked all those receiving promotions to come to the meeting.
    9. Please attend a meeting for all employees who will be promoted next month.
    10. Marlys intends to use her new position to mentor employees joining the firm, which will encourage commitment and good work habits.
  4. Find an example of a poor sentence or a spelling or grammar error that was published online or in print and share your findings with the class.

6.2 Writing Style

Learning Objectives

  1. Demonstrate your ability to prepare and present information using a writing style that will increase understanding, retention, and motivation to act.
  2. Distinguish between formal, informal, bureaucratic, and conversational writing styles and choose the right one for a given audience.
  3. Rewrite passive sentences in active voice and explain the rhetorical effect of the change.
  4. Apply emphasis strategies—position, typography, and visual aids—to direct reader attention without clutter.

Imagine you’re invited to a business dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town—the kind that’s topped every “best of” list for decades. You know about the dress code: no jeans, T-shirts, or sneakers. So what do you wear? If you want to blend in with the other guests and make a good impression on your hosts, you’ll pick a quality suit or dress with appropriate shoes and accessories. You won’t show up in an evening gown or a tuxedo, which would draw the wrong kind of attention. And you won’t wear anything too revealing, which would distract from why you’re there in the first place. Maybe you feel like your freedom of expression is being cramped. Maybe you appreciate the chance to look your best. Either way, following the style conventions serves you well in a business setting.

Business writing works the same way. Unlike poetry or fiction, it isn’t a chance for self-expression. It calls for a fairly conservative, unadorned style. Writing style—sometimes called voice or tone—is how you address your reader. It shows up in your vocabulary, your figures of speech, your phrasing, your rhythm, your sentence structure, and your paragraph length. Developing a solid business writing style reflects well on you and pays off throughout your career.

Formal versus Informal

There was a time when business documents were written in the third person to project an air of objectivity. That formal style was often passive and wordy. Today, it’s given way to active, clear, concise writing—sometimes called “Plain English.”[3] As business crosses more borders and languages, writing that obscures meaning causes real problems. Efficient styles have become the norm. Still, you’ll run into an “old school versus new school” debate about abbreviations, contractions, and informal language in what was once a formal space. Compare the following:

Bureaucratic: Attached is the latest delivery data represented in topographical forms pursuant to the directive ABC123 of the air transportation guide supplied by the Federal Aviation Administration.

  • Formal – Please note the attached delivery data for July 2025.
  • Informal – Here’s the delivery data for last month.

Most people agree that bureaucratic forms obscure meaning, but there’s still debate about formal versus informal styles in business communication. Formal styles usually require more detail, follow rules of etiquette, and skip contractions and folksy expressions. Informal styles mirror everyday speech and welcome contractions and colloquialisms. Many managers won’t accept contractions in a formal business setting. Others will insist that the serial comma (the one before the last item in a list) is standard, not optional. And some just tell you to “keep it professional.” So what is professional writing in a business context? If you said “it depends,” you’re right.

Audiences come with expectations, and your job is to meet them. Some business audiences want a formal tone. If you use contractions or drop into casual speech, you may lose their interest and make them question your expertise. But if your audience expects informal language and you write too formally, you’ll lose them too—you may even come across as arrogant or pompous. One style isn’t better than the other. They’re just different tools for different jobs. Business writing sometimes has to meet legal standards and carry references, like the bureaucratic example above, but that’s not the norm for most internal communication. A skilled business writer knows the audience and adapts the message to fit. Choosing the right style shapes how your writing is received.

You’ll also hear about a conversational tone—a style that sounds like spoken communication in its rhythm, tone, and word choice. It fits some audiences and some contexts, but it can easily slip into feeling unprofessional.

If you drop phrases that imply a relationship or insider knowledge—like “you know” or “as we discussed”—without giving the background, your writing can come across as overly familiar, intimate, or even cagey. Trust is the foundation of every communication exchange, and one careless phrase can crack it.

If you want to use humor, think hard about how your audience will take it. Humor is fragile. It depends on irony, timing, and shared values. What cracks one person up can bore or hurt someone else.

There are times in business—a job interview, a self-evaluation—when you have to talk up your accomplishments. But in general business writing, skip the self-referential comments about your past wins. They come across as selfish or arrogant. Instead, give credit where it’s due. Thank your colleagues. Acknowledge the people who contributed good ideas.

Jargon is the shorthand a particular group, discipline, or industry uses. It’s useful as long as your audience knows what it means. If you’re writing for bank customers, you can say “ATM transactions” and they’ll know exactly what you mean. Spelling out “Automated Teller Machine transactions” would be unnecessary and a little silly. If you’re working in a hospital, you’ll use medical terms with other medical professionals. But when you’re writing to a patient, medical jargon gets in the way of understanding rather than helping it.

One last thing: a conversational tone is not an excuse for sloppy grammar, disrespectful slang, or profanity. Communication is the bridge between minds, and your words represent you when you’re not there. A good gut-check is to ask yourself, “Would I say this to their face?” Then ask, “Would I say this in front of everyone?” Your command of professional language is one of the clearest markers of business skill, and how well you master it will show up in your results. Take care, take time, and make sure your writing carries a professional tone that represents you and your organization well.

Case Connection: Finding the Voice for Volkov-Sastre

Part of Anwuli’s paralysis is a style problem. She’s been reading Theron’s 1994, 2001, and 2012 proposals in the file cabinet, and they all open with elaborate third-person paragraphs about “the honor of being considered.” That was the voice of business writing thirty years ago. Today, Dr. Volkov-Sastre will read two proposals in one afternoon. Stanwick’s will be polished and distant—”It is respectfully submitted that the firm possesses unparalleled expertise.” Anwuli’s instinct is to match that voice because it sounds safer.

It’s the wrong instinct. Volkov-Sastre is an analyst with an economics PhD who writes his own memos in plain English. If Anwuli opens her proposal with “Bellweather & Associates is respectfully submitting” she’ll sound like every other bid he’s bored of. If she opens with “The 1907 limestone façade is sound. The structural steel is sound. The second-floor ceremonial courtroom is the only intact Beaux-Arts courtroom in West Virginia. Restoration is cheaper than replacement. Here is how we’ll do it.”—that’s a voice he’ll actually read. Formal enough to respect the stakes, direct enough to respect his time. The right style isn’t the most formal one available. It’s the one that fits the specific human who’s going to read it.

Introductions: Direct and Indirect

Sometimes the first sentence is the hardest to write. Knowing the two main opening strategies won’t make the blank page any less intimidating, but it will give you a plan. Business documents usually lean on one of two openings, no matter what their larger organizational pattern is. The direct pattern states your main purpose right up front and leaves little room for confusion. The indirect pattern puts the main idea a paragraph or so in, which helps when you need a strong opening to hook a reader you think may not care. Generally, if you expect a positive response, use a direct opening—be clear from the first sentence about your purpose. If you’re delivering bad news or don’t expect a warm welcome, a less direct approach can soften the blow. Each style has its place, and the skilled business writer learns to be direct and to set up bad news with a positive opening paragraph.

Adding Emphasis

There are times you’ll want to make a word, phrase, or statistic stand out from the surrounding text. Visual aids can help. For example, if you write that sales are up 4 percent over last year, the number alone may not get the attention it deserves. But drop a bar graph next to that line showing the sales-growth figures, and suddenly the point hits twice—once in text, once in picture.

Look across the top of your word processor and you’ll see bold, italics, underline, highlights, color options, and a bunch of interesting fonts. It can be fun to play with these, but don’t use them just for decoration. Consistency and branding are key to your firm’s public image, so you want the visual side of your writing to support that image. Still, when you need to flag an important fact or a key question in a report, your readers will appreciate a visual nudge to draw their eye. Consider these examples:

  • Bullets can be effective when used with discretion.

Take care when using the following:

  1. Numbers
  2. With subheadings
  3. In serial lists
  4. As they can get
  5. A bit overwhelming to the point where
  6. The reader loses his or her interest

Your font choice matters too. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman and Garamond, have small decorative strokes that make them easy to read in body text. Sans serif fonts, like Arial, lack those cues and usually work better as headers.

You can also change the emphasis by moving information around inside a sentence:

  • Maximum emphasis. Sales have increased across the United States because of our latest promotion efforts in our largest and most successful market.
  • Medium emphasis. Because of our latest promotion efforts in our largest and most successful market, sales have increased across the United States.
  • Minimum emphasis. The United States, which has experienced a sales increase, is our largest and most successful market.

The end of a sentence is what people tend to remember, so that’s your spot for maximum emphasis. The beginning is the second-best position for recall. The middle is the weakest. If you want to highlight a point, put it at the start or the end. If you want to play a point down, bury it in the middle.[4]

Pro Tip: The Read-Aloud Bureaucracy Check

Print your draft, stand up, and read it out loud. Not in your head—out loud, with breath and pauses, as if you were reading it to a colleague sitting across the table. Three things will happen. First, you’ll trip over bureaucratic phrases because your mouth won’t want to say them. “At such time as it becomes feasible” will physically fight you. That’s the phrase to cut. Second, you’ll notice when you run out of breath mid-sentence. That’s a sentence to split. Third, you’ll hear when a paragraph starts to drag because your own voice will flatten. That’s the paragraph to prune.

Professional editors do this on every significant document. It sounds theatrical. It is. It’s also the single fastest way to find the sentences that look fine on screen and collapse the moment a human tries to speak them. Your reader is going to process your writing partly through their inner voice. The read-aloud test lets you hear what they’ll hear.

Active versus Passive Voice

You want your writing to be engaging. Which sentence would you rather read?

  • A – All sales orders are processed daily by Mackenzie.
  • B – Mackenzie processes all sales orders daily.

Most readers pick sentence B. Why? You already know every sentence has a subject and a verb, but you may not have thought much about how those parts work together. Look at sentence B first: “Mackenzie” is the subject and “processes” is the verb. Mackenzie is the doer of the action. In sentence A, “sales orders” is the subject, and they’re the ones receiving the action of “are processed.” Sentence B is written in active voice—the subject acts. Sentence A is written in passive voice—the subject is acted upon.

Active sentences tend to be shorter, more precise, and easier to understand. That’s especially true because passive sentences can hide the doer of the action. “All sales orders are processed daily” is a complete sentence, but you don’t know who’s doing the processing.

Active voice is the better choice in most situations—but not all. When you want to downplay the doer, you can write, “Ten late arrivals were recorded this month,” and never name names. Passive voice lets you avoid blame or credit, which makes it more diplomatic in some settings. It also lets you sidestep personal pronouns (he, she, they) for a more objective tone. And sometimes the doer is genuinely unknown, as in “graffiti was painted on the side of our building last night.”

Most business communication guides recommend active voice as the default. The styles themselves aren’t the problem—it’s how you use them. A skilled business writer treats both as tools and learns when each one fits the job.

Commonly Confused Words

The sentences in Table 6.6 “Common Errors in English” focus on some of the most common errors in English. You may recognize this exercise from the start of the chapter. How did you do? Check the “Additional Resources” section at the end of the chapter for more on English grammar and usage.

Table 6.6 Common Errors in English
1. accept or except The office will _______ applications until 5 p.m. on the 31st. accept Attendance is required for all employees _______ supervisors. except
2. affect or effect To _______ the growth of plants, we can regulate the water supply. affect A lack of water has a predictable _______ on most plants. effect
3. e.g. or i.e. Please order 2,000 imprinted giveaways (_______, pens or coffee mugs) e.g. Charge them to my account (_______, account #98765). i.e.
4. its or it’s The department surpassed _______ previous sales record this quarter. its _______ my opinion that the new marketing campaign will be highly effective. It’s
5. lay or lie Please _______ the report on the desk. lay The doctor asked him to _______ down on the examination table. lie
6. pressure or pressurize We need to _______ the liquid nitrogen tanks. pressurize It might be possible to _______ him to resign. pressure
7. principle or principal It’s the basic _________ of farming: no water, no food. principle The _______ reason for the trip is to attend the sales meeting. principal
8. regardless or irregardless _______ of what we do, gas prices are unlikely to go back down. Regardless _______ of your beliefs, please try to listen with an open mind. Regardless (Irregardless is not a standard word; see your dictionary)
9. than or then This year’s losses were worse _______ last year’s. than If we can cut our costs, _______ it might be possible to break even. then
10. that or which _______ type of marketing data did you need? Which Karen misplaced the report, _______ caused a delay in making a decision. which
There are several kinds of data _______ could be useful. that
11 there their, or they’re The report is _________, in the top file drawer. there __________ strategic advantage depends on a wide distribution network. Their
__________ planning to attend the sales meeting in Pittsburgh. They’re
12. to, too, or two Customers need _______ drive slower if they want to save gas. to After sales meeting, you should visit customers in the Pittsburgh area _______. too
In fact, the _______ of you should make some customer visits together. two
13. uninterested or disinterested He would be the best person to make a decision, since he isn’t biased and is relatively _______ in the outcome. disinterested The sales manager tried to speak dynamically, but the sales reps were simply _______ in what he had to say. uninterested
14. who, whom, who’s, or whose __________ truck is that? Whose __________ going to pay for the repairs? Who’s
__________ will go to the interview? Who To __________ should we address the thank-you note? whom
15 your or you’re My office is bigger than _______ cubicle. your _______ going to learn how to avoid making these common mistakes in English. You’re

Making Errors at the Speed of Light

In business and industry, the pressure to produce under tight deadlines has been cranked up by the instant speed of our communication tools. Say you get an e-mail or text while you’re deep in a complex problem. You may be tempted to “get it out of the way” by firing back a quick reply—but in your rush, you may forget to qualify something, leave out key information, or even fail to check whether you hit “Reply,” “Reply to All,” or “Delete.” Pause. Review your text, e-mail, or document before you consider it done. Here’s a quick do/don’t list to run through before you click “send.”

Do remember the following:

  • Everything you access via an employer’s system is subject to inspection.
  • Everything you write or record reflects you and your business or organization, even if it is stored in a Google or Yahoo! account.
  • Respect personal space by not forwarding every e-mail you think is funny.
  • Use a concise but relevant and informative phrase for the subject line.
  • E-mail the receiver before sending large attachments, as they may exceed the limit of the receiver’s inbox.
  • Attach your intended attachments.

Reflection Write: Your Voice Inventory

Spend fifteen minutes on a one-page voice inventory of your own writing. No outline, no revision—just continuous prose. Answer these three questions in order:

  1. When I’m writing something important and I want to sound “professional,” what word or phrase do I reach for that I don’t actually use in speech? List three. Then ask yourself if each one is adding meaning or just signaling formality.
  2. When I’m writing something casual—an email to a friend, a group chat, a text—what does my natural voice sound like? Give an example sentence. That sentence is the starting point for your conversational business voice.
  3. If I had to write a one-paragraph description of my work to someone I respect but don’t know, would I lean formal or informal? What would be lost if I went the other way?

Keep this inventory. Your voice isn’t one setting; it’s a range. Knowing the edges of your range is how you deliberately shift between a legal memo and a customer email without losing yourself in either one.

Style choices aren’t personal quirks—they’re tactical decisions about how your reader will receive your message. A formal tone can project authority or distance; an informal tone can build warmth or erode trust. Before you move into the Key Takeaways below, ask yourself which register your current writing defaults to, and whether it’s serving the audiences you actually write for.

Key Takeaways

An appropriate business writing style can be formal or informal, depending on the context, but it should always reflect favorably on the writer and the organization.

The exercises below give you a chance to move deliberately between registers. As you work, notice which style feels most natural to you and which style takes the most effort—that gap is where your writing will grow the fastest.

Exercises

  1. Select at least three examples of writing from different kinds of sources, such as a government website, a textbook, a popular magazine, and a novel. According to the style characteristics discussed in this section, how would you characterize the style of each? Select a paragraph to rewrite in a different style—for example, if the style is formal, make it informal; if the selection is written in active voice, make it passive. Discuss your results with your classmates.
  2. What are some qualities of a good business writing style? What makes certain styles more appropriate for business than others? Discuss your thoughts with a classmate.
  3. Find an example of formal writing and write an informal version. Please share with your classmates.
  4. Find an example of informal writing and write a formal version. Please share with your classmates.
  5. You are assigned to a work team that must develop a formal declaration and an informal explanation for the declaration. The declaration could be a memo indicating that your business will be observing a holiday (each team should have a different holiday).
  6. How would you characterize your writing style? Do you need to modify your style to make it suitable for business writing? Write a one- to two-page essay on this subject.

6.3 Making an Argument

Learning Objectives

  1. Demonstrate how to form a clear argument with appropriate support to persuade your audience.
  2. Recognize and understand inherent weaknesses in fallacies.
  3. Apply the Toulmin model (claim, data, warrant) to a written argument and identify the warrant as the connective tissue.
  4. Select among the seven GASCAP/T argument strategies based on audience, evidence available, and rhetorical goal.
  5. Evaluate the ethics of a persuasive message using Johannesen’s eleven-point framework.

The famous satirist Jonathan Swift once said, “Argument is the worst sort of conversation.” You may be inclined to agree. When people argue, they’re in conflict, and it’s usually not pretty. Arguments get ugly because people reach for fallacies and false statements, or they stop treating each other with respect. They get defensive. They try to win. They stop listening.

But that’s not how a written argument should work. When you make an argument in writing, you present your position with logical points and back each one with appropriate sources. You give your audience every reason to see you as ethical and trustworthy. You treat them with respect, and you don’t write in a way that makes them defensive. Build your credibility with sound arguments and strategic use of the tools in this section.

We’re going to look at the classic form of an argument, a more modern interpretation, and then seven basic argument strategies you can pull from. Think of them as tools in your toolbox—you want to know how each one works so you can reach for the right one. And remember: the people trying to persuade you, from telemarketers to politicians, already know these tools by heart.

Let’s start with a classical rhetorical strategy. It asks the speaker or author to frame an argument in these steps:

Table 6.7 Classical Rhetorical Strategy
1. Exordium Prepares the audience to consider your argument
2. Narration Provides the audience with the necessary background or context for your argument
3. Proposition Introduces your claim being argued in the document
4. Confirmation Offers the audience evidence to support your argument
5. Refutation Introduces to the audience and then discounts or refutes the counterarguments or objections
6. Peroration Your conclusion of your argument

This is a standard pattern in rhetoric, and you’ll probably see it in both speech and English courses. It works as a prep checklist to make sure you’re ready. But you won’t often see it applied in this exact form day to day. What you will see more often is Stephen Toulmin’s rhetorical strategy, which focuses on three main elements (see Table 6.8 “Toulmin’s Three-Part Rhetorical Strategy”).[5]

Table 6.8 Toulmin’s Three-Part Rhetorical Strategy
Element Description Example
1. Claim Your statement of belief or truth It is important to spay or neuter your pet.
2. Data Your supporting reasons for the claim Millions of unwanted pets are euthanized every year.
3. Warrant You create the connection between the claim and the supporting reasons Pets that are spayed or neutered do not reproduce, preventing the production of unwanted animals.

Toulmin’s strategy makes your claim explicit, shows the connection between the claim and the data, and lets the reader follow your reasoning. You may have a great idea, but your audience still wants to know how you got there. The warrant answers the unspoken question: “Why does this data matter to your topic?” It does the work of showing readers how your information fits together.

Case Connection: Arguing Against Stanwick’s Cost Number

Let’s put Anwuli’s argument through the Toulmin model. Her claim: restoration of the 1907 Huxley courthouse is cheaper than replacement. Her data: two independent structural engineering assessments price restoration at $2.4 million against Stanwick’s $9.8 million replacement bid; the limestone façade and structural steel are sound; the interior demolition required for replacement would trigger an additional $1.1 million in environmental abatement. Strong numbers.

Her warrant is the part most new writers skip. The warrant is the sentence that explains why the data supports the claim for this specific reader. For Volkov-Sastre, the warrant might be: “Because a sound structural shell eliminates the largest cost driver in new construction—foundation, steel, and envelope—restoration of a sound shell is inherently cheaper than replacement, and the structural assessments confirm the Huxley shell is sound.” Without that sentence, Volkov-Sastre has to build the logical bridge himself. With it, Anwuli has done his work for him. Warrants are the difference between a proposal that shows numbers and a proposal that makes an argument.

Effective Argumentation Strategies: GASCAP/T

Here’s a useful way to organize—and remember—seven key argumentative strategies:

  1. Argument by Generalization
  2. Argument by Analogy
  3. Argument by Sign
  4. Argument by Consequence
  5. Argument by Authority
  6. Argument by Principle
  7. Argument by Testimony

Richard Fulkerson notes that a single strategy can carry an argument some of the time, but combining several usually works better.[6] He lined up the strategies this way to compare their differences, highlight their similarities, and make them easier to discuss. The model is usually called GASCAP, and it’s a handy way to remember six key arguments. We’ve adapted it here by adding one more—the argument by testimony—which shows up often in modern speeches and presentations. Table 6.9 “GASCAP/T Strategies” presents each argument, gives you a definition and an example, and shows how to evaluate each one.

Table 6.9 GASCAP/T Strategies
Letter Argument by Claim Example Evaluation
G Generalization Whatever is true of a good example or sample will be true of everything like it or the population it came from. If you can vote, drive, and die for your country, you should also be allowed to buy alcohol. STAR System: For it to be reliable, we need a (S) sufficient number of (T) typical, (A) accurate, and (R) reliable examples.
A Analogy Two situations, things or ideas are alike in observable ways and will tend to be alike in many other ways Alcohol is a drug. So is tobacco. They alter perceptions, have an impact physiological and psychological systems, and are federally regulated substances. Watch for adverbs that end in “ly,” as they qualify, or lessen the relationship between the examples. Words like “probably,” “maybe,” “could, “may,” or “usually” all weaken the relationship.
S Sign Statistics, facts, or cases indicate meaning, much like a stop sign means “stop.” Motor vehicle accidents involving alcohol occur at significant rates among adults of all ages in the United States. Evaluate the relationship between the sign and look for correlation, where the presenter says what the facts “mean.” Does the sign say that? Does it say more? What is not said? Is it relevant?
C Cause If two conditions always appear together, they are causally related. The U.S. insurance industry has been significantly involved in state and national legislation requiring proof of insurance, changes in graduated driver’s licenses, and the national change in the drinking age from age 18 to age 21. Watch out for “after the fact, therefore because of the fact” (post hoc, ergo propter hoc) thinking. There might not be a clear connection, and it might not be the whole picture. Mothers Against Drunk Driving might have also been involved with each example of legislation.
A Authority What a credible source indicates is probably true. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, older drivers are increasingly involved in motor vehicle accidents. Is the source legitimate and is their information trustworthy? Institutes, boards, and people often have agendas and distinct points of view.
P Principle An accepted or proper truth The change in the drinking age was never put to a vote. It’s not about alcohol, it’s about our freedom of speech in a democratic society. Is the principle being invoked generally accepted? Is the claim, data or warrant actually related to the principle stated? Are there common exceptions to the principle? What are the practical consequences of following the principle in this case?
T Testimony Personal experience I’ve lost friends from age 18 to 67 to alcohol. It impacts all ages, and its effects are cumulative. Let me tell you about two friends in particular. Is the testimony authentic? Is it relevant? Is it representative of other’s experiences? Use the STAR system to help evaluate the use of testimony.

Try It: Spot the Fallacy, Spot the Strategy

Open any major newspaper’s op-ed page or a well-read political blog. Pick one opinion piece—any length, any topic. Read it once for the argument, once for the tactics. On a separate sheet, answer five questions:

  1. What is the writer’s main claim in one sentence?
  2. What data does the writer offer, and does each piece come with a visible warrant?
  3. Which of the seven GASCAP/T strategies does the writer lean on most? Name at least two.
  4. Where does the writer slide into a fallacy (see Table 6.10), even a mild one? Quote it.
  5. If you were writing a response, would you argue with the claim, the data, the warrant, or the fallacy first? Why?

Swap your analysis with a classmate. Notice how two careful readers can diagnose the same piece differently and still agree on the weak spots. That’s the skill—not being right, but being precise about what’s weak.

Evidence

Now that we’ve walked through several argument strategies, how do you actually back up your position with evidence? If your premise is solid and your claim is clear, your audience will naturally turn to “prove it.” That’s where evidence becomes critical. Here are three guidelines to make sure your evidence passes the “so what?” test. Make sure your proof is:

  1. Supportive. Examples are clearly representative, statistics are accurate, testimony is authoritative, and information is reliable.
  2. Relevant. Examples clearly relate to the claim or topic, and you are not comparing “apples to oranges.”
  3. Effective. Examples are clearly the best available to support the claim; quality is preferred to quantity, and there are only a few well-chosen statistics, facts, or data.

Appealing to Emotions

We’ve laid out several things to consider when you choose evidence, but here’s the thing: Aristotle strongly preferred an argument built on logic over emotion. Can the same be said for your audience? And how much does emotion—and your appeal to it—really drive modern life?

Emotions are psychological and physical reactions, like fear or anger, that we feel in response to stimuli. Your feelings shape your own point of view and your readiness to communicate, and they influence how, why, and when you say what you say. Emotions affect what you say and how you hear others. They can be hard to control. And they’ll move your audience—maybe even move you—to change or act.

Aristotle thought the best way to persuade was through logic, free of emotion. But he also knew people can be moved, even manipulated, when someone exploits their feelings. In business, we still argue about this. We demand the facts separate from personal opinion or agenda—and then we watch companies sell products on pure emotion.

Marketing experts are famous for creating a need or tying an emotion to a brand to move product. You’ll speak the language of your audience in your document, and you may choose to appeal to their emotions. Just know how the strategy works. It’s a tool with two edges.

Think of the appeal to emotion as a knife. One edge cuts your audience; the other can cut you. If you write about spaying and neutering pets and describe the millions of unwanted animals killed each year, you may spark an emotional response. But if you lean on this approach again and again, your audience will get tired of it, and it’ll lose its punch. Switch to animals in research, and the same risk applies. Repeated emotional appeals can backfire—cutting you instead of your reader—and produce what we call “emotional resistance.”

Emotional resistance is what happens when a reader gets tired, even hostile, from hearing too many messages trying to yank on their heartstrings. Emotional appeals can wear out your audience’s capacity to receive the message. Aristotle named the three building blocks of any document: ethos (credibility), logos (logic), and pathos (passion, enthusiasm, and emotional response). Your job is to create a balanced document that uses emotion, but uses it carefully.

Emotional appeals can also trip you up as a writer. Say you’re writing about suicide to persuade people not to commit it, and you pull up a photo of a brother or sister you lost that way. Your own emotional response can cloud your thinking and get in the way of what you’re trying to say. Never pull in a personal story—or someone else’s—if telling it makes you lose control. It’s important to discuss relevant topics, but you also need to assess your relationship to the message. Your document isn’t an exercise in therapy. If you “lose it” because you aren’t ready to talk about the issue, you sacrifice ethos, credibility, and the effectiveness of your writing.

Case Connection: When Pathos Backfires

Anwuli has a photograph. It shows her grandfather standing on the steps of the Huxley courthouse in 1968, wearing his one suit, on the day he became the first person in his family to serve on a jury. She keeps a copy pinned above her desk. If she includes it in the proposal, with a caption about the three generations of her family who have stood on those steps, she can move a reader to tears. Dr. Volkov-Sastre included.

She shouldn’t do it. Not because the photograph isn’t true—it is—and not because the feeling isn’t legitimate—it is. She shouldn’t do it because the moment she makes the proposal about her grandfather, she has handed Stanwick a weapon. Their counter will not be “we disagree”; their counter will be “this firm is too emotionally invested to be objective.” Pathos is the third leg of Aristotle’s triangle, but for a procurement argument to a fiscal analyst, the pathos has to come from the building, not from Anwuli. The leaded glass oculus. The scorch marks. The ceremonial courtroom’s oak paneling. Those carry their own emotional weight without putting Anwuli’s credibility on the line. A good writer learns the difference between the stories that move her and the stories that move the reader. They’re not always the same story.

Recognizing Fallacies

“Fallacy” is just another way of saying false logic. Fallacies—rhetorical tricks—can fool your audience with style, drama, or pattern, but they add almost nothing in substance. Best to avoid them. They actually hurt your effectiveness. Several techniques let writers lean on style without making a real argument, cloud their central message, or twist the facts to their advantage. Table 6.10 “Fallacies” walks through the eight classical fallacies. Learn to spot them so they can’t be used on you, and learn to steer clear of using them yourself.

Table 6.10 Fallacies
Fallacy Definition Example
1. Red Herring Any diversion intended to distract attention from the main issue, particularly by relating the issue to a common fear. It’s not just about the death penalty; it’s about the victims and their rights. You wouldn’t want to be a victim, but if you were, you’d want justice.
2. Straw Man A weak argument set up to easily refute and distract attention from stronger arguments. Look at the idea that criminals who commit murder should be released after a few years of rehabilitation. Think of how unsafe our streets would be then!
3. Begging the Question Claiming the truth of the very matter in question, as if it were already an obvious conclusion. We know that they will be released and unleashed on society to repeat their crimes again and again.
4. Circular Argument The proposition is used to prove itself. Assumes the very thing it aims to prove. Related to begging the question. Once a killer, always a killer.
5. Ad Populum Appeals to a common belief of some people, often prejudicial, and states everyone holds this belief. Also called the bandwagon fallacy, as people “jump on the bandwagon” of a perceived popular view. Most people would prefer to get rid of a few “bad apples” and keep our streets safe.
6. Ad Hominem or “Argument against the Man” Argument against the man instead of his message. Stating that someone’s argument is wrong solely because of something about the person rather than about the argument itself. Our representative is a drunk and philanderer. How can we trust him on the issues of safety and family?
7. Non Sequitur or “It Does Not Follow” The conclusion does not follow from the premises. They are not related. Since the liberal 1960s, we’ve seen an increase in convicts who got let off death row.
8. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc or “After This, Therefore because of This” It is also called a coincidental correlation. Violent death rates went down once they started publicizing executions.

Ethical Considerations in Persuasion

In his book Ethics in Human Communication, Richard Johannesen lays out eleven points to keep in mind when you communicate. They were written for public speaking, but they apply to business writing too. You’ll notice that many of his cautions connect directly to the fallacies we just covered. His main points echo much of what we’ve talked about in this chapter, and they’re worth keeping in mind as you prepare and deliver your persuasive message.[7]

Do not

  • use false, fabricated, misrepresented, distorted, or irrelevant evidence to support arguments or claims;
  • intentionally use unsupported, misleading, or illogical reasoning;
  • represent yourself as informed or an “expert” on a subject when you are not;
  • use irrelevant appeals to divert attention from the issue at hand;
  • ask your audience to link your idea or proposal to emotion-laden values, motives, or goals to which it is actually not related;
  • deceive your audience by concealing your real purpose, your self-interest, the group you represent, or your position as an advocate of a viewpoint;
  • distort, hide, or misrepresent the number, scope, intensity, or undesirable features of consequences or effects;
  • use emotional appeals that lack a supporting basis of evidence or reasoning;
  • oversimplify complex, gradation-laden situations into simplistic, two-valued, either-or, polar views or choices;
  • pretend certainty where tentativeness and degrees of probability would be more accurate;
  • advocate something that you yourself do not believe in.

Aristotle said the mark of a good person, well spoken, was a clear command of the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. He talked about perceiving multiple points of view on a topic and giving each one thoughtful consideration. It’s essential to feel the complexity of a case, but you’re not a lawyer defending a client.

As you build your persuasive message, lean on honesty and integrity. Your audience will appreciate it when you consider more than one view and show that you understand how complicated an issue really is. That’s how you build your ethos, or credibility. Don’t stretch the facts or cherry-pick evidence just to win the point—prove the argument on its own merits. Deception, coercion, intentional bias, manipulation, and bribery don’t belong in a persuasive message.

Ethical Consideration: The Johannesen Checklist in Practice

Johannesen’s eleven points look abstract on the page. They sharpen fast when you apply them to a real choice. Imagine Anwuli considers Option Two from the opening case—the quiet footnote implying Stanwick has plagiarized Theron’s framework without actually saying so. Run that choice through Johannesen:

“Use irrelevant appeals to divert attention from the issue at hand.” A footnote about a rival firm’s ethics is not irrelevant—plagiarism genuinely affects bid credibility—but it is a diversion from the structural merits of the proposal. Warning.

“Deceive your audience by concealing your real purpose.” A “quiet” footnote whose real purpose is accusation without saying “accusation” conceals purpose. Red flag.

“Pretend certainty where tentativeness would be more accurate.” Anwuli isn’t one hundred percent certain Stanwick didn’t license the framework or cite it elsewhere. A footnote implying plagiarism pretends to a certainty she doesn’t have. Red flag.

Three warnings in one move. That’s why Option Two—the clever, insinuating, middle-path move—is actually the least ethical option Anwuli has. The direct options (cite the 2019 paper correctly, or raise the issue openly through Volkov-Sastre) don’t trigger Johannesen’s framework. The clever one does. Ethics isn’t the absence of tools. Ethics is knowing which tools carry their own cost.

A persuasive argument is ultimately a promise to your reader—that you’ve done your homework, treated them with respect, and given them the tools to decide for themselves. Before you move to the Key Takeaways, consider the last argument you made in writing, and whether you met all three parts of that promise.

Key Takeaways

The art of argument in writing involves presenting supportive, relevant, and effective evidence for each point and doing it respectfully and ethically.

The exercises below give you a chance to practice argument analysis on real-world texts. Pay attention to how the best persuaders make their strategies nearly invisible—and how the weakest persuaders wear their fallacies on their sleeves.

Exercises

  1. Select a piece of persuasive writing such as a newspaper op-ed essay, a magazine article, or a blog post. Examine the argument, the main points, and how the writer supports them. Which strategies from the foregoing section does the writer use? Does the writer use any fallacies or violate any ethical principles? Discuss your results with your classmates.
  2. Find one slogan or logo that you perceive as persuasive and share it with your classmates.
  3. Find an example of a piece of writing that appears to want to be persuasive, but doesn’t get the job done. Please write a brief review and share it with classmates.
  4. In what ways might the choice of how to organize a document involve ethics? Explain your response and discuss it with your class.

6.4 Paraphrase and Summary versus Plagiarism

Learning Objectives

  1. Understand the difference between paraphrasing, summarizing, and plagiarism.
  2. Demonstrate how to give proper credit to sources that are quoted verbatim and sources whose ideas are paraphrased or summarized.
  3. Demonstrate your ability to paraphrase in one or more written assignments.
  4. Recognize patch writing as a form of plagiarism and describe the professional consequences it carries in a business setting.

Even when you’re writing about something you know well, you’ll usually pull in information from other sources. How you represent other people’s ideas, concepts, and words is critical to your credibility—and to how well your document works. Say you’re reading a section of a document and find a point that fits your current writing project perfectly. How do you bring that into your own work? You’ve got a few options.

One option is to reproduce the quote verbatim—word for word—making sure you’ve copied all the words and punctuation exactly. If you do this, you put quotation marks around the passage (or, if it’s more than about fifty words, indent it with wider margins) and give credit to the source. The format of your citation depends on the discipline or industry of your audience. Standard formats include APA (American Psychological Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), and CMS (Chicago Manual of Style).

Real-World Application: Citation Formats in Business

Academic writers argue over APA versus MLA versus Chicago the way sports fans argue over teams. In business, the rules are different—and looser, and stricter, at the same time. Looser because most business documents don’t follow a single academic style guide from cover to cover. Stricter because the wrong format in the wrong audience can quietly kill your credibility.

A grant proposal to a foundation will usually want APA or Chicago author-date—clean, parenthetical, social-science tone. A legal memo will want footnote-style citations closer to Chicago or the Bluebook. A journalism-adjacent business piece—a white paper, a trade magazine article—will want named attributions in the prose itself (“According to a 2024 report from the Urban Institute…”). A scientific or engineering business document will lean on AMA, IEEE, or CSE depending on the field. A procurement proposal like Anwuli’s will usually want Chicago notes-bibliography, because historic preservation work cites archival sources, building surveys, and unpublished reports that author-date handles clumsily.

The question to ask before you start any important business document isn’t “which citation style is best?” It’s “which citation style does the person reading this already use?” Then match. If you can’t find out, default to Chicago notes-bibliography for anything historical or preservation-related and APA for anything behavioral or managerial. You can always adjust.

Another common strategy in business writing is to paraphrase—to rewrite the information in your own words. You’re still passing along the main point, but you’re not copying the original. You still give credit where credit is due, but your citation can be more informal, like “A Wall Street Journal article dated July 8, 2009, described some of the disagreements among G-8 nations about climate change.” Here are a few steps that can help you paraphrase a passage while respecting the original author:

  1. Read the passage out loud, paying attention to the complete thought rather than the individual words.
  2. Explain the concept in your own words to a friend or colleague, out loud, face-to-face.
  3. Write the concept in your own words, and add one or more illustrative examples of the idea that are meaningful to you.
  4. Reread the original passage and see how your version compares with it in terms of grammar, word choice, example, and conveyance of meaning.
  5. If your writing parrots the original passage or merely substitutes synonyms for words in the original, return to step one and start over, remembering that your goal is to express the central concepts, not to “translate” one word into another.
  6. When you are satisfied that your expression of the concept can stand on its merit, include it in your document and cite the original author as the source of the idea.

Pro Tip: The Paraphrase Out-Loud Test

Step two on the paraphrasing list above—”explain the concept in your own words to a friend or colleague, out loud, face-to-face”—is not a suggestion. It’s the single most reliable technique for clean paraphrasing that working writers have. Here’s why. When you read a passage and immediately try to rewrite it, the original sentence structure is still fresh in your short-term memory, and your brain will reach for the same nouns and rhythms. You’ll produce something that sounds like a synonym swap. That’s patch writing, and patch writing is plagiarism.

When you explain the concept out loud to another person, something different happens. You process the idea through your own working vocabulary, your own sentence patterns, your own sense of what your listener needs to understand. By the time you write it down, the original sentence structure has dissolved. What’s left is the concept, in your voice, filtered through a real conversation with a real listener. Try it on the next difficult passage you need to paraphrase. Use a roommate, a family member, your dog, a mirror. The listener doesn’t matter. The out-loud part does.

Summarizing is another common way to fold information into your work, and it demands the same care and attention. To summarize is to reduce a concept, idea, or data set to its most basic point. You may need a literature survey to summarize related work in a field, or a background section that does similar work. Suppose you’re reporting on a business situation and realize one of Shakespeare’s plays has a plot that mirrors yours. You might sum up the play in a few sentences before drawing the parallel. That kind of summary can help your readers understand and remember your report. Wherever you include a summary, keep its original context in mind and preserve its meaning without distorting it in your new context.

Because summarizing strips detail, some of the original richness gets lost. Think of a photograph you took in the past with several people in it. Using image-editing software, draw a box around just one face. Delete everything else. Part of the photo is still there, and one person is now the focal point—but the context is gone. In the same way, if you zero in on one statistic, one quote, or one idea and lose the background, you pull the information out of context. Context is one of the eight components of communication, and without it, the whole process breaks down. You can’t keep all of the detail of an original source in a summary, but you have to preserve the essential point within its context or you risk distorting the original meaning.

Unlike quoting or paraphrasing, summarizing is something you also do to your own writing. You might start a document with a summary of the background that gives it purpose. Formal business reports often open with an executive summary, and scientific articles usually open with an abstract—both give readers a brief preview of what’s coming. In a long document, you might write a short internal summary after each main point to remind your reader of the discussion so far and set up what’s next. And a summary is one of the most common—and effective—ways to close out a document. Ending with a summary helps your reader remember your main points.

Plagiarism is not paraphrasing. It’s not summarizing either. Plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as your own. Professional standards—in every field from architecture to banking to zoology—are built on authenticity and credibility. Credit goes where credit is due, authorities get properly cited, and original writing is expected to actually be original. Patch writing—cutting and pasting snippets from other sources into your writing without crediting them—is plagiarism. Wholesale copying is plagiarism too. Both destroy your professional credibility.

Colleges and universities have policies against plagiarism, and within business and industry, the hit to your credibility and career often runs deeper than any academic punishment. There’s no shame in quoting someone else with credit, paraphrasing a point correctly, or summarizing results from a study you didn’t run. But there are real consequences when you pass someone else’s ideas off as your own.

Set the fear of punishment aside for a minute. A skilled business writer has to recognize that intellectual theft is simply wrong. You may be tempted to borrow a sentence, but your document will live on in many forms over time, and more than one career has been wrecked by plagiarism that surfaced years after the fact. An accomplished business writer treats being properly cited as a compliment. A novice learns by example—but doesn’t copy and paste.

In a world where most modern documents are searchable online with a couple of keystrokes, plagiarism is a self-defeating move when better options exist. Quote and give credit. Link to related documents with permission. Paraphrase and summarize with citation. Just don’t plagiarize.

Case Connection: The Patch-Write Discovery

Back to Anwuli’s moment of realization. She’s reading Stanwick Continental’s template for the third time, marking structural claims she plans to counter, when she notices something odd. A paragraph on Appalachian Beaux-Arts masonry assessment uses a phrase she’s read before: “graduated moisture ingress protocols.” She pulls up her mentor’s 2019 white paper. There it is. Paragraph four. Same phrase. She reads the next Stanwick sentence. It’s Theron’s sentence with three nouns swapped. She reads the next. Theron’s, with the verb tense changed. She reads the next. Theron’s, reordered. Four consecutive sentences, patch-written from an unpublished, uncopyrighted document.

Patch writing is a perfect example of why plagiarism is so insidious in professional settings. Nobody at Stanwick cut and pasted a whole paragraph. Somebody—probably a junior staffer under deadline pressure, possibly Calista Rennfield herself—read Theron’s paper, decided it was too good to paraphrase honestly, and rewrote it at the sentence level with just enough variation to defeat a naive word-match check. The result looks original. It isn’t. It’s theft committed one word at a time.

What makes Anwuli’s position hard isn’t whether patch writing is wrong. Everyone who’s been to graduate school knows it’s wrong. What makes it hard is that Theron never published the 2019 paper, never copyrighted it, and gave copies to three preservation groups saying “knowledge like this should move freely.” The ethical violation is clear. The legal remedy is murky. And the person who has to decide what to do with the information is a twenty-nine-year-old on her first solo proposal. Welcome to professional life.

Attribution is a professional habit, not just a classroom rule. Before you move to the Key Takeaways below, think about the last time you incorporated someone else’s idea into your own writing—at work, in school, in a text to a friend. Did you mention where it came from? Would the original author recognize their own thinking in yours?

Key Takeaways

There is nothing wrong with quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing with credit to your original source, but presenting someone else’s work as if it were your own is plagiarism.

The exercises below ask you to practice the three techniques—quotation, paraphrase, and summary—on real texts. Treat them as muscle memory. The more you build these habits on small pieces, the less likely you are to slip into patch writing on the big ones.

Exercises

  1. Select a piece of writing, such as an essay from a website, a book chapter, or a newspaper or magazine article. Write a paraphrase of a portion of it. Write a summary of the entire piece. Note the difference between the two techniques. Giving credit to the original piece, discuss your paraphrase and summary with your classmates.
  2. Find an example of an advertisement you perceive as particularly effective and write a one-sentence summary. Share the ad and your one-sentence summary with the class.
  3. Find an example of an advertisement you perceive as particularly ineffective and write a one-sentence summary. Share the ad and your one-sentence review with the class.
  4. Find a case where plagiarism or misrepresentation had consequences in the business world. Share your findings and discuss with classmates.

Closing Case Study Analysis: Back to the Ninety-Page Promise

Let’s return to Anwuli at her desk. Copper cornice gone dim. Nine days on the clock. Four options spread in front of her. Stanwick’s template open in one window, Theron’s 2019 white paper open in another, her ninety pages of nothing in a third.

Start with what she doesn’t do. She doesn’t call Dr. Volkov-Sastre. Not yet. She doesn’t write the quiet insinuating footnote either—she ran it through Johannesen in her head and felt the three red flags. She doesn’t withdraw from the bid. And she doesn’t spend another forty-seven minutes staring at the “shall include, but shall not be limited to” paragraph.

She starts with the sentence.

She deletes the entire first page of her draft. At the top of the blank page she writes: “Restoration of the 1907 Huxley County Courthouse is cheaper, structurally sounder, and historically irreplaceable. This proposal describes how Bellweather & Associates will complete the restoration for $2.4 million in eighteen months, using the 2019 Bellweather Condition Assessment Framework for Appalachian Beaux-Arts Courthouses, originally developed by Theron Bellweather and released without copyright to the preservation community.” Then she goes to bed. It’s 9:47 p.m. She’s been working since 7:30 a.m.

Day two (Section 6.1, Organization). She ghost-outlines her existing ninety pages. The outline is a mess: fourteen sections, no clear logic, her cost comparison buried on page sixty-three. She throws the whole outline out and rebuilds it on a point pattern from Table 6.1: four structural advantages of restoration over replacement, each supported by data, each warranted explicitly. Under point three, she places the cost comparison. She builds transitions between sections using Table 6.5: internal previews at the top of each section, internal summaries at the bottom, signposts for Volkov-Sastre to skim by. The outline compresses to nine sections, seventy-two pages, thesis on page one.

Day three (Section 6.2, Writing Style). She reads her draft out loud. Every bureaucratic phrase trips her tongue. “At the present time”—cut. “Pursuant to the directive”—cut. “In the event that”—cut. “It is respectfully submitted that”—cut. She rewrites the introductory section in active voice: “We will restore. We will stabilize. We will deliver.” She cuts two pages of florid introduction and replaces them with four hard paragraphs Volkov-Sastre can actually read. She keeps the formal register—this is a procurement document, not a blog post—but her formality no longer hides her argument behind it.

Days four through six (Section 6.3, Making an Argument). She runs every major claim in the proposal through the Toulmin model. For each claim, she writes out the data and then—critically—the warrant, the sentence that makes the bridge explicit for a reader who isn’t a preservation architect. She pulls GASCAP/T strategies deliberately: sign for the structural engineering photographs (cracks mean this, rust means that), authority for the two independent engineers’ condition assessments, analogy for the three comparable Beaux-Arts restorations within three hundred miles that came in at or under budget, principle for the Secretary of the Interior standards, and a careful, disciplined testimony—from Henrietta Burkhalter-Dlamini, the retired county historian, not from Anwuli’s grandfather. She does not include her grandfather’s photograph. The emotional weight stays on the building, not on her.

Day seven (Section 6.4, Paraphrase and Summary versus Plagiarism). She cites Theron’s 2019 paper correctly in the methodology section, using Chicago notes-bibliography because the proposal already draws on archival sources. Full attribution. Full title. The phrase “released without copyright” inside the citation, because that matters to a procurement officer who will wonder why she didn’t license it. She does not mention Stanwick in the proposal. Not a footnote, not a remark, not an implication. She writes her methodology so thoroughly from the original 2019 framework that anyone who reads both documents side-by-side will see the difference between a writer who understands the framework and a writer who patch-wrote from it. That’s Option Four—the one she hadn’t seen yet. Let the proposals speak.

Day eight. She calls Theron and tells him about the patch writing. He listens. He’s quiet for a long time. Then he says, “The framework was meant to move freely. If they used it, they used it. You write a cleaner proposal than they did, and Volkov-Sastre will do the rest of our work for us.” He pauses. “Thank you for not making it about us.”

Day nine. Anwuli walks the final seventy-two-page proposal into the Huxley County procurement office at 3:40 p.m., twenty minutes before the 4:00 p.m. deadline. She hands it to Dr. Ilario Volkov-Sastre personally. He weighs it in his hand, which is a habit of his. He says, “Shorter than Stanwick’s.” She says, “Yes, sir. The argument’s on page one.”

Three weeks later, the Huxley County Commission votes five-to-two to award the restoration contract to Bellweather & Associates. Volkov-Sastre’s procurement analysis—widely circulated in the trade—notes that Bellweather’s proposal “demonstrates mastery of the 2019 condition-assessment framework in a way that the competing submission, which cites the same framework as proprietary methodology, does not.” Two months after that, Calista Rennfield is quietly reassigned off historic preservation bids at Stanwick Continental. Anwuli doesn’t celebrate that part. She files it under “unintended consequences of writing clearly.”

The Huxley ceremonial courtroom reopens to the public in June of the following year. Henrietta Burkhalter-Dlamini cuts the ribbon. The oak paneling is restored. The leaded-glass oculus is reset. The scorch marks on the east wall are preserved, unrestored, as a deliberate memorial to the 2024 fire. Anwuli stands at the back of the room and thinks—not for the first time, but for the first time with conviction—that she picked the right profession.

Case Discussion Questions

  1. Anwuli rejected Option Two (the insinuating footnote) after running it through Johannesen’s eleven points. Do you agree with her analysis? Is there any version of Option Two that would pass the Johannesen check?
  2. Ghost-outline Anwuli’s final seventy-two-page proposal based on the description in days two through seven. Which organizing principle from Table 6.1 is she actually using? Would a different principle have worked equally well—or better?
  3. Anwuli keeps her grandfather’s photograph off the proposal even though it carries genuine emotional weight. Is this the right call, or is she over-correcting against a legitimate pathos appeal? Defend your answer using the discussion of appealing to emotions in section 6.3.
  4. Was Theron right to release his 2019 framework without copyright, and does the Stanwick patch writing change your answer? Is there an ethical difference between “released without copyright” and “public domain,” and if so, does that difference matter here?
  5. Apply the Toulmin model to Option Four (let the proposals speak side by side). What is Anwuli’s implicit claim to Volkov-Sastre? What is the data? What is the warrant—the unspoken bridge she’s asking him to cross? Why does she trust him to cross it without being told?
  6. Imagine you are Dr. Ilario Volkov-Sastre, reading both proposals on the same weekend. Walk through, paragraph by paragraph, how you would notice the gap between Bellweather’s mastery of the 2019 framework and Stanwick’s patch-written version. What specific organizational, stylistic, or argumentative features would tip you off?

End-of-Chapter Review Questions

Review Questions

  1. List the six elements every document should cover (the who/what/when/where/how/why framework) and explain why “why” is marked “sometimes.”
  2. Define ethos, logos, and pathos, and give one sentence describing how each one shows up in a business document.
  3. Name the five principles Steven and Susan Beebe recommend for thesis statements.
  4. Which organizing principle from Table 6.1 would you use to argue that a new policy solved a long-standing problem? Why?
  5. What is the difference between the topic sentence, body sentences, and the conclusion sentence in a paragraph?
  6. Identify the four basic sentence types (declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory) and which two dominate business writing.
  7. What are the three positions of emphasis inside a sentence, in order from strongest to weakest?
  8. When is passive voice the better choice in business writing? Give two specific situations.
  9. State the three elements of Toulmin’s rhetorical strategy and explain the function of the warrant in your own words.
  10. List the seven GASCAP/T argument strategies by letter and give one example of each from a context other than the chapter examples.
  11. Define “patch writing” and explain why it qualifies as plagiarism even when no single sentence is copied verbatim.
  12. What question should you ask about your audience before choosing a citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago) for a business document?

Key Terms Matching

Match each numbered term with its lettered definition. Answer key appears at the end of the exercise.

  1. Thesis statement
  2. Ethos
  3. Logos
  4. Pathos
  5. Topic sentence
  6. Transition
  7. Signpost
  8. Internal preview
  9. Active voice
  10. Passive voice
  11. Direct pattern opening
  12. Toulmin warrant
  13. GASCAP/T
  14. Ad hominem fallacy
  15. Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy
  16. Straw man fallacy
  17. Paraphrase
  18. Summary
  19. Patch writing

Definitions:

  1. The subject is the doer of the action; produces shorter, more precise sentences.
  2. Cutting and pasting snippets from other sources into your writing without crediting them, even with minor word changes; a form of plagiarism.
  3. A short, specific, pointed declarative sentence expressing your document’s central idea.
  4. The writer’s credibility, demonstrated through sources cited and authority on the topic.
  5. The logic of your argument, showing how the pieces connect.
  6. The passion, enthusiasm, and emotional dimension of your document.
  7. The first sentence of a paragraph, stating its main idea or purpose.
  8. Rewriting information in your own words while still giving credit to the original source.
  9. A word or visual cue that helps readers follow your ideas and move from one point to the next.
  10. A transitional phrase that alerts the audience you are moving from one topic to the next, like a road sign.
  11. A brief statement referring to a point you are about to make; forecasts a main point.
  12. An opening strategy that states the main purpose up front, leaving little room for confusion.
  13. The subject receives the action; useful for diplomatic phrasing or downplaying the doer.
  14. Toulmin’s connective element that explains why the data supports the claim for a specific reader.
  15. The seven-letter mnemonic for Generalization, Analogy, Sign, Consequence, Authority, Principle, and Testimony arguments.
  16. An argument against the person making the argument rather than against the argument itself.
  17. The “after this, therefore because of this” fallacy; confuses sequence with causation.
  18. Setting up a weak version of an opponent’s argument so you can easily knock it down.
  19. Reducing a concept, idea, or data set to its most basic point, with care to preserve original context.

Answer key: 1-C, 2-D, 3-E, 4-F, 5-G, 6-I, 7-J, 8-K, 9-A, 10-M, 11-L, 12-N, 13-O, 14-P, 15-Q, 16-R, 17-H, 18-S, 19-B

Application Exercises

Exercise 1: The Thesis Rescue

Find a document longer than one page that you wrote in the past six months—an email, a project update, a cover letter, a memo. Read only the first paragraph. If your thesis—your central idea—is not contained in a single clear sentence in that paragraph, your document is burying its thesis. Rewrite the opening so the thesis sits in the first sentence. Do not rewrite anything else. Bring both versions to class and discuss which one a busy reader would actually read.

Exercise 2: The Toulmin Audit

Choose one of the following as an argument you must make in writing: (a) your employer should adopt a four-day workweek, (b) a specific academic program should be saved from budget cuts, (c) a nonprofit you care about should receive a $50,000 grant. Draft a one-page argument. Then take a colored pen and underline your claim in one color, your data in a second color, and your warrant in a third color. If you cannot find a warrant for any major claim, write one. Submit both the original and the annotated version.

Exercise 3: The Patch-Writing Forensic

Your instructor will provide a short source passage (or use any three-paragraph passage from this chapter). Without looking at the original, write a paraphrase. Now write a patch-written version—the kind of “synonym swap” that a hurried student might produce. Finally, write an honest paraphrase using the out-loud test: explain the passage to a partner, then write what you just said. Compare all three. Write a short reflection on what makes the honest paraphrase different from the patch-written one, even when both “cover the same points.”

Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions

  1. Anwuli’s draft was paralyzed by what she called her “inner voice” telling her that a clear, direct opening sounded “amateur.” Where does that voice come from? Have you experienced it in your own writing? How do you work against it without becoming sloppy or overconfident?
  2. Theron tells Anwuli that “knowledge like this should move freely” and releases his 2019 framework without copyright. Stanwick then patch-writes from it. Is Theron’s position on intellectual property vindicated by Anwuli’s eventual win, or undermined by Stanwick’s appropriation? What does this say about the relationship between open knowledge and professional ethics?
  3. The chapter argues that audiences expect different writing styles (formal, informal, bureaucratic, conversational) and that a skilled writer adapts. Is there a point at which adapting to an audience crosses into inauthenticity? How do you tell the difference?

Extended Project: The Proposal Triple-Pass

Extended Project

The task: Draft a 1,500–2,000 word proposal arguing for a specific, realistic change at your school, workplace, or community organization. You pick the topic—a new policy, a budget reallocation, a program launch, a building renovation. The proposal should be directed at a specific decision-maker you can name (real or hypothetical, but with a clear role and level of expertise).

Triple-pass structure. Submit three versions of the proposal, drafted in this order:

  1. Pass one — organization. Write a complete draft. Then ghost-outline it using the technique from Section 6.1. Identify your organizing principle from Table 6.1 and justify it in a one-paragraph memo attached to the draft.
  2. Pass two — style. Revise pass one using the read-aloud bureaucracy check. Delete every bureaucratic phrase that trips your tongue. Convert at least three passive-voice sentences to active voice. Attach a one-paragraph reflection on which changes improved clarity and which changes cost you something (nuance, diplomacy, formality) you had to add back differently.
  3. Pass three — argument and attribution. Revise pass two for argument clarity. Apply Toulmin to your three strongest claims: make each warrant explicit in the text. Identify which two of the seven GASCAP/T strategies you’re leaning on most. Cite every external source using an appropriate format for your audience, and include a one-paragraph rationale for your citation style choice.

Deliverables: all three drafts, the ghost outline from pass one, and the three attached reflections. Total length of reflections: roughly one page. The point is not volume—it’s the visible trail of how your draft improved at each pass.

6.5 Additional Resources

Read an informative article about outlines and get a sample outline template. http://www.essaywritinghelp.com/outline.htm

This Writing Tutorials site from John Jay College of Criminal Justice offers a menu of tools for composing a thesis statement, an outline, well-constructed paragraphs, and more. http://resources.jjay.cuny.edu/erc/writing/index.php.

This RefDesk.com page offers a compendium of different resources for English grammar and usage. http://www.refdesk.com/factgram.html

Read an article on avoiding bureaucratic language by marketing strategist David Meerman Scott. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=14538&ContextSubtypeID=12

Garbl’s Wordy Phrases presents a list of bureaucratic phrases to avoid and their standard English alternatives. https://www.garblwriting.com/stylemanual/phrases.htm

Read about logic in argumentative writing on Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL). https://owl.purdue.edu/

Read about arguments and critical thinking on the Excelsior University’s OWL. https://owl.excelsior.edu/argument-and-critical-thinking/

The College Board website provides a robust guide for how to avoid plagiarism. http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/college-success/10314.html

Explore the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN), the U.S. federal government’s clearinghouse for plain-language writing guidance. https://www.plainlanguage.gov/

Review Hemingway Editor’s free web tool, which highlights passive voice, long sentences, and complex phrases in a draft. https://hemingwayapp.com/

Self-Assessment: Looping Back

Self-Assessment

Return to the four questions you answered in the Before You Read diagnostic at the start of the chapter. Reread your original answers without editing them. Then answer the same four questions again, in light of what you’ve learned:

  1. When you write something important, where does your thesis usually land—in the first paragraph, somewhere in the middle, or at the end? Why? (Has your answer changed after reading about direct openings and the “burying your thesis” common mistake?)
  2. Describe your default writing “voice” in three words. Is it the voice you want, or the voice you fall into when you’re tired and rushed? (After the Voice Inventory reflection write and the formal-versus-informal discussion, what three words would you pick now?)
  3. When you argue for something in writing, do you lead with evidence, with emotion, with authority, or with story? What makes that your default? (Which of the seven GASCAP/T strategies did you discover you lean on hardest? Which one would you benefit from practicing more deliberately?)
  4. If you found a paragraph that said exactly what you meant—better than you could say it yourself—how would you use it in your own document? (Given what you now know about patch writing, honest paraphrase, and citation formats, would your answer be different from the one you wrote at the start of the chapter?)

Write a one-paragraph reflection on the single biggest gap between your before-answers and your after-answers. That gap is what this chapter was for.

  1. Strunk, W., Jr., & White, E. B. (1979). The elements of style (3rd ed.). Macmillian. ↵
  2. S. [Steven], & Beebe, S. [Susan]. (1997). Public speaking: An audience-centered approach (3rd ed., pp. 121–122). Allyn & Bacon. ↵
  3. Bailey, E. P. (2008). Plain English at work: A guide to business writing and speaking. McGraw-Hill. ↵
  4. McLean, S. (2003). The basics of speech communication. Allyn & Bacon. ↵
  5. Toulmin, S. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge University Press. ↵
  6. Fulkerson, R. (1996). The Toulmin model of argument and the teaching of composition. In E. Barbara, P. Resch, & D. Tenney (Eds.), Argument revisited: argument redefined: negotiating meaning the composition classroom (pp. 45–72). Sage. ↵
  7. Johannesen, R. (1996). Ethics in human communication (4th ed.). Waveland Press. ↵

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