Are you interested in honing your business writing skills and climbing career ladders? Learn more about the importance of business writing, how you can use it in various career paths, and the investment involved in taking classes to improve your skills.
Key Insights
- Business writing is a specialized form of communication used within and outside an organization, focusing on concision and clarity.
- Proficiency in business writing is invaluable in today's commercial landscape, with applications in emails, business letters, memoranda, reports, and proposals.
- Improving business writing skills can enhance your overall writing quality, leading to more effective communication in all areas of life, including social media and personal correspondence.
- Business writing classes, usually lasting one or two days, typically cost around $300 to $400, with cheaper and more expensive options available.
- Free introductory business writing courses such as those offered by Udemy and Coursera can provide a good starting point for interested learners.
- Noble Desktop offers a comprehensive Business Writing Bootcamp, with hands-on curriculum, small class sizes, and a free retake option to reinforce learning.
Do you want to become a better business writer? There are free training options out there, but if you’re serious about it, you’re eventually going to conclude that you’ll need an actual class to get your skills where you want them to be. A class will involve an investment, and some are more affordable than others. The good news is that even the more expensive classes aren’t going to cost both an arm and a leg. While business writing is sometimes labeled a “soft skill, ” it’s still one that’s vitally important to your success and one that you can use pretty much anywhere in the business world. A business writing class is, in other words, an excellent investment.
What is Business Writing?
Business writing is a specialized style of communication, both internal (within your company) and external (with clients). It’s a very different discipline than academic writing (let alone any other writing in which personal style is paramount), substantially limited in the creativity department, and designed to make practical points as quickly and straightforwardly as possible.
Business writing today depends most on concision and clarity. Learning to express oneself within those confines is an invaluable workplace skill, given that email has become the preferred inter-office communication method. There’s no office worker who doesn’t need to read and write emails; a study quoted by GreggU calculated that the average businessperson has to deal with a whopping average of 80 emails daily. And that’s just email: there are business letters, memoranda, reports, and proposals that all need to be written in business language as well.
Read more about what business writing is and why you should learn it.
What Can You Do with Business Writing?
Business writing is, in today’s commercial landscape, inescapable. Consider its most frequently encountered application: email. A generation ago, people made internal calls for quick inter-office communication. They used to have secretaries who would return calls at the recipient’s convenience. Today, those calls have all but been replaced by internal email. Whether or not you perceive that as faster or slower, it’s an inevitable fact of life. Suddenly, people must be able to write in the language of business.
Above and beyond, emails, memoranda, reports, and client proposals all call for business writing that can impress the recipient. Little can make you look better today than being able to write well in the idiom of commerce. Learning how to write a good piece of business English has several other advantages. It will teach you how to organize your thoughts, which, in turn, will help you when it comes to oral presentations. You’ll also become a better writer in general: your social media posts will improve in quality and accuracy, and who knows? You may even be able to write a convincing love letter that will capture the person of your dreams.
In-Depth Review of the Training Cost
The most effective (and, in the long run, cost-effective) way of learning business writing is by attending a live class, which can mean either in-person in a brick-and-mortar school or online. These classes generally last one or two days and carry comparable price tags in the $300 to $400 range, though there are some more pricey outliers.
Although they lack the human contact with a teacher who makes live classes so effective a teaching method, there is the more economical option of an asynchronous (self-paced or on-demand) class usually costs more in the neighborhood of $100. However, there are outliers on both sides of the scale. For instance, if you can catch Udemy while a sale is on, they have classes for as little as $15.99.
The only associated cost (besides paper and pencils for taking notes) with a business writing course is having a computer armed with word processing software and email access. An advantage of taking a live class in an in-person computer lab is that all the necessary and up-to-date hardware and software will be available. Of course, if you’re going to attend an in-person class, you’re also going to have to factor in the cost of commuting to the class, although that’s probably not going to be too high for journeys you’re only going to have to make once or twice. If you intend to take a class online (be it synchronous or asynchronous), you’ll also need a stable internet connection in the place from which you intend to follow the class.
Free Introductory Business Writing Course Online
If you’re on the verge of taking a business writing class but aren’t quite sure, consider a free online course. You can’t complain about the price, and you have nothing to lose. Udemy, for example, offers a free “Better Business Writing in 35 Minutes” video designed to improve your skills quickly (and to tempt you to take one of Udemy’s more in-depth paid classes). Coursera offers a free audit-type option for its writing classes as well.
Those are only the tip of the iceberg. Type “business writing” into the YouTube search box, and you’ll find a modest plethora of videos ranging in duration from a few minutes to an hour and a half. Some of these are better than others: with some, you get what you pay for; with others, you may gain practical advice that might prompt you to take a more structured class.
Read more about free business writing videos and online tutorials.
Learn Business Writing with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop
An excellent way to learn business writing is to take an in-person course such as those offered by Noble Desktop, a tech and IT school in New York City that offers in-person and online classes. Noble provides its students with expert and experienced instructors who are always ready to answer students’ questions, whether they’re posed in the physical classroom or online.
Noble Desktop’s classes offer several features, including small class sizes that guarantee you’ll receive ample attention from the instructor. The curriculum is hands-on, allowing you to make practical use of what you’re being taught through exercises that let your instructor monitor your progress. There is also a free retake option that enables you to repeat the class at no charge within a year of your first taking it. Far from being just a way for those who fell behind to catch up, the free retake option helps cement what you’ve learned in your mind.
Noble offers a Business Writing Bootcamp that begins by reviewing key points of grammar over which people are wont to stumble today. The course then delves into the hows and whys of written business communication in the contemporary world, be it for emails, reports, or other essential documents. And note that business writing is just one aspect of the business training classes offered by Noble Desktop.
Key Insights
- There is no shortage of free resources for learning business writing.
- Some of these are brief video tutorials; longer tutorials and free seminars are also available.
- Free print resources also exist for those who’d rather read the book than watch the teacher.
- Noble Desktop offers an in-depth Business Writing Bootcamp that culminates in a certificate that you may add to your resume and online profiles.