Effective business writing translates to better sales, greater credibility and increased trust.

Did you know, for example, that economising on words in a promotional SMS could increase response by thousands of percentage points?

Or that the use of one correct adjective on a tweet can trigger a million dollar sale?

Or even a well-spaced paragraph, which can significantly enhance the relationship between writer and reader.

And best of all, that it can be an advantage if you’re writing in English, but English is not your first language?

Coming very soon to this site: a course for all those who write in English for their business.

It’s simple.

It’s comprehensive; covering texts, emails, web copy, social media and SEO writing.

It’s more about discipline than actual writing talent.

And it’s a virtual certainty to pay for itself the first time you apply it.

A WORD (OR TWO) FROM JOHN SMEDDLE

I’ve spent the majority of my 35-year writing career in advertising as a copywriter. Despite winning over 200 awards (the ad industry loves patting itself on the back!) and working on almost every product and service category imaginable, I must state the most value I extracted from the experience was how to write with economy.

This discipline has led me to engage in a continuous study of ‘what makes people read’. Not the broader meaning of the word in terms of a reader’s interest in fiction, non-fiction or a particular subject matter, but rather what keeps a reader’s interest alive whilst digesting a commercial or corporate message. The Business Writing School offers some easy guidelines to understanding ‘what makes people read’. When I started it, I admit it was my life as a consumer, not just my calling as a writer, which was guiding me. Like all of us, I too was sick and tired of the thousands of uninvited commercial intrusions I was receiving daily. The sheer numbers meant that most of the messages offering something of value were being discarded. As a writer, this was unacceptable to me.  But what started as a simple training module on commercial SMS writing, has become a little bigger, exploiting all the experience I have gained as a commercial writer. Emails, web copy, social media and SEO writing have since joined the list, to become The Business Writing School.

You won’t find a lot of my advice in a textbook. But I think the reader threw the textbook out a long time ago.