The Random House Guide to Business Writing [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE STUDENT In preparing The Random House Guide to Business Writing, we talked to a number of successful business writers. Many indicated to us that they have found their business careers to be limited only by the number of people they can influence. Mastering writing and speaking skills will enable you to present yourself persuasively to those people who are important to your career. Our goal for The Random House Guide to Business Writing is to teach you the skills to handle all of your business writing assignments successfully, both in the classroom and on the job. We take a process approach to writing in this text because such an approach demonstrates not only what good writing is, but also how it is produced. In the introductory chapters as well as in the chapters on memos, letters, and reports, you will see how business people engage in seven activities as they write their business communications: (1) setting the goal of the business communication, (2) assessing the reader, (3) gathering information and generating ideas, (4) organizing, (5) writing a draft, (6) revising, and (7) editing and proofreading. Later chapters also use the process approach to teach you the related communication skills of making oral presentations, using visual aids, conducting the job search, and using computers. In an effort to be completely up-to-date on how business writing is being done in the 1980s and 1990s, we have consulted numerous business people who work in diverse industries, functional areas, and parts of the country. From these discussions and from reviews of portfolios, we found that business people are confronted with challenging communication problems that draw on sophisticated communication skills. We have used their experiences to demonstrate the dynamic process of writing. For example, you will see how the manager of a travel agency uses a report to persuade her boss, who is afraid of computers, to invest several thousand dollars in computer equipment. You will also find a personnel manager using a memo to finally settle a long-simmering office feud between smokers and nonsmokers. And you will see how a director of corporate communications writes a public letter intended to reassure an entire town that is concerned about a chemical leak that the corporation has in fact safely contained. The business writers whose work appears in this book are either the people we have observed and interviewed or they are composite portraits of several of these people. All demonstrate how essential communication skills are to success in business. The experiences of these business writers will give you an idea of the business situations you may encounter during your career, the purposes for which you may have to write, and the roles you may have to play as you deal competently—and even imaginatively—with communication problems. The exercises at the end of each chapter put you in the shoes of similar business people as they help you to apply to specific writing tasks the principles you have studied in the chapter. Checklists provided throughout the chapters provide clear summaries of these principles as you progress.