Business Communication Academy

Tracked document changes belong in one of the many circles of hell, do they not? Especially when more than one other person is involved. All writing has its own integrity by default. When there are comments, opinions and inputs from too many people (that's three or more, by the way) what you have written becomes alphabet soup and that is a truly horrible thing on many levels. Document commentators rarely, if ever, focus on or make a document better. They tend, instead, to pontificate and posture. Usually their aim is to make sure that their comments are seen in a good light by the boss who asked for feedback. Improvement is rarely the intention. It is easy to comment on the work of others, technology makes it so. This brings its own danger because it takes the commentator too close for comfort to the mythical subject of this quote: ‘Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.’ Even those rare comments which are properly thought through and are apparently helpful, will damage coherence and change the ethos of an original work. The quickest way to muddy clear writing is to allow groups to comment on and change it. Guard your writing fiercely. Be as a tiger cub’s Mum with every one of your words. Fight off threats to their safety with every tooth and claw at your disposal. Business Writing Academy https://lnkd.in/ecPkPXBU

In Denmark the bacon is delicious, the local beer is tasty, and people are friendly and happy. In the World Happiness Score, Denmark came second behind Finland. The UK is ranked 20th, down one place from the previous year. Yes taxes are relatively high, yet they return great social value and wide choices to all Danish citizens. For example, rather than political parties using education as a political weapon with which to attack each other, the state subsidises private schools through a voucher system. Private schools receive 75% of what it would cost the State to educate each child. Why? Because the country saves tax income when parents send their children to these schools. This system makes it possible for the children of less wealthy parents to go private too. Choice delivered, the people are happy, the state is relaxed and no party political bludgeoning is required. https://lnkd.in/ee_kzNGt

If English writing causes you stress, please relax. BWA has all the tips you need to feel more confident. #grammar #businesswriting #englishlanguage

Chatting with a post-grad at Henley Business School whose specialist subject is Corporate Governance, he told me why minute-taking is now such a big deal. Investigations and inquiries into corporate and institutional wrong-doing (Post Office now, infected blood scandal in the 1970s and 80s, financial crash 2007/2008, water companies today, spring to mind) all hinge on ‘who said what to whom’ in crucial meetings. Meeting minutes which record decisions only, and leave out the discussions around them, leave people who disagreed and made objections at reputational and, in some cases legal, risk. Office juniors, interns and work experience people are there to learn. To make them take on a task of such importance to the organisation, that more senior people regard as a tedious chore, is probably foolish and potentially damaging.

The bill for a business lunch is irrelevant compared to its benefits. From my earliest days as a journalist I knew instinctively, and from personal experience, that press conferences rarely delivered worthwhile news and, anyway, everyone had the same story. Lunch with a contact or source, however, always and invariably did. And it was a story, moreover, that my rivals generally did not have and would not get, because they weren’t there. Newspapers and magazines where the offices emptied for two hours or so every day from noon onwards, produced and published significantly better content than those where sandwiches were consumed desk-side and press releases were seen as the be-all and end-all of news reporting. Lunch, as broadcaster James Max puts it: “Is simply a great way to get to know people better, explore new ideas and win new business.” In the final 20 years of the 20th Century, people were enthusiastically told to extend their contact books at the company’s expense. As the late, great Alan Coren (Father of Giles and Victoria) put it in Punch: “In Paris it was Doris, the fairest of the bunch; Down in his expenses she was petrol, oil and lunch.” The folks in Accounts killed that culture off because they were never invited. My proudest recommendation, from a former colleague, on LinkedIn, says: “He has taught me a great deal about our industry - especially the art of lunching like a true professional.” As important as being able to communicate in English, lunch is a fundamental constituent when it comes to building business relationships that endure and deliver. Never trust anyone who hasn’t got time for lunch.

Do traditional rules, as taught in schools, fit into the sort of writing required at work? On the one hand those rules apply broadly to all writing. On the other, so long as the people who read what you’ve written understand your drift, that you’ve broken a few doesn’t really matter. Or does it? If you have to explain what you’ve written then it does, because you’re effectively doing the same job twice. And have probably lost the attention of some or many of your readers. I recommend to think of writing as you do of thinking, your thoughts in effect, expressed on a screen or paper. The end result is that your thinking has been slowed down by the keystrokes your brain and fingers have chosen. Because your synapses have worked at a slower pace you will see, and your readers will see, how elegantly you have processed information into something compelling on which you have had to focus and concentrate. Lose that focus, stop concentrating, and your writing is instantly incomprehensible. Retain it though, and in a short time your writing will become a source of pride and joy. Business Writing Academy https://lnkd.in/e6JHVmqy

If you struggle with writing, from getting started to editing your own copy when you think you’re done, you’re not alone; may I please help you? Business writing, fiction writing, diary writing, social post writing, email writing; all use the same 26 letters in the alphabet, plus a few punctuation marks, and the same principles. So long as people understand what you write, your task is complete. Business Writing Academy’s modules will help you to achieve that clarity. The modules offer a stress-free path to help you communicate effectively in writing and get better results than you thought possible. There are two versions of the course: Full and Lite, both with the same content. The difference is that the Full version includes assignments with teacher feedback. Both can be bundled, with a discount, to meet your specific needs. Do please get in touch to solve any writing problems you may have. Business Writing Academy https://lnkd.in/et-saNjz

A training group I'm in was individually challenged in a funding meeting to write down accurately and in as few words as we could: who I am, what I do, what is my purpose and to define your metier. We each had five minutes. For me the hardest point was the fourth on the list: to define my metier which I understand to be a personal synthesis of the first three points. It was hard. There was so much that I wanted to write, and so little time to meet the objective. The aim of the exercise was to strike, laser-like, into the imagination and memory of an investor by whom each one of us in the meeting wished to be remembered. Good exercise. Now, with no pressure, try it with people you know.

Just claimed by AI start-up Anthropic about its new chatbot Opus: “It exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks, leading the frontier of general intelligence.” Allegedly it outperforms GPT-4 (Open AI) and Google’s Gemini in undergraduate and graduate thinking, maths, and common knowledge assignments. Now there’s a wild and unverifiable statement. Its ability to respond accurately and helpfully to bank and utility company customers wasn’t mentioned. But then, being helpful may not be the game plan. In a year when there are a number of important elections, AI is being used continually to craft and communicate fake images on top of fake news. Much more than it is providing help for normal people to get service from companies that exist to, ostensibly anyway, serve rather than defraud them. The farce which was the Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow, marketed and scripted by deceptive communications written and created by AI, is both a mere trifle and a case in point, compared to what the tech could do to us all this year. https://lnkd.in/eNYrkTg6 What is the game plan if being helpful is not it? Surely it involves more than unregulated profit and power grabs?

AI is less ‘intelligent’ than the unknown techies who programme the diverse algorithms behind the experience. Not being human, AI has no common sense (or sense of humour), the capability to understand nuances that are characteristic of human behaviour. Because it is limited by the data it has been trained to search, logically we know that AI cannot be trusted to be unbiased. From that we might deduce that the humans who programmed it cannot be wholly trusted either. It’s down to us, normal humans with common sense (and humour), to work out what is true and what is not and we are, as history makes clear, not that good at this. As a species we are remarkably easy to fool by people who use noise, shiny fake things, fear and magic beans to do just that. Sloppy journalism makes claims for AI that do not stand up; this article in Entrepreneur by Roy Dekel illuminates. https://shorturl.at/boBC7 The incentive behind Business Writing Academy is that each category of writing – broadly these are academic, business, fiction and non-fiction, and journalism – is better when writers, whether of a one line post on LinkedIn to a 125,000 word book, are clear and honest. Unless readers are able to understand what a writer is trying to communicate, we might as well leave the writing to machines and their programmers.