Writing for Business Success/Effective business writing/Video signpost Tebbutt

Media

View video – David Tebbutt and Alison O’Leary: Business Writing Skills. [23:36 min.] In this video, O’Leary, a public relations specialist, interviews Tebbutt, a journalist, on effective business writing skills in various print and social media contexts. Beyond the basics of knowing your subject and audience, and conveying authentic interest in your message, Tebbutt observes that social media messages usually need to be more concise and have search engine friendly headlines. He advises how to capture and hold audience interest in any text by clarity in sentence and paragraph structure, and overall flow of message, noting the usefulness of the journalistic inverted pyramid writing structure. Tebbutt also describes common writing slip-ups in language usage, and offers practical suggestions on how to carry out the writing process from getting started to polishing your final revision. As you view this video, what would you say are your own business writing strengths and challenges? What interviewing techniques shown in this video might you adapt to learn more about your own audiences? Record your responses in your learning journal.

Business Writing Skills

Task

Explore Internet learning resource - Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). This resource has a rich assortment of writing resources, which includes information on the mechanics of writing, and the journalistic structure Tebbutt discusses, as well as a wide range of other subject-specific writing guidelines and citation formats.