ABSTRACT
Many books on business writing start by offering advice on the most appropriate business style. For example, Albert Joseph’s book, Put It In Writing!, which described itself as ‘the most widely used writing course in the English-speaking world’, starts by emphasising that good business writers should write so that readers receive a clear and accurate impression of the writer’s message. It then moves on immediately to five principles of clear writing, where principle one is ‘to prefer clear, familiar words’ (Joseph, 1998, p. 12). We comment on principles like this in the next chapter but we think that all writers need to start by taking a step back to reflect on their approach to writing and the way they organise information. This will also raise questions about what sort of document is needed and we focus on that in Chapter 8.
