Quick & Painless Business Writing: An Essential Guide to Clear and Powerful Communication

Want to send an e-mail your boss will open right away? Need a knock-out proposal to seal a deal? Want to create a Web site that no customer can resist? Quick & Painless Business Writing will show you how. Yes, you can improve your writing without memorizing endless rules, perusing checklists of do's and don'ts, or revisiting the lessons of high school. Quick & Painless Business Writing reveals secrets that will eliminate business-writing phobias and faux pas and help you create outstanding documents that get optimal results. First, you'll learn that grammar is not a collection of stagnant rules you'd better follow (or else), but an ever-changing set of principles with plenty of choices. Then you'll discover secrets about writing your English teachers never told you: the secret power of nouns, the destructive force of innocent-seeming verbs, and the way sentence structure can elicit certain responses.

You'll happily replace what you learned about "structure" with an altogether new understanding of how to open, develop, and close your messages. Even better, you'll learn how to build a cohesive message quickly, with little need for rewriting. But business writing cannot live on words alone. That's why this book explores the review process--whether your reviewer is an in-house editor, a client, a boss, or even a spouse--and help you learn strategic ways to approach and manage them. With this information, you'll do more than write well. You'll be able to craft strategic messages that get the right response from your reader, whether you want a colleague to send important information now or a customer to say "yes" to your proposal. Have to address a difficult situation? Confront a co-worker? Defend yourself to your boss? Give a bad employee bad news? This book will show you how to do that and more--quickly and painlessly.

Susan F. Benjamin, a former college professor, has taught more than 100,000 professionals the secrets of business writing during the last 15 years. She has appeared on CNN-FN, NPR affiliates and other broadcasts, and participated in the White House initiative on plain language. Her articles, research findings, and opinion pieces on communications regularly appear in national publications. She lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.