Business Writing for Technical People

AFTERWORD

Business writing has a lot in common with coding or scripting: it can seem pretty frightening to the uninitiated; it can usually benefit from being optimised; and the people who do it for a living sometimes make it seem a lot more difficult than it actually is. But whether it’s writing corporate copy or crafting computer code, the process is actually really very simple.

First, you identify the objective that you want to achieve.

Second, you create the words or code necessary to achieve that objective.

Third, you optimise and test what you’ve created to ensure it does what you want efficiently, effectively and with no alarms and no surprises.

As the poet Matthew Arnold wrote in the late nineteenth century (McPherson Shilling and Fuller, ...