Model Business Letters, Emails and Other Business Documents, 7th Edition

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21st century business language

We’ve discussed the importance of getting your punctuation and apostrophes in the right place and understanding how to put a sentence together. However, it’s not going to make you an effective writer if you write like our great-grandfathers used to write. It might still get the job done (eventually) but using old-fashioned language will not help you stand out from the rest, and it will not help you to build relationships.

In the middle of the 20th century, business was conducted in a much more impassive, formal way than it is today. Face-to-face meetings were very formal and aloof. Similarly, the writing that evolved then became very formal, using long-winded, quite overbearing language. Writers used big ...