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One of the key purposes of business writing is to write in a way that reinforces your brand. It’s also one of the main areas where much business writing often fails. If your brand is about dynamism, energy and modern thinking, your writing needs to support that. So that means using appropriate language, tone and structure.

We were recently working on a recruitment brochure for a major professional services firm. Being a recruitment brochure, the firm wanted to suggest energy, innovation, friendliness and approachability. But one of the main contributors insisted on using words like hence, thus and amongst. Fine words in themselves, but ones that jarred with the firm’s branding message.

Words like hence, thus, amongst and whilst, have a whiff of old-fashioned formality, of stuffiness and of, well, naffness. It’s one of the reasons why most newspapers rarely use them, preferring while to whilst, among to amongst, and just avoiding hence and thus altogether.

You should do the same. Unless, of course, you’re deliberately looking to suggest old-fashioned fustiness and 1950s propriety. In which case, good luck.

No,  not a comment on the weather, but one of the main considerations for anyone trying to tighten up their writing. Good writing is all about clarity – getting your message across clearly and concisely. But in the wrong hands, words can often cloud, rather than clarify, the intended message.

Have a read of what Julian Critchlow had to say in a recent letter to The Times:

Sue Whiting, a “retired special educational needs co-ordinator”, asserts in her letter (Oct 10) that “there are likely to be 20 per cent of children in any classroom with specific learning differences”.

My initial reaction on reading this was that, surely, all the children would have learning differences: that is the human condition. However, on closer analysis I deduced that what was stated was not what was actually meant. Surely Ms Whiting’s unadorned meaning was that 20 per cent of the children would, for one reason or another, have learning difficulties.

…

Orwellian usage of this kind debases the language as a tool for expression. It leads, at best, to lack of clarity and, at worst, it is downright misleading and stifles legitimate debate. It needs to be rooted out.

Julian Critchlow, Savage Club, SW1

Hear, hear for Mr Critchlow. It’s not always easy to be honest in your writing. But if you can manage it, you’ll usually be rewarded with better understanding and more engagement from your readers.

Isn’t the web great? There are all sorts of great writing tips out there. I came across this excellent – and funny – article about writing for the web. It cocks a bit of a snoop at some of the web-writing theories about how people read online.

My view is that while there is some value in the readability research and techniques espoused by the likes of web-writing guru Jakob Nielsen, they are not the only consideration when you’re writing for the web.

What a lot of these techniques seem to overlook is the fact that the best way to keep people reading is to make it interesting. If you can do that, you’re three-quarters of the way there.

If they’d done all this kind of readability research when they were inventing books, we’d all be reading large print Mills & Boon picture books, full of one sentence paragraphs, sub-heads and bullet lists.

Some of the most effective tools for clearer business writing are so obvious we tend to overlook them. Take bullet points, the unsung heroes of the print world.

Bullets work because they:

• Add structure and organisation to your writing
• Provide multiple entry points in to the text
• Help simplify information
• Emphasise key points
• Improve comprehension

How to use bullets:

• Begin with a header/title followed by a colon (as above)
• Make sure that text and bullets are properly aligned
• Try to apply some sort of logical order, perhaps based on the alphabet, chronology or priority.

But watch out for these common bullet mistakes:

* Having too many of them: bullets should be used for emphasis, but if you emphasise too much, the emphasis is lost.

* Using different colours or fonts: the strongest colour is always black. Simplicity makes for clarity.

* Avoid non-parallel construction: bullet points still need to make grammatical sense and fit into the context of the paragraph. You’ll notice that the first two items in this list begin with a present participle ending in -ing. The third item (this one) doesn’t, and as a result it jars. It would have been better to start with ‘avoiding’ rather than ‘avoid’.

Bullets aren’t the answer to every writing problem, but they are a useful structural device to make your writing clearer, more readable and give key points greater impact.