Informational Report First Draft

Writing in Business

            Writing is important in any field of work that you plan to do, and is unique to each profession and career, whether it is biology, engineering, or in this case, business. There are many different careers a business person can have with many different types of writing involved, but most business writing all share one thing; they are very precise and do the point without much extra “beautiful writing”. Writing in business is not to entertain, but to get the point across as effectively and quickly as possible.

            To help further my understanding of writing in the business field, I interviewed the assistant vice president of deposit operations at a bank.  The main things she has to write are levies, garnishments, and denied deposit slips. The frequency depends on when these things are needed, it could be daily, or biweekly. Levies and garnishments are written to customers who owe money to the state but wont pay, so she has to write to them to inform them their assets are frozen and being paid to the state. She writes denied deposit slips when a check that a customer tried to deposit bounced. All of these things are formal writing that are done and must be professional. Some informal writing she does are emails to coworkers, or notes taken during meetings. One example she gave me was taking notes at a meeting about a new banking app where checks could be deposited with a picture, and she wrote down notes on the directions and how to use the app.

           

            To get a broader range of information on the subject I also interviewed my Economics professor. As a college professor, most of his writing now a days is informal, such as notes, lessons plans, power points, or emails to other professors or his students. At one point he did work for the government as an economic advisor, and in this position formal writing was very important to his profession. One of the most important formal writings to his position were business letters he would have to write to present ideas or contact other professionals in the field.  According to him this wasn’t a type of writing that was done daily, but whenever it was needed, usually weekly. The informal writing usually occurs at least once a day now as a professor because of all the things he has to deal with.

            All business professionals write multiple different types of writing, some more formal than others. All types of writings are part of the job, notes, or even articles written for newspapers or magazines. These are all considered informal forms of writing and wouldn’t be used to conduct formal business. For instance, a Business professor at the University of Michigan by the name of Justin Wolfers has written an article that was published in the New York Times. This article is written to share information but also is more opinionated than most of the formal writing this is done in business. “That is, so far all of the gains of the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent. By contrast, this group suffered only one-third of the income declines during the preceding recession.” (Wolfers 2015) The language of the piece is written to where the reader does not have to be extremely educated in the field to comprehend the information. Another example of this is from another article written for the New York Times by author Tabuchi (2015), “McDonald’s announced on Wednesday that its chief executive would step down, just days after the fast-food restaurant chain posted one of its worst financial performances in years.” This is a quote from a business article explaining the financial side of McDonald’s changes in positions to people that may not be very educated in the field, is relatively short in length, and is easily understood. 

In contrast to an article produced in a newspaper, there is more formal writing done which can require a lot of knowledge on the subject to understand. For example, this quote taken from a business journal, “Where: y - (yi,y2, - ,yp) is a (p * 1) vector of several indicator variables. À is the vector of regression coefficients, and [varepsilon]' is a (p * 1) vector of white noise disturbances.” (Vo, Duc Hong; Ly, Thinh Hung 2014, p.139-148) Without prior business knowledge and extensive education in the field, this will make very little sense to someone. The length in the pieces are also very different, with the article in the New York times being a few paragraphs and the article in the business journal having multiple sub heading and being four or five times as long. Here is another example from an article in a scholarly journal written by Leonidour and Barnes (2010), “In light of the above, the purpose of this study is a comprehensive assessment of all international marketing articles published in the leading mainstream marketing journals during the period 1975-2004[4].” This article was written with extensive research and time and is very lengthy to provide an in depth analysis to the study there are conducting, unlike the non-academic newspaper articles that were written to give the general business interested public some background information.

            Just like every career or profession in this world, there are certain things that make business writing unique. There are many different types of writing that can be used in the business world that all serve different purposes. Even in a business, different positions will have to write different things than someone in a different position than them. One thing most business writings all have in common though, is that they are usually short, and to the point.