Changing the Tone of Business Communication

A couple of generations ago, business writing was incredibly longwinded and heaped with endless, fawning formalities. The simplest concept was dressed up with "I refer to your letter of such-and-such date" and "I most respectfully suggest that" and "I am enquiring as to whether this matter has been brought to your attention." And so on.

Nor were marketing materials an exception. "Your valued customer," "our esteemed client," "upon receipt of your kind payment of $X" and other gibberish were littered all over brochures, direct mail and other marketing communications.

There was a point to it, though. You could hide behind it. You could use it to say very little or gently dismiss something. And, if you were clever, you could use it to get across the most vile, evil messages so subtly that the recipient wouldn't realize how foul you were being until s/he had read it four times.

Now, with our focus on bold, blunt, "write-as-people-speak" prose in business, we no longer have the fancy phrases to lurk behind. We're on our own.

So why has business writing become so much more direct in the comparatively short period of two generations or so? Is it just the advent of computers, or is there more to it?

Didn't Ad Copy Get There First?

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Suzan St Maur (www.suzanstmaur.com) writes extensively on marketing and business communications and is the author of the widely acclaimed Powerwriting.