Business Writing: Persuasive Report Writing Training Course - 1 Day

1. Clear Purpose
2. Clear Language
3. Reason and Logic
4. Rationally Structured
5. Emotional: Factual
6. Emotional: Figurative

Carefully choose the level of language that is correct for your reader.

Language comes in many forms. We select the form that best matches the needs of our readers.
Who are your readers? What kind of vocabulary is most likely to be best received by them?

In any language, there are many words and phrases that are often used, but ill defined. They are ambiguous and vague words that have many possible meanings. We must write so that each term we use is clearly understood, without any room for misunderstanding. We will learn how to write clear definitions for all our key terms.

We should always structure our writing, because unstructured writing is unintelligible.

Writing structure take many forms, such as:

• Problem / cause / solution.
• Chronologically (ordered through time).
• Logical sequence
• Cause and effect.
• Most important to the least.
• Best to worst, etc.

To persuade people to our view, our writing must have an internal logic.
In this section, we learn how to present our message more logically.

Persuasive writers understand that all true proposals and opinions can be validated with factual evidence. So, in this section, we learn how to validate our opinions by referencing hard facts.

Persuasive writers know that everyone thinks in pictures, so they make good use of appropriate visual images, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps and illustrations. In this section we learn about imagery.

Persuasive writers prove (justify) their proposals by reference to general laws and principles, because this is the strongest form of all justification. We learn how to employ this powerful technique in our writing.

History provides us with insights about what individuals, organisations and nations do under certain conditions. If we want to persuade people to accept our proposals, then we ask them to learn from what has worked for others, and what has failed, in the past.

In this section we learn how to use historical examples to our advantage.

All decisions and actions have consequences which may be either pleasurable or painful.

If we want to persuade people to make a particular decision, then show them how acting in accordance with our ideas will bring them pleasurable consequences, AND in addition; that FAILING to act in accordance with our ideas will result in painful consequences.

People judge us on the technical quality of our writing.
To use English correctly we need to know how grammar works.
We will review the essentials of English grammar and show you how you can use grammar and avoid common errors.

To be effective, all theories should be put into practice. In this section we summarise our key points and put them into practical action in our own writing.