Technical Managerial Written Skills

The best trait when working to achieve effective and professional writing is humility. Although all of us consider ourselves above-average writers, the fact is that there are only a few who rise above the rest with "perfect" documents that achieve "flow", and exercise exceptional word choice, correct paragraph sentence and paragraph structure, and perfect grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and hyphenation. These, then are the attributes and standards we hope to achieve starting with this first module. Our goal is that each of us rise above our current level of writing expertise.

The most fundamental business writing exercise is exemplified by the "Letter To the External Stakeholder". In addition, there are the larger questions that are addressed here. These include the viability of letter writing as a business practice; the fundamentals including formatting, grammar, punctuation, paragraph formation; the importance of word choice; and the very important practice of proofreading. All of this is an important first step for improving one's writing skills.

A common element of writing in business and industry is the Research Proposal. The "proposal" is a common tool in business and industry used to compete for future business. Proposals are not just statements of what you or your business are capable of doing; there will be many bidders who will make the same statement. Instead, your proposal must CONVINCE the customer that you are the best choice of vendor for their upcoming work. In the effort to convince them, you must write to the customer's primary concerns, create a clear mental picture for the reader of your proposal, be brief and concise, and be perfect in format and all of the other writing fundamentals. Therefore, I offer this module as support for this most-common form of business writing.