ROUGH DRAFT
The role of writing in business
The University of Iowa
By: Matthew Picchietti
Matthew Picchietti
Professor Paudeo
Fall 18 Rhetoric
6 September 2018
Writing in Business
Business and writing?! Yes. According to Felix, founder of a concierge service, writing is a more than essential aspect of business, he writes multiple times a day (personal communication, September 7, 2018). Various people, myself included, are under the assumption that writing and business do not go hand and hand, like say journalism. Well they would be very heavily mistaken. In 10 REASONS WHY BUSINESS WRITING SKILLS ARE SO IMPORTANT author Michelle Brooks explains just how vital writing is. Stating that it demonstrates intellect, gives one credibility, conveys courtesy and multiple other things. Business writings are done through both academic and non-academic, non-academic being the much more common form of writing(Brooks 2018). Due to this, the research on the paper was done through three academic sources, three non-academic sources and an interview.
Academic writing in Business
Academic writing is defined as a published piece, mostly written by professionals, that use research to draw a new conclusion about that discipline’s theory. Academic writing in business is seen few and far between, especially compared to non-academic writing. The small list of examples one may stumbleupon are journal articles, dissertations, and papers. There are three conventions to consider when a businessman writes an academic paper. They are structure, Language, and reference. The academic conventions of writing vary greatly from those of the non-academic writings, and if used properly these three things can make a paper fantastic or, on the flip side, make a paper unreadable.
The first convention of writing a businessman has to pay attention to while writing an academic source is the structure that he/she is using on their paper. All of the academic sources are structured almost identically. Each one of them starts with an “Abstract” which is a much smaller summary of the entire article. The abstract in the article The Impact of Opportunity and Necessity Based Start-Up on the Choice of an Economic Sector in Tunisia covers the article in its entirety in only two sentences (Zaouali, Khefacha, Belkacem, 2015). Each abstract was identical to this, covering a lot in a little. They are typically much less organized than the non-academic sources in terms of how the paragraphs are organized. Having most paragraphs starting with a header that is larger than the rest of the text and bolded sort of helps find some information. An example would be “Principal Components Analysis” (Birley, Westhead 1994) However, it is much less obvious than the non-academic sources and not every paragraph is bolded. Academic sources are less organized, typically the person reading through it is not skimming through it and look for something, but rather reading the whole thing.
The second convention of writing a businessman has to consider while writing an academic source is the language that he/she is using to compose their paper. All of these sources are made for a much more intelligent, smaller target audience, of experts in the field. So the language that they use in it is much larger and more complex. For example, the article The role of live streaming in building consumer trust and engagement with social commerce sellers uses a special word called “SNS” (Assarut, Wongkitrungrueng 2018). This is a word that only an expert in the field would know, it means Social Network Working Service. Others use larger terms and words such as the ones in A taxonomy of business start-up reasons and their impact on firm growth and size. They use monstrous, hard-to-understand words such as “venture”, “monetarist-inspired”, “typologies” (Birley, Westhead 1994) and numerous other words the average person would not be able to understand.
The third convention of writing a businessman has to take into account while writing an academic source is the reference that he/she uses when drafting their paper. The amount of authors that are referred to is momentous in these types of articles. In one paragraph alone in the article A taxonomy of business start-up reasons and their impact on firm growth and size there are seven sources alone. Due to the amount of scholarly information and the type of people reading, they need to be credible.
Non-academic writing in business
Non-academic writing is very different than academic writing. It is intended for the average person who is not an expert in the field of business. One might see this type of writing in newspapers, online articles, emails, letters and many other places. Felix claims non-academic writing is much more commonplace in the business world due to all of the emails, notes and letter that are written multiple times a day (personal communication, September 7, 2018). Due to the informalness of this writing style, the three writing conventions of structure, language, and reference are very different than they are in academic writings.
The first convention of writing a businessman has to pay attention to while writing a non-academic source is the structure that he/she is using on the paper. The organization in non-academic is much easier to follow and find information than academic. This is made for an audience who are not experts in the field and do not want to know all of the information that an expert in field would know, and just want to find a few pieces of information. Pinterest for Business: Everything You Need to Know, shows this through numbering the start of each paragraph, bolding it, making the text larger, and putting less fluff into the paragraphs. An example is the first paragraph title, “1. Share creative, inspiring and actionable pins” (Driver 2018). This points out the sections that the less knowledgeable reader may be looking for allowing them to skim through. Other articles, such as The Finance 202: Trump's attack on Trumka could hurt him in NAFTA talks has pictures, videos, links to social media, and advertisements (Newmyer 2018). These make it way easier and more entertaining for the readers.
The second convention of writing a businessman has to follow while writing a non-academic source is the language that he/she uses. The language used in these sources is much more dumbed down and intended for the average person who is not an expert in the field. For instance, 3 lessons from this year’s Coolest Places to Work has the word “cool” in its title (Moore 2018). This is a word one would never find in any academic article. Other words such as “you” (Driver 2018) are a clear giveaway of a non-academic source. It is not very credible to have those types of words in a research paper. Passive voice is used as opposed to the active voice in academic sources. 3 lessons from this year’s coolest places to work uses the passive voice when saying “the impressive number of returning companies on this year’s list suggests that those that work to improve their corporate culture are finding it a lasting benefit and creating ways to keep it going” (Moore 2018). The use of active voice makes things much more reputable.
The last convention of writing a businessman has to abide by while writing a non-academic source is the reference that he/she uses when composing their paper. While these articles use others sources like Donald Trump’s tweets from The Finance 202: Trump's attack on Trumka could hurt him in NAFTA talks, there are nowhere near as many compared to that of those academic resources (Newmyer 2018). The information in this appeals to a much less sophisticated audience so it does not take as much information from other sources.
Conclusion
While academic and non-academic writings in business are vastly different, it is still extremely important to know and understand each one. Because they are both used in the discipline and one will be seeing a lot, and maybe even writing a lot of each. Knowing that non-academic sources structure makes phrases much more organized and easy to find, that the language in an academic piece is not made for the average person in a different discipline to understand or that non-academic resources will have less references is vital information. Upon understanding the differences and similarities one will greatly improve on their readings and writings on these sources.
References
Assarut, A. & Wongkitrungrueng, A. (2018, September 1). The role of live streaming in
building consumer trust and engagement with social commerce sellers. Journal of business research. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com
Brooks, M. (2017, December 6). 10 reasons why business writing skills are so
Driver, S. (2018, September 4). Pinterest for Business: Everything you need to know.
Business News Daily. Retrieved from https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7552-pinterest-business-guide.html
Moore, A. (2018, September 2). 3 lessons from this year’s Coolest places to work.
Westhead, P. & Birley, S. (1994, January). A taxonomy of business start-up reasons and
their impact on firm growth and size. Journal of business research. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com
Zaouli, N. Khefacha, I. & Belkacem L. The Impact of Opportunity and Necessity Based
Start-Up on the Choice of an Economic Sector in Tunisia. Journal of business research. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com
I thought that the paper was overall not bad. I thought it was a good first draft but their is a need for work.
ReplyDeleteI thought that you needed to work on the structure of your paper. When you wrote your paper you listed 1st convention, 2nd convention etc. So, as I was reading your paper it became predictable and made it not go by as fast. So, I would work on trying to make the first sentence in your paragraph flow more into the body of each paragraph. If you can find a way to figure this out it will make your paper unique in a new way.
another problem you had was with your quotes and journal names. You often bolded them for no reason. Just undo that it will make it better. Also in the first paragraph you talked about 10 reasons why and that whole sentence was capitalized which confused me and made it harder for me to understand what message you were trying to portray.
Lastly your conclusion, I felt that you didn't really dig down and sum up your paper. You left a lot of open questions within the final paragraph. Honestly I thought this was the hardest part of your paper to read. just because you were trying to sum up the paper, but you only did partially. My last tip of advice for the conclusion is work on your last sentence, because that is the last thing a person reading your paper is going to see. So, you want this to be your strongest sentence so they stop reading your paper with a good feeling about it
In my opinion, your paper is overall good, and I have some similar arguments with yours, since I also wrote business field in my paper. However, I think you should change many formats.
ReplyDeleteFirst, you must delete the personal information, date and title in the top-left corner on page 2, and you can retype those information in your title page. Second, your headers should type "Running head: WRITING IN BUSINESS", that's the correct format. Then, for your all in-text citations, you should add some page numbers or paragraph numbers.
You can write more concepts from the person you interviews and analysis more. Also, the subtitles for academic writing and non-academic writing should divide into more aspects. You should type more subtitles for both academic and non-academic on the top of text, and it will looks clearer.