From the course: Business Writing Principles

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Making your writing concrete

Making your writing concrete

From the course: Business Writing Principles

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Making your writing concrete

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- [Instructor] Concrete terms refer to objects or events that are specific. They give exact information and don't require your reader to try to guess your meaning. Effective business writers use those specific, meaningful words, rather than vague words that are open to multiple interpretations. Look at these words. What do they mean? Some, several, many, a few, a lot. Let's test their meaning. Get several chairs set up and bring a lot of the blue handouts to the meeting. Several could range from 3 to 50. A lot could mean 10 to 100. As you can see, those vague words are meaningless and create communication breakdowns. Have you ever written to a subordinate or received from a superior the message get the report to me as soon as possible? Did your subordinate get it to you when you really wanted it? Or were you chastised by your supervisor because you were late? What if the message had said please send me an…

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