Discuss the importance of adapting your writing to your audience and explain how to make a report more, or less, formal

What will be an ideal response?


Answer: Reports and proposals can put heavy demands on your readers, so the "you" attitude is especially important with these long messages. In general, try to strike a balance between being overly informal (which can be perceived as trivializing important issues) and overly formal (which can put too much distance between writer and reader). If you know your readers reasonably well and your report is likely to meet with their approval, you can generally adopt an informal tone. To make your tone less formal, speak to readers in the first person, refer to them as you, and refer to yourself as I (or we if there are multiple report authors).To make your tone more formal, use the impersonal journalism style: Emphasize objectivity, avoid personal opinions, and build your argument on provable facts. Eliminate all personal pronouns (including I, you, we, us, and our). Avoid humor, and be careful with your use of similes, metaphors, and particularly colorful adjectives or adverbs. However, you don't need to make the writing monotonous. For example, you can still create interest by varying the types of sentences to create a pleasing rhythm. Take into account that communicating with people in other cultures often calls for more formality in reports, both to respect cultural preferences and to reduce the risk of miscommunication. Informal elements such as humor and casual language tend to translate poorly from one culture to another.

Business

You might also like to view...

Which of the following might an analyst not want to eliminate from past earnings when using past earnings to forecast future earnings?

a. nonrecurring gains from the sale of assets. b. unusual asset impairment charges. c. nonrecurring restructuring charges. d. revenue from the sale of inventory.

Business

It is difficult to track costs to individual products in a continuous flow manufacturing process

Indicate whether the statement is true or false

Business

A pharmaceutical manufacturer offers monetary incentives to its sales representatives to promote a new drug to the medical professionals in their respective geographic territories. This is an example of a ________ strategy

A) push B) direct marketing C) vertical integration D) pull E) publish-subscribe

Business

Taxpayers can have more than the minimum amount of required income tax withheld from each pay

Indicate whether the statement is true or false.

Business