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The Death of Good Business Writing (And Why Your Emails Make You Look Like an Idiot)
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Nobody talks about this, but your business writing is probably terrible. There, I said it.
After seventeen years training executives across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, I've watched the slow-motion car crash that is modern corporate communication. The worst part? Most people think they're good at it because they can string together a sentence and know where the full stop goes.
Wrong.
The Email That Changed Everything
Three months ago, I received an email from a senior manager at a major Australian bank. The subject line read: "URGENT: Need to touch base re: the thing we discussed." The body was one massive paragraph with no punctuation, three different font sizes, and ended with "Please advise ASAP."
I printed it out. Framed it. It now sits in my office as a reminder of how far we've fallen.
This wasn't some junior grad having a bad day. This was a $180,000-a-year executive who somehow thought this constituted professional communication. When I called to clarify what "the thing" was, he couldn't remember either.
The Three Deadly Sins of Australian Business Writing
Most training programs focus on grammar and punctuation. Bloody waste of time, if you ask me. The real problems are deeper, more insidious, and frankly more embarrassing.
Sin #1: The Fake Urgency Epidemic
Everything is urgent now. URGENT. HIGH PRIORITY. ASAP. CRITICAL.
Mate, if everything's urgent, nothing is. I've seen managers mark birthday party invitations as "high importance" in Outlook. Your colleagues aren't stupid – they can smell fake urgency from three cubicles away, and it's destroying your credibility faster than you can type "circle back."
Real urgency doesn't need caps lock. It needs context, clear deadlines, and specific consequences. "Please respond by 3pm Wednesday as the client presentation depends on your input" beats "URGENT!!!" every single time.
Sin #2: The Corporate Jargon Avalanche
"Let's circle back and touch base to ideate some blue-sky thinking around our core competencies."
I threw up a little writing that. Yet I hear variations of this nonsense daily in offices across Australia.
Here's what happened: someone, somewhere, decided that sounding smart was more important than being understood. Now we've got entire departments communicating in a language that would make Shakespeare weep. Managing difficult conversations becomes infinitely harder when nobody knows what anyone else is actually saying.
Plain English isn't dumbing down – it's clearing up. The smartest people I know can explain quantum physics to a five-year-old. Yet we've got marketing managers who can't explain their quarterly targets without using seventeen buzzwords and three acronyms.
Sin #3: The Emotional Vampire
This one's subtle but deadly. It's the passive-aggressive undertone that creeps into emails like a bad smell.
"As per my previous email..." "Just following up again..." "I'm sure you've been busy, but..."
Stop it. Just stop.
These phrases don't make you sound professional – they make you sound like a petulant child having a sook. If someone hasn't responded, pick up the phone. Walk over to their desk. Have an actual conversation.
The Real Cost of Bad Writing
Poor business writing isn't just annoying – it's expensive. A 2023 study by the Australian Business Communication Institute found that unclear communication costs the average Australian company $47,000 per employee annually through misunderstandings, rework, and lost opportunities.
That's not a typo. Forty-seven thousand dollars. Per person.
Think about your last major project that went sideways. How much of it came down to poor communication? Someone misunderstood an email. A brief wasn't clear. Instructions were vague. The brief was perfect but nobody read it properly because it was buried in corporate speak.
The Plot Twist Nobody Saw Coming
Here's where I'm going to lose some of you: most "business writing training" is making the problem worse.
Traditional courses teach formality when we need clarity. They focus on structure when we need substance. They're teaching people to write like robots when what we desperately need is human connection.
The best business writers I know break grammar rules constantly. They use sentence fragments. Start sentences with "And" or "But." Write like they talk. Because – and this might shock you – people respond better to humans than to corporate automatons.
What Actually Works (The Uncomfortable Truth)
After nearly two decades of this, I've identified three simple principles that separate good business writers from the masses:
Write for skimmers, not readers. Nobody – and I mean nobody – reads business emails word for word anymore. They scan for the important bits. So make it scannable. Use bullet points. Short paragraphs. Clear headings.
Lead with the punchline. Put your main point in the first sentence. Not the third paragraph. Not after two pages of background. First. Bloody. Sentence.
End with a clear ask. What exactly do you want the reader to do? When? Why? Be specific. "Please review and advise" is not a clear ask. "Please confirm by Thursday 2pm whether you approve the $15,000 budget increase for additional software licences" is.
The Australian Context (Why We're Different)
Australian business culture is informal compared to our American or British counterparts. We value directness, humour, and cutting through the BS. Yet somehow our business writing has become more pretentious than a Melbourne coffee shop.
Embrace the Australian voice in your writing. You don't need to sound like you swallowed a thesaurus. "Thanks mate" is perfectly acceptable in most Australian business contexts. "I appreciate your assistance in this matter" makes you sound like a colonial governor.
Use contractions. Write "we'll" instead of "we will." It's not unprofessional – it's conversational. And conversational gets results.
The Technology Trap
AI writing tools are everywhere now. Grammarly, Jasper, ChatGPT – they're all promising to make your writing better. Here's the thing: they're making it more correct, not more effective.
I've seen perfectly grammatical emails generated by AI that completely miss the mark because they lack context, personality, and genuine understanding of the situation. Technology should support your writing, not replace your voice.
The Five-Minute Fix
Want to immediately improve your business writing? Try this: after you write something, read it out loud. If it sounds like something you'd never say in a meeting, rewrite it.
Better yet, imagine explaining your point to your mum over dinner. Then write it exactly like that. Suddenly your communication becomes clear, direct, and human.
The Uncomfortable Reality About Training
Most business writing courses are taught by people who've never run a business. They understand grammar but not deadlines. Structure but not stress. Theory but not the reality of trying to get thirty people aligned on a project while the client changes their mind every Tuesday.
Good business writing training should be taught by people who've been in the trenches. Who understand that sometimes you need to send a quick message at 11pm. Who know the difference between formal documentation and everyday communication.
What's Actually Killing Good Writing
It's not poor education or lack of training. It's fear.
Fear of sounding too casual. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of not sounding important enough. So people overcompensate with formality, jargon, and unnecessary complexity.
The irony? This fear-based writing achieves exactly what they're trying to avoid – it makes them sound unprofessional, unclear, and unimportant.
The Bottom Line
Good business writing is like good management – it's about clarity, respect, and getting things done. Everything else is just window dressing.
Stop trying to impress people with your vocabulary. Start trying to help them understand what you need, when you need it, and why it matters.
Your colleagues will thank you. Your clients will thank you. And maybe, just maybe, we can save business communication from itself.
Now stop reading articles about writing and go fix that email you've been putting off.
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