Business and Marketing Writing

Before you can write or recognize successful copy, you'll need to understand your corporate identity: who the company is and what the company offers. In this lesson, you'll delve into all the aspects of corporate image that writers and marketing professionals need to ponder before producing effective projects.

Now that you understand image, what can you do with it? In this lesson, you'll analyze business and marketing goals—and the needs of your audience—to figure out the appropriate writing style for any project.

It's a creative field, but certain projects require certain conventions. In this lesson, you'll see how a particular medium or project type can guide your writing style and approach, helping you save time and stay on target.

This lesson will gather up the information you explored in the previous four lessons and put it all together. It will illustrate how to apply everything you've learned so far as you develop an original writing project from start to finish.

Do you need to write in complete sentences? What is a complete sentence, anyway? This lesson will give you a brief refresher on sentence construction and then go over some guidelines for using fragments in business writing. You'll also learn to recognize and fix one of the most common errors in modern writing: the comma splice.

You can't write without words! In this lesson, you'll learn to make accurate word choices. The lesson will discuss the level of vocabulary appropriate for business writing and show you how to choose words that reinforce a project's theme. It'll also clarify some tricky word pairs and discuss word-choice problems whose usage can undermine the professionalism of your writing.

In this lesson, you'll take a critical look at the inside of a company. First, you'll see how to develop "marketing" projects for audiences within a company. Then you'll explore the roles of the various specialists who contribute to a single marketing piece—bosses, clients, editors, junior writers, artists, and designers. You'll learn how to work with all of them to create smoother relationships and better projects.

For even the most experienced writers, bureaucratic influences can creep in to reduce creativity and impede communication. In this lesson, you'll take a look at buzzwords and jargon, and then explore some ways to achieve maximum power and effectiveness by keeping your writing clear, concise, and active.

In this lesson, you'll explore the final steps. You'll learn to enhance and refine business and marketing projects during the editing and proofreading processes. You'll also learn to evaluate finished pieces and even test their effectiveness in the real world!

In this lesson, you'll once again be putting it all together, but this time as an editor. You'll apply everything you've learned so far in the course, editing a project from beginning to end.

Marketing involves images, and it's easy to lose sight of the truth. In the final lesson of the course, you'll go over some important considerations that marketing professionals need to think about.