Business Writing: What Works, What Won't » (REV)

Wilma Davidson, Ed. D., is a writing and presentation-skills coach. Her clients include corporations throughout the Fortune 500. She lives in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and Longboat Key, Florida.

A thorough, accessible, and results-oriented guidebook intended for today’s business environment, Business Writing: What Works, What Won’t offers the first and last word on writing memos, business letters, reports, and all other kinds of business documents. Wilma Davidson, a veteran corporate writing coach whose clients have included M&M Mars, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, and several other, Fortune 500 companies, uses clear and memorable examples, charts, cartoons, and anecdotes to convey exactly what succeeds—and what fails—in written business communication.

This new edition of Business Writing has been fully revised and updated to cover e-mail, Palm Pilots, and the latest in word processor technology. It will be an indispensable reference for all students of business and management—a book that answers questions about style, provides guidance in matters of grammar, and reveals countless insights about writing with precision, confidence, humor, and eye-catching effectiveness.

Library Journal

Business writing manuals tend to fall into two traps. One is dwelling on how much business people hate to write because of bad teachers in school (no one wants to admit that writing takes thinking). The other is inconsistency in tone-trying to use everyday business language but lapsing into quoting Shakespeare in Latin. This book avoids both traps. It has a good format for use in seminars and classes: Chapters are short and contain exercises and examples, humor, and illustrations to make their points clear and memorable. This book suggests some useful activities that don't often appear in similar manuals, such as clustering and writing dialog to get started, and wisely emphasizes getting the first draft done before doing any editing. Davidson is a 15-year veteran of teaching writing seminars in the corporate world for such companies as AT&T and Johnson & Johnson. Her manual is appropriate for public, academic, and corporate libraries.-Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C.