Information flows at lightning speed, making older forms of business communication increasingly obsolete. Instead of elaborate letters and memos, businesses rely more and more on rapid exchanges of email, to audiences both inside and outside of a company. In this lesson, you will write electronic communication that is clear, concise, and appropriate in a business context. If you don't write emails in a professional manner, others might question your competence or to respond negatively to your requests. Good writing is a reflection of your professionalism.

In the previous lesson, you learned how to plan and write basic electronic business messages. Yet writing always occurs in a specific context that you have to adjust to. In this topic, you will apply the writing principles you have studied to specific business situations and learn to address the needs of a particular audience. Not only does business writing require organization and planning, but it often demands diplomacy. You have to consider how your writing affects others. By using basic strategies for responding to requests for information and for delivering bad news, you can write strong communications that are also diplomatic.

In the previous lesson, you identified writing strategies and applied them to specific business scenarios, customizing your message for particular audiences. Although you conduct much of your business correspondence through email, there are times when a letter format is necessary. In this lesson, you will use your writing and diplomatic skills to create formal business letters. There are certain times when the formality of communicating through a letter is required. Unfortunately, you may only vaguely recall how a business letter is properly structured. You could guess, but if you guess wrong, you might make a bad impression. Polished business letters convey your professionalism and project your company's image.

In previous lessons, you learned to write effective business correspondence that is essentially meant to inform. But much business writing has a different purpose: to persuade. In this lesson, you will use basic persuasive strategies that will allow you to plan and deliver effective proposals. The quality of your ideas does not always guarantee that your proposals will be accepted. By learning persuasive strategies, you can improve your odds of success by constructing business proposals that are both logically and emotionally compelling.

You'll wrap things up and then validate what you've learned in this course by taking an assessment.