Wordiness and clutter have a way of creeping into all sorts of business correspondence. We are going to look at several ways to avoid this trap. We’ll start with use of the active, not passive, voice. The passive voice is arguably the biggest enemy of concise business writing. Passive construction shifts the subject, or actor, into a position following the verb, or action, as seen in the examples below. While the passive voice is not wrong grammatically, it is cumbersome, wordy and often vague. Passive Example: It was determined by the committee that a response was necessary to the … [Read more...]