If you're operating a business, eventually you will be required to write a business document. It could be a business letter, a business proposal, a business plan, a marketing strategy, copy for your web site, a white paper, a job description, an inter- office memo, a Board report, a press release, or…?

There is good news if writing is not your strong point. Writing is a skill that can be learned. With practice, almost anyone can learn to write an acceptable document.

Why is good writing important? First, some people will judge you by your writing. Why risk losing customers or investors because of a poorly written document?

Secondly, good business writing is easier to read and easier to comprehend than poor writing. Clarity is always a goal when writing business documents. Flowery prose is best left to those who write fine literature.

Many written documents show dramatic improvement when a few common writing errors are corrected. Try this test. Find a letter or document you have written, and go through it making changes listed below. You could be surprised at improvement when you follow these basic guidelines.

Use Active Voice Write in active voice instead of passive voice. That is, rather than writing, "The computer that belongs to my brother," say, "My brother's computer." Rather than writing, "The merchandise that was delivered yesterday," say, "Yesterday's merchandise delivery."

Many people find that by making this one change, they can improve their writing substantially.

Tip: Use MS Word's Spell and Grammar feature to help find passive sentences. It's found in Tool menu.

Use Tenses Consistently Changing tenses through a document is a common mistake. Decide which tense you want to write in, then stick to it. "Tense" refers to past, present, or future.

Past Tense: We did it this way. Present Tense: We do it this way. Future Tense: We will do it this way.

It is jarring to a reader to encounter tense changes such ones in this paragraph:

I call this concept 'trigger'. Triggers initiate nearly everything we do during a typical work day. Anything that causes you to pause, stop what you are doing and move onto something else is a trigger.

Triggers come in a whole range of forms. The phone ringing, an interruption by a colleague, mail arriving on your desk, a computerised alarm – these can all be triggers. A sudden thought or idea can also be a trigger.

Our routines and habits act as powerful triggers. If you are in habit of having a coffee at 10 o'clock every morning, that habit is a trigger: it pulls you away from what you were doing.

Some triggers set us on path towards getting something done while others keep sending us off on a detour. We might say triggers can act for 'good' as well as 'evil'.