Identifying purpose for business documents

In earlier blog posts, I posted some tips for those who have to do some business writing as a subset of their work, but are not professional writers.  My first few posts on this topic gave some insights about where to start out and what to consider when beginning such a writing process.

To quickly review:  I mentioned that a good starting point for writing a business document involved first figuring out the nature of the reader for the document and, in tandem with that, figuring out what that reader [known as “audience” to business writers] needed to get out of the document.  The “what the reader needs” also refers to what professional writers call the rhetorical purpose of the document.  This evaluation then feeds into some form of document planning process, such as an outlining process.

In this blog post, I’m going to follow up with some further information on the kinds of purpose you are likely to find in business documents. 

For the most part, ‘layperson’ writers . . .those who don’t write as a major part, or the entirety of their job . . . will deal with a handful of specific rhetorical purposes in the business documents they are called on to write.

The first and second purposes are probably the most common and are related but not identical.  Those purposes are to inform and to summarize.

The difference between these two is subtle but does exist.  You can think of a document with the purpose of “inform” as one that provides new information, or primarily new information, to the reader(s).  Whereas, a document that has the purpose of summarizing will review material that is already known, or some of it is known, to the readership of the document.

For documents assigned to a professional who will only occasionally get assigned to write a business document on the job, these two rhetorical purposes will probably form the rhetorical purpose for most such documents.

The next three purposes also have subtle associations with each other.  Those purposes generally have the objective of generating some form of response.  Those purposes include to engage, to generate action such as through the issuance of an order, and to persuade.

You will structure your document around the “engage” purpose in an instance when you want to introduce interest in something.  An example of a document with the purpose to engage would involve something along the lines of an informational newsletter.  The nature of generating action such as through an order has an obviousness to it:  this would involve things like written announcements of mandatory training or briefings. 

A document that has the purpose of persuasion also seeks to generate an action.  However, a document that seeks to generate action through persuasion has an objective of convincing the readership that the action taken, often a purchase of some kind, provides a benefit to the individual.  While many persuasion documents seek to incite a “buy” response for a product or service, the rhetorical purpose of persuasion can also extend to a “buy in” response.  A business document may seek to convince management, for instance, to implement, extend, or up-staff a particular project or set of projects.

This second group of rhetorical purposes:  engage, generate action by issuing an order, and persuasion actually transition into the category of business document more often handled by a professional writer than by someone who writes business documents only occasionally.  However, these types of documents may well come up for the ‘layperson’ writer of business documents every so often.  For example, a cover letter has a “persuasion” purpose to it.  On the job, a project leader may need to persuade management about extending a deadline, changing a project direction, or modifying project staffing.  Additionally, even when a dedicated business writer . . . or often a team or business writers and editors . . .handles the writing of the persuasive documentation of a proposals to a potential client, technical personnel may have contributing roles to the final proposal.  It should give such personnel an advantage to understand a little about rhetorical purpose in such a case.

Three other rhetorical purposes factor into those kinds of documents that a ‘layperson’ writer may have an involvement in writing either in entirety or as part of a team:  although most often documents having rhetorical purposes in this third category will fall into the province of the professional business writer. 

Those three purposes involve:  to instruct [such as training materials], to provide a procedure on how to do something, and to give an edict . . . such as dress codes, codes of conduct, and statements on an organization’s business ethics code.

Once you define your readership or audience, the next step in preparing for the planning out of your document involves determining which of these purposes will drive the structuring of your final document.

While this is not an exhaustive coverage of all types of rhetorical purposes that could come about, by far these are the most likely rhetorical purposes for business documentation that the layperson writer of a business document is likely to encounter in their need to write business documentation.