I wish they had told us all, in high school and college, how important our communication skills were to our future. Want to stand out from the crowd at work or in business? Polish your writing skills and I can assure you, you will be ahead of the pack. Writing is important in customer relations, marketing, human resources and more. Let’s look at some ways you can be sure your writing doesn’t look sloppy and amateurish.

One of the best things you can do to improve your writing is to read more frequently. Many people don’t enjoy reading for pleasure. If this is the case, at least spend some time reading business books or magazines. Pay attention to sentence structure, punctuation, grammar and style to improve your own writing. While you are improving your writing, you are getting increased business knowledge as well.

Don’t count on spell check to catch all of your errors. Yes, it helps! But grammar and punctuation are harder for spell/grammar check to identify. Once you use it, go over your writing and hand it off to your best proofreader to review.

Editing and revising are required steps in the writing process. Many professional writers consider these the most important steps of writing. If you are working on an important document or letter and want it to be polished, powerful and persuasive, plan on revising it several times. This also improves your writing skills.

You are not alone in commonly misusing certain words. In fact, there are many web sites that will give you a list of these misused words like effect vs. affect, loose vs. lose and it’s vs. its. Bookmark one or a few of these and make sure you aren’t making these common mistakes that spell check will not pick up.

Keep a good style/grammar guide book on hand. Review it often and make note of the situations where your most common errors occur. Until you become aware of them, you’ll keep making them. If you do a lot of business writing, there are nice laminated cheat sheets you can buy and use for quick reference.

Ernest Hemingway pointed out that good writers use short sentences. Be brief! Don’t tell people what you are going to tell them (i.e. “in this article, we’ll discuss…”). Just tell them. Avoid fluff or fillers like “however” and “of course”. Edit and see how brief you can be while still communicating your point clearly.

Be aware of your local language. Different regions of our country butcher English in different ways (“I seen that” versus the correct “I saw that” and “Can I go with?” versus the correct “Can I go with you?” or “I should of” vs. “I should have”). Once you are aware of them, you can begin to erase those errors in your writing.

Remember that your writing says more than you realize. It certainly says more than the message you mean to convey and creates an impression about you and your business. Professional writing indicates a professional business and creates credibility and trust. Improving this basic skill is time well spent.

With 30+ years consulting experience, Steven Schlagel provides training and coaching for startups, entrepreneurs and small business owners. Check his site for more articles to increase your success!