The In-Basket Approach to Business Writing
by Tracy Blues
Educationist, Cape Town
The In-Basket Approach to business writing is an attempt to make the dreary task of teaching business writing more real and meaningful. I devised this as a course for adult learners learning English as a foreign language (EFL) but it is really just bringing together a collection of exercises I had done with high school English first and second language students over many years.
The EFL learners that I designed this for are actually business people who come to South Africa to learn the language of business in English. They have very real needs as when they go back home they are expected to conduct business or at least business correspondence through the medium of English. In most cases this is because companies that previously served a domestic market have been affected either by globalisation or at least by e-commerce. The reality is that both the global economy and the on-line world tend to be conducted in English. South Africa's weak currency and native English speakers make us an attractive destination for European and Asian students to learn English. Cape Town with its natural beauty and popular tourist attractions has a whole host of language schools serving this market. I teach at one of them.
The In-Basket Approach is an entire programme for teaching business writing. Every office (and most desks) has an In-Basket in some form or another. I use the lids of photocopier boxes marked 'In-Basket' (who would have guessed!) for this programme. The real work ( as with any decent teaching programme) comes in the planning. To create an 'In-Basket' you have two options: either elicit 'real' material from the learners (much easier if they are business people) or create/source the contents yourself. Having done business writing over many years I have lots of examples of business correspondence to draw on. Tip: Be a squirrel and store everything away, you never know when you'll need it.
So what does this In-Basket have to contain? A good In-Basket would contain: a completed telephone message requiring some action; a telephone message form; a memorandum requiring some response; a business letter requiring some response; some company letterheads; a fax requiring some response; minutes of a meeting requiring some written action such as a report or memorandum; some company fax coversheets; a report; some advertising brochure or flyer about the company; some e-mail correspondence; a presentation on overheads or Powerpoint; a curriculum vitae with a covering letter of application; company forms for example, leave applications and claims forms; health and safety reports (accident report forms); payslips; etc.
As you can see, this is all real correspondence that a business person would have to deal with on a daily basis. The purpose of the programme is to give each learner practice in recognising and responding appropriately to the many different kinds of written communication with which they will be faced. Too often business writing courses focus on business letters and reports, forgetting that there is a deluge of written information besieging the poor business person. The problem with a limited writing course is that unless in real life it's a letter or report, requiring a letter or report in response, the person is stuck. The aim of this In-Basket approach is to make business writing as real and familiar as possible.
I must mention two points about the actual In-Baskets:
- Be very clear about what is required from the learners if they are supplying the contents and assure them that the information in the correspondence will be kept confidential (no-one wants company secrets compromised)
- The In-Baskets for each learner may be entirely different unless they are all from the same company
Of course, if you are compiling the In-Basket for a group of learners who are not business people, you will decide what goes into the In-Baskets and you can decide whether you want them all to be identical or not. The programme can easily be adapted to accommodate either identical source material or individual material for each learner. Once the In-Basket has been assembled the programme can begin.
In the first lesson I explain the concept of the In-Basket approach: that it is an elaborate role-play with the aim being to clear their In-Basket. I also explain that to achieve that aim they will have to respond to every piece of correspondence in their In-Basket. I also give the learners a chance to look at the contents of their In-Baskets.
In the second lesson we have a general class about business correspondence. I use the 6 C's and pyramid approaches. I am also a big fan of editing so writing drafts and correcting them is stressed. The 6 C's of good correspondence are that it should be Clear, Complete, Correct, Concise, Courteous and Considered.
- Clear refers to clarity of intention, idea, details and language.
- Complete refers to content as omissions lead to further correspondence.
- Correct refers to format, language, tone and facts. At the very least mistakes create a poor impression.
- Concise refers to keeping correspondence brief and to the point.
- Courteous refers to being polite even when you are disagreeing with a correspondent.
- Considered refers to having thought about the writing, planned it and having considered the needs of the reader.
The pyramid approach refers to the structure of a letter, memo, fax or longer piece of correspondence. This means the writing should open with a brief summary that defines the purpose (an initial contact), then offer strong positive details to support the opening paragraph (an evidence section) and close with a brief remark that identifies what action is to be taken next (your closing statement which opens the door to the next step).
- Initial contact
- An evidence section
- Your closing statement
In the third and subsequent classes a different type of business correspondence is dealt with in each class. I normally start with the simpler writing tasks like reading and responding to a telephone message and writing a telephone message from a role-played telephone conversation. For some types of business writing like reports and presentations more than one class may be necessary. I usually start each lesson with a look at the specific format of the business writing with the class as a whole and then spend time with each learner looking at their specific example and looking at their draft responses.
One of the issues that arises with using real business correspondence is that it is not always well written. Then we look at it as how not to write business correspondence! The fact is that learners are going to have to deal with just such business writing in their working day so they need to get used to dealing with it - good or bad.
This In-Basket approach can be used in all kinds of situations. I have conducted it entirely on-line using e-mail and web-pages as the communication tools. I have also used it to help a company develop a new marketing strategy as they expanded into an English speaking market. It can take as long as you like or be restricted to a few examples over a shorter period of time. Each educator needs to adapt it to suit their purposes (or more importantly, the purposes of the learners).
There is no formal evaluation of this course by an external body because there is no examination. However, a few of the companies for whom I have run this programme keep sending more of their employees to us. The employees are going back into the workplace and have improved their ability to deal with English correspondence. For me that shows that the In-Basket approach to business writing is meeting its objective: to teach people to deal with business writing in English in a real and meaningful way.
