Academic vs business writing: tips to help you adjust to working life

Jacob Lister | May 5, 2025

If you’ve entered the business world from school or university, you may have realised how different academic writing is from business writing. Even if you’re an excellent writer, the skills that helped you academically can get in the way at work.

Realising this can be frustrating. You may be thinking to yourself, ‘How do I know if my writing is right?’ or ‘Why has my education not prepared me for writing at work?’

You’re not alone. Many academics-turned-professionals face these same problems.

Academic and business writing aim to do different things

Academic writing is about demonstrating knowledge, analysing information in great depth, and crafting strong arguments. Persuasive writing in academia uses long explanations that build to a main point, with extensive citations along the way.

Using the same amount of detail in your business writing will make your work seem bloated and waffly. If you’re still writing to prove you know what you’re talking about, your colleagues may think you’re trying to show off or wasting their time.

Writing in the business world assumes the writer is already an expert on the topic — you don’t need vast evidence and justification to prove yourself to the reader. You can cut to the most important information with much less background. It’s also action-oriented and adapted for people with busy schedules and overstuffed inboxes. Good professional writing is direct and concise.

Now that we’ve set out the difference between academic and business writing, here are three tips to ease the transition.

Tip 1: Tell your reader why they’re reading, and what you expect from them

Unlike your teachers, your colleagues aren’t paid to decipher your writing. Often, all anyone reading a document at work cares about is whether they need to do something, and whether there’s a deadline. If you don’t lead with action, people will often either miss what you’ve asked of them, or they won’t read it. No writer wants to feel they’ve wasted their time.

Anything you ever write at work should begin with a clear purpose statement — a short paragraph telling your reader:

• what this thing is
• what they need to do
• what they can expect to find in it.

Write your purpose statement before anything else! You will save yourself time and effort if you build this habit. To construct a successful purpose statement, you have to know what you’re going to say before you begin writing. Gone are the days when you wrote the introduction or abstract last.

A good purpose statement can set up your writing to be concise. As a rule, anything that doesn’t help your reader achieve the purpose in your purpose statement doesn’t belong in a professional document.

Tip 2: Consider your audience when creating your structure and headings

In the professional world, even if your readers are paid to read your emails or reports, they will skim and skip what they can. You risk your readers missing your main ideas if they’re buried in the middle of paragraphs or the bottom of a page.

You’re also writing to a wider audience with varied understanding and experience with the topic, and a much broader range of literacy. You will lose your audience if you don’t keep it short and simple, and only include information they need.

Prioritise what the reader finds relevant, not what you find relevant

In business writing, consider what information your reader needs to do ‘the thing’. Then check whether you’re presenting that information from most to least important — from their perspective, not yours.

What you believe is important may be totally different from what your reader finds important. Try imagining what your readers might ask themselves when presented with an important piece of information. Then answer that question. It’s instinctive to prioritise what we think is relevant about the topic, but you’re not writing for yourself.

In business writing, any recommendation, proposal, or decision is almost always more important to the reader than your background detail or justifications. A common time-wasting trap  when writing a new document is agonising over the background. Writers focus on who their organisation is, what they aimed to achieve, and why they did all the work they did. But readers want to know what you actually did.

Use headings to make your main ideas unmissable

While you’re planning your work, write your main ideas as complete statements or sentences and use those as your headings. Tell us something we didn’t already know in the heading, instead of building up to it as the final sentence of your sections. Look no further than the headings in this blog for examples of what I mean. Best-case scenario, your readers should get your gist through headings alone.

Tip 3: Write directly to your reader, exactly as you speak

Passive voice dominates academic writing because it prioritises ideas over the writer. But people don’t speak in passive voice, so it can come across as robotic and uncomfortably formal in most business writing.

For an easy explanation of passive voice, check out our blog below.

Be active, not passive (and watch out for wild penguins)

If you want to be concise with good tone, write exactly how you speak at work. If what you’ve written isn’t exactly what you’d say out loud to another person in real life, consider rewriting it. Don’t be afraid of words like ‘I’, ‘we’, and ‘you’. You are a person speaking to another person, and your writing should reflect that.

Use simple, everyday words

Your goal isn’t to impress readers with your wordsmithing, but to communicate effectively. It doesn’t matter who you’re writing to, everyone at every level prefers writing that’s easy to understand over flashy wordplay that takes time to decipher.

If you’re worried about ‘dumbing down’ your ideas by using simple words, fear not! Your ideas don’t change if you use different words to express them.

Learn more about business writing

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