Business Communication

The Model of Communication breaks down every act of communication into its component parts — useful for diagnosing exactly where a message went wrong.

The parts of the model

Internal vs. external noise

• Internal noise happens inside the receiver (or sender) — distraction, bias, fatigue, assumptions that color how a message is decoded.
• External noise happens outside either party — a bad phone connection, a loud room, a channel that isn't suited to the message.

A miscommunication almost always traces back to a breakdown at one specific point in this model — an unclear encoding, the wrong channel, or noise interfering somewhere along the way. Naming where it broke down is more useful than just saying "there was a miscommunication."

Why this matters in business

Every business communication — an email, an ad, a press release, a meeting — can be analyzed with this same model. Choosing the right channel for a message, anticipating likely noise, and encoding a message clearly for its intended audience are all skills this model makes concrete.

Good business writing depends on good sources — and not every source that looks credible actually is.

The CRAAP test

The CRAAP test is a framework for evaluating whether a source is high-quality enough to cite:

Articles found through a general web search need the CRAAP test applied especially carefully — a professional-looking website doesn't guarantee a reliable source.

Building a CER paragraph

A claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) paragraph makes an argument in three parts:

1. Claim — the point you're making
2. Evidence — a specific fact or quotation from a high-quality source that supports the claim
3. Reasoning — your own explanation of why that evidence actually supports the claim

Evidence should be integrated smoothly into your own sentence, not just dropped in as a floating quotation, and needs an in-text citation in APA format pointing back to where it came from.

Communication within an organization doesn't all flow the same direction. There are four directions to know.

Linear vs. non-linear communication

• Linear communication flows in one direction only, without expecting a response (a company-wide memo).
• Non-linear communication involves back-and-forth exchange between sender and receiver (a negotiation, a meeting, a customer service call).

Most everyday business communication is non-linear even when it doesn't look like it — an email that expects a reply is still a two-way exchange, just a slower one.

Why direction matters

The direction a message flows changes what "good communication" looks like. A downward message (a policy change) needs to anticipate questions it can't immediately answer; an upward message (raising a concern) needs to be clear about what action is being requested; a lateral message needs to account for the fact that neither party has direct authority over the other.

New communication technologies create real benefits for businesses — but also real risks, both to the company and to the people it communicates with.

Noise in the channel

Every communication channel can introduce its own kind of noise. A channel with high external noise (a chaotic group chat) or high internal noise (a message sent to a distracted, overloaded audience) undermines even a well-encoded message — see the communication model.

Risks of new communication technology

• To consumers: privacy concerns, being reachable at all hours, information overload
• To the company: messages spreading faster (and further out of the company's control) than intended, higher expectations for response time, new channels to monitor and secure

A technology that makes communication faster doesn't automatically make it better — speed can amplify the effect of noise just as easily as it amplifies a clear message.

Weighing the trade-off

When a business adopts a new communication technology, it's worth asking the same two-sided question every time: what does this let us do that we couldn't before, and what new risk does it introduce that we didn't have before? Neither side of that question should be skipped.

Two of the most important — and most often rushed — parts of a professional document are the conclusion and the executive summary.

The conclusion and the call to action

A strong conclusion does two things:

1. Summarizes each major section of the document in roughly one sentence each
2. Ends with a call to action — a specific, concrete next step you want the reader to take

A call to action isn't "in conclusion, this topic is important." It's specific: what do you actually want the reader to do with what they just read?

The executive summary

An executive summary sits at the beginning of a professional document and gives a busy reader everything they need without reading the whole thing: a sentence summarizing each section, plus a call to action similar to (but not word-for-word identical to) the one in the conclusion.

Why both exist

In real business settings, many readers of a report will only read the executive summary. Writing a genuinely useful one — not just a restatement of the title — is a real skill, and it's exactly why this gets built as its own lesson rather than assumed.

Clear, professional writing is a skill that gets developed through editing, not just drafting. A few principles from non-fiction writing apply directly to business documents.

Common issues to look for

• Qualifiers — words like "very," "somewhat," or "kind of" that weaken a sentence without adding information
• Passive voice — "Mistakes were made" instead of "We made mistakes" — often used to avoid clear ownership, and usually less direct
• Jargon and unnecessary lingo — industry terms used where a plain word would do, especially with a general audience
• Wordiness — saying in twenty words what could be said in ten

A self-editing pass

When editing your own professional writing, it helps to read through specifically looking for one issue at a time, rather than trying to catch everything in a single read: one pass for passive voice, one for qualifiers, one for jargon. Reading your own writing out loud is also a reliable way to catch sentences that are technically correct but awkward to actually follow.

Editing for concise, direct language isn't about making writing sound "fancy" — it's usually the opposite. Simpler, more direct sentences are typically the more professional choice in business writing.

A professional email follows conventions that casual texting and messaging don't — because it represents you (and your company) in writing, often to someone who doesn't know you well.

Elements of a professional email

Email etiquette

• Match your tone to the relationship and the context — a first email to an administrator you don't know reads differently than a follow-up to a familiar colleague.
• State clearly what response or action, if any, you're expecting.
• Keep it as short as the purpose allows — a long email to make a short request often goes unread carefully.

Because email is asynchronous and permanent, it doesn't have the same room for immediate clarification a phone call does — a professional email needs to be clear enough to stand on its own.

A press release is a written statement issued by an organization to announce news to the media and the public.

Why organizations write them

A press release lets an organization control the initial framing of a story about itself — a new product, an event, a leadership change, a community initiative — rather than leaving the first version of the story entirely to outside reporting.

Structure of a press release

1. Headline — states the news clearly and concisely
2. Dateline and opening paragraph — the who, what, when, where, and why, up front
3. Supporting details — background, context, and often a quotation from someone at the organization
4. Boilerplate — a short standard paragraph describing the organization, often reused across releases
5. Contact information — how a journalist can follow up

Like a news article, a press release front-loads the most important information — a reader (or a busy editor) should get the essential facts from the first paragraph alone, even if they read nothing else.

Writing one

A press release should read like something a journalist could publish close to as-is — factual and clear, not written like an advertisement, even though its underlying purpose is promotional.

Digital communication has real implications for privacy — both for the consumers a business communicates with and for the business itself.

What businesses collect, and why it matters

Companies routinely collect data through the channels they use to communicate with customers — email sign-ups, website activity, app usage. This creates value for the business, but it also creates responsibility: how that data is stored, used, and shared has real consequences for the people it belongs to.

The Right to Be Forgotten

The Right to Be Forgotten is a legal concept, most established in the European Union, giving individuals the ability to request that companies delete their personal data under certain circumstances.

Government regulation of digital privacy varies significantly by country — a policy compliant in one jurisdiction may not be compliant in another, which is itself a real challenge for companies operating internationally (a preview of Unit 4).

Precautions consumers take — and why they matter to business

Understanding what makes consumers cautious online (data breaches, unclear privacy policies, unexpected data sharing) helps explain why trust, not just legal compliance, is a real business asset. A company that is only technically compliant with privacy law but that consumers don't trust still has a genuine business problem.

Social media has become a core communication channel for businesses — both for marketing to customers and increasingly as a form of customer service and e-commerce.

Why it matters for business communication

Social media is unusual among business communication channels because it's simultaneously:

• External (reaching customers and the public directly)
• Lateral and immediate (customers can respond publicly, in real time)
• Highly visible (a response — good or bad — is seen by far more people than just the original sender and receiver)

This changes the stakes of the communication model from earlier in the unit — noise (a poorly worded post, a mistimed message) becomes public and hard to fully retract, and a company's response to a customer isn't private the way an email reply usually is.

A real-world example worth studying

Companies with strong, responsive social media presences (fast food chains and airlines are common examples, since they field high volumes of public customer interaction) often manage their brand voice deliberately — a consistent tone across responses, quick acknowledgment of problems, and a clear sense of what topics get handled publicly versus moved to a private channel.

Building a social media plan

A basic social media plan for a business should identify: which platforms fit the target audience, what kind of content will be posted, how customer questions or complaints will be handled, and who inside the company is responsible for it.