The Business Writing Class Available to You All Day Every Day…

(Updated January 2026) Looking for a business writing class? Good! I teach them so I believe in them! But I also know there’s plenty to learn during your workday when you start to see how not to do business writing. All you need is the writing of others and a critical eye…

Learning from Other’s Mistakes

Maybe it’s just me, but I am a big believer in learning by seeing how not to do something. It helps me learn, sometimes even more than seeing the proper way to do something. I think it’s because when I can spot the error in someone else’s writing, I learn to spot it in my own.

Most of us can benefit from a business writing class, whether we need the basics or something intermediate. But we can learn on our own every day when we take the time to spot bad writing.

And to do that, we simply need to start training our eyes.

That’s why I pulled together these examples below. Some have simple errors. Some are confusing.

For each example, I’ll comment on what is wrong, but you try reading each one first to see if you can spot the mistake or confusion.

Real-life Examples of Bad Writing

Below are eight real-life examples that result from writers being lazy, losing clarity in the process, and causing their readers to stumble over the words. In other words, eight examples of what not to do.

I’ve added comments for each with my corrections.

For the record, these are all taken from public materials such as websites, pdfs, and printed magazines. That means these bad business writing examples were all written by professional people writing at work, as opposed to being content that showed up in an email from a colleague, for example. And that means these all should have been fixed before going public.

Example 1

Some of the team’s supervisors and managers pointed to having many new team members and apathy of seasoned ones as a primary contributing factor.

My comment: Which is the primary contributing factor? They gave us two: new team members and apathy of seasoned ones.

Example 2

Ensuring your workforce stays sharp with the skills to do their jobs and keeping up with the latest trends and technologies, can be a challenge even if you have a sizable team to manage it. 

My comment: What’s with that comma between technologies and can? It doesn’t make sense. You can tell if you read the sentence out loud.

Example 3

First thing’s first, the importance of employee development isn’t up for debate.

My comment: Things doesn’t need an apostrophe. We don’t use apostrophes to make words plural.

Example 4

For traditional selling, sales professionals relied on lists that were purchased and generally included unqualified data, contact was made using cold calling followed by making an appointment which forced targets into a sales cycle using scripted selling that often involved a lack of listening. 

My comment: I think there should be a period—not a comma—between the words data and contact. They are two sentences, not one long one. As written, it doesn’t make sense.

Example 5

If you’re a LinkedIn Group moderator with your own tips or advice — and would like to give us some feedback on this and future moderator materials, please click here.

My comment: Despite the recent brouhaha over em dashes and ChatGPT, they have their place when used correctly. Here, however, one is missing. The comma after materials should be an em dash.

Example 6

Supporting your group members outside of the group is a very effective way to keep them engaged. Here’s a few easy ways you can recognize their accomplishments…

My comment: Here’s should be Here are because ways is plural.

Example 7

Whether you’ve got some garden know-how already under your belt or you’re just getting into gardening, a new book, Gardening 101, is the right book to guide you through the fun, challenging, and satisfying journeys that home gardening will take you.

My comment: This is from a magazine ad, meaning it was printed and mailed to tens of thousands of households (at least that many). However, despite that and the costs of the ad, I don’t think anyone re-read this. It is very clunky and I think it’s missing a word at the end: on.

Example 8

The numbers to fix the nation’s crumbling and outdated roads and bridges is staggering, billions is overly optimistic, it seems trillions is more accurate.

Rather than read my comment on this last one, let’s pick it apart as if we were in a business writing class. Think of this as a mini course. Re-read it and note what you see as mistakes.

Okay?

It has punctuation errors. Do you see them? Both commas would be better as periods or semicolons. I used a colon, as you’ll see.

But is also poorly written:

• Numbers isn’t clear. Numbers of what? I think they mean dollars.
• The word outdated is implied by crumbling so isn’t necessary
• Overly before optimistic seems unnecessary

Plus, the more time I spend with this, the more I realize that there’s no point in saying billions because the sentence has more impact when we jump straight to the much larger number of trillions. This is how I rewrote it:

The amount of money required to fix the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges is staggering: It will probably cost trillions.

However, as I teach in my basic writing class, we have more impact with our words when we put the most important information first. In my opinion, the cost of trillions of dollars to fix our roads and bridges is the most important point. Therefore I reordered the sentence to:

It will probably cost trillions of dollars to fix the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges.

Can You See the Business Writing Class Examples All Around You?

Was that a helpful exercise? I hope so! Because if you can learn to read the writing of others with a critical eye, you will learn on an ongoing basis without taking a business writing class. And you will find examples to learn from with little effort, I promise!

I get it though. I’m busy. You’re busy. We’re all busy. We think we don’t have time to re-read something to make sense of it, let alone take online classes to learn to do better.

And we aren’t without our own guilt! I can show you bad writing examples all day long, but I’ve written my share of them. As writers, we’ve all had mistakes slip past us, dashed off something in a hurry without error-proofing it first, or read something so many times we are blind to the typos. I’ve been guilty of it many times, even though I spent 20 years working as a freelance writer and editor.

But here’s the thing: When we learn to read the writing of others with a critical eye, we also learn to read our own writing with a critical eye.

As writers, we have to make sure we aren’t writing sloppily and indirectly communicating apathy to our audience. We have to be aware and take care. We have to work at having good business writing skills, and making sure we are always clear.

Taking a class can help, as can learning how to proofread and to self-edit. But applying what we’ve learned to the writing of others can too.