If you want to sell your business idea to a potential investor (particularly in this age of over-the-internet angel investment), then you need to put a lot of time and energy into your business proposal.  After all, if you’re asking someone else to put money up to support you and your ideas, you need to make absolutely certain that both your ideas and your proposal are 100% up to scratch.

When it comes down to it, the key to writing a good business proposal - like the key to all writing - is to consider your audience.  So - what is the salient point about the audience for your business proposal?  What you need to remember is that the bank manager or potential investor reading your report needs to know, within a few seconds (or minutes at most) whether or not you and your idea are credible.  At heart, they won’t be assessing your idea - they can’t possibly have the same level of knowledge about the idea or the market as you - so they’ll instead be trying to work out as quickly as possible whether or not you know what you are talking about, and are good for your word.

This means that your business proposal - your representation of your business idea to a potential investor in written form - must be a scrupulously honest document, something that demonstrates in its integrity, clarity and precision that you know what you are talking about and are not concealing anything from them.  If you want to convince people, there is nothing more important than honesty.

The Gunning fog index is a useful way of evaluating the complexity of any passage of writing. Using a fairly simple formula (looking at sentence and word length), there are a number of tools available that use this index to give you a rough approximation of how many years of education it would take to understand your writing.

A simple passage might be clear to someone with 5 years of education; a complex passage might be clear only to someone with 20 years of education - that’s 8 years after high school!

Don’t worry too much about the exact number, but do try to keep your writing at a level appropriate for your audience. Too complex, and no one will understand.

First sentences are fundamental.  There’s simply no two ways about it - if you want to communicate, you have to start by getting your reader on side with your very first words.  Successful journeys begin, as they say, with successful first steps.  But saying this, we all know that first sentences are hard - maybe the hardest sentences you’ll write.  We’ve all agonised over them, trying to condense complex arguments into one quick introduction, or to cunningly win the reader’s attention with a witty opening.

So - how do you write an excellent opening sentence?  There is no gospel to this, but here are two tricks that can really help.

The first thing you can try is to consider the opening sentences of your favourite novels, books or essays.  Consider, for example, the first sentence of Crime and Punishment: “On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowy, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.”; the opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”; or the beginning of the first Harry Potter: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”  These - or your own favourites - might give you hints that can inspire your own writing.

The other thing you can do is a little more direct: just say what you want to say in the simplest, clearest language that comes to hand.  No one will ever fault you for simply stating “This essay argues…”, “I am writing to apply for the position of…” or, perhaps, “First sentences are fundamental”.

It has been said that the letter is a dying form of communication, a concept replaced in our hearts and minds by e-mails, phone calls, text messages and a variety of other modern communication methods.  That may be the case in general, but it is still true that for some purposes - such as lodging a formal application or a complaint - the letter remains the most direct, acceptable and useful form of communication.  Indeed, there remain cases in which the letter remains the only acceptable form of communication.

With that said, it is worth thinking a bit about what makes up a good letter.  The key to this is claritiy of purpose.  That is, if you want to write an effective letter - whether a cover letter for a job application, a formal complaint to a company or a correspondence to your local congressman or congresswoman - you need to hold a steely focus on the job at hand.  You should begin the letter simply and directly by stating exactly what it is you are writing about.  By all means elaborate about this in the following few paragraphs, but get rid of anything not crucial to the purpose of the letter.  Extra sentences will (at best) merely waste your readers time, or (at worst) actively confuse your message.

At heart, the thing to remember is that only clear, accurate communication is listened to - and that, of course, is the goal of any letter writing.