Business writing hardly ever resembles academic writing. By business writing, I mean writing associated with blogging and copywriting. When starting a business blog, one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs and content writers is getting their tone of voice or ToV right.
Most writers get started as academic writers. I mean they learn to write in college or university using classic academic essay tropes or principles. Such an approach usually involves things like writing a five-paragraph essay —- this includes stating the thesis statement and main ideas in the first paragraph.
This is then followed by three paragraphs that explain each idea per paragraph. Lastly, you include the conclusion that summarizes everything you wrote before.
This is not the case for blogging or business writing. With business writing, you are speaking to a different audience — that is, an audience of potential buyers. These buyers will be potentially turned off by an academic tone.
In this article, I discuss the difference between business writing and academic writing and provide tips to ensure that you write business-related content in the appropriate tone. In doing so, I use vintage tobacco ads as examples to illustrate this difference.
What is business writing?
Business writing refers to writing meant to promote business goals. We could call it writing associated with content marketing. Business writing defined in this way can be divided into copywriting and blog writing.
Copywriting refers to copy that is directly related to making a sale. This includes the writing of advertisements, sales letters, and service and landing pages and is usually short-form copy.
On the other hand, content writing refers to blog content. This is typically long-form content. While long-form content of this sort can focus on sales (especially for BOFU content), it usually is educational content that caters to customers at the early stages of the sales funnel.
In any event, both content writing and copywriting are concerned with mainly one thing —- selling. Typically, this means a broad swathe of the public. This is radically different from academic writing, where the audience is rather narrow.
For university students, the audience would be their professors. For master’s and PhD students completing their theses or dissertations, it would be the members of their defense committee.
For researchers trying to get published in a scientific or academic journal, it would be the journal editor and a small group of reviewers in charge of reviewing the journal manuscript. In the following section, we’ll look at the major differences between business and academic writing.
The differences between business and academic writing
There are several differences between business and academic writing. We have already mentioned the main difference —- business writing is about selling, whereas academic writing is about meeting a kind of intellectual standard set by scholarly authorities.
The five principles of academic writing
Academic writing is based on five principles:
Objectivity
Clear logic and reasoning
Credible evidence
Formality
Rigorous structure
Objectivity means that you should strive as much as possible to be objective. Logic and reasoning mean making arguments that are logical and that can be followed through a solid chain of reasoning.
To support these arguments, you should rely on “credible evidence.” This means evidence that has weight in the eyes of academia. For this, you should depend on sources written by authors with high reputations and standing. Another tactic is relying on sources in publications with high standing, such as top-tier journals.
Formality in academic writing refers to being proper in your expression. In academic writing, you are not supposed to use common contractions, such as “didn’t” or “couldn’t.” You are not supposed to begin sentences with “and.” In short, you are supposed to avoid informal speech patterns as much as possible.
Lastly, rigorous structure refers to the formal structure of academic writing. The most formal structure associated with academic writing is the IMRaD format, which stands for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Most academic papers, to some extent, follow this structure.
All these elements together combine to give academic writing a specific tone. Academic writing in terms of ToV is typically formal and serious. This will not do for copywriting or blogging.
If you are trying to convince people to buy, being formal and stuffy is not the way. Your tone should be conversational and approachable. However, just as in academic writing, you have to come up with convincing arguments that can persuade listeners or readers to buy.
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Two principles of business writing
The main goal of business writing is to sell, and they do so through mostly emotional and psychological appeals. The objectivity, formality, and rigorous structure that we associate with academic writing are done away with in copywriting for advertisements and commercials.
So what are the principles that should be followed when writing copy? They include:
Persuasion through awareness, interest, and attraction (or desire)
A convincing ToV
1. Persuasion. In copywriting, you have to persuade buyers to purchase. One of the more popular copywriting formulas is known as AIDA. AIDA stands for Awareness, Interests, Desire, and Attraction.
According to AIDA, the copy must first capture the reader’s attention. This leads to a generation of interest in the product. That interest is subsequently turned into a strong desire to own the product. Lastly, the reader is asked to buy the product.
This process, like most other processes that occur in copywriting formulas, involves emotional and psychological appeals to consumers. This process unlike academic writing does not depend very much on logic or credible evidence. It is true that business writing we find in sales and ad copy relies on the three concepts of logos, ethos, and pathos, which stand for appeals to logic, authority, and emotion.
However, emotion is the strongest point that an ad relies on. The appeals to logic are often shallow or false. The appeals to authority are similarly superficial. Such appeals to
To illustrate, let’s take a look at a vintage tobacco ad:
The ad above makes an appeal to authority by claiming that doctors recommend a brand of cigarette — Lucky. The ad goes as far as saying the cigarette protects your throat. In addition to this, cigarette brands in the past were frequently associated with luxury and class in advertisements.
Knowing what we know today, this is outrageous. Smoking tobacco has come to be associated with risks of lung cancer and several other diseases. Having a doctor vouch for it is quite an empty and misleading appeal to authority. In addition, associating smoking with high fashion, class, and style is also a kind of false logic and appeal to emotion.
This is unlike academic writing. There, the focus would be on gathering evidence from credible sources to prove the health effects of cigarettes. An academic study would have nothing to say about the scientific relationship between class and a cigarette brand. However, it would be able to determine the health effects of cigarettes and certainly would not recommend it as a healthy option that doctors prefer.
2. A convincing ToV. The tone of voice in copy and blog articles should always be conversational. You should avoid as much as possible the overly formal tone that one expects in academic writing. This means beginning sentences with "and" and other conjunctions.
You should also use figures of speech and pauses and rhythm typical of conversational language. This often means striking a balance between everyday language and more creative language that uses literary or rhetorical devices, as discussed in a previous article: Advertisements with Rhetorical Devices.
Let's take a look at the copy of the cigarette ad featured in the introduction to see what I mean:
A gentle act, a gentle help, a gentle thing, can say so much. That's why gentleness is what modern taste demands in cigarettes. And why today's Philip Morris, born gentle, refined to special gentleness in the making, makes so many friends, among our young smokers. Enjoy the gentle pleasure, the fresh unfiltered flavor, of today's Philip Morris. In the convenient snap-open pack, regular or smart king size.
The ad in the very first sentence does away with conjunctions. There should be an "and" before." This is known as asyndeton. It reproduces how people often speak in real life. It also enhances the rhythm of the sentence.
The third sentence also begins with the conjunction "and." The last sentence begins with a capitalized word and ends with a sentence, but is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. Overall, the ad works by associating the cigarette brand with "gentleness."
The gentleness in question suggests two things: sophistication and style, as in what we associate with the term "gentleman," and the sensual sense of touch as featured in the picture of a man and woman embracing.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, January 31). Academic vs. Business Writing | The Essential Differences. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/academic-vs-business-writing |
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