This document provides information about interpersonal skills in a business environment and concepts to apply in project 1. It defines interpersonal skills as an employee's ability to get along with others while completing their job. The document outlines relationship building language, types of business messages, and finding and annotating a negative Amazon product review. It provides guidance on writing a refund letter, memo report, and email in response to the negative review. Finally, it lists five business prose style principles of writing concisely, using action verbs, active voice, shorter sentences and paragraphs, and appropriate business jargon.

1. Interpersonal Skills and
Business Writing

2. Table of Contents
Definition of Interpersonal Skills 3
Concepts You Need to Apply in Project 1 4-9
Finding a Negative Amazon Product Review 10-11
Annotating the Negative Amazon Product Review 12
Writing the Refund Letter, Memo Report, and Email 13-15
Business Prose Style Principles 16-21
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3. Put simply, interpersonal skills in business environments refer to
an employee’s ability to get along with other people while getting
his/her job done.
Interpersonal skills include everything from how you communicate;
how you listen; your attitude and manners; to how you dress.
Interpersonal skills are closely related to intercultural skills which
is the knowledge of social expectations and customs of another
culture and the ability to adjust your interpersonal skills accordingly.
Definition of Interpersonal Skills
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4. For deliverable 1 of this project, you will need to study and apply the
concepts covered in the following slides:
• Use Relationship Building-Language
• Learn the Three Common Types of Messages (and how your
communication should differ based on type).
• Five Business Writing Prose Style Principles.
Concepts You Need to Apply in Project 1
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5. The way in which you write and respond
to others can foster positive workplace
relationships or negative ones.
Your prose style can show respect or
disrespect for others and reveal positive
or negative intentions
Simply adding please, thank you,
expressing appreciation, and
displaying respect for other people’s
time goes a long way to build and
preserve good workplace relationships.
Use relationship-building language.
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6. Positive
• looking forward to
• happy to
• terrific
• glad
• etc.
Negative
• no idea
• no way
• impossible
• etc.
Choose positive words / phrases.
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7. Positive attitude:
We’ll be done with the conference room at 2, so it’s all yours
after that.
Ask instead of tell:
Do you have time to get me this information today?
Thank others who help you:
Thanks for getting me this information today.
Explain why:
We’ve changed the date of the meeting because Tom has a
prior commitment.
Examples
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8. 1. Neutral messages convey
information that the recipient would
view as neither good nor bad news.
2. Negative news messages convey
information that the recipient would
receive as negative, unpleasant, and
may disappoint, upset, or even
anger the recipient.
3. Positive news messages convey
information the recipient would view
favorably.
Positive and neutral messages are easy
to write because of the content. Negative
news messages are more difficult.
Three common types of business messages.
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9. 1. Be clear so the recipient does not need additional clarification.
2. Help the receiver understand and accept the news by explaining.
3. Maintain trust and respect for the business or organization and for the
receiver.
4. Avoid legal liability or erroneous admission of guilt or culpability.
5. Maintain the relationship, even if a formal association is being terminated.
6. Reduce the anxiety associated with the negative news to increase
comprehension.
7. Achieve the designated business outcome.
When delivering negative messages.
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10. Before you start creating your business correspondence package, you
must find a negative product review from Amazon.
Follow these steps to find negative reviews on Amazon:
1) Find a product you are interested in responding to. For this example, I
found an espresso machine. Click on the product to find the reviews.
2) Click on “ratings” link to the right of the stars. See picture below.
Finding a Negative Amazon Product Review: Pt 1
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11. 3) Find the “Customer Reviews” on the
left hand side of the page. Click the 1-
or 2-star reviews. See picture to the
right.
4) Select a review! Remember, the
more content in the review, to more you
will have to respond to. I recommend a
review about the length of the picture
below:
Finding a Negative Amazon Product Review: Pt 2
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12. After you found your product review, you will need to analyze it for the
customer’s concerns and their tone. Once you identified these aspects of
the review, you can direct your business letter to the customer’s specific
concerns and match their tone. See below for an example:
Annotating the Negative Amazon Product Review: Pt 2
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Concerns: “water on the counter”, “not the one pictured”, “didn’t even make
it 4 months without breaking”.
Tone: “disappointed” because it broke before 4 months and it was a gift

13. The refund letter is mostly a positive message.
Analyze the review closely; however, before composing your letter.
You will submit a “Product Review Annotation” to help you do this.
A key challenge is to issue the refund and state why you are issuing
it without admitting or implying that your business is liable for the
problem this customer encountered or blaming the customer.
Make sure you build a positive relationship with this customer,
encourage them to continue to buy from you, and offer a refund.
Use standard conventions to format your letter.
Amazon Product Review: writing the refund letter.
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14. The memo report is a negative message.
You are conveying information about a problem and also
documenting that it exists. This documentation will create a record
for legal purposes if needed.
Your challenge will be to explain the problem while conveying your
concern about a potential liability without being alarmist.
Your second challenge will be to do that without blaming anyone.
Make sure you explain the customer’s problem and negative review,
explain how you reached out to the customer, explain the
importance of fixing this problem and why the company needs to,
and suggest some possible solutions to help prevent this situation in
the future.
Use standard conventions to format your memo report.
Amazon Product Review : writing the memo report.
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15. The email conveys the memo report as an attachment.
For this hypothetical situation, you would have discussed the
problem with the supervisor so your email would be considered a
neutral message.
Make sure you remind your supervisor what the memo is about and
foster a positive work relationship.
Keep the email short, and it should look like a standard email. This
includes “To”, “From”, “Date”, and “Subject” lines. Feel free to make
up a name for your supervisor.
Amazon Product Review: writing the email.
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16. 1. Write concisely.
2. Use action verbs.
3. Use active voice.
4. Writer shorter
sentences and
paragraphs.
5. Use business jargon
appropriately
Five business prose style principles.
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17. The goal of concise writing is to use the most effective words to
meet audience needs and your purpose for writing.
Concise writing does not always use fewer words, but it
always uses the strongest ones.
• The reason parents will buy this product is that… (not concise)
• Parents will buy this product because… (concise)
Principle 1: Write Concisely.
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18. Action verbs make your writing more concise, direct, and easier to
understand.
• We need an impending study that will ascertain the feasibility of
our obtaining a solution. (action is unclear)
• We need to study the feasibility of this solution.(action is clear)
Principle 2: Use Action Verbs
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19. In active voice, who is doing the action is the subject of the
sentence.
• Our team discovered the problem yesterday.
In passive voice, the action or object of the action is the subject of
the sentence and who is doing the action is either missing or stated
as a “by” phrase.
• The problem was discovered yesterday.
• The problem was discovered yesterday by our team.
Principle 3: Use Active Voice
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20. Typically, modern business prose style uses shorter sentences and
paragraphs.
The average sentence length is between 14 and 20 words, but avoid
applying this average as a rigid rule. Vary sentence length to
improve cadence.
Keep paragraphs to one topic even if the paragraph is only two or
three sentences.
Principle 4: Use Shorter Sentences and Paragraphs
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21. Jargon is industry or discipline specific terminology.
Use jargon when the audience is knowledgeable about how the term
is both being defined and used.
When your audience would not have this knowledge, then jargon
creates a problem with being clear.
Principle 5: Use Business Jargon Appropriately
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