Chapter 27 Exercises: Business Communication: Email, Reports, and Documents

These exercises build AI-assisted business writing skills across email, reports, proposals, and formal documents. Complete them using real scenarios from your professional context where possible — the skill development is most effective when the stakes are real.

Foundation Exercises (Exercises 1-5)

Exercise 1: The Difficult Email Sprint

Objective: Practice drafting difficult emails with AI assistance and editing them to sound authentic.

Task: Choose three of the following difficult email scenarios (or use real situations from your work): a) Declining a request from a colleague you want to maintain a good relationship with b) Following up for the third time on an unanswered request c) Delivering bad news about a project delay to a client d) Escalating an issue to your manager for the first time e) Acknowledging a mistake and proposing how to fix it

For each chosen scenario: 1. Write a brief (5-10 sentence) description of the specific situation. 2. Run the "difficult email" prompt template from Section 27.1 with this context. 3. Read the AI draft aloud. Mark any sentence that sounds robotic or wouldn't come from you. 4. Edit the draft — rewrite or remove every marked sentence. 5. Compare your edited version to the AI draft. Calculate: what percentage of the AI draft survived unchanged?

Reflection prompt: What do the edits you made reveal about your personal communication style? Are there AI-generated phrases you almost kept but ultimately rejected? Why?

Exercise 2: Voice and Authenticity Test

Objective: Identify the gap between AI-generated business language and your authentic voice.

Task: 1. Find three emails you've sent in the past month that you're proud of — emails that felt natural and produced good outcomes. 2. For each email, identify: specific phrases, sentence structures, or communication patterns that are characteristically yours. 3. Now take a new email scenario and do the following in parallel: - Write a first draft yourself (without AI) in 10 minutes - Run an AI prompt to generate a draft for the same scenario 4. Compare the two drafts. List the specific differences in: - Sentence length and complexity - Word choice (formal vs. conversational) - How each handles the emotional content - How each opens and closes 5. Create a "voice guide" for yourself — 5-7 specific notes about how you communicate that AI consistently gets wrong.

Deliverable: Your personal voice guide plus an annotated comparison of your draft vs. AI draft.

Exercise 3: The "Brief Me" Technique

Objective: Convert rough notes into professional documents using AI as a structure tool.

Setup: Use a real situation where you need to write a report, memo, or summary but have only rough notes.

Task: 1. Take your rough notes exactly as they are — unstructured, incomplete, in whatever order you captured them. 2. Run the "brief me" prompt from Section 27.3 with your notes. 3. Review the AI-generated document: - Is everything you intended to include actually there? - Is anything included that shouldn't be? - Has AI added anything that sounds plausible but isn't actually accurate? 4. Revise the document to ensure factual accuracy and appropriate tone. 5. Track: what percentage of your editing time was spent on structure vs. accuracy vs. tone?

Reflection prompt: The "brief me" technique shifts work from drafting to editing. Do you find editing AI-generated content easier or harder than drafting from scratch? What does this tell you about where AI fits in your workflow?

Exercise 4: Executive Summary Writing

Objective: Write an executive summary that stands alone as a complete argument.

Task: 1. Take any report or analysis you've written (or a real document from your work). 2. Write your own executive summary first — without AI. Time yourself. 3. Run the executive summary prompt from Section 27.3 with the same document. 4. Compare the two executive summaries. Apply the "standalone test": if a busy executive reads only the summary, can they: - State the main finding in one sentence? - Name the key recommendation? - Identify what decision they need to make? 5. Which executive summary passes the standalone test better — yours or AI's? Why? 6. Write a final version that combines the best elements of both.

Reflection prompt: What's the most common failure in executive summaries (including yours)? Based on this exercise, what's the single change that most improves an executive summary?

Exercise 5: Tone Calibration Practice

Objective: Develop sensitivity to tone in business writing and learn to calibrate it with AI.

Task: 1. Choose one email you've received that had a tone problem — it was too aggressive, too passive, too formal, too casual, or somehow "off." 2. Without sharing the original, write a prompt describing what the email was trying to accomplish and what the tone problem was. 3. Ask AI to generate a version that accomplishes the same goal with better tone. 4. Now take the original and run the tone calibration prompt from Section 27.1. 5. Compare: AI's fresh draft vs. AI's suggested edits to the original. Which approach is more useful for fixing tone problems? 6. Draft three versions of the same email at different tone points: (a) too formal, (b) ideal, (c) too casual. What specific language choices create each tone?

Intermediate Exercises (Exercises 6-10)

Exercise 6: Proposal Structure Workshop

Objective: Build and evaluate a complete proposal structure with AI.

Task: 1. Identify a real proposal opportunity — something you've proposed or could propose (to a client, to your manager for resources, for a project). 2. Write a paragraph describing: the client/audience, their problem, your solution, why you're the right fit. 3. Run the proposal structure prompt from Section 27.4. 4. Review the structure AI generates: - Does it lead with the client's problem or your credentials? (Should be client's problem) - Is the executive summary section strong enough to stand alone? - Are the proposed deliverables specific enough? 5. Run the competitive positioning prompt for this proposal. 6. Write the full executive summary and the "why us" section.

Deliverable: A proposal structure with full executive summary and differentiation section.

Exercise 7: Progress Report Templates

Objective: Build a reusable progress report template for your most common reporting situation.

Task: 1. Identify your most frequent recurring reporting requirement (weekly team update, monthly client report, quarterly board update, etc.). 2. Run the progress report prompt from Section 27.3 for a real or realistic reporting period. 3. Identify the elements that are always relevant, sometimes relevant, and never relevant for this specific audience. 4. Build a reusable template that includes: - Fixed sections (always include) - Conditional sections (include when relevant) - Tone guidance for different situations (things are going well vs. something is off track) 5. Test the template against two or three historical reporting periods.

Deliverable: A reusable progress report template with usage guidance.

Exercise 8: Batch Email Processing

Objective: Practice AI-assisted email triage and batch reply generation.

Task: 1. Take a real backlog of emails (or simulate one with 15-20 realistic email scenarios). 2. Run the triage prompt from Section 27.2 on the subject lines and senders. 3. Review AI's priority and time estimates. Where do you disagree, and why? 4. For the 5 emails that require substantive replies, run the batch reply prompt. 5. Review and edit the replies. Which required the most editing, and why? 6. Track time: triage + AI reply generation + editing vs. your typical processing time for 15-20 emails.

Exercise 9: Policy or SOP Writing

Objective: Create a formal operational document using AI as a structural tool.

Task: 1. Identify a process in your work that doesn't have a written procedure but should (or has a poor one that needs rewriting). 2. Write your rough notes about how the process actually works. 3. Run the policy/SOP prompt from Section 27.5 with your notes. 4. Review the AI-generated document for: - Accuracy: does it describe the process correctly? - Completeness: are all edge cases covered? - Usability: can someone who has never done this follow it? 5. Test the SOP: have a colleague read it and describe back what they'd do. Where does the procedure break down? 6. Revise based on the walkthrough test.

Exercise 10: Meeting Minutes System

Objective: Build a meeting notes-to-minutes workflow using AI.

Task: 1. For your next three meetings, take rough notes in whatever format is natural for you. 2. Within 30 minutes of each meeting, run the minutes prompt from Section 27.5. 3. For each set of minutes: - Review for accuracy (did AI capture decisions and actions correctly?) - Check for anything AI inferred that isn't actually what was decided - Verify that action items include clear owners and due dates 4. Compare your AI-assisted minutes to any minutes you've produced manually. What's different? 5. Create a note-taking template that captures the information the minutes prompt needs: decisions, action items, and discussion summaries.

Reflection prompt: What changed in how you take meeting notes when you know you'll run them through an AI tool? Did your note-taking quality improve, decrease, or change in character?

Advanced Exercises (Exercises 11-15)

Exercise 11: The Stakeholder Translation System

Objective: Build a complete technical-to-business communication translation workflow.

Task: 1. Take a technical document, status update, or report written for a technical audience. 2. Identify three non-technical audiences who need information from this document: (a) executive/management, (b) client/customer, (c) adjacent team (non-technical). 3. Run the translation prompt from Section 27.9 for each audience. 4. Evaluate each translation: - Does it maintain factual accuracy? - Has any technical nuance been lost that actually matters? - Is there anything the non-technical audience would misunderstand from this version? 5. Build a "translation guide" for your most common technical-to-business translation: what terms always need explanation, what simplifications are acceptable, what must never be simplified.

Deliverable: Three audience-appropriate versions of one technical document, plus a personal translation guide.

Exercise 12: Template Library Creation

Objective: Build a personal email template library for your most frequent scenarios.

Task: 1. Analyze your sent email from the past 3 months. Identify the 5-7 types of emails you send most frequently. 2. For each type: - Run the template generation prompt from Section 27.6 - Edit the template until every sentence sounds authentically like you - Add placeholder guidance so you know what to customize each time 3. Test each template on a real email scenario. 4. Organize your templates in a format you'll actually use (document, email draft folder, note-taking app snippet).

Deliverable: A personal template library with 5-7 templates, each personalized to your voice.

Exercise 13: The Proposal Adaptation Challenge

Objective: Adapt a single proposal for three different clients with different needs.

Task: 1. Write (or identify) a base proposal for a specific type of work you do. 2. Identify three clients who have different priorities, contexts, and decision-making criteria. 3. Run the audience tailoring prompt from Section 27.4 for each client. 4. Review: what changed between versions? What stayed the same? Is the adaptation genuinely meaningful or just surface-level language changes? 5. For each adapted proposal, write one sentence describing what is specifically, authentically true about this client that makes this version of the proposal different from the others.

Reflection prompt: When is proposal adaptation genuinely valuable (tailoring the argument to what the client cares about) vs. cosmetic (changing a few words without changing the substance)? How do you know the difference?

Exercise 14: Privacy-Aware Workflow Design

Objective: Build confidentiality-safe AI writing practices for your context.

Task: 1. Map your business writing scenarios into categories: - Can be used with external AI tools without modification - Requires anonymization before using with external AI tools - Should only use with your organization's enterprise AI (if available) - Should not use AI at all 2. For each scenario in the "requires anonymization" category: - Define what you'd remove or replace (client names, financial figures, etc.) - Write a sample anonymization for a realistic scenario 3. Research your organization's AI usage policy. What guidance exists? What gaps does it leave? 4. Write a 1-page "personal AI confidentiality guide" for your role — practical rules you'll actually follow.

Exercise 15: The 24-Hour Proposal Challenge

Objective: Produce a complete proposal in 24 hours using AI throughout.

Constraint: Use a real opportunity — a proposal you need to write anyway.

Requirements: The proposal must include: - Executive summary (standalone, under 400 words) - Problem statement (reflects the client's specific situation) - Proposed solution (specific deliverables and timeline) - Why you (differentiation from alternatives) - Investment (pricing with appropriate framing) - Success metrics

Rules: - AI must be used for first drafts of all sections - Every AI output must be edited — nothing goes in unreviewed - The executive summary must pass the standalone test - The proposal must contain at least one sentence per section that AI couldn't have written (something specific to this client or your relationship)

Deliverable: The completed proposal plus a 1-page reflection on which sections required the most human judgment.

Capstone Exercise

Exercise 16: The Full Communication Audit

Objective: Audit your existing business communication patterns and build a systematic AI-assisted writing system.

Task: 1. Collect 20 business communications you've sent in the past month: emails, reports, proposals, documents. 2. Evaluate each on three dimensions (1-5 scale): - Clarity: did it communicate the key message clearly? - Efficiency: was it the appropriate length and detail level? - Authenticity: did it sound like you, or generic? 3. Identify the three weakest areas across your communication portfolio. 4. For each weak area, use AI to: - Identify the pattern problem (what specifically makes these examples weak) - Generate 3 improved versions of one representative example - Create a template or guidance note to improve future examples 5. Write a "communication quality plan" — specific changes to your writing process that will address the three weak areas.

Deliverable: A communication audit report (2-3 pages) with examples, analysis, and an improvement plan.