Business Writing Help!

As I'm sure anyone who has read my blog knows, I love to write. I mostly enjoy academic writing, such as essays and journal articles, but I've dabbled in blogging and journalism, and I've even tried my hand at creative writing. (NaNoWriMo fell victim to real life this year, though. Better luck next time.) Business writing is an area where I'm weak, however.

I got my start in the working world in 2000, when the dot-com bubble was at its bubbliest. I was a green 18-year old with no college education and no experience. They don't teach business writing in high school. [1] There was a huge labor shortage at the time, so qualifications for getting a job were: 1) Do you have a pulse? 2) Do you have a social security number?. Seeing as I was in possession of both of those qualifications, I got hired by a temp agency.

There's no training at most temp agencies, so I just got thrown into the world of business. I was expected to sink or swim. Fortunately, I learned to swim pretty quickly. Then college happened, then my mission happened, and then law school happened. During college, I worked as a teaching assistant, so I didn't have to worry about office skills. In law school, I worked in the library, where I shelved books and helped students with legal research.

Then The Great and Dreadful Interruption of Life (TM) happened. I suddenly found myself with half a law degree, no job, no money, and no marketable skills. I called up a different temp agency (that I had used over summers in law school when I wasn't shelving books) and I got placed in the rotation again. Business was slow, so I took a part-time job doing home health care on the weekends to pay the bills. (This health care job, which I intended to take for a few months to get back on my feet ended up becoming a full-time job that lasted for 3 years.) Once again, no need for business writing.

I went to paralegal school, but because of my 3 semesters of law school (which included a rather worthless legal writing and research class, as I've mentioned before), my writing class was waived. I graduated with honors, giving me a nice shiny marketable degree, but because of the economy, there wasn't really a market for paralegals at the time.

Back in February, I landed a position through my temp agency that was supposed to last for 3 months, covering the front desk. Once the 3 months was up, I was promoted to HR, where I still am today. (I got hired as a permanent employee in August.) So, I have a ton of work experience, I managed to go back to law school after TGaDIoL, but I still feel like my skills are deficient in a few key areas. (I had a much better legal writing class this time around, but I know business writing is different from legal writing, and I'm not even that good at non-academic legal writing anyway. Just ask my professor...)

My roommate recently graduated with a certificate in administrative assisting. I didn't even know that there were schools for that. She learned all sorts of useful stuff like how to write a memo. Anyway, so now I'm juggling law school (at the end of this semester, I will have completed 3 years, which is as much as most lawyers, but I digress) and working in HR, where I have no experience. I'm sort of learning as I go.

My boss asked me today to write a specific type of memo, and I'll admit that I had to google it to get an example. I'm a good writer, but there's so much in the business world that I don't know because I've spent most of my adult life in school, and I've spent much of my working life working for universities. This is a sort of long-winded way of getting to the point, but does anyone have any suggestions for a good business writing textbook or style guide? I want to have a good reference and a way to teach myself all the stuff that I probably should have picked up along the way over the past 10 years. [2]

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[1] There may have been business writing courses available, but if there were, I never heard about them. I was tracked into high-end math and science classes because the guidance counselors, teachers, and many of my family members figured I would go on to become an engineer. Imagine everyone's surprise when I decided to study political science and philosophy in college and then go to law school. Of course, I do work for a software company, and I'm studying intellectual property law, so I'm sort of the most engineer-like legal person around.
[2] I don't need help with grammar, etc. Mainly, I need help with tone and formatting. Everything I write sounds like it was written by a lawyer, albeit a lawyer who refuses to use the words "heretofore" or "whereas". (But who apparently has no objection to the use of "albeit".)