Professional Writing Skills Development for Corporate Communication Staff in Nigerian Banking Institutions

This study examines the state of professional writing skills among corporate communication staff in Nigerian banking institutions and evaluates the effectiveness of workplace writing skills development programmes in improving the quality of official correspondence, reports, and customer-facing communications. Effective written communication is a critical competence for banking professionals, yet many corporate communication departments in Nigerian banks report persistent challenges with grammatical accuracy, tonal appropriateness, and genre-specific formal conventions in staff writing. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining a writing quality assessment of 150 work documents submitted by 50 communication staff from five major commercial banks with structured interviews with communication department heads and training coordinators. Documents assessed include internal memos, customer letters, regulatory reports, and media releases. Writing quality is evaluated against a rubric covering grammatical accuracy, organisational coherence, register appropriateness, and genre convention adherence. Findings reveal that formal grammar accuracy is relatively high among graduate-level staff, but tonal inconsistency, poor executive summary construction, and failure to adapt register to different audience types are widespread weaknesses. Banks with structured in-house writing skills development programmes show measurably better staff performance on the assessment rubric. The study identifies a significant gap between generic writing skills training content and the specific genre requirements of banking communication. Recommendations include the development of sector-specific professional writing curricula aligned with the documentation genres most common in Nigerian banking practice. Keywords: professional writing, corporate communication, banking sector, writing skills, Nigeria.