Communication Theory: the intersection of two minds

December 20, 2024 by Jenny Morse

The theory of communication is that it is the intersection of two or more human minds. In order to communicate, one person has to be saying or writing something–typically called the “sender”--and the other person (or people) has to be listening to reading the message–typically called the “receiver”. Communication happens in the space between the people, the space where someone says something that another person hears or someone writes something that another person reads.

So, communication means that the sender has to craft a message the receiver can understand, which typically involves at least three features:

Thinking about other people thinking: Theory of Mind

November 27, 2024 by Jenny Morse

Theory of Mind is the ability to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling. And humans start to develop it around the age of 3.

Monkeys have it, too.

The Netflix series Babies has a great experiment illustrating theory of mind. A researcher sits across from a mom with a toddler on her lap. On the table between them are two bowls: one of broccoli and one of cookies. The researcher proceeds to talk about how much she loves broccoli. A toddler who does not yet have theory of mind will look at the researcher like they are crazy and push the bowl of cookies over–because no person in their right mind could possibly want to eat broccoli. But a toddler who has theory of mind will tentatively push the bowl of broccoli over to the researcher because the toddler now has the basic concept that not everyone likes the same things.

This ability to understand that everyone is different starts when we are toddlers and continues to grow and expand throughout our lives as we encounter people who are different from us.

And it is this ability to imagine that other people might have thoughts and feelings that are not the same as ours which creates the foundation of empathy.

Timing Matters in Professional Communication: Here are three reasons why

October 29, 2024 by Jenny Morse

Timing is critical in so many things. Buying a house. Investing in the stock market. Dating. And professional communication.

Timing isn’t just about luck like getting across the railroad tracks before an oncoming train. In communication, timing sends signals to other people about how prepared you are, how important the message or person is, and whether you can be trusted.

Timing is directly related to credibility.

So it’s important to consider the effect of timing before we communicate and in how we respond to communication from others.

Here’s the thing: different methods of communication have different associated timing.

Bullet points are good. But bullet points with correct grammar are better

September 11, 2024 by Jenny Morse

Bullet points are an incredibly useful formatting tool. They help group similar information together, so the reader can see at a glance where the most relevant content is in a document.

Bullet points work to draw the eye the same way that other changes in formatting do: By being different from other stuff on the page. See, we imagine that we read left to right and top to bottom. And generally we do.

But we don’t read every word. (I mean, unless it’s a really great novel)

Basically, our eyes take in a page as a pattern of lines. The margin of the page helps to establish a field–white space–that is broken by the lines of text. There’s a whole science of page design. Seriously, that’s a thing I learned as a publishing intern. The way to make text both easy and interesting to read.

Brains are interested in patterns, but our attention is drawn to places where the pattern changes. You know those “tests” on social media like can you find the A in all the Zs? or can you find the panda in the sea of yinyangs? Sure, those can be challenging because they are small and the shapes are hard to distinguish, but most people can do it. Our eyes go to places where the pattern is different from everything else.

That’s how formatting works to direct the reader’s attention: by disrupting the pattern. You can do that with our old standards of bold, italics, and underline. Though bold works best for making people look.

And bullet points are a disruption in the flow of text on the page. A way to signal to the reader “Look over here! There’s something interesting!”

Goldilocks and context: how to get the amount of content just right

August 22, 2024 by Jenny Morse

In our professional space, too little context often happens because the writer assumes the reader knows something they don’t.

For example, does your workplace use abbreviations? Do new employees know all those abbreviations from day 1? Typically not.

This is why the standard use of an abbreviation is to write out its meaning the first time you use it. That defining practice helps ensure that the reader always knows what the abbreviation means and how it is being used in the document.

It isn’t fair for us to write messages that assume the reader has the same information that we do. If they had the same information, we probably wouldn’t need to write the message in the first place.

Question #1 for context

How to be nice(r) in writing by focusing on the use of "I" and "you" and "we"

July 15, 2024 by Jenny Morse

How the words “I”, “you”, and “we” get used in written messages reflects the ways that the writer does and the reader will perceive relationships. Many of us learned some techniques for using these words in school, like “When you __________, I feel __________” statements that help frame negative experiences and emotions. But the ways we use these words in spoken language are different from how we use them in writing. For one thing, spoken language takes turns, so each person in the conversation gets to be the “I” and the “you.” Writing doesn’t have turn taking, so the whole message is coming from “I” to “you” and the response–where the “I” and “you” switch–comes later. Because of that fact, reading someone’s written message sometimes feels like more of a lecture than a conversation.

These strategies help create more of a conversation.

You might also think of them as eye contact. When we are talking to someone, we typically look at them. Sure, we glance away every once in a while, but we know that making eye contact–connecting eye to eye–is an important part of nonverbal communication. Eye contact is so important for humans that it may even be related to how our eyes evolved: We have more white space around our eyes than many other animals and the speculation is that the big whites and smaller irises allow us to see where people are looking from further away. We can guess pretty accurately where another human’s attention is, even at a distance.

Purpose: Do you need the other person to write you back?

June 18, 2024 by Jenny Morse

Purpose.

Your message must have one.

And you should know what it is–why you are writing and what you want the other person to do with your message–before you send it.

Big picture: you have two *different* motivations for writing tied to two different outcomes.

Either, you want to

1) Tell the reader something → Know it (no reply needed) so that they know it. In which case your last sentence is

“Let me know if you have questions.”

2) Get the reader to do something → Do it (and reply back to you)

“Please do [x] by [date] so that [y].”

These are different purposes that lead to different outcomes.

Clear grammar builds trust with your audience

May 21, 2024 by Jenny Morse

Because I am an English PhD, people often love to share with me their grammar horror stories. I can laugh at a lot of these because grammar mistakes can create funny pictures in people’s heads. I used to teach a class for Employers Council called Brush Up English (I still teach classes through Employers Council, but this specific class is no longer available through Employers Council; I do have grammar seminars, though) and the exercises on misplaced and dangling modifiers always make me laugh:

Piled up next to the sink, I washed the dirty dishes.

Do you get it? The grammar says that “I” am “piled up next to the sink.” 😆

This grammar is unclear, creates the wrong picture in the other person’s head, and may create some confusion.

Clarity: helping your reader understand you

April 16, 2024 by Jenny Morse

The trouble with clarity in writing is that you can’t see the reader’s face to know if they are confused or not. When we speak to each other, we can see the other person’s response in real time. If they are confused, we can try again, rephrase, explain, or ask questions. While those things can happen in writing, they will happen much slower as we write back and forth to each other. Lack of clarity in writing creates more work–more emails that you have to read and write.

Clarity in writing reduces the number of exchanges you and the reader need to have. And the fewer times you have to read and write back and forth, the more time you have for coffee breaks and crossword puzzles (or meetings or phone calls or whatever other work-related tasks you are responsible for).

Designing messages people will read

March 21, 2024 by Jenny Morse

To write messages that people will read–or at least that it is more likely they will read–you need to know 3 things:

Few people will read every single word you write.
Most people will skim down the left side of the message.
People will look where the pattern changes–white space between paragraphs, bullets, bold, anything that is different from the standard and repeating lines of text.

People who research reading–I always imagine labs full of people with lasers strapped to their heads like bike helmets–track eye movements as their experiment participants read. Based on the data, most people read in an F pattern. What that means is that people read most of the first line of the first paragraph. Then less of the first line of the second paragraph, and very little of the first line of the 3rd, 4th, and remaining paragraphs.

Concise = the balance between short and effective

February 22, 2024 by Jenny Morse

First, and I say this with all the wry humor you can imagine, no one wants to read your writing at work. People, for the most part, want to do their jobs. And doing their jobs involves reading your messages. But the reading people do at work is not the same reading people do when they pick up a good book or dig into the most recent blog post by someone they follow. Your colleagues aren’t *choosing* to read your writing. They have to read it to do their jobs.

Because of this attitude, our writing at work needs to be short. We need to get the point across quickly so that people can stop reading and do the things they actually get paid for.

But, and this brings me to my second point, short writing feels mean. Studies have been done on why writing feels different from things that are said out loud, and it boils down to a combination of these facts:

1) writing doesn’t have a body.

2) writing has a lengthy (millenia) history of being associated with rich and therefore educated people.

3) writing tends to be and needs to be more correct than spoken language.

4) writing is considered more “official”--has more power in court–than things said out loud.

When you combine these facts together–no body, a history of elitism, the necessity of correctness, and the value of writing in the legal system–you come up with what researchers have called the negativity effect.

Audience-focus: how to write for others

January 16, 2024 by Jenny Morse

Most people learn how to write so that other people do things through trial and error. Writing messages at work and seeing what happens as a result of them. We also learn by imitating others–we see what other people write and figure “We’ll do it that way, too”. And sure, sometimes that works. But also, we often are copying people who aren’t writing experts either.

Audience-focused writing is writing that works *for* the reader. It’s easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to act on.

Pretty much all the writing you do at work is *for* others. The goal is to give them information or get them to do something. And if they can’t read or understand the information easily or don’t know what you want them to do next, then your writing isn’t very effective.

The two best writing habits for the new year

December 29, 2023 by Jenny Morse

But these habits do not support good writing.

Why do we care about good writing at work? Most of the people I train aren’t so-called “writers” and don’t want to be. They are professionals who write to get their jobs done. “Good” doesn’t seem relevant.

But it is. What I mean by “good” is writing that is easy to read and act on. Good writing at work is writing that makes it easy for the other person to do their job.

And while we might think, ok, so by that definition, I’m a pretty good writer because my work is getting done or moving forward. Sure, but how many messages have you sent that didn’t get a response? Or that came back confused? Or answered a completely different question? Or where it seemed like the person hadn’t read your whole message?

Those responses indicate writing that isn’t successful for work. In fact, research estimates that almost one whole work day is wasted by every professional every week because of poor communication.

Every time you have to explain again, or send a reminder message, or call a person because they haven’t responded by email, your work is happening slower and taking longer than it needs to.

So what habits can you build that will help you become a better writer for work? Two simple things

On your way out? Make sure to set up your Out of Office Message

November 16, 2023 by Jenny Morse

Why do you need an out of office message?

As we are approaching the holiday season, many people will take advantage of their vacation days and other well-deserved time off to visit family, escape to a beach, or sneak in holiday shopping.

But for many industries, the holiday season doesn’t mean that business slows down. Product-based businesses are cranking out products and stepping up marketing efforts. Service-based businesses are working to line up business for 1st quarter and lock down contracts and budgets. The work doesn’t stop, even if an employee takes a pause.

Luckily, most of the work we do happens in teams where we can share responsibilities and take turns covering for each other.

Out of Office messages are one of those tools that can seem annoying but are actually helpful.

What is annoying about them is that on the writer’s side a) you have to turn them on before you actually stop checking your messages, which leaves you feeling a little guilty, b) you have to figure out what to say, and on the reader’s side c) the person you want to talk to isn’t available and d) you keep getting their out of office message whenever you copy them on something you know they need to see.

Those things are annoying, but mostly resolvable.

More importantly, these small inconveniences are offset by how enormously helpful out of office messages are.

First, out of office messages are helpful to the person writing to you. That person has expectations about when you will get back to them. Your out of office message helps to manage those expectations and direct others toward a person who can actually help them while you are away.

Second, out of office messages are helpful to you because they allow you to focus on whatever awesome things you are doing outside of work without worrying about what responsibilities you have abandoned or what clients can’t live without you. Out of office messages allow you to be free.

Guidelines for the perfect out of office message

Here’s what you need to do to ensure your time away is safely and responsibly protected and that everyone who might reach out to you is taken care of:

You can schedule the out of office message to start after you leave the office. You must schedule it for a time after which you will not check your messages. That means, turn off your work email on your phone, computer, and wherever else you might be tempted to look.
And then you *must not* check your messages after that point. Once your out of office message is on, the only person you will respond to is your designated contact person. They will decide which messages require you and which ones don’t.
Keep in mind that if you respond directly to anyone (other than your designated contact person), you are violating your Out of Office message and *decreasing* your credibility with others. They can’t believe you when you say you are out of the office or they can impose on you even though you are “technically” not working. Holding the boundary of not responding once your Out of Office message is on actually *builds* trust because you are doing what you say you are going to do.
Also, if you respond to some people and not others, they might talk and someone’s feelings will get hurt that you violated your boundary for “special” people but not for other people. Don’t do that. Simply don’t respond to anyone other than your designated contact person.
You only have to say who people should contact while your away and when they can expect a response from you. That’s all your out of office message says. It can be something short like this:

Thanks for your email. I’m out of the office right now.

You can expect to hear back from me by Friday, December 1.

If you need a response before then, please contact my colleague, Alan: alan@company.com and 970-555-3409.

Make sure Alan knows that he is your out of office contact person. And that you have talked about how to handle any urgent things that come up. You might have your email automatically forward to Alan so that he can review all the incoming messages and decide which ones you need to address yourself. You don’t have to do that, but it might help Alan better manage the messages. Do make sure that Alan is the gatekeeper for you and tell Alan how to get in touch with you if absolutely necessary since you will have turned off your email on your devices. It is now Alan’s job to either cover your job or contact you if he can’t handle it. In no circumstances should you communicate with anyone other than Alan. As soon as you call a customer from your beach vacation, your vacation is over and you’ll have to turn off your Out of Office message and start working again. Make sure to protect your time away and the trust you have built with others by adhering to your own rules and boundaries.

For that reason, you don’t want to tell people the exact days and times you will be away because they will then expect to hear back from you the day they know you are back. They will call you, send follow up emails, and schedule meetings all while you are still trying to get caught up!

Give yourself a few days. We all know that coming back from time away is a bit overwhelming. You’ll have to sort through everything that has happened since you left, which means reviewing an average of 124 messages for each day you were gone, talking to colleagues who have so many things to tell you, and checking in with bosses. And that first day will probably already have several meetings scheduled, so you won’t just get to lock yourself away in your office and chug along until you’ve responded to every email.

The only date you should include in your out of office is message is the date that people can expect to get a response from you. Then hold yourself accountable to that date. And if you don’t get it all done by then, you’ve allowed people to send a follow up message after that date has passed.

3. Use the out of office message settings to select that people should only get the out of office response on the first email or one time. Make sure you are limiting how many times people–who might have to copy you on messages for documentation reasons–are notified that you are not at work. Once should be enough. For example, Google will only send the out of office message to a contact once every four days–even if you are copied on several messages from that same person.

What not to do in your Out of Office message

Some cautions on out of office messages:

Your message never needs to and should not include an explanation of *why* you are out of the office. If you tell people why, they will use it against you and/or judge you for it. If you say you are on vacation, they will whine about how much you go on vacation or how they wish they could take a vacation. They will be jealous and petty. Don’t encourage that behavior. We all are entitled to vacation time. Take yours! If you tell people you are out for medical reasons, they will ask intrusive questions, send inappropriate get well wishes, or freak out about your imminent death. If you tell people you are spending time with family, they will lament their own family relationships for good or bad. The only people who need to know why you are out of the office are your boss and HR–and even they should only know exactly what is necessary to process the appropriate type of leave. Vacation time is for vacation. Medical leave is for medical. Family leave is for family. They don’t need to know anything beyond those three options: vacation, medical, family. Not where you are going, not who you are with, not what you are being treated for. Do not give them more information than absolutely necessary as it will be used against you when it suits your employer.
Only use out of office messages when you are away for multiple days. While business hours have traditionally been 9-5, our global and remote workforce means that people are working in time zones all around the world and at hours that may not be standardized or consistent. If you are spending the afternoon in a professional development training session, you don’t need an out of office message. You’ll get to those messages when you are back at your desk the next morning. Out of office messages are for when you are away for more than 24hrs.
Do not use them if you will be away for less than 24hrs. Remember, the standard response time for an email is 24hrs. So, unless your company has a specific policy on this, you always have 24hrs to respond to any email message you receive. That means you should have time to manage any emotional response you have to a message, craft a rough reply, and wait at least 15min or more before reviewing it and sending it out. Writing well requires patience. Take the time you need to write messages that will build trust and connect with your audiences.

Feel free to use my template above as your Out of Office message. And I’ll make sure that Alan gets a big end-of-the-year bonus for covering all of our jobs.

How to write with (or without) AI language tools

October 20, 2023 by Jenny Morse

Think of AI language models as AI language calculators. They might be able to write grammatically correctly, but because they follow rules that are programmed, they can’t actually think. They don’t know what they are doing. They don’t have context. They don’t have input unless you put it in. They don’t know what to do with the output. You have to do that.

To use AI language models effectively, we have to become experts in how to put in the right stuff to get the right result that we can actually use. If I don’t know basic math, then I can’t use a calculator. If I don’t know basic language, then I can’t use an AI language model either.

These tools can’t write *for* you. They can only write *with* you. You still have to know why you are writing, who you are writing for, and what you want to have happen as a result of the writing. You still have to make choices about purpose and audience and context. The AI can show you a million different permutations of the exact same prompt, but you still have to pick the one that will work best.

So how are you going to do that?

Writing as a Team Sport

September 19, 2023 by Jenny Morse

The easiest way to make writing as a team less painful is to have really good project management and communication.

You will likely have a final deadline for delivering the writing project. The whole group knows it has to be done by then.

The key to success is working backward from there to determine what needs to happen in order for the project to get done and by when each step needs to be completed.

What’s the Best Way to Send a Message? It depends.

August 08, 2023 by Jenny Morse

Before cell phones and the internet the means of sending a message were limited. Anytime in the late 19th century or earlier, there were basically two ways to send a message: find the person and talk to them or send a letter or a note or a calling card (ok, there were choices, but we don’t have to worry about most of those mechanisms any more). Then the phone was invented, and now you could actually hear the person’s voice even when you weren’t in the same space with them. The phone was a channel for communication between talking to them in person and sending a written message. And it was revolutionary.

But here in the 21st century, our means of communication have proliferated. Of course, you can still talk to people in person (if you want). And you can call them (that is a function the device we call a “phone” still has). But you can also FaceTime (aka video call), text, post/chat/DM on any one of the ever-multiplying social media platforms, instant message through Slack or Google Chat (or those same social media platforms), email, or send a voice message, video message, meme, gif, or any other communication object through any of these platforms.

The ways to communicate are infinite.

So how do we make choices about which ones to use when?

Giving and Receiving Feedback is Hard: Try to Think of It As a Gift

July 13, 2023 by Jenny Morse

I don’t think I am great at giving or receiving feedback. Yet. But I do know what we *should* do. And I know why we should do these things. I hope that by sharing them with you, you can practice these skills and keep working to develop the trust in others and trust in yourself that giving and receiving good feedback requires.

How long is too long for an email?

June 19, 2023 by Jenny Morse

The purpose of email is to communicate the task, question, need, or invitation. Once we start explaining the how or the why, our message will start to get longer than the audience may need or want to read.

A good rule of thumb for an email is to think that if we have to scroll down, the content is too long.

The non-verbal signals we send with our written communication

May 18, 2023 by Jenny Morse

I recently read Erica Dhawan’s book Digital Body Language, which has such great insights about how people are evaluating trust based on the signals we send when we communicate. Her point in the book is that trust is built by more than the language we read: the combination of all our choices creates a signal for the audience. What she emphasizes is that we read the contextual signals of written communication much like we read body language during a face-to-face conversation.

We know what you mean when you say “We’re going to have to take another look at this” because we can hear your voice, see your face, read your posture. All those things add up to tone, the emotions we ascribe to a bit of communication. And, Dhawan suggests–despite our long-held belief that writing doesn’t have a voice or a face or posture, that writing doesn’t have tone in the way that we know speaking does–it turns out that writing does have non-verbal signals that we can interpret as positive or negative, enthusiastic or uninterested, overwhelmed or bored. And we need to be aware of those signals so that we can make choices about the signals we send.