Have you used an emoji in an email at work? Seriously, have you? I bet you have. At least one smiley face. AT LEAST a wink;)
But if I asked you if emojis are “professional,” most of you would probably say no.
Read MoreSlide decks come in two major types: those meant to accompany you talking and those meant to be read. The rules are different for these two types because one is supporting material and the other is center stage.
What they have in common is image and color. Slide decks allow for visuals in a way that reports, memos, letters, and emails don’t. The slide is meant to be seen rather than read. We expect a slide to have more color than black and white. We expect the text to be accompanied by images. We appreciate colorful headings, highlighted words, background colors, and other design elements that are typically not part of other written formats.
Read MoreAristotle is to be blamed for teaching us the so-called “rhetorical triangle” of ethos (credibility), logos (logic), and pathos (emotion). Of course, the reason teachers are still teaching ethos, pathos, and logos is because we have centuries of testing that shows they work. Your ability to persuade is determined by whether the audience can trust you, whether you can provide logical and relevant evidence, and whether the audience has an emotional stake in your content. We won’t listen to people we don’t trust (ethos): credibility is the foundation for all effective communication. But we also don’t listen to people who we don’t *care* about, or who don’t make us *feel* something (pathos). We want to feel connected or inspired or powerful; maybe we want to feel angry or sad. Whatever the emotion, persuasion will only work when we *feel* it.
Read MoreRoutine messages are messages that are…routine, as in you write them all the time or you get the same kind of messages all the time. These are your day-to-day, the main things you do, the things you probably should have built templates for so that you can just swap out the names at the top.
Read MoreYou may have been told in middle school not to use passive voice. Or your high school or college writing teacher used red pen and underlined sentences marking them “Passive voice!!” as if you should’ve known what that meant and why it mattered. Or you see Microsoft Word’s squiggly blue line under a sentence and read “Passive voice” and then just accept whatever suggestion the AI offers. It’s ok. You don’t have to know everything about writing, and using grammar check is a good habit! But this is one technique that you may want to know how to use.
Read MoreThis month’s blog post is on introductions and conclusions to help those of you who write reports feel more confident about how you are starting and ending those documents. Most writing guide books will tell you that the introduction sets the stage for the report, and the conclusion summarizes. You might have heard the idea “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.” Conceptually, that’s about right. More specifically, we will give you the concrete elements that should appear in both your introduction and conclusion to create the strongest frame for your report and the best reading experience for your audience.
Report writing is primarily about sharing information with an audience. The goal of the report is to present that information in a logical and organized way that helps the reader digest the content and understand how the content could be applied or what it might mean.
Read More… Knowing how to be professional for a particular audience in a particular context is what allows us to build, create, or maintain credibility…Professionalism linked to suits in the workplace is one example of the ways we generalize “professionalism”, even though suits in the workplace aren’t professional for every situation and every audience. Professionalism really depends on the context rather than a fixed set of rules…
Read MoreOur professional writing has to be concise because, unfortunately, no one wants to read anything. Most of the people who are reading your messages or are writing to you are doing so because they need to get things done, or we need them to get things done. They need to have information. Rather than reading to enjoy your emails, like they would a good book, they are reading the message trying to figure out: Why are you writing to me? And, what am I supposed to do with this?
Read MoreRecently, a few videos on “psychological tricks” have been popping up in my social media feed. One of the tricks that gets a fair amount of attention is that of mirroring. The idea is that if you mirror people’s body language, they are more likely to trust you. For example, if a person reaches for their drink, and then you reach for your drink, the similarity of the action subconsciously suggests that you are alike, which can build trust. So, if the person leans forward, you lean forward; if the person crosses their legs, you cross your legs.
Read MoreYou know the saying “Take a walk in someone else’s shoes”? What is that saying about? It’s asking you to consider what it’s like to be a different person, to see something from their perspective rather than your own. That ability is called theory of mind, the ability to imagine what another person is thinking or feeling.
Most humans develop this ability as toddlers, around age 3.
Read MoreWe all know that food motivates people. Whether it’s training a toddler to use the potty, or a 57-year-old telling herself that she can have a snack as soon as she finishes prepping tomorrow’s presentation, food operates on our brain as a reward.
At the same time, we know that most people do not want to read everything we write for work. Professionals skip over words, sentences, whole paragraphs, skimming our messages to read as little as possible and still be able to carry out whatever task the message assigns. We don’t want to read messages at work; we have to read messages at work. What this means is that most of us need external rewards in order to read.
Read MoreYou may have been taught in school that using the singular “they” to refer to one person is grammatically incorrect. While the singular “they” has been employed for centuries by famous authors, professional writers, and as part of everyday language, your teacher was right, was being the keyword.
In this blog post, we want to address two things: 1) Using the singular “they” is something you’ve probably already been doing, unconsciously when you speak, and possibly even when you write. And, 2) The singular “they” can be an adjustment when referring to a non-gender binary individual, but it also reflects the nature of the English language.
Read MoreBeginning writers spend most of their time thinking about how to put words together into a logical message. Their focus is on getting the words out, writing down words that reflect the ideas in their heads. They feel finished when they have put their idea on paper, just put it into writing. This is a lot of hard work. It is a challenge to find the right words, to put them in order, to write as fast as your mind, or slow down your thoughts to match your typing speed. Your thoughts and your hands are constantly out of sync. So it is a struggle just to write.
Read MoreWhy does writing well matter? So much of grammar seems arbitrary, annoying, and irrelevant to communication.
The real reason correct and clear writing matters is credibility.
In my seminars recently, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about tone. People feel that they themselves or others are too “abrupt” or “brusque” in email. This is not uncommon.
The problem exists because writing is a much more limited system than our other forms of communication. When we talk to people face-to-face, we interpret their body language, gestures, facial expressions as part of what they are saying. When we talk on the phone, we lose the body, but we still have the voice with all its inflection, tone, and volume.
A few semesters ago, I had an out of town engagement on the first day of class, so I sent an email to all my future students introducing myself and giving them a writing assignment to work on before the “second” day of class. The majority of students answered my questions eloquently, used correct format for an email to an unknown superior, and generally impressed me with the writing skills they would be bringing to our class. However, not all of them exceeded my expectations.
Read MoreWe have become an informal culture. CEOs wear hoodies to work. We text, chat, facebook, and use all sorts of other intimate communications with strangers. The constraints and conventions of society have changed.
For most of us.
Every time we sit down to write something, anything, we are writing to someone. Often, our writing is simply for ourselves: shopping lists, errands, books we'd like to read, or calendar entries. When we write for ourselves, we know our audience intimately, and so we don't have to put much thought into it: we need enough words to jog our own memory and clear enough handwriting to read what we wrote.
Read More