Tone

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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.

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Plan, Write, Revise

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Today, a seminar participant wrote on his feedback form: "This seminar took writing, which seems complicated and difficult, and made it really simple: plan, write, revise.

Some people are afraid of the blank page. Planning gets those writers started so that they are never faced with a blank page. The page has, at a minimum, their responses to the planning prompts.

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Writing for work

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I’m preparing to conduct my first business writing seminar, and I’m a little nervous. Sure, I’ve taught business writing for a while, but I’ve been focusing my teaching efforts on college students for so long that what I’m nervous about is tailoring the material to people who actually know what writing for work is like.

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Clarity is the difference between writing to yourself and writing to someone else

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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.

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Writing Habits

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Recently, I’ve been reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The ideas in it are fascinating. Basically, a habit is a routine that happens in response to a particular cue and leads to a particular reward. Habits are shortcuts for our brain, ways of transforming everyday tasks into automatic ones. In Duhigg’s book, he explains how it works and how certain people and companies have used this built-in system to improve or create new habits. 

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Clarity

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One of the biggest challenges with written language is communicating our ideas effectively to a reader who is not present. When the message is accurately transmitted, written language is amazing. But when the message is inaccurately transmitted, fury encourages us to blame the other person, writer or reader, for the mistake.

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Keep reading

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My students are just starting to work on a big project. To begin, they have to choose a topic. One of the groups had chosen the very broad topic of literacy and technology. Narrowing it down, they talked about how computers could be used to increase reading comprehension, they talked about developing apps to teach people how to read more effectively or faster or offering speed reading classes to high schoolers, they noted how people are reading a lot of short things but not very much long stuff.

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Punctuation and meaning

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It's almost the holidays and I've been too overwhelmed with final grades (and students begging for better grades) to think of something to write. But a few years ago while at a poetry reading that was taking place in an awkward industrial space that forced the reader to stand in a corner lit primarily by the familiar white and red "Fire Escape" sign, I thought of this mini lesson on grammar.

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