Providing your reader with context

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Beginning 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.

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Professional email

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In our age of myriad technologies and informality, sometimes I think it's helpful to remind people of established conventions that are still expected in professional contexts. Professional does not necessarily mean within the context of business, but generally refers to a context in which the writer seeks to address a person of higher social standing. This could mean someone older, someone in a position of authority, or someone who you want something from.

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Paragraphs

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With our new technologies, twitter, facebook, text messaging, we have learned to cherish the shortest messages, and while the increasing value of the clear and concise 160 character message has improved our ability to communicate quickly, it hasn't helped our ability to communicate substantively.

We are losing the art of the paragraph.

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Semantics

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A few years ago, I was visiting friends in Germany. One of them is an English teacher and she asked me if I could explain to her the difference between "fill in" and "fill out". She gave an example, "Would you say 'I want to fill in the form'? or 'I want to fill out the form'?" I tried to imagine the situation. At the doctor or dentist's office, they hand you that clipboard with all the info you have to verify and say, "Please fill out the form." Ok, so "fill out", but "fill in" sounded just as right. On a test, it might say "Fill in all the blanks." So, I decided that the difference had to do with what was expected from the writer. To "fill out" seems to be to put in all the necessary information--to complete a form or provide information. To "fill in" seems to be to put back what has been taken out or removed. If there are obvious gaps in something, you fill them in. But if there are gaps and you need not complete all of them, you fill them out. Thoughts?

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Cover letters

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A cover letter is a document that pretty much all of us have to write. It's that thing that goes with your resume, a letter required by your potential employers. But what is the purpose of this letter? Your resume should tell the employer everything they need to know: where you went school, where you've worked, what responsibilities you've had, how long you've been at a job or in school, what your computer skills are, etc. What else do these people need from you?

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Three of My Favorite Word Choice Errors

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Prior to the prevalence of computers, (misspelling was the most common writing error. But spellcheck solved that problem and, like so many of our best inventions, created a new one: the word choice error. Now, our greatest problem is having a computer choose our words for us and, occasionally, choose incorrectly. Here are three of my favorite irreverent errors.

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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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