You 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 MoreWe’ve all done it. Written an email, looked it over, sent it out, and at the very moment it disappears from our screen into the ether, we realize…TYPO! We’ve misspelled the person’s name or put the wrong date or made some other obvious and totally unnecessary error.
So, why does this happen? Because, as Stanislaus Dehaene writes in his book Reading in the Brain, “What we see depends on what we think we’re seeing.”
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 MoreMonths before CoVID-19 changed the way we work, Appendance had been working to develop an online course.
We’ve finally made that happen! On June 8, we launched our online course, Better Business Writing.
Read MoreMost of us didn’t grow up wanting to be writers. Ok, I did and I am, but most of you didn’t want to be writers when you grew up. You wanted to do other things like work with people and support their development in human resources, or buy and sell stock, or manage real estate. You wanted to do things, not write about them. But think about your day. How much time of the time you spend working is dedicated to writing? 30%? 50%? 80%? You are taking notes, writing emails, sending text messages, maybe create social media content, crafting reports. Turns out, you grew up to be a writer.
Read MoreThese are strange times to be living in! A few short weeks ago, I was riding my bike to school to teach undergraduates on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and driving down I-25 on Tuesdays and Thursdays to train professionals at companies along the Front Range. Now, I’m teaching from a whiteboard I hung on a wall in my house. The commute is shorter, but I miss the classroom interactions…
Read MoreWe learn to write in middle school; how to get our own ideas out of our heads and onto the page. In college, we learn to add adjectives and extra words as “fluff” to fill space on the page. By the time we get to our careers, most people are still using the skills that they acquired as younger, less qualified versions of the people they are now.
Read MoreIt's a new year. If you're like many entrepreneurs, business owners, or other managers of content, you might have made a resolution to finally choose or create a style guide.
Read MoreHoliday cards are tough for oh so many reasons. One reason is planning; this is why I typically send out New Year’s Cards rather than attempting to get them out before Christmas. Because my life still runs on semesters, I have a break mid-December that I can use to get my cards done, but I can’t even think about attempting them as the semester ends.
Another reason the cards are so difficult is grammar.
Read MoreI attended the 84th Annual International Conference of the Association for Business Communications (ABC) in October. The Conference, organized for academics and practitioners, was an exhilarating experience emphasizing the intersection of theory with practical application through its theme of “Innovations with Business Communication: Companies, Communities, and Classroom. I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions and look forward to sharing new ideas with Appendance’s clients.
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.
Read MoreRecharged after the weekend and eager to start my day, I was quickly skimming my emails to prioritize my tasks when I saw “IT”- the dreaded email from my department chair directed to “All.” Most of my colleagues would have stopped there and deleted the message, but as a writing consultant, my natural inclination was to keep reading.
Read MoreThis spring, I noticed that my undergraduates were writing much better than they had in the previous 5 years I’d been teaching. It was the first semester that I hadn’t read a paper that talked about a house when the sentence actually meant a way: “In this manor, we’ll be able to meet virtually.”
Read More“Company culture” is a phrase we hear a lot these days, most often in relation to either a company having one that is “toxic” or striving to create a “positive” one. We hear about companies redesigning their office layout to be more open and community-based, or allowing employees to pursue creative projects alongside their usual tasks, or offering flexible hours
Read MoreI recently held a workshop with a great group of professionals there to learn about better business writing strategies. They were kind, energetic, and good-humored about spending a day in a professional development seminar. As the day went on, though, it became clear to me that some people were going to benefit from this seminar and some were not at all. It made me realize something.
Read MoreYesterday, a student came into my office to ask for help with an assignment. While reviewing his work, I spotted this sentence:
Bluetooth was removed from consideration since all the cars evaluated had this feature.
The context for this assignment is that students are writing a report to an imaginary boss explaining how they chose a particular vehicle to purchase for the company. In this sentence, the student was pointing out that bluetooth capability wasn’t a factor in his decision since all the cars had it. But what stood out to me was that he had framed that as a negative
Read MoreLast week, my main sewer line collapsed and backed up into my basement. It was disgusting, and infuriating, and resulted in lots of men tromping through my house doing expensive things to help.
When a few of the contractors nicely asked what I did, and I said that I teach business writing, the responses were a lot of throat-clearing and awkward requests not to judge their communication with me.
Read MoreOur language has two main branches, Latin and German. English is a mutt language, so we’ve integrated words from numerous other cultures, but these are the main two that came together in the massive conglomerate of English. For the most part, Latinate words stayed in our most elevated speech, particularly the disciplines of math and science. Germanic words were the main body of our everyday speech.
While this diversity led to an exceptional language mash-up, it also left us with a few redundancies. The most atrocious of these redundancies are the words “use,” Germanic, and “utilize,” Latinate. These words have the exact same meaning. The difference between them is the number of syllables it takes to express that meaning. There may be a few occasions on which the word “utilize” serves best, but I cannot think of any.
For everyday speech, for professional writing, even for academic writing, “utilize” is a redundancy, the use of which only demonstrates the exceptional overreaching of the speaker or writer’s vocabulary. Unless the writer or speaker is involved in science or math where the frequency of Latinate words may lend itself rhymically or stylistically to “utilize,” use works perfectly well in all other cases.
I write a lot about grammar: how to use punctuation marks, the importance of spelling, the challenges of sentence structure. But I realized I haven't talked a lot about proofreading. Proofreading, editing, revising, copyediting: these are all terms that we use to talk about what we do to our writing after we have written it. "Editing" tends to be the broadest concept and can refer to changes from content and ideas, to structure and organization, to grammar and punctuation. Editing means taking something that has already been written and making it better.
"Revising" has a similarly broad conceptual scope. The word broken down is re: again + vise: to see. So, "revision" is actually about just that, looking at your work again. Ideally, this second look will give you clearer insight into what you are trying to say and how best to say it.
"Copyediting" is a more professional term that basically points to the details. When we "copyedit" we check references and facts, make sure that citations are accurate, that the writing follows a particular style guide, and that its grammar is correct.
"Proofreading", at least for my students, is the more focused and deliberate review of work solely to find grammar errors. While I try to differentiate between this correction-minded review and more substantial revision and editing, students cling to the idea that if they can just make everything grammatically correct, they won't need any other revision. For some, that may be true, but for most of us, it just isn't.
In any event, people tend to struggle with all kinds of editing/revising/proofreading because they know what they want to say. When they read their work, they understand it because they know what it means; they know what the words intend. So, people aren't reading the work on the page; they are "seeing" what their minds already know. This is the challenge of revision: to see the work with new eyes.
What follows are some techniques for proofreading that can help us see our work with new eyes.
1. Use another set of eyes, literally. Get a friend, relative, role model, person-who-you-perceive-as-a better-writer-than-you, anyone to read over your work. They will find errors you miss. They will point out things they don't understand. But you have to ask them to help you. It doesn't work if you ask them things like "Is this ok?" or "Do you think this is good?" Those questions will lead them to pay more attention to your ego than your writing. Ask them to help you improve your writing by helping you look for grammar errors and things that don't make sense or feel clear to them.
2. Try reading your work backwards, one sentence at a time. This strategy prevents your mind from making sense of whatever is on the page. You are just focusing on the sentence itself and whether it functions grammatically.
3. Read out loud. When we read our work out loud to ourselves or someone else, we engage a whole additional area of the brain through our auditory processing centers. Our eyes are easily deceived--in fact, our eyes are already making up (as in inventing) a substantial part of our reality. We think we see one whole, coherent picture, but our eyes are actually bouncing around, filling in a blind spot, and taking independent pictures of our surroundings. Our brains put together a clear picture of what we "see". So, we cannot trust our eyes/brains because our brains are used to filling in details from our eyes--we trick ourselves. Our ears are not so easily deceived. If you read out loud, your ears will pick up mistakes that your eyes simply "auto-correct" for you.
Apart from these three basic techniques for proofreading, another key is to allow yourself time to proofread and to expect proofreading to be part of your writing process. Correctness matters, as I have discussed before, so we need to make sure to review our own work to make our ideas as clear to our audience as possible.