Helping Your Reader Read: 3 Ways To Make Your Writing Easier To Read

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Research shows that people are more likely to read things that are written in easy or familiar fonts. As professionals who write, we are most concerned with efficiently communicating information in order to generate new business, maintain business relationships, or just get work done. Most of us focus on what we need to say in order to accomplish those goals. But communication is a process that requires a message to be created and received. When we focus on creating the message, sometimes we forget to consider how that same message will be read by the person on the other end.

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Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes: Theory of Mind and Writing

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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.

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Made you look! The art of using color to get people to read.

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We 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.

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Your Eyes are Lying to You

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We’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.”

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Using The Singular "they" to Promote Inclusivity in Your Writing

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You 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.

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Writing is one of your most essential on-the-job tools

Most 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.

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Face-to-face training goes virtual

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These 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…

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Communication as a Top Skill in the Business World

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We 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.

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Are we The Jones's, The Jones', or The Joneses? A Guide to Plurals and Apostrophes in Last Names

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Holiday 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.

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A trip to the annual Association for Business Communication conference

I 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.

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Avoid IT: How not to inspire dread in your audience

Recharged 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.

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3 Easy Strategies to Improve Company Communication Culture

“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

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The First Step to Becoming a Better Writer

I 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.

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Creating a more positive tone

Yesterday, 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

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Try not to be afraid to write; instead, focus on showing the audience you are competent and you care

Last 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.

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Latin: Utilize; German: Use

Our 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.