Why do you write at work? Your answer might be “I write at work because I have to use email,” or “I write at work because it’s part of my job” or something similar. But is any of that really the reason why? Nope. The real reason why you write at work is to inform, persuade or even convince someone, be that a coworker, boss, stakeholder, prospect, customer, vendor or someone else. But to do any of that, your writing first has to get read. Because you can’t inform anyone if they don’t read what you wrote, can you? And how do you get...
Almost every job involves some kind of writing. So, when everyone can write, why does it matter whether or not you write well? I’ll let Natalie Canavor, the author of several business writing books, reply to that when she says, “You are what you write these days.” Think about it: In an age when so much communication is done via written words like emails and chat messages, not during face-to-face or even phone meetings, your writing is your brand, the way you work and communicate. Your writing is your everything. But there are other...
I can help you with your New Year’s resolutions by helping you get back some of your most precious resource: time. Now, why on earth am I bringing up New Year’s Resolutions in late January? Because this is about the time of the month when we start to go from ambitious enthusiasm to wondering if setting those goals were such a good idea in the first place (as the gym parking lot meme shows). But we do set them! Millions of us set goals for the new year, and then most of us fail at them within the first week or month. I’m no...
We waste too much time writing and reading confusing communications at work. The four Rs can save us from ourselves. Once upon a time, we referred to the three Rs that kids learned in school: reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. Today as adults in the 21st century who write at work, we need to focus on the four Rs: Re-read Remove Replace Rewrite And we need to starting now. Because time’s a wastin’ and we have better things to do. Why You Need the Four Rs As I’ve written about elsewhere, we are wasting $400 billion every single year...
Seek to understand. It sounds a bit like advice you’d get from a karate kid movie or Yoda, right? (Wait. Did I just date myself?) But it’s sound advice for anyone trying to communicate—especially when writing at work. It takes longer to make the effort to understand as opposed to knee-jerk reactions, but it saves time in the end. Not only that, seeking to understand can improve workplace communications. In his article titled How do you improve workplace communication? Ask questions, writer Michael Bungay Stanier explains that we shy...
Do you remember the song Inside Out by Eve 6 from a few years back? It was playing over the sound system at the grocery store last week and I’ve had it stuck in my head ever since, especially the line about putting “my tender heart into a blender, watch it spin around to a beautiful oblivion.” Sometimes writers seem to put their words into a blender and watch them spin around into a not-so-beautiful oblivion. And, sad to say, the higher up the corporate food chain, the more likely this mess of words tends to be. I say this because I...
