Getting unstuck as a writer: It’s about good interviewing skills

Using good interviewing skills will help to ensure that you don’t sit for hours in front of a blank screen.

Surely you’ve had the experience of sitting there, gritting your teeth in frustration as you try to get the first words written. It’s not because you have some congenital brain disorder; it’s often because you don’t have the information you need, which is a consequence of shoddy interviewing. Many people don’t think of it as an interview, but it is. We’re not talking about a Mike Wallace interrogation here. The issue is simply how to get the most out of a conversation.

Here are a few suggestions:

- Think before you pick up the phone or walk into a person’s office. Make sure you know ahead of time what you need to come away with, then write your questions. It’s important to know the key questions you need to get answered because you never know when the person will get a phone call or have to leave for a meeting, at which point your interview ends abruptly.

- Ask questions that invite the person to elaborate. Avoid questions that will solicit “yes” or “no” answers. Those aren’t useful. Ask a lot of questions that begin with “how” or “why,” and you will get answers that are more specific and more detailed.

- Ask the person to explain, clarify, and give examples. Never be afraid to ask a reasonable question; that’s your job. If you don’t, you won’t be able to explain it to anyone else. And readers can tell from your writing that you don’t really understand your topic.

Be careful about fashionable new words

When you latch on to new words that surface in the language, you can appear to be trying too hard to be trendy, and it can make you sound artificial. An internal newsletter at the Wall Street Journal cautioned writers recently about word use in their stories, and anyone communicating in business should take note. Yes, the language is always evolving, in that dozens of new words are added each year and obsolete words fade from use. But just because you see or hear a word that seems to be catching on, resist the urge to weave it into your everyday vocabulary until it has established itself.

Occasionally, a word such as “tsunami” will emerge from a news story, and before long, every time there is an increase in voter discontent or a backlash from investors, it becomes a tsunami of disapproval. And every turning point in a process or an ongoing story is now called a tipping point, a term that you almost never heard before Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book of the same name.

The problem is that, as with many words, once you begin to use them to describe a range of events and concepts, their original definition becomes stretcehd to the point where the word could mean a dozen different things, and the reader or listener does not know what you mean. In business, our job is not to create ambiguity. It annoys readers because having to figure out a message wastes time.

It also can make you sound lazy. When a manager urges a salesperson to look for opportunities to “upsell,” what is that supposed to mean? Is there any difference between selling and “upselling”? And if there is, how many people would know the distinction? Similarly, what is an “uptick”? People apply the word to small and significant increases. Choose words that tell people what you mean.

Traditional communication can influence an audience

New technologies are great, but phone conversations and written notes help us maintain the thoughtful, personal nature of real human connections.

It’s especially true given today’s demand for authenticity and transparency.

As gender-communication specialist Connie Glaser tells us in her column this week it’s still great to answer the phone and hear a real human voice or to receive a handwritten thank you note, letter, or Christmast card.

A real conversation or a handwritten card or letter is a gesture more thoughtful than banging out one more e-mail message that is one of a thousand in someone’s in-box. A conversation also is is more efficient because you can speak faster than you can type, so you can have a quick exchange and finish the discussion. It avoids the misunderstandings and incomplete thoughts that often characterize e-mail notes that go back and for a week, dragging out the discussion for far too long. Granted, e-mail is valuable for numerous reasons, but a phone call or a written note, when the situation calls for it, helps establish a human connection that too often we miss.

A Stylebook can Save Embarrassment

For questions about accepted usage and punctuation, a stylebook is a must

Ever wonder whether your company’s “band-aid solution” requires that band-aid be capitalized? And are you closed for a holiday shut-down or a shutdown? These and many other answers can be found in a writing stylebook, a resource that ought to be on every business professional’s desk. A stylebook is halfway (or is it half-way?) between a dictionary and a grammar book; it addresses common questions relating to appropriate business writing style.

Keep in mind that there are two kinds of “style,” personal style and editorial style. We are talking about the latter.

The most widely used style guide in business and journalism is the Associated Press Stylebook, and two others that also are worth having are the Chicago Manual of Style and the Gregg Reference Manual. All three are set up differently, and one might contain more details about a particular issue than the others. The AP Stylebook is in alphabetical order and it is a usage manual, covering such questions as when to abbreviate, when to capitalize, and how to punctuate. The Chicago manual is a heftier guide. It contains more in-depth explanation of punctuation issues and such things as how to use quotations and how to use tables and charts, but it does not provide the same coverage of word usage that the AP Stylebook does. The Gregg Reference Manual is closer to the Chicago guide, and it too has a wealth of information, with an inclusive index that makes it easy to find the answer you are looking for.

The books agree on many issues about accepted style, but they also will vary a little on certain questions. That’s because some issues in the language do not have well-established answers. For example, the AP Stylebook will say that after a colon, you capitalize the first letter if the information after the colon is a complete thought, and if it isn’t, you don’t uppercase the first word. The other stylebooks will elaborate more about when you do and don’t capitalize the first word. The best practice for you is to choose one book to follow and then be consistent. A major reason we have stylebooks is for consistency, to ensure that everyone in a company is not doing something different.

For more tips, go to www.WritingWithClarity.com, or if you have questions, write me at Ken@WritingWithClarity.com.

Clarity: It’s not Just Word Count that Matters

People frequently hear the familiar workplace mantra “write short sentences,” but while such advice is well intended, it will not immediately solve all clarity problems.

 
You might recoil at the thought of writing a 40-word sentence, but the truth is, you read lots of sentences that have between 35 and 45 words in them, and you don’t have a problem processing them. That’s because what really determines sentence clarity are three things, and word count is not among them.

1) Word choice. The number of syllables in the words you choose is important for the reader to process the information. Choose words from everyday conversation whenever possible because those words tend to be shorter and more specific.

2) Sentence structure. Do you have any long introductory clauses or phrases at the beginning (long, as in 25 words) or in the middle of the sentence? Introductory elements are fine if they are reasonably short (3-18 words, roughly). The longer they are, the longer it is before the reader sees the subject and verb. Long clauses or phrases in the middle of a sentence can make it a contorted structure that is difficult to follow.

3) Punctuation. Punctuation guides a reader and ensures that the reader easily grasps your intended meaning. How you punctuate a sentence will go a long way toward determining how easily someone reads the sentence.

This is not to say you can write 85 word sentences; it simply means that a series of eight-word sentences is not the answer either, because such writing reads like a children’s Dick and Jane book. It is boring, and it divides related information in to separate sentences, which makes the reader work harder to piece together the meaning.

The Inverted Pyramid: a Great Format for Web Pages

The traditional newspaper format is the most efficient way to present information on the Web.

 
You might or might not have heard the name “inverted pyramid,” but you know the structure. Information on the newspaper’s front page is more compelling than what you find on the “run-over” page, where the story continues inside. That is because you are moving progressively toward less important information. This organizational structure is called the inverted pyramid because the pyramid represents the descending importance of the information. The most significant comes first and the least appears last.

Most feature stories are told in a different format, and they are presented differently online than they are on a printed page. But people generally do not go online to read stories anyway; they go in search of information that they want to absorb quickly and move on, and the most-to-least important structure is the most efficient way to deliver it.

The opening paragraph (the first two sentences), should contain the essential facts or the main point of the message, and then you develop that idea in the subsequent paragraphs.

Also, make Web pages self-contained whenever possible to save readers from clicking to another page to finish the piece. A great site to see for tight writing is the Mayo Clinic site.

Social media “toolkit” has more influence than traditional news release

Usually we say, “Out with the old, in with the new,” around January, but that also describes what is happening to the news release.

For decades, communications people have relied on the traditional news release to generate coverage of an announcement. Now, the preferred format is more of a social media toolkit, a one-pager that provides journalists and bloggers with more access to information and encourages sharing. Instead of the traditional one- or two-page, text-only news release, the SMR opens with three or four bullets of core information and then goes on to provide links to additional product information, video, audio, an RSS feed for product information, links to influential bloggers, and opportunities to share via Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr.

The SMR is rapidly gaining interest, because we are quickly moving away from the old one-way, controlled messages. Shel Holtz, the guru on all things technology, says there is still a place for the traditional release. One reason is because some trade publications still have a news hole to fill, and it can be easier to receive a page or two of text, edit it down, make a couple of phone calls to confirm details, and print it. Shel doesn’t like the phrase social media “news release”; he would prefer to call it the social media “press kit,” because people should still write the old release and then link to the SMR for additional information and resources.

One thing that is noteworthy is that this is one of the rare occasions in our cultural history that we transform the way in which we format and organize a document in business. E-mail did not dramatically change the way we write memos. E-mail and the traditional Word document memo are both written in a descending order of importance, with the most significant details in the beginning (in most cases). And the only real change in business-letter formatting was that with the advent of technology, which justified all text to the left, people stopped indenting paragraphs and stopped positioning the signature over on the right (some people still do, and it’s OK).

But when it comes to disseminating news, we have different and better ways to influence an audience today.

Influence Your Audience with Stories

You hear it all the time when people are offering advice to a speaker about connecting with an audience. ”Tell stories,” they say, but frequently people don’t really know what makes a good story. If you write or orally retell the details of yesterday’s committee meeting, is that a story? If you tell someone in writing or speaking about your company’s performance this quarter, is that a story?

Stories have been around since the days when cavemen scrawled figures on rock walls. We enjoyed stories as kids and we love them as adults, but not everything is a story. But for a narrative to be a story, however short, it needs to have some sort of complication, a conflict or a challenge that the protagonist (main character) is trying to overcome. You need a little drama or suspense, however mild, to move the story along. You need good description about the character and the scene. The story needs to hold together, and it needs to move forward to where the complication is resolved.

Dinner speakers often are boring because they just ramble, providing not stories but anecdotes that don’t go anywhere. That’s why people sometimes will say, when they get to the end, “I’m not sure what the point of that story was, but anyway … “

Understanding what a constitutes a story is important to editors in communications departments who are trying to determine if something is worth publishing, on the intranet or in a magazine. Is it a good story? they often ask. Many things are just articles, compilations of facts, and those certainly are valuable. But they don’t have the same allure and richness as stories.

Influencing Customers: Even Call Center Operators Need to Write

An interesting article in the Sarasota Herald says that more customers are using e-mail and instant messaging to communicate with companies, and call-center operators also are using those tools. The ability to correspond with a few people simultaneously using instant messaging enables the operators to accomplish more than when they are talking to a single person on the phone. But the writing is often so sloppy that the communication does not reflect well on the company.

While some principles of communication extend to both oral and written messages, there also are differences. One big one is permanence. The words of someone who is an inarticulate speaker do not have the same “staying power” as a written correspondence that reads as if it were written by a teenager.  A poorly written message also is more likely to come back to haunt a company, because the customer can complain that she misunderstood it because of the confusing writing.

Invest the time to make the message look professional. Everyone is in a hurry, but readers are less forgiving about glaring mistakes that make them wince.

Thoughts from the Nieman Conference

Contrary to what some people might think, journalism is not disappearing, but the way journalists report the news and tell stories is changing. And hundreds of writers gathered in Boston over the weekend to learn how. The Harvard’s 2009 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism drew writers from major magazines, papers, and networks, along with distinguished freelance journalists.

Josh Benton, who directs the Nieman Journalism Lab, discussed the importance of “beat blogging” to obtain information from and build relationships with the public and government officials who follow your beat.

Amy Pederson, an editor at the New Yorker magazine, reminded us of the nuances of good storytelling when discussed what to do when you have two different chronologies in your story. She also emphasized the importance of good interviewing: putting subjects at ease and treating them with respect, in the interview and in the story.

Connie Hale, director of the Nieman program and the author of Sin & Syntax, offered tips to make writing more lively and colorful: use parallelism (word repetition or structural repetition) to add rhythm and to make your point more powerfully; avoid surplus prepositional phrases and forms of the verb be, which bog down the writing; write visually by using metaphors and similes; and vary your sentence structure to make the writing more graceful.

This event should be on the “must attend” list of anyone striving to improve their feature writing, particularly their narratives.

Keep your message focused

Welcome to this new blog about how we can write in ways that have an impact on our audiences.  I will offer techniques for being more persuasive, and I will offer observations and tips that I hope will be useful in all of your professional writing.

If you want to make your writing more compelling so that people will remember it, start by limiting the scope of your message. Too many messages that are intended to persuade an audience fail because the writer tries to cover too many points and the reader or listener is left in a daze. When we feel close to a topic and we are knowledgeable about it, everything seems important, so we can’t let go. Consequently, we cover too many topics and we pack in too many details as supporting evidence. We are proud of ourselves, but the reader is not impressed. In fact, the reader is in a fog.

Presidential candidates certainly try to be persuasive. But Danny Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, did a study of debates and found that in one instance, candidates had spent an enormous amount of time studying briefing books on the issues, and they referred to many facts, statistics, and studies during the debate. But the avalanche of information left the audience in a fog. Rather than be persuaded, people said later that the candidates apparently didn’t understand the issues because they had not articulated their positions clearly.

Before you write, ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. What result do you want from this message? The communication should have one primary purpose, one central thought. You then can provide a few points to explain your main idea, but be careful not to bury the reader in information. If you want people to remember the message, keep it focused and keep it to a reasonable length.

For more writing tips, go to my site, www.WritingWithClarity.com.

Reaching your readers

When you want someone to comply with your request, one way to make your message persuasive is to build your appeal around something that the reader wants, needs, or values.

Recognizing what is important to the audience, what people consider to be in their self-interest, is critical.  Keep in mind the famous model of human needs, composed by psychologist Abraham Maslow. He said the following needs are important to people:

1)      The chance for self-fulfillment (achieving their creative potential)

2)      Self-esteem (recognition, respect)

3)      Sense of belonging

4)      Safety (security, stability, freedom from fear

5)      Physiological needs (food, water, shelter, warmth)

Maslow presented this as a hierarchy, saying that the most fundamental needs are physiological, then personal safety, etc. Psychologists today say this particular order does not apply to everyone, because some people will be more concerned about a sense of belonging than about achieving full potential. But these categories of needs will apply to most people, so keep them in mind as you try to influence others.

Appearances do make a difference

I am in Boston today, speaking to the Institute of Management Consultants annual conference on the issue of how to craft messages that influence your audience. One point I will reinforce is that appearances do make a difference. Sixth-grade mistakes in writing make readers wince, and then they focus more on looking for mistakes and less on your message. Looking things up in reference books and asking others to take a look at your writing are significant steps to polishing your writing.

Many things about writing are not very complex; they just take practice and a commitment to be conscientious when you sit down to the keyboard. If you are not sure where the comma goes, ask someone or check a book that covers punctuation. Influencing your audience is about more than using persuasive techniques. It is about looking professional.

Oops! Writing on PowerPoint Slides

During a luncheon yesterday, I heard a newspaper publisher discuss the state of his industry, and one of his slides referred to an issue that ”keep’s me up late at night.” Why he had an apostrophe in “keep’s” or why he had many words on other slides randomly capitalized was a mystery, but it underscored the importance of appearances.

I wrote recently that what is most important about writing is that we make the commitment to be conscientious when we sit down to  the keyboard. Writing, for the most part, is not a complex topic. It’s not nuclear physics. It simply requires that we make the effort to check reference books when we have questions or ask colleagues to take a look if something doesn’t seem quite right. Almost anyone at the paper would have noticed the glaring mistakes in the speaker’s slides, and I’m sure the audience did.

The surprising mistakes you see on PowerPoint slides can be avoided. Don’t be caught standing in front of the room sharing in the embarrassment as you notice what everyone else does — a conspicuous error. Credibility sinks, and the audience starts to look for other mistakes, rather than paying attention to your message.

For other tips, go to www.WritingWithClarity.com

News Releases: Still the Same Issues

As I edit a corporate news release, the thought occurs to me how little has changed in the way people write releases. If you compare releases from the 1970s with releases written today, they are strikingly similar. The cautionary advice from journalists over the years continues to be ignored.

Leads are too congested because they contain details that are secondary to the main news point. It is material that might need to be in the release but should not be in the lead. Releases contain too many buzzwords and marketing hype that quickly turns off a reader, and they include too much information that is added just to please internal audiences. Such information clutters the release and reduces the likelihood that anyone will use it, because they can’t make their way through the dense thicket of underbrush.

The demand for authenticity in social media will help alleviate the problem of marketing jibberish, but too many writers still struggle to distill the essence of a message and convey it clearly and quickly.

Sentence Clarity: It’s more than word count

When many people think about what makes a clear sentence, they immediately think about word count, but that often is the least important factor.

This is a big issue when people are writing leads on news releases. They are terrified to have a sentence with 35 words in it. Perhaps 35 is too many, but maybe not. The truth is, we all read lots of sentences with 35 words, and sometimes more, and we have no problem understanding it because what really determines clarity are the words you choose, the structure of the sentence, and the way you punctuate it.

If you use words from everday conversation, the words will be simpler and shorter and more specific. Most of them will be one or two syllables, sometimes three, and the brain can grasp those easily.

If you use a direct sentence structure, with the subject and verb appearing reasonably close to the front of the sentence, you will express your thought clearly. Try to avoid long introductory clauses or extended elements in the middle of the sentence. Punctuation is intended to guide the reader through the sentence so that she gets a clear understanding. How you punctuate it will go a long way toward determining how clear the sentence is.

This is not to say that word count never matters. We can’t repeatedly pour out 60-word sentences and expect people to understand us, but it does mean you can’t always be wedded to a number when you are trying to evaluate your sentence. Read it aloud. If you are not wheezing at the end of the sentence and you comprehend it with no problem, you probably are in good shape.

For more tips, go to www.WritingWithClarity.com

Two Ways to Become a Writer

In her delightful little book “How Reading Changed My Life,” Anna Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from the New York Times and Newsweek says there are two ways to become a writer: by writing continually and by reading.

We do not read enough as writers. Whether we are reading purely to enjoy or to stretch ourselves intellectually, we usually read for content because we are interested in the information, but if we are more attentive to what writers do, we can learn a great deal from technique. As you read, whether it is a news article or a novel, ask questions. If the prose is particularly fluid and graceful, what did the writer do to create that effect? It could be that he or she deliberately varied the sentence length and occasionally used sentence fragments. It also might be the effective use of punctuation. Pay attention to the descriptive detail, which results from word choice, analogies, and helpful explanation. If it’s a novel, why do you enjoy the characters?

What about the opening of an article or story? What made you read the second paragraph? Was the opening clear and direct, and did it focus your attention? Or if it is a feature story, perhaps it teased you and aroused your curiosity. If it is an op-ed piece, was the opening thought-provoking and did the writer make a compelling argument throughout the article?

We can improve our writing skills in several ways, and reading good writers and quality publications is certainly one.

Avoiding Buzzwords: Don’t be an Idiot

In workshops, I stress the importance of avoiding buzzwords, those trendy, fashionable words that people use simply because everyone else does. Our job in business is to write messages that people can grasp easily, so that we don’t waste the reader’s time and don’t risk misunderstanding. We are not writing to entertain people, and we are not writing to impress, other than to gain respect for clear, efficient prose. People read your messages because they feel obligated to do so to do their job; they want to absorb it, process it, take appropriate action, and move on.

One book that addresses the issue in an enlightening and humorous way is titled Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, Jon Warshawsky, senior partners at Deloitte. (See www.FightTheBull.com.) Every business professional should read it and take notes. The book is packed with good advice about clear communication, and you will smile throughout, because you will see yourself or your company as having been the “idiot” at some time in your career, perhaps still.

One of the many good points they make is that employees in America are pleasing for authenticity. They don’t want “mechanical” prose, sentences that appear to have been cut and pasted from a similar message last year and the year before. They want a conversational tone (well written and carefully edited but also conversational). They want to know there is friendly human being with a personality on the other end. That’s why blogs are so popular; they are authentic. The same CEO will sound terrific in a blog but will sound stilted in many memos. She doesn’t have to; she could be conversational in all her memos, but it doesn’t usually work out that way.

Words such as cutting-edge, bandwidth (as in, “We don’t have the bandwidth to handle it”), mission-critical, leverage, win-win, solution, and cross-business synergies are generally not conversational. People don’t use them when chatting with friends at happy hour. They are cliches, so boring that they are nauseating. Most important, in the interests of clear communication, they are ambiguous. They don’t give the reader an umistakeable understanding of what you are trying to say.

Always be Writing

It’s early morning, the best time to write. The mind is fresh, and so is the coffee. Wipe away the fog, pull yourself up to the keyboard, relax and let the words flow.

So often people wonder how they can improve writing. One answer is to write every day, or as often as possible, about something, even if you have no particular project or assignment you are working on. You are surrounded by topics to write about, things that might seem insignificant but ideas we could elaborate on. Was there anything in the news that disturbed you? Why do you like or hate your job or management? Who is your best friend and why is that relationship so meaningful? What annoys you about business travel?

It doesn’t have to be a blog; it can just be a blank screen. You can write a few paragraphs at lunch, and when you are out of time, close it up and go back to it for a few minutes tomorrow. It probably is never going to be published, but you are crafting with words, which is most important. Have the discipline to bring to the task the same techniques and principles that you would if it were an important article, proposal, or memo. If you have questions about spelling, style, grammar, or punctuation, look them up. Now is the time to do it, during a “practice run.” The more you do it, you faster you will commit the answers to memory, and the less likely it is you will need to do it when you are on deadline with a critical communication to your client or an SVP.

Writing improvement is gradual, but everyone can get better.

Gung-ho for Grammar

“Grammar, grammar, who cares?” people sometimes mumble. Well, you would be surprised at how many people do care. Don Ranley’s article on www.Ragan.com, titled “Seven Myths about Grammar,” touches on a few important points.

Grammar and punctuation are important because they serve as the “cement” that holds the bricks together. It might seem like an overwhelming collection of prescriptive rules, but there really are six or seven principles that are most important, and anyone who wants a two-page handout listing them can send me an e-mail at Ken@WritingWithClarity.com. And no, the rules haven’t changed, as people often say. The key principles of grammar have been in place for a few hundred years. What changes is the person giving you the advice. Many people are well-intentioned. They are trying to give you the right answer, but they often are recalling something they heard years ago. They don’t really understand the issue completely, and they haven’t looked it up.

We try to stay sharp about the key grammatical guidelines for two reasons: sentence clarity and our credibility. Every language has its grammar, its inherent structural rules, because those ensure that people understand each other when they communicate. And your credibility can plunge when readers or listeners notice conspicuous flaws that simply shouldn’t be there.

Relax. Grammar is not as difficult as people make it out to be. Yes, there are numerous guidelines, but this is not nuclear physics. Just keep looking things up, and you will commit the information to memory. That’s how we get better at things. Practice. Most people struggle with grammar and punctuation not because they are numb but because they don’t put in the effort to use resources (books or online sites) or ask colleagues who are knowledgeable about this sort of thing. Consequently, they continue to make the same embarrassing mistakes for years, even in important documents and resume cover letters. No one is suggesting that you commit yourself to a life of linguistics; just make a consistent effort.

The often-heard line, “People don’t care anymore anyway,” is a myth. Most people do wince at the sight of glaring errors, and you never know who the reader is. It might be someone who will influence your next career move. The person doesn’t need to know exactly what the grammatical problem is. If she simply knows intuitively that it’s a mistake, that’s all she needs to know.

Make Your Message Visually Attractive

People think about using bullets, bold headings, and underlining when they write a traditional memo, but it doesn’t occur to many people to use such graphic devices in an e-mail, even when the message an entire page long.

Since the advent of e-mail in the early 90s, people have thought about communication in two buckets, the traditional, “formal” memo, which was labeled “Memo” at the top and contained the different tools that made it look visually attractive. But when it comes to e-mail, people seem to unconsciously think it’s just an e-mail and they are all the same. So they do what they do with any e-mail: sit down and start typing until they are finished, then hit the send button.

Whether or not someone reads a message has a lot do with how you package it. Sometimes, when people don’t read it, it’s not because of the content. It’s because long blocks of unbroken text are so dreadful to look at, the reader doesn’t even start. 

If you want people to take the time to read a message, it needs to be inviting to the human eye. Such things as bullets (or letters or numbers), bold headings, white space, and indentation are valuable devices for making the message visually attractive. Where it might be a little different is that in an e-mail, depending on your system, you can’t always control the indent on the bullets and they look oddly positioned. But if you use a hyphen (-) instead, you won’t have the same problem. You also can use letters with parentheses (A). In a routine list, avoid using numbers. Use them if you are presenting information in order of importance (#1 is the most important, etc.) or in a sequential order (do step 1, then step 2, etc.).  If you use numbers for all lists, a reader might wonder if there is a significance to the numbers.

Writing: Impressions Matter

If you go out to lunch with a prospective employer and you tend to drool when you eat, you can forget about that job. First impressions still matter, whether they involve your eating or your writing. People do not need to know exactly what the issue is, whether it involves grammar, punctuation, or syntax; they only need to know that it isn’t right, or it looks and sounds awkward.

We are more casual as a culture and more tolerant — to a point. Readers, particularly executives, are less forgiving of mistakes that simply shouldn’t there. They often result from carelessness because the writer is in a hurry or laziness because the writer doesn’t bother to look something up or ask a colleague. The frequently heard response “Well, the reader can figure it out” is not the issue. You can say to someone who asks a favor “I ain’t got no time” and they will figure out what you mean, but what kind of impression will you leave?

These first impressions also can affect whether a reader stays with you on a Web page. As Bob Holland comments today on the Ragan front page (www.Ragan.com/ME2/Audiences), if your headlines or subheads are boring or vague people will leave. Readers see headlines and subheads quickly and if those don’t draw them in, they won’t bother to dig into the text. It’s on to another click.

Not All E-mail is Created Equal

Reading a piece about what’s wrong with corporate memos, I noticed that the writer didn’t distinguish between e-mail and any other type of internal memo. That’s good, because in most cases, there isn’t any difference. Not any more.

Some people still think there’s a difference between e-mail and memos, and there was a clear distinction in the 1990s, before e-mail became the mainstream vehicle for communicating. Back then, most messages were still Word documents with “Memo” at the top, and e-mail was an “anything goes” environment for trivial chit-chat. 

Today, the distinction is not so much between memos and e-mail as it is between two types of e-mail: the substantive messages of two paragraphs or longer about a significant issue (the traditional memo), and the one-sentence e-mail that is a quick response, a short request, or an invitation to lunch. If it is a detailed message about a meaningful topic relating to daily business operations, it’s a memo. Being sloppy might be convenient for you because you’re in a hurry, but so is the reader. Making the message difficult to read is inconsiderate, and it doesn’t do much for your image.

Not All Writing is Really Writing

There are many more people playing baseball in Sweden these days than were 15 years ago, but how good do you think Swedish baseball is? That occurred to me when I saw the headline on a short New York Times piece, “We are all writers now.” Well, maybe not. (See http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/we-are-all-writers-now/.)

The headline implies that writing is getting better, but just because more people  are putting words on a screen today doesn’t mean the quality of writing is improving. If you dabble in paint for 30 years without ever receiving adequate instruction and guidance, you can call yourself a veteran artist, but your work will give a different impression. Yes, it is terrific that blogs, Web sites, and other outlets give people opportunities to feel more relaxed, more at ease, about expressing their ideas. It does help to get the creative juices flowing, and I hope it makes people more excited about writing.  But unless they use the opportunities to practice by thinking about principles and techniques of good writing, then they will continue to write messages and documents that are wordy, unclear, and poorly organized.

American business doesn’t run on “texting”; people need to craft messages that demonstrate their knowledge, their ability to communicate complex ideas, and their leadership.

Editing vs Proofreading

Most people have a long list of elements they look for when they edit; the problem is that they look for all of them at the same time. Effective editing is best done as a three-step process.

If the message is substantive, that is, if it’s a few paragraphs long or longer and is about something significant, take the time to read it at least twice, preferably three times. The first time, just take the helicopter view. Be sure that it all makes sense, that the body supports the opening paragraph, and that there are no gaping holes where missing information needs to be placed.

The second reading zooms in on paragraphs and sentences. Are paragraphs coherently wrapped around one main idea? Do paragraphs and sentences flow smoothly from one to the next? Are sentences efficiently written or flabby with extra words? Are the words clear or vague?

The third reading is line-by-line editing, called proofreading. Editing and proofreading are not synonymous; proofreading is the last step of the editing process. This is where you look for mistakes of grammar, punctuation, and style. Don’t make the common mistake that many people make, which is that they immediately begin looking for grammar and stylebook errors as soon as they start to read it. You can’t “micro-edit” the first time you read because you have bigger, more important issues to pay attention to. You will be so immersed in the text, wondering if it should be a comma or a semicolon or second-guessing yourself on a usage issue, that you will not notice that the entire sentence is in the wrong place.

Another suggestion is to print out the document, at least for the third reading, preferably earlier. It will appear different to your eye, because the resolution of ink on paper is sharper than pixels on a screen, so you will notice things in a “hard copy” that you won’t notice on the screen.

Putting a Cap on Capitalization

For a writer to be successful with persuasion, she has to be viewed as credible, and if there’s one place where people lose credibility, it’s in their arbitrary use of capitalization.

The guidelines have not changed since we were all in school: Proper nouns are capitalized; common nouns are not, and there are a few words that might be considered proper nouns because of longstanding use. Sometimes it is difficult to determine, but in most cases, it’s a clear call.

Check a dictionary or a stylebook (Among the style guides, the AP Stylebook is the best one for this type of question) to see if something is capitalized. Many things that people capitalize should not be in upper case.

A person’s title is capitalized if it appears immediately before his or her name but not if it appears alone or after the name. If you say, “The president of the company will attend,” the word president is lower case because president is not a proper noun. It is capitalized if you say President Obama because the formal title is considered to be almost part of the name.

Some people would capitalize chair and if you ask them why, they would say, “because that’s the name of it.” Everything has a name or a descriptive label, but that doesn’t mean it warrants capitalization.

Want to Influence? Can the Slides

An article in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press this week discusses the increasing disdain for PowerPoint, and it’s worth noting. (See  http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/200910050415/NEWS02/91004005)

The article refers to a British study that found that an instructor’s single biggest contribution to student boredom was PowerPoint slides. And it reminded me of an anecdote about Lou Gerstner, the former CEO at IBM, who was sitting in a meeting while an SVP fumbled his way through a PowerPoint presentation. Gerstner, not always known for subtlety, walked up and turned the machine off and told his SVP, “Just talk to us. Have a conversation.” Great advice.

S0 many potential customers dread the next RFP presentation because they will need to sit through an excruciating slide show. The slides should not be the center of attention; it should be your conversation with the audience. Most people will be delighted if you don’t use it.

 They key is to talk directly to the audience. Use few slides, do not put much information on them and instead use them only as talking points, and have a handout that offers tips and some in-depth text, something that will be useful to the audience two days later. Most slides are worthless soon after the presentation, unless people took copious notes.