5 Tips Towards Better Communications
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 16, 2011
While trying to come up with the title of this post, I wondered if I should limit it to business communications, since this is a business blog. I decided that it didn't matter who it was geared toward because communications is a problem we all have with each other, business or not.
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I like to think I'm as good a communicator as the next person. However, I find that, at least through blogs, people don't always understand what I'm saying, or they're not reading all that I'm saying so they get it wrong. I actually wrote a post about it on my other blog titled Why Don't People Read, where I lament that a very short message I have on a third blog telling people how to contact me is always ignored, such that people see my email address but don't follow the rule, as there's only one, and I've even highlighted it for them.
This pretty much means that all of us can only be as good of communicators as the audience we're reaching out to and their interest in seeing what it is we have to say. Still, there are steps one can take to try to get someone to pay more attention. One of these is going to be controversial, but I'll explain it; on to the 5 tips:
1. Make most of your paragraphs relatively short. I will tend to have some long paragraphs, but most of the paragraphs I write are 5 sentences or less. There's this thing about white space that, for whatever reason, makes people think there are fewer words than there might actually be.
2. Make sure people understand your terminology as well as possible. If I'm writing about medical coding and I use "ICD-9", many people will have no idea what that is. However, if I say "procedure coding" that makes more sense to the masses people people pretty much know what a procedure is.
3. Every once in awhile throw in a large word. This is the controversial one, because many people that talk about communications will say to keep the language simple. I've found that occasionally when I throw in a large word people will stop, they'll think, and even if they're not sure what that word means they'll read everything else to try to figure out what it means. This stops what, in another industry, we call "banner blindness."
4. Grammar, punctuation, etc. I know that every once in awhile I skip a word because it's in my head and I can think faster than I can type, though I can type fairly fast. I've never gotten my punctuation incorrect, though. If your language doesn't make sense people won't listen to you. If you don't build in punctuation people don't take time to breathe, which makes them tired. And if you forget to capitalize certain words... well, you know.
5. Spelling. Come on, most word processing programs and all browsers at this point have spell checking, and it's live most of the time. Look for those squiggly lines and take a moment to fix those words. Give people a chance to know what you're talking about if the word is supposed to be "excerpts" instead of "eggsurpz". Although, to be truthful, most people would probably stop on the second one, think about it, laugh, and maybe you'll capture them that way. Nah! 🙂
Absolutely right, Mitch. Actually very often I am making some of this mistakes – especially using terminology which I don’t explain and expect people to understand. And sometimes directly write the article without doing spell check in Word, but just relaying on browser spell checker. Also very often sentence become very long and heavy.
Carl, when you preview your copy, see if there’s a place where you can put a space. I’ve had to learn to do this over the years as well. And my browser’s spell check works pretty well, so that should be fine.
After I reading your post, actually I’ve looked for ebook related to proofreading and actually I found free one. Hopefully, this will help me to become better writer. Reading the first chapter, I’ve already saw one of my mistakes. Everytime I try to edit and correct mistakes immediately, but I see that better practice is to leave the text for a while and check it again later.
That’s one way Carl. Another way is to read it out loud to yourself to see how it sounds to you. Course, if you’re writing in a different language it might not work as well, but it will work for your own language.
Point 4 and 5 are the best ones. I read blogs where people clearly don’t double-check what they write, and it’s always a lot of fun. I mean, sure, the logical structure of the paragraph can be weird, it can happen, but spelling, really? Nobody cares to spell-check anymore?
Whenever I am done writing something I press shift-command-, 10 times (it’s the spell-check combo on a Mac) and I make sure nothing red pops up, not that hard uh?
Gabriele, it’s never hard, and a reputation can be lost if there are too many mistakes too often. Great stuff!
Thanks for this tips. I could use some help on communication and writing skills. These really are helpful. Now, the thing I need to worry is my speaking skills. I need a bit more training on them.
Good luck to you Ian; glad to help some.