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Decide What You Want

§ April 3rd, 2011 § Filed under communication, marketing, small business, training, writing § Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , § No Comments

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want. – Ben Stein

If you find that you are not receiving responses to your email messages, I may have discovered one of the problems.

I recently met a man who is in charge of volunteers at a local non-profit. I had been planning to volunteer with this organization for the last few months, so this meeting presented the perfect opportunity to offer my training services. I handed him my business card and wrote on the back what I wanted to provide.

Two days later, I received an email from the volunteer director. He said he was glad to have met me and appreciated my interest in the organization. He provided some details about the volunteer opportunities with this non-profit and finished his email by saying that he looked forward to discussing my involvement.

It was obviously a canned response, and although it would have been nice to have received something that responded to my particular offering of providing training, the template aspect did not bother me. What bothered me was that there was no call-to-action. There was no “next step” for me to take. He could have said, “please contact me at your earliest convenience” or “please fill in the volunteer form on our website” or “I will call you next week to set up an appointment.” Instead I was left feeling like we would have to run into each other on the street to move this relationship forward. I wonder how many volunteers are lost because of this missing request.

I shouldn’t give this guy too hard a time. He is not alone. We all send out emails all the time without thinking about what we want to accomplish.

If you want to create email messages that get a response, the most important step you can take is to decide what you want the outcome to be when the recipient reads the email. If you don’t provide your readers with the next step, the email will sit in their in-boxes, unanswered, largely because there was no question to answer.

Look back over some of the emails you have sent. Were you clear in your purpose? Did you ask for the sale? Did you move the process forward? How could you have ended the message that would have made it easy for the recipient to take action?

If you want to learn additional ways to create messages that deliver results, come to this month’s Lunchbox Workshop.

Texting and Writing

§ March 1st, 2011 § Filed under communication, small business, training, writing § Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , § No Comments

“The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.” – Joseph Priestley

In response to my request for communication pet peeves, one of my readers emailed, “I dislike the fact that kids, with texting, are using “shortcut” language.  This definitely will not help their spelling & written skills.”

Texting! Just like my reader, I worry about the writing skills of our youth. I teach writing classes on the college level, and I see omitted punctuation, lack of capitalization, and words that I have to read aloud to decipher the meaning.

Is texting ruining the writing skills of an entire generation? To be honest, probably. But the problem may not the obvious one.

English teachers throughout history have had to help students understand the difference between formal and informal language. (Growing up in Texas, we all had to learn that “ya’ll” was not an acceptable pronoun when writing a school paper, but then neither was any second person pronoun.) Texting adds a layer to that concern, but with some training, students can move between the formal and informal writing easily. Research shows that students, especially those with some college, tend to understand the difference in requirements when writing formally.  If you are interested in how teens perceive their writing skills, the Pew Research Center has done a fascinating study on teen writing and technology.

The bigger problem may be that texting requires quick, to-the-point, no-nuanced writing.  Conversely, good writing requires supporting detail, more explanation, and additional depth.  One of the concerns pointed out in the Pew study is that most writing assignments in high school are short – a few paragraphs at the most. The combination of texting, Tweeting, and sharing short messages on Facebook, plus a lack of opportunity to learn how to write lengthier and more in-depth prose may be hurting our students’ writing skills much more than the abbreviations and shortcuts.

I have my pet peeves when it comes to spelling and grammar, but I can usually decipher those mistakes easily. The harder task is sorting out writing that is illogical and unsupported, and I seem to find a higher frequency of poorly thought-out writing these days whether in my classes or in the marketing materials of businesses. We need to teach students to think critically and write fully thought-out papers. Businesses need to learn to communicate from the reader’s viewpoint, answering questions before they are asked. I love the idea of communicating quickly through text messages or 140 character Tweets, but to be decent writers, we have to be able to provide detailed, coherent information.

As we embrace our new forms of communication, there will probably come a time when “your” will become “ur.” I can’t find a good argument against the shortening of some words, leaving out letters that serve no meaning except to confuse non-native speakers and to point obscurely to the mongrel history of our language. The only argument that I can fall back on is that we have rules for the way we have always written, and I know that is a miserable excuse. So I won’t be surprised, and I won’t fight the inevitable. I won’t completely give in just yet, either. So, instead of “thx 4 rdg,” I’ll say, “Thanks for reading all of my letters, even the unnecessary ones.”

The Tone of Our Discourse

§ January 16th, 2011 § Filed under communication, training, writing § Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , § 6 Comments

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do, it is important for us to pause a moment and make sure we are talking to each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”  – Barack Obama

Last month, I listed some communication resolutions for 2011. Apparently I don’t have a widespread enough audience yet to reach the entire country. I have listened to friends, acquaintances, newscasters, and pundits explain what happened in Tucson and what the root causes of the problem are. I agree with the President who said that a lack of civility did not cause this tragedy.

The issue of our country’s discourse is a two-pronged one. There is a legal standard. Free speech is guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. That means that you have the right to say anything you want. However, throughout history our courts have limited that right. You do not have the right to incite violence. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote:  “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

I am not a fan of Sarah Palin, and I find her response to her perceived attack over this tragedy self-centered and disappointing at best. However, I will defend to my death her right to place gun-site type targets over a map of Congressional districts. I will even defend her right to say things like “Don’t retreat. Reload!”

We now have people who believe that the country is on fire and they need to scream to make sure we all feel the same fear.  I get it. There are those who believe that the country is sliding into socialism or fascism. They are tired of being politically correct.  They are genuinely afraid of what will happen if the health care bill continues to be enacted.  I defend their legal right to be as strident and loud and discourteous as they want.

I do wish, however, they would consider the practical aspect to all this rhetoric. Consider the scenario in the Holmes quote. If you are in a theater that truly is on fire, do you want someone yelling “Fire”? Or would you prefer someone who calmly explains that there is a danger and that you should quickly proceed to the nearest exit?

The second prong is a decency standard.  So much has been said these last few days about the tone in this country. Yes, we all have the legal right to be offensive.  However, just because we have the right to be rude doesn’t mean we should be.

When I hear people say they are “tired of being politically correct,” what I hear is that those people are tired of being polite and do not care if they offend. What is wrong with being more inclusive? Why can’t we use the filters we have been given?

We need to find ways to put across our thoughts and ideas, even those that are passionately held, without insulting others. Engaging our brains before we open our mouths is still sound advice.

So I will repeat my final resolution from last month: resolve to be kinder. As President Obama said in Tucson, “We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”

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