When Words Close Doors How would you feel if you walked into an office party and no one made eye contact with you or spoke with you? You’d feel unwelcome, right? Certainly uncomfortable. Our brains experience something similar when we encounter language such as gender-specific pronouns that don’t include our own gender identity, or words […]
Dealing with Writer’s Anxiety
Writers can be anxious people. Our minds generate stories and ideas, looking for sources of conflict and drama. We sometimes have trouble shutting down that narrative engine. A mind that’s always looking for trouble is going to find it. For writers, this means inevitable writing anxiety. Anxiety and worry stalks writers of all types, whether […]
Email or Text – Why It Matters
If you want to communicate with a work colleague, do you compose an email or send a text? How about a family member? As a rule, do you prefer to text or to email? For most of us, the answer is it depends on the situation. But some people take sides. They insist on texting […]
How and Why to Filter the Jargon
Jargon – it’s the language we love to hate. We complain about encountering legal terms in packaging, or dense abstractions in academic journals. The term jargon brings a negative connotation of being pretentious and incomprehensible. Yet the much-maligned jargon has its place. It saves us a great deal of time. Industry-specific terms are how we […]
A Quick Trick for Writing Better Emails
You need something from a colleague, a vendor, a partner, a relative – what do you do? If you’re of a certain age, you write an email. You do it in hopes that something will happen as a result – the recipient(s) will take action, respond, whatever. Yet often, those emails go unnoticed, lingering unread […]
Leaving Room for the Unexpected
Rummaging through a box of possessions recently, I found programs for theater productions from high school and college. (I did a lot of theater back in the day.) Most of those performance have dissolved into the haze of distant memory. Some stand out, though. There was the time the set fell over in the middle […]