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 […]
Business writing
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 […]
Collaborative Writing
Although writing in the workplace is a team sport, usually only one team member bats at a time. After the planning phase, the designated writer accepts responsibility for putting the words together for the first draft. In some situations, however, team participation also extends to the drafting phase. Truly collaborative writing presents significant challenges for […]
How to Improve Your Technical Explanations [Video]
In this Femgineer video, Poornima Vijayashanker and I discuss techniques for being understood when you’re writing or speaking about abstract topics. Highlights include: Getting over your misconceptions about using story Balancing brevity and repetition Dumbing down vs. being clear The video covers topics from my book Writing to Be Understood. If you like the […]