A Warning

Before you commit yourself any further to Get Your Message Heard, I want to make something clear; this is not the guide for anyone hoping to learn the secrets of writing consistently perfect, impeccably grammatical sentences. We’re all busy people these days and the last thing I would want is for you to start reading this, get halfway through and discover that you still don’t have a thorough understanding of the subjunctive tense when that’s what you were looking for all along. If following along and not coming away with a definitive answer to the problem of the serial comma would leave you feeling cheated, please look elsewhere for help. Perfection is just too much for us to shoot for. Let’s face it, if you weren’t a grammar savant in high school you’re probably never going to be one. We’re just too busy, and what we need today isn’t flawlessness so much as functionality.

Besides, I’m really not the person to try to teach you perfection. By the time I went to public schools in the 70’s they had all but done away with teaching grammar and instead devoted most of their time teaching “English” to drilling us on a list of spelling words that administrators knew would show up on standardized tests. Despite this, I’m still a lousy speller and would be lost without spell-check. I wouldn’t even know where to begin diagramming a sentence, and I seem to have a very specific form of dyslexia where I often can’t tell the difference between a lowercase “d” and a “b”. Many of you are probably better proofreaders than I am so, go ahead, look for mistakes here. I’ll own up to them. While we’re cataloging my flaws, I stubbornly resist anything I’m told I “have to” do, and I tend to get way too emotional watching TV. There are at least three episodes of Futurama that make me cry-- go figure.

My main goal is to help you develop some basic writing skills that will enable you to communicate more effectively at work. The first step is convincing you that good writing is important in our fast-paced workplaces and that it is still possible in the era of email and instant messaging. It’s a good sign that you're paying attention now. All it takes for most people to make a significant improvement in their writing is to step back from it a little bit and think about what they’re doing. Because most of us who are writing badly at work don’t know that’s what we’re doing. We have no idea that our typo-ridden messages are causing us to lose credibility with our clients, that our boss never reads past the third sentence of our epic emails or that the red font we habitually use has so annoyed our co-workers that they’ve set up a rule to automatically delete all of our incoming messages. While it would be wonderful if we could all write dazzling prose, that’s really not what most of us need at work. What we need is something more utilitarian. Almost all of the writing we do in our jobs is focused on conveying information; we’re either asking someone a question that we need answered or we’re supplying information that someone else needs. So our writing should be primarily concerned with making sure that we’re getting this information across to our readers. If we don’t get their attention, if they stop reading because we’ve made them angry or they don’t take us seriously, if they can’t even make sense of what we’re trying to say, we’re not getting our message across. If our writing fails, communication fails.