Pay Attention!

If you think email has made communication easier, think again. I’m focusing primarily on email because it is overwhelmingly the way we communicate at work, but much of what you’ll find here are simply suggestions for maintaining good communications. And I’m not just talking about written communication-- email has also taken over for much of the conversation that we used to do in person and on the phone. Think about it, how often do you send email to the person sitting at the desk next to you rather than just getting up and going to talk to them? And much of what I have to say about email can also be applied to other forms of written communication. Unfortunately, the problem of short attention spans, the expectation of an immediate response and generally poor communication skills apply to all of our writing these days.

As much as we’d like to blame the format of email itself for all of our communication problems, much of the time we have nothing to blame but ourselves. Even though it has probably never been harder to get and keep someone’s attention, there are also a lot of things we do all the time that make people stop reading what we have to say and effectively shut down our communications. This is what happens when you send someone one of those long messages that they have to wade through to find your point. Or when they can’t figure out how your email is relevant to them in the first place. It happens when you send them a message that’s full of typos and makes them feel like you didn’t take the time to proofread it. If the message wasn’t important enough for you to run spellcheck on it, they may (rightly) think, why should they take the time to read it? They’re likely to stop reading if you haven’t made yourself clear and they find themselves struggling to make sense out of what you have to say. Why should they have to do all the work? But the very worst thing you can do is send them something that makes them angry, whether you’ve done it intentionally or not. If you make someone angry you run the risk of shutting down not only your current communication, but any future contact as well. Because when you make your reader angry they aren’t exactly going to be receptive to anything you send them in the future, either. So much for that relationship.

That’s the focus here, helping you to make sure that people pay attention to what you have to say, that you don’t sabotage yourself and make them stop reading. While learning the rules of grammar and punctuation are important in helping you write clearly and professionally, they only occupy one section of my tips here. My broader goal is to help you overcome the modern obstacles that make written communication more and more difficult. It’s to help you write persuasively and in a manner that will give you credibility at work and anywhere else writing is important. It’s to ensure that people pay attention to what you have to say and that you are able to share the information that is vital to your work. It’s to make sure that you don’t go around pissing people off unintentionally. If pissing people off is your goal, that’s another thing entirely. Still, there are some good examples of ways to do that later in the book. Keep reading!