To consultant Dianna Booher, this is a scenario that’s all too familiar, as she points out in her Communication Tip of the Month e-newsletter:  ” People always assume the confusion happens on the other end of the communication–that what they themselves say is perfectly clear and that the other person just missed it somehow.”

Very nice – at least for your ego.  But in business communication, you may be asking for trouble if you assume too much.  Wise communicators never take their skills for granted.

Want a good gauge of your own clarity, or lack of it?  Beware the blank stare!

Need additional signs that your message just might not be getting through? Booher offers the following:

Lack of questions. (You call for questions at the end of a presentation, and there are none. Or, you bring up an idea in a meeting and you’re greeted with only polite smiles.)

Unexpected responses. (People respond irrationally to what you say, such as with anger, withdrawal, silence, or denial.)

Lack of coordination. Things “fall between the cracks” in coordinating projects.)

Low morale. (People feel discouraged that they can never “get it right” when, in fact, projects are frequently delegated without essential elements for successful completion.)

Rework. (Projects have to be redone because the instructions weren’t clear the first time. Or, extra work was completed “just in case” to “cover all the bases” because somebody wasn’t sure what was needed.)

Bottom line remains as always: fuzzy words lead – at very best – to fuzzy action. Only with clear words canyou expect clear action.

A time to work and a time to play or rest, a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to speak up and a time to remain silent, a time to make peace and yes, even a time to fight. And many other examples you can think of for yourself.

And…oh yes, for writers, a time to write and a time to refrain from writing.

Throughout history, people with the urge to write – except for an especially gifted or privileged minority – have been lonely folk. Creating a piece of literature – or to use current terminology, producing content – was one thing, but searching, often in vain, for some means to get it seen by a decent number of eyeballs was something else entirely.

And now? Now the wheel has turned full circle. The big dilemma is not struggling to find the tools for publication, but since the tools are so so readily accessible at such low cost and at the press of a button, now that I have them, how do I make full use of them?

The question is not “how do I find an audience for my creations?” but “how do I find creations for my audience?” I don’t think there’s a need to labor the point.

Given the current environment, it’s no surprise to see the appearance of a new automated service designed to serve “blog owners who want fresh, on-topic content but don’t have the time to search online everyday” for it. This is done by providing “hot-off-the-press, on-topic (human-reviewed) content based on the categories and/or keywords that are most important to you.” Any blogger who so desires merely has to install a small piece of software for syndicated material to appear on their blog everyday.

All, of course, without having to lift a finger.

Significantly, the content is supplied by authors who actually pay for the privilege of submitting their work, and who are provided with a “powerful tool to make it easy” for them to submit several versions of the same article, so that each subscribing blogger will receive “more unique content” (Can something be “more unique” than “unique”?)

I don’t want to enter into a detailed discussion on the merits or demerits of plastering the same information – in a world of consumers suffering terribly from information overload – on a million places all over the Web. Here at Hodu.com we do publish so-called “duplicate content” (on a much more limited basis now than in the past), but only when we believe our own typical site visitor might not find it easily elsewhere.

The bottom line must always be this: As a publisher, am I helping to bring clarity to the lives of my readers, or am I (gasp!) only creating confusion through extraneous background noise? Am I facilitating communication, or setting up communication barriers? Am I aiding the free flow of information, or am I actually hindering it?

An important article on our site deals with a common human failing: particularly when we feel uncomfortable in a work or social situation, we have a tendency to speak up for the sake of speaking up. We often see this at meetings. The author explains the benefits of resisting temptation and remaining silence at times,  as opposed to the dangers of putting in your two and a half cents worth in the hope of appearing intelligent.

Would that writers, site or blog owners,  “content producers” or whatever you want to call them, exercise the same restraint!

Perhaps…is it just remotely possible… that the Internet would be a better place?

Your comments please!

Does it make the message any clearer? No

Does it annoy me? Yes, it annoys me a lot!

With these three short paragraphs, business communication coach Helen Wilkie introduces a short rant in her excellent e-newsletter Communi-keys.

Of course, she could have written: “Recently I’ve noticed strange new pattern creeping into people’s speech. It sounds very irritating, and doesn’t make the message any clearer.” Direct and to the point. Doesn’t that sound better to you? My guess is that it does.

But Helen, of course, doesn’t need to be taught how to communicate. She was using the very style she wanted to attack in order to drive home her point.

One hears this round-about way of talking in many places today, especially from public figures, politicians, business executives and other people who are frequently interviewed in the media. When asked to elaborate on a point or provide information, instead of making a simple, straightforward statement, they phrase their message as a question and answer.

This is the result:

Do we have all the answers? No.
Do we still have a long way to go? Yes.
Are we moving in the right direction? Yes.

A silly way to speak, right? A simple, straight-forward statement would get the message across more clearly and concisely than a gimmicky mini-session of one person asking and answering his own questions.

Helen laments that the virus is spreading and she’s hearing these one-person Q&A’s from people in the workplace. She says she’s tempted to interrupt before they answer their own question and retort: “I don’t know. I thought you did!”

Sometimes, concedes Helen, the self-directed question can be useful if the person you’re conversing with doesn’t make his or her own question clear. You might then say: “If you’re asking me if we will be expanding our product line this quarter, then the answer is no.” This is obviously an attempt to clarify the subject in order to be sure you are answering the right question, and is perfectly acceptable–once.

But when a series of factual statements is turned into a list of artificial questions, it’s just plain silly. Not only that, but it soon becomes irritating, and verbal irritants make for poor communication.

At all times a good rule to follow is: never say in ten words what you could just as easily say in five without loss to clarity or meaning. So use questions to get information from other people, not from yourself! Forget about the flourishes. Just say what you have to say.

For another kind of irritating habit in verbal communication that’s becoming increasingly common, see here.

Well, this is how consultant Dianna Booher describes two styles of writing – at the opposite ends of the spectrum – in her very worthwhile email offering: Communication Tip of the Month.

As we know, different people have different ways of expressing themselves with words. “Stuffed shirt writing” refers to the ultra-formal, stilted, impersonal and stuffy way some folk prefer to write, while the “T-shirt” style is just the opposite: very personal, warm, chatty, and often more than a little bit too informal.

Dianna points out that the “stuffed shirt” variety is as easy to recognize as it is difficult to define: those who use it “bury their ideas in passive verbs. They select weak sentence beginnings and bury key actions…they drape their ideas in trite, verbose, statements.”

The other extreme are writers “who send email that could pass for a T-shirt slogan”!

These people, says Dianna, “use aggressive words and no tact…They ramble on and on, without sorting out the main ideas and details from the irrelevant. They misspell, omit punctuation, and write incomplete thoughts, leaving clarity as the reader’s problem.”

She offers a pointed and instructive sample of each style. No prizes for guessing which is which!

Example One

It can easily be seen that when large volumes of gas are metered and when variations in the gas temperatures become commonplace, the resulting circumstance will be a loss of revenue if corrective action is not taken.

Example Two

Large volumes of METERED gas-big problem-in about two months we’re gonna lose our shirt unless somebody gets off their duff and okays something.

Two sentences, two distinct choices of words and phrases, both purporting to say the same thing. Is either choice music to your ears? I think not.

‘Business Casual’

Diana aptly observes: “Like our work clothes today, the preferred writing style has become business casual. And just as the business casual dress code has some people stumped, so has the business casual writing style.”

And just in case you count yourself among the stumped, she translates the above examples into the “business casual”-or in plainer language, simple and direct-writing style for you. Yes, it’s really as simple as this:

As we meter large volumes of gas, variations in gas temperature will result in lost revenues unless we take corrective action.

Bottom line: in business writing, this is the only acceptable style. T-shirt messages really do belong in the shopping mall, certainly not on your documents. As for stuffed shirts, do they really belong anywhere?

Dianna’s tip was extracted from her book E-Writing, available here.

The University of Maryland’s Professor Linda Coleman, former director of the Freshman Writing Program at the University, offers some very handy writing tips to enable any student to turn out top-notch term papers, essays and assignments. Here are some of them:

1. Read the assignment sheet carefully and follow instructions. You’d be surprised how often students make mistakes because they think they remember what was on the assignment sheet. Read any additional material your teacher gives you.

2. Break the task into segments and assign a “date for completion” to each segment. For a paper, this is likely to include topic selection, initial planning, initial research (if research is required), follow-up research, multiple drafts and a final proofreading. Put these in your personal organizer. (If you don’t have one, get one.)

• • Allow time for major editing and revision, including at least a couple of drafts, before the final draft. (You will almost never hand in a first draft.)

• Allow time for a final proofreading before the paper is handed in. A surprising number of papers lose points because of sloppy final proofreading.

3. Hope for the best but plan for the worst.

• • Save your work often, and save it to more than one location: not just your hard drive, but also a CD, zip disk, flash drive, external drive, etc.

• • From time to time, email your work to yourself. That way, if your computer crashes, you’ll have a copy of a recent draft available in cyberspace.

• Don’t expect to print your paper the day it’s due. Make sure you have a back-up plan in case your printer doesn’t work, and leave yourself plenty of time to put it into action.

4. Invest in a good handbook. Many teachers in writing classes assign handbooks as required texts. If your teacher doesn’t, find one or ask your teacher for a recommendation. Handbooks will help you write every paper you are assigned in college. They include information on how to remedy a host of common writing problems, suggestions for gathering and organizing materials for research papers, and very importantly information about how to avoid plagiarism (a serious offense in the academic community).

5. Whenever you sit down to work on a paper, take a few minutes to look at the comments your teacher made on your previous work. Few things are less fun than revisiting work you’ve already done, but those comments are designed to help you improve your work on the next paper. List two or three things you want to do better in the paper you are working on now and check the list frequently.

6. Write to your audience, not to yourself. Whether you have a constructed audience or are writing a paper for the teacher, adjust your writing style and content to your reader(s), taking into account what they already know and believe and what you want them to conclude from your paper.

7. Try these techniques for editing and revision:

• • For the rhetorical effect of the paper: when you’ve finished a draft, list the three or four most significant things you wanted to get across. Then re-read the paper and decide whether you in fact did get those points across.

• • For paragraph coherence: try reading each paragraph by itself, starting from the end of the paper. In the margin beside each paragraph, write in one sentence what the paragraph is about. (If you start to run out of space, you probably have an incoherent paragraph.) Check to see whether your topic sentence matches what you have written in the margin. Possibly, what you’ve written in the margin would make a better topic sentence.

• • For detail: read your paper, or sections of it, aloud. Reading aloud helps you catch errors or gaps that silent reading often lets you slide over.

8. Revise, revise, revise. And then do a final proofreading to make sure everything is perfect.

Now it’s up to you! Happy writing, and look forward to the great grades you richly deserve!