I hope you find my writing and business tips and observations useful. My business and blog are dedicated to helping businesses communicate clearly and reach their potential.
Read, subscribe to my newsletter, enjoy!Tash
Making FAQ worth reading
An FAQ that makes someone laugh is a positive for your business
Looking at options for some software, I viewed a few FAQ pages lately (FAQ being Frequently Asked Questions).
Some FAQs are better than others, and some were great – informative and easy to understand.
Using humour
An FAQ page is full of facts, otherwise what’s the point of having it? But that doesn’t mean you have to make it all staid and boring.
Here are some examples for amusing FAQs I have spotted:
Q: How do I invite someone?
A: The basic invitations are simple SMS messages. Naturally, you have other options to bring your friends here. Try sending them a download link via any other messaging service: email, Facebook, WhatsApp, an actual telegram — you name it.
Q: Will you have ads? Or sell my data? Or steal my beloved and enslave my children?
A: No.
Q: will these faqs ever end?
A: well it always has before!
Q: You didn’t answer my question. How come?
A: Probably because this FAQ was written by a marketing person. Please ask us your question using our contact us form.
A bit of humour and lightness makes the whole page easier to read – and more memorable, too, and every business wants to be remembered.
How can you add some humour to your FAQ page?
*Image courtesy of Frugo at 123rf
Communicating to potential voters
It’s hard to choose who to vote for if the candidates communicate poorly.
Throughout Victoria, we are about to vote for our local councils.
Unbelievably, in my ward, there are 21 candidates for us to choose from to select 3 councillors!
This is a lot of people to consider while trying to choose my vote and is a bit overwhelming but it is useful from a communications perspective as I can see big differences in their statements.
Candidates’ statements
So, putting aside politics and any particular platforms these people are standing for, here is a summary of the candidates I can choose this week. I am basing this on the official statements prepared by each candidate that were sent to us by the Electoral commission, and I am not using anyone’s real name!
group 1 – sole platform
George – has a personal dislike to something other residents are doing so wants us to vote for him to stop that behaviour.
Fred – is retired and is standing to get better deals for older residents.
Sally – is mum to young children and will fight for better services for new mums and for families.
Communications – all three of these people have written a reasonable statement that is easy enough to understand and sound like reasonable people. I just find it difficult to trust someone who is obviously going into council for their own best interests.
group 2 – political
Jenny – states she is affiliated with a major political party but lists various local issues and experience to show relevance. The second half of her statement is more formal and is about policies, sounding much more like a politician than a local councillor.
Ed – does not state any political affiliation but the statement sounds formal and like a federal election campaign piece. It is not law that candidates state they belong to a party (and follow part lines) but this is a contentious issue of late. All sounds pretty perfect really…
group 3 – mixed platforms
Rachel – the current councillor and someone who is involved in our community – and the only one most people I know have met or seen around. Her statement shows her passion, is easy to understand (both through competent writing and using approachable language and style) and ends with “I ask you to vote for me” (rather than demanding it). She covers a number of issues.
Angus – a young person who grew up in the area and covers a number of issues in his statement. Again, it is well written and readable.
Communications – there are others in this group but all of them discuss a number of issues in clear English and declare no connection with a political party.
group 4 – questionable
David – started his statement with “7 years house designing in Shanghai; Melbourne.” No, I don’t know what that means either – and as he works in the IT industry and is standing for a council role (not a council planning job!), it makes little sense.
David’s statement has many examples I could use in my bad writing posts – “Experience in retails…Involving security issue with PM…I pointed city apartment…Successfully suggested VCAT improve hearing procedure with writing hearing” {the lack of final full stop is copied by the way!}
Due to his poor written communication, I don’t understand what he is standing for – even when I can guess the meaning of a sentence, I can not be sure if he is for or against that issue!
group 5 – pushy
Simon sent a SMS to some people, outwardly to remind people of the need ot vote, but everyone I know of (and others according to local media) were irritated by this message. Simon came across as pushy and people felt their privacy had been invaded by these messages sent to private mobile phones.
Other than the SMS, Simon fitted into group 2 but I know at least two people who voted him as number 21 purely due to the SMS. As I have said at various times, being aggressive and overly confident in communications often backfires (with Australian audiences anyway).
Communicating with potential votes
Obviously, there are other ways these candidates can promote themselves to the voters but let’s limit ourselves to these statements. Because that is the only way most people in our area get information to make a choice in the elections.
There is a wide selection of writing styles – from someone who does not know how to write in English, through those who write good conversational English, to those who write formal, professional pieces. Just this choice of style will have a big impact on how voters will perceive each candidate.
Given there are 21 candidates (and apparently some areas have many more than that!), many voters will not read the statements in depth nor do other research. So the style and approachability of these statements is critical for their success.
Who to vote for?
Based purely on their communication skills as described above, who would you vote for if you lived in this area?
Who would you not vote for? This is possibly an even more important question for anyone trying to learn how to communicate effectively to get positive results.
Back to basics on editing
“It’s not fun to reread everything but you have to edit your work. I’ve written long essays at Uni, thinking they were good, but when I edited them, I found some bits just didn’t make sense. Sometimes your brain takes a little rest and you don’t write as well.”
That’s what my son’s grade two teacher said this morning as she led a class on editing.
learning to edit
The ability to edit what we write is an important communication skill. For instance, if I wrote an invitation for Thursday 10pm, I may be a bit lonely at 10am when no one turn up because I hadn’t checked what I wrote in the invitation.
While it can be much easier to edit someone else’s work as it is fresh to us and we don’t have an expectation or memory of what was to be written, there are many times when doing your own editing is necessary.
Technically, learning to read and write gives us the skills to edit our work (for example, you could recognise ‘siad’ was incorrectly spelt).
However, as I saw in the classroom today, being given direct tasks for editing is an effective way to understand and undertake editing.
basic steps of editing
Each student was given a checklist of tasks to edit a piece of work they wrote last week.
The group I worked with, went through the list item by item to improve their writing. When I edit, I probably do multiple steps at once but doing one at a time is simpler for children. I also think that doing it step by step actually makes errors easier to spot.
So the checklist today was:
- title
- sizzling start
- backfill
- events in order
- does it make sense?
- check capital letters and full stops
- check spelling
Why not follow this list next time you have to edit something?
understanding the checklist
Just because this list uses very specific terms taught at our school (and others!), here are a few tips…
- not everything needs a title, but most writing that you would edit does (including an email subject as a title)
- make the beginning interesting! Primary students are taught to make a sizzling start on a simple level, but your writing should also start with something interesting
- backfill just means an introduction or explanation of the writing. Consider this the all important sentence that answers who, what, where, why and when.
- different styles of writing require differences in content, so you may not always need events to be listed in chronological order – but the order of what you do include needs to make sense in the relevant context.
- at school today, I had the students check each sentence made sense. Some had written ‘first tunnel ball. then octopus.’ which obviously needed to be more like ‘first we played tunnel ball, then played octopus.’
As more literate adults, we can read t
Recent Comments