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.
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Getting creative
Do you consider yourself to be creative? Do you take any steps to inspire or nurture your creativity?
I must admit I haven’t thought about creativity for a while, but was recently inspired to think about it by Michelle Grice’s post about musical inspiration.
I believe creativity is important to help us solve issues and stay interested, and it doesn’t have to be creative in any specific way. Many people say “I can’t draw/paint/sew/sculpt so I’m not creative” but I disagree with that as a narrow view of creativity.
The people who thought of liquid paper, sticky notepads and tea bags were all creative – and for all we know they couldn’t draw, sew or sing either!
Developing creativity is fun, and it can help you see things in a different way, find solutions to challenges and grab new opportunities. I think doing anything out of the ordinary and basically avoiding being in a rut will develop creativity, but here are some more specific ideas to get you (and me!) started:
- move to some energetic music – don’t call it dancing if that will limit you, just move!
- grab a pencil and draw your favourite holiday – interpret that in any way you like!
- do some mind teasers – pictures hidden in a see of dots, conundrums, riddles, and so on
- think of a different ending for the last movie you saw or book you read
- spend 5 minutes looking at some artwork online – look at the colours, think about your responses, follow your instincts
- think of how to make your Christmas break up suit a theme – maybe Knights & Damsels, The Jungle, Fairies & Elves or Hollywood inspires you with decorations, costumes, menus and more. It never has to be done, just imagine it
- let your mind follow some music without focussing on any lyrics
- imagine you just won $5million – what would you spend it on? where would you go? how would you resign/leave your clients?
What other ideas do you have for getting creative?
And for today’s brain teaser… if four men take two hours to dig a hole, how long will it take eight men to dig half a hole?
Quotation marks for speech
Do you remember learning about talking marks at school? I remember thinking of them as commas up in the sky:)
Over time, I learnt they are called quotation marks and that there are a few simple rules associated with their use. One of the rules about quotation marks is that you don’t close them until the person finishes speaking.
It isn’t often I come across examples of this in business writing – it’s generally more relevant for fiction or story writing. However, I did come across a media release recently which completely ignored this rule (and a few others but that’s a different story altogether!)
How do we use this rule? I’m glad you asked!
John said ‘It is hot today.’
John has finished speaking so we close off the quotation marks – easy.
John said ‘It is hot today and I would like to go the pool for a swim. The pool is just around the corner.
‘I wonder if Mary and Susan would like to come too? I will call them before I leave.’
In this example, John’s speech is divided into two paragraphs but he hadn’t finished speaking so I didn’t close the quotation marks. For clarity, however, I opened them again to show he is still talking (and I hadn’t just forgotten to close them!)
However, if John’s talking was interupted by text, we would close the quotation marks:
‘It is hot today and I would like to go the pool for a swim. The pool is just around the corner,’ said John.
‘I wonder if Mary and Susan would like to come too? I will call them before I leave.’
That’s a lot
It’s not so much that I see this pair of words used instead of each other, but unfortunately a number of people get the first one wrong.
a lot: a large extent, often, many. Note it is two words.
She has been using the writer a lot for this project.
allot: to distribute or assign parts of something
The manager will allot tasks to his team.
The word alot does not actually exist – it is simply how ‘a lot’ sounds.
Once could be an error…
As much as I advocate being careful with spelling and grammar, everybody is human and mistakes will be made. So I can excuse an error.
It is much harder to excuse a document or website that makes the same mistake more than once. I came across this sentence a little while ago:
“Informing you super fund of a change of address is just as important as informing you bank.”
Using you instead of your is one of those things done easily enough (spell check won’t pick you as wrong) but really annoys me. Seeing it twice in that sentence just tells me the writer doesn’t understand the difference between you and your or just doesn’t care about being professional or making a good impression.
Two errors in that sentence would also make me less forgiving of other mistakes in the same document so it goes further than two missing letters.
How about you – do you also cringe when you read (or hear!) about ‘you object’?
the mystique of a mystic
mystic:someone involved in mysterious things, usually relating to the occult and other non-mainstream beliefs. Also can describe things related to these beliefs and traditions
Jane saw a mystic to contact her husband’s spirit.
mystique: a sense of mystery, power and interest about a person, place or event
Modern communications have reduced the mystique of fashion models.
If you have trouble remembering which is which, remember that mystique is about mystery and questions.
Fowarding emails
Emails are so convenient – how did we ever do business without them? So quick to send a message to someone, or a group, and respond to things, emails are a great aid to communication.
However, we need to be careful with emails that we forward to others.
Before forwarding, check the entire email – there may be part of it you want to transfer to Mary but there may be parts Mary shouldn’t see. For example, there could be confidential information about someone else, unpleasant comments about Mary herself or out of date information that could cause confusion. This is a particular risk in very long email trails (i.e. if a number of replies are included in the one email) where subjects may even have changed along the way.
The other issue with forwarding emails is email addresses – if emailing a group of people, ensure that they can’t see email addresses they shouldn’t. The main exmaple of this is when you get jokes and stories that are passed from gorup to gorup – some emails I’ve got have given me access to at least 100 email addresses of strangers. Lucky for them I detest spam so will not abuse their email addresses, but not everyone will respect their privacy so it’s best to delete email addresses before forwarding.
Have you ever forwarded something you now regret? Did you find a way to remedy the situation?
Natural disasters
With floods in Victoria, NSW and especially in Queensland, fires in WA and cyclones in Queensland, we are experiencing natural disasters across Australia.
Aside from any emotional reactions and personal needs, this is clearly a time to prepare our businesses for the worst. For those in affected and threatened areas, you may not have the time or energy to do much now but I believe the rest of us should take this time to protect our businesses so we can stay strong to help those who are loosing so much.
To help you prepare, here are some previous blog posts where I have written about contingency plans and actions:
Risk acknowledgement
Chain reactions…
Prepared for a chain reaction?
Protecting the essential
Crucial planning ahead for problems
What’s essential?
Website hosting security
Use real keywords
Keywords are used to help search engines relate your web pages to terms people use in the search engines.
So if you sell books, you want search engines to find you when people look for a book shop they can access so you could use keywords like books, reading, store, fiction and non-fiction. Keywords like bike, engineer, beautician and plumber would be less useful (unless you specialised in books about those things!)
I think it’s really important to use real keywords, too. By that I mean words that real people will use to find your goods or services, not jargon or unusual alternatives of words.
Terms like motor insurance, pertusiss and downhaul are actually accurate but used by professionals – most people refer to car insurance, whooping cough and (sail) rope so they are the real keywords.
Worse are words used in a different context, such as benefit. Most of us think of benefit as an advantage whereas the insurance and super industries use benefit as the money you may be entitled to; would you ever type ‘super benefit’ in a search engine to find out about superannuation?
So when preparing your website copy and metadata (meaning the text you can add to a webpage for search engines to use), make sure you focus on words your customers will use rather than words people in your industry use. Sometimes, your customers do know the jargon, but don’t just assume it.
Writing office effective memos
Emails may be replacing inter-office memos overall, but the memo still has its place in many larger companies. Yet many memos (past and present) are not always treated with respect as many have been so poorly written or produced for the sake of having a memo.
So here are some tips to make your memos worth reading…
- keep it short – it is not a letter or a procedural manual. A memo is about giving some important information quickly so get to the point and leave out unnecessary information
- remember that you are writing to colleagues not customers so it’s ok to write something like “see Sue for a copy” or “in the main foyer” as everyone will understand
- be personal – you know the people you are writing to so it doesn’t have to be very formal. “Call me”, “pop into my office” or “let me know” are much friendly than “don’t hesitate to call me” or “reply by fax”
- be polite and show respect, even if the memo is pointing out something negative. Compare “we need to improve customer service so…” with “you are all really bad at customer service so…”
- use personal terms – you, me, I, we – to maintain a connection with your readers
- be specific so staff know what is needed – “the renovations start on Monday so please clear your desk by 4pm Friday” or “reports are now due by 10am Tuesday” are clear and easy to comply with
- make it clear who is getting the memo – I don’t want to waste time passing it onto my team if they already have it but I also don’t want them to miss it; if it is sensitive, it helps to know who else is reading the information
- most importantly, don’t write a memo unless there is actually a need to do so – sending out lots of memos loses their effectiveness no matter how well you write them.
Of course, these same rules apply to important internal emails, too.
Have you received any really bad memos? What made them stand out as bad?
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