The Art of Crafting Communication
My personal opinion is that communication best practices evolve quite rapidly with time and tools. I’ve spent some years writing for various entertainment publications and my editors had been very good to me. When crafting emails and documentation, a lot of the same principles apply and I’m keeping this as a reminder to myself.
Keep Your Sentences Short
As a beginning writer, I found myself wanting to be descriptive and thorough. In emails and high level documents, readers tend to skim through the content too fast to appreciate language nuances. You don’t want to lose your reader before a sentence completes. Learn to break your sentences.
Use Simple Words
I work in very multinational teams and English isn’t always everyone’s first language even if they speak it well. People generally latch on to keywords and you want your keywords to be concise. Skip the fancy vocabulary unless they’re very specific terminology. Even for native English speakers, it helps a lot because when you’re using simple words, they’re likely to repeat the same words to anyone else they’re explaining your writing to and everyone gets a good understanding of your points.
Be Aware of Space
One of the things I struggled with as a writer was to fit my script within very specific column dimensions. This means that if you have a line like
The use of a comma is superfluous
You can end up with a visual like these:
Working with a ‘Justified’ alignment looks better but personally I try to keep my paragraphs as evenly-spaced as possible for ease of reading.
Use Pictures if They Explain Better
A picture says a thousand words. Use diagrams, screenshots or pictures and mark them if you must to illustrate your point. This helps break up text as well and especially if you’re writing a guide to do something, you would do well with illustrated examples.
Summarize, Then Elaborate
When I’ve to write lengthy paragraphs, I generally follow the formula of first declaring my aim or to have a leading statement (short one) before jumping into specifics. This makes your ramblings easier to follow and even if people don’t finish reading what you have to say, at least they’ve caught on to the main gist and can follow through if/when they want.
This applies too with email requests. Give a brief of who, what, where, when, why — whichever applies.
Use Points or Headlines
Again about breaking up text. This is mostly a visual means of engaging readers. It’s easier to understand information if you can visually categorize it. Oftentimes, you can do without complete sentences and just have a general keyword or phrase to lead the reader to your intent.
Active vs Passive
Active voice: The dog ate my homework
Passive voice: My homework was eaten by the dog.
There are uses for each. Here’s a better explanation of when to use what. Also, sometimes, you might want to be more conscious about what you’re using when you’re addressing people in communication to reinforce your intent or position (as in your stand, not so much your job title although, maybe).
I vs We
Personal bit here. I aim to craft sentences with intent. When working in a team, I place importance to communicate as a shared voice and also to give credit where credit is due. When representing a team effort, I tend to use ‘we’ when referring to work that is uncontroversial or factual. In cases where I’m either personally liable or where something is of my personal opinion or a result of my initiative, I prefer to use ‘I’ so my team mates don’t get blindsided by information they might not be aware of. I find it useful to be guided by courtesy and to perhaps be a bit more sensitive to people around.
Know Your Audience
Finally, know who your audience is. One of the hardest writing jobs I had was a technology column for the equivalent of your everyday BTS fan. Every time I submit something obvious, my editor would reject my script, challenging me to explain a concept I had taken for granted. I would learn that not everyone knows what the difference between a gigabyte and a megabyte. If you need a good parallel, talk to your parents about the latest trends and you’ll get a good idea of the amount of information you’ll need to simplify to be understood.
Don’t get too technical when you’re not dealing with subject field experts or if you’re unsure if they are. If you’re unsure, you can try prefacing with a general summary in simple terms before launching into full technical jargon.
That about sums up my considerations when crafting words. Hope they’re useful tips for you too!
