Writing is such a critical skill for employees in any profession, according to numerous corporate, government, and university websites, notably the Tulane University School for Professional Advancement. I am encouraged to argue this point because so many experienced frontline, managerial, and executive staff have made this point to me.
We are living in a time that demands good writing skills. Most employees meet coworkers, clients, and vendors through email. In effect, writing has become our primary communication mode to inform, instruct, guide, encourage, or propose to people we have never met in person. Writing is our means of proving we have started or completed an assignment; tracked a project's progress, actions, and decisions; and suggested ways of improving the effectiveness or efficiency of a process, product, or organization. Our work-related documents testify to our clarity, thoughtfulness, responsiveness, and compliance, among other factors. What we write may lead to how our managers value, advance, support, and promote us.
For at least these reasons, we can improve or reinforce our on-the-job writing by regularly engaging in three activities:
1. Read high-quality, management-approved documents. This practice includes critically reading operating instructions, meeting reviews, incident reports, root-cause analyses, staff appraisals, project reports, internal proposals, white papers, policy announcements, client consultations, and many more messages across your organization. Make those management-approved messages your quality target for improving your writing skills.
2. Practice professional writing daily. If your writing responsibilities consist only of replying to inquiries, then write some inquiries yourself. If all you write are descriptions of processes and events, then write about how those descriptive documents bring value to your organization. If you compose solely analytical documents for supervisory review, then graduate to proposal writing for managerial review. Find reasons to write.
3. Seek feedback from coworkers whose writing skills you respect. When you ask coworkers for their opinions and suggestions, you honor them as a highly regarded source. Get feedback from at least two sources because you might find conflicting opinions, which is not a bad thing. You will learn a lot about the subjective nature of writing assessment. Look for patterns in your writing. Are your reviewers usually finding the same issues, such as completeness, organization, conciseness, sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation? If yes, focus more on those issues in your future writing assignments.
The next post will discuss why reading outside one's field is as critical for writing improvement as reading inside it.
