Writing Confidence at Work, Part 3: Feedback

Q: Should you get feedback on your writing?

A: Yes. And you should too.

Q: When?

A: Always.

Q: What do you mean by always?

A: At every step of the writing process?

Q: What steps?

A: In step one, planning, when you're listing ideas to include in the document. Ask your manager and teammates, should I include just the problem or the impact, history, and cause of the problem? Just the solution or the options and benefits of the proposed option? You might be surprised by their answers. They might say, be sure to include the advantages and disadvantages of each option including your proposed one, and the methods you used in determining the options. Step two, drafting based on your plan, seems like a solitary activity, so why seek feedback? Won't that request slow you down? Maybe, but the rewards outweigh the minor drawback and will enable greater efficiency during future writing assignments. Ask, is a rough, single-paragraph draft all right for review? Should I use a preexisting template? If you get stuck in the middle of the draft because you can't think of an advantage of an unpreferred option, ask for someone's opinion. They might see something that was right under your nose all along. In step three, quality controlling, you revise, edit, and proofread. If unsure when revising, ask, did I leave anything out? Should I delete anything? Should I move any section higher or lower? When editing, ask, is that sentence overlong? Did I choose the right word here? Is a question better than a command there? Ask someone you trust to proofread for you. They are more likely to pick up your overlooked errors. Of course, offer yourself as a resource for those you ask when they write complex documents. 

Q: Why bother with all this feedback?

A: This give and take among staff go a long way toward making a proficient writing organization. It also helps writers understand that feedback is not a means of punishment or embarrassment, but a natural element of the writing process. Ultimately, it builds writing confidence.

Writing Confidence at Work, Part 2: Perfectionism

You want to write the perfect feasibility study, procedure, policy, or status report. You think you have but wonder whether it will get the expected reception. Maybe some of those on your distribution list won't even read it. Others might react indifferently to it. Maybe the most important readers will be downright critical of it. You review the document one more time and see why you have had those thoughts. You can make so many improvements, starting with the forcefulness of that opening sentence all the way to that last uncommitted paragraph.

You look at the draft an hour later. Now you believe the style is much improved, but another thought surfaces, You believe you've sacrificed style for substance. You go back to your original outline to find that, in fact, you have not removed any detail, but the most essential content is now buried in the middle of overlong paragraphs. You decide to rearrange information to make the key points more prominent. But now the internal logic of the piece has run amok.

You get the point. Perfectionism. You've got to stop somewhere; you've got to press send sooner or later. You can be sure that no matter how well you write a work-related document, you will find ways to improve it as soon as it drops into your files. You are constantly learning, the business is continually changing, and the industry is revolutionizing. Perfectionism is pointless.

Aiming for perfect is a noble goal, so long as you don't let such a pursuit take over your better senses. If you keep focusing on not hitting your mark, on failure, you might as well give up. Just produce. It's just a bunch of words.

Writing Confidence at Work, Part 1: Subjectivity

Possessing a confident mindset matters to writing success at work. Writing ranks as one of the most  common activities in most jobs, so we can't spend even a moment of our workday feeling uncertain about our writing capability or apprehensive about approaching a big writing task. That's why, starting with this installment, WORDS ON THE LINE starts this six-part series dedicated to the concept of writing confidence. 

Why do so many good writers, or at least adequate ones, lack confidence in their writing? I meet them all the time in professional workshops. They openly express their insecurities about the quality of their reports, analyses, or proposals. They wish they could compose faster, fluidly, painlessly. If writing amounts to most of their daily work, then their job is torture.

Confidence is an attitude. And attitudes are subjective, at least as others perceive us. One person's idea of an assertive tone is another's aggressive, one's straightforward another's rude, one's humility another's disengaged. It would help people who beat up themselves over their perceived inadequate writing skills to start with this mindset. Even the most celebrated writers in the world have received bad reviews.

Writing style is also as subjective as any art, song, cuisine, or fashion. We cannot deny that some documents are well written and other poorly written, but the same well written document for one reader might not do for another. Start with that thought the next time you write something important on the job.

New AI Webinar and Course Available

I have just added to my catalogue a new two-hour webinar and full-day course, Using AI as Your Writing Assistant. The basis of this program is my article "Using AI to Improve Writing Creativity, Productivity, and Quality," which appeared in ACS Chemical Health & Safety for the American Chemical Society.

The course focuses on these objectives:

• Using artificial intelligence in work-related writing.
• Plan with AI to enhance creativity.
• Draft with AI to increase productivity.
• Revise, edit, and proofread with AI to improve quality.
• Identify ethical implications of AI usage.

I can offer "Using AI" in multiple formats and durations and customize it to the writing of your organization. If this program is a fit for you and your team, you can contact me at Phil@PhilVassallo.com. 

Talking Up Writing

When I see teams talk up their writing among each other, I see good writers employed in a publication organization. This assertion calls for qualification of three terms: talk up writing, good writers, and publication organization.

Talking up writing is easy enough to explain. Let's say Anita, Brian, Carlos, and Diana—who call themselves the Fab Four—work on the same team in a large company. Anita has never written an internal proposal, but she needs to draft one for management. She asks Brian to share a successful one he wrote last year so that she can use his as a template. Brian, on the other hand, needs to write a monthly meeting review, but he's bored of using the same boilerplate style. So he asks Carlos to read his meeting review before submittal for suggestions on what he might add to or delete from the document. And while Carlos is writing a new procedure, he asks Diana if she can think of a way to make a particular sentence sound better. Meanwhile, Diana, who is crafting a necessarily negative response to a query, asks Anita to look for tone problems before sending it. Just the fact that these staffers are talking up their writing gives them deeper insights into each other's approach to writing and into the writing process itself.

Describing good writers is a tougher nut to crack. To keep it simple, we could say that management almost always accepts the writing of the Fab Four without comment. Or management also turns to the Fab Four to draft their own messages before editing them to reflect their own style. Or the Fab Four's supervisor asks them for their opinion on a business-critical email. Or employees in other departments of the company seek the Fab Four's input at any point of the writing process, from planning the scope of a white paper to drafting a status report on a massive project to reviewing an audit report for precision,  clarity, and conciseness. If any of these situations apply to you and your team, then you are good writers.

Perhaps the easiest term to qualify is publication organization, because these days virtually every company is one. This term does not apply only to book publishers. Does your business create and archive blogs, business forecasts, business plans, disaster plans, procedures, audit reports, meeting reviews, internal and external proposals, project plans, status reports, and completion reports? If yes, then you work for a publication organization. Everything you do must be in writing, so you and your fellow employees are no less writers than novelists, playwrights, and poets. In fact, you and your team likely write more than "published authors"; therefore, you need every writing tip possible to improve the productivity and sharpen the quality of all your documentation. 

Talking up writing at the workplace has many benefits. It will enhance everyone's writing experience and tighten the team camaraderie. 

The Pretense of Southern Exposure

Just too much can go wrong. Starting with wanting her. The moment they separated their bodies after making love for the first time, he knew it was over. So why did he bother? 

He lay next to her considering his ex-wife. Certain things are hard to get over. She understood him better than anyone. Even his mother never really knew him. He remembered his mother once told him, "You're my only child, but for the life of me I'll never figure you out. Your father was as transparent as the invisible man before I kicked him out for good. But you're another story altogether." When his ex-wife said she'd leave him for good, a flood of confusion seized him. All that data about him would now be compromised—how he refused to eat anyone's cooking but his own, how only he could do his own ironing, how he stacked on the bedroom dresser loose change from his pocket in a tower from quarters at the base to nickels to pennies to dimes at the summit. She said he didn't care about her. But that's not true. If it were, why was he thinking about all this now? 

He got out of bed leaving her there, put on just his pants, and walked outside. The rising sun was radiating on the front of his house. The clapboard siding and shutters needed painting. The white paint from the clapboard and the black paint from the shutters were peeling, especially on the southern side of the house. He could not forgive himself for buying into the brazen lie about the advantages of southern exposure. He needed to paint but he needed a change. This time he thought, he'd paint the clapboard black and the shutters white. And he'd get started right away. He wouldn't wait for her to leave. And if she did, it wouldn't matter. Not this time.

Wanting to Make Art

I woke up this morning with a feeling I never had before. I wanted to make art of something, anything, but I'm not sure what art looks like, sounds like, feels like.

On the subway to my college art history class, a painting popped up on my phone, "Flaming Summer Meadow" by Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe. I really like it, it made me want to paint something like that myself. But when I showed it to my art professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, he said, "Where's the art in that painting?" I didn't know how to answer him. What could I say? The sheer human emotion that I saw in it? The radiant colors that brought together what people and nature have in common? I didn't say anything becuase I was sure my art professor knows more about paintings than I do.

Then I went to the park to meet my best friend for lunch. My friend is one of the most educated, worldly people I know. He knows something about everything. While I was waiting for him, I was reading Jon Fosse's Septology. What an interesting book, I thought. All stream of consciousness, one long sentence over hundreds of pages. It made me want to write a book myself. When my friend arrived, he said, "Don't tell me you're reading that timewaster. I see you're almost finished part one. Don't bother with the other six parts. It's more of the same. Seven hundred pages of emptiness." I didn't know what to say to my friend. But on the subway ride back home, I thought about it. I realized I could have said for me the book was a deep examination of what it means to be alive, to create art in absolute isolation, to choose a life of solitude, to be a deeply self-examining Catholic, to survive troubled family relationships and lingering suicidal thoughts, that if art were life as life really is, then this book is a consummate work of art. But it was too late, and I didn't want to call out my friend on his judgment, because his friendship meant too much to me and, after all, he has read more books than I ever will and probably knows better about Fosse's book than I do. Maybe I'm just misreading it.  
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When I got home, I told Alexa, "Play 'Tití Me Preguntó' by Bad Bunny" as I lay in my bedroom. I am not a big rap fan and don't understand Spanish, but I like the swing of this song and I've memorized the lyrics in translation. I can't get that songe out of my head. Maybe that's what I should do, write lyrics for some rapper. I think I'm a pretty good writer, and I completely get rhythm and meter. No sooner did I think that than my father knocked on my door, more like pounded on it, and shouted, "Turn off that garbage. Why don't you ever listen to real music?" It's his house, and I'm living on his dime, so I can't argue with him. He’s entitled to his opinion, especially since he’s always playing sonatas in the living room on the Steinway piano he inherited from his father. Makes me wonder, how did I end up with no talent? So down went Bad Bunny. And my father did get me to think. Maybe “Tití Me Preguntó” isn’t real music. If art is forever, then he has a good point when he says that the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven has lasted nearly three hundred years and all the stuff I listen to disappears in no time.  

Now it's past midnight. I can't sleep. I'm in bed thinking what a weird thought I had this morning when I woke up. How can I make art when I don't know what it is. I hope the same thought doesn't waste another day tomorrow.