Listening for Punctuation

Reading aloud during the editing phase of the writing process reaps benefits. For one, it helps writers pick up awkward phrasing that a silent reading might ignore. Reading aloud would more likely detect the misplaced quickly in the sentence I want to pick up quickly errors. For typos, you can leave this task to the read-aloud feature of your word processing software. It will read verbatim the sentence I found man errors, so you can change man to many. 

Reading aloud will also help you determine punctuation. Here are three cases in point.

1. If you have questions please call Adam. If you read deliberately, you will hear a slight pause after questions and insert the comma after it. Even if you read superfast, you'll hear at the least a dip and rise in volume between questions and please, where the comma belongs. 

2. When she called the customer said he was shipped the wrong item. This is another case of the introductory comma but with a twist. Without the comma, you might not pause until customer and realize the rest of the sentence is senseless. Then you would correctly insert the comma after called. 

3. I am not in the office, I am in the conference room. Many people would think the comma correctly punctuates this sentence, but reading aloud would help editors decide that the comma is improperly setting off two complete sentences. They would then replace the comma with a semicolon or a period, or they would place but after the comma.

Yes, you can hear punctuation, so read sentences aloud when editing.

Explaining Exclamation Points

The question keeps arising: “What do you think of all these exclamation points people are using these days?” My opinion matters for at least three reasons. First, I work as a writing consultant in the private and public sectors, so people often rely on my expertise in deciding appropriateness of usage for themselves and their staff. Second, I have been tracing the increasing appearance of explanation points in routine business emails, which have entirely replaced traditional memos and letters as formal means of company communication. This trend suggests an evolutionary practice; therefore, the pervasiveness of exclamation points is here to stay. Third, the opinions I heard range wildly, from “I just think they’re cool” to “These idiots who use too many are immature writers.” Neither of these observations is helpful, because even informal writing requires more standards than does formal speaking to save the audience from ambiguity, especially in a business world demanding clear interpretations and precise commitments. Here is my take.

While anyone’s judgment on the appropriateness of exclamation points is subjective, I need to start with two disclosures: I use them sparingly, and I challenge anyone who claims their usage is generational. While younger people, millennials in particular, might have started the phenomenon (although I am not entirely convinced they did), I see plenty of baby boomers using them these days.

Using exclamation points excessively may represent a lazy shortcut for explaining how writers feel. Instead of writing to a teammate, “Thank you for your call!” you can write, “Your call came just as I was thinking of how we can inexpensively solve this problem while not interrupting the project. Your recommendation achieved those two objectives for our team. Many thanks for your contribution.” Exclamation points can also signal an ineffectual masking for weaknesses in using language skillfully and delicately. Better than writing to a client, “I can’t do the job today!” is writing, “While my production commitments preclude me from completing the job today, I can have it ready for you by tomorrow evening.”

With these thoughts in mind, I offer two tips:

1. Use exclamation points to express pleasure, not anger or disappointment. Think of using them to congratulate someone for an accomplishment or to thank someone for doing you a favor. Avoid “You are wrong!” “How could you!” “No way I’m doing that for you!” and the like.

2. Limit exclamation points to one per message. I restrict my use to maybe one in a month of hundreds of emails. Overuse loses their effectiveness in conveying your intended meaning. Make exclamation points matter.

BOOK BRIEF: Learning from a Master

The Essential Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, editors. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 819 + xxxiv pages.

Just for the sake of learning about yourself in the context of your own time and its place in literary, socioeconomic, and geopolitical history, The Essential Tagore is an endless adventure. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first Asian laureate of Nobel Prize for Literature, apparently never exhausted his oeuvre across so many genres during his seven-decade career. He produced long-lasting fiction and poetry as a child, and dictated his last creative works on his deathbed traveling the world over several times in support of much more than his literary endeavors. He was also an educator devoted to redirecting children from a stifling traditional schooling system to a more creative learning environment, as he highlighted in his Nobel acceptance speech, included in this collection. The Bengali author lived when his beloved country contended with poverty exacerbated  draconian public policies, India pushed toward independence from a recalcitrant United Kingdom, a centuries-old conflict intensified between his Hindu and Muslim compatriots, and the world survived more than two horrific global wars. 

Reading Tagore is like contemplating the totality of human experience. This massive volume opens with two in-depth, reverential, engaging essays by the editors about Tagore's literary vision and biography. Each of the ten following sections divide his writing by letters, autobiography, nonfiction, poetry, songs, stories, novels, drama, humor, and travelogue. This partitioning is not as easy a task as it may seem, as Tagore’s humor might come in the way of a children’s play, his letters burst with polemic pondering as well as poetic imagery, and his fiction and poetry can be equally narrative and lyrical. As abundant as the book is, the editors’ prefatory notes to each section frequently describe how limited the collection actually is. Much of this prodigious literary giant’s work is difficult  to translate into English or accompanied by the author’s artwork, beyond the scope of the compilation. The editors refer readers to numerous other Tagore collections, which the present volume will inspire readers to investigate.

While Tagore was a fierce human rights advocate, he did not always walk lockstep with Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vision for an independent India. On the salt and cloth boycotts, he wrote, “We have killed diversities in opinions and actions and have termed it national unity. ... All we see around us are signs of divisiveness, of separation. When this difference is very strong, we are unable to establish our rule or tenets in our own land. So, someone else will govern over us—nothing we can do can prevent that from happening.”

Tagore surely struggled with the contradiction of his best intentions of seeing equality among all Indian citizens and reaping the benefits of farmers’ labor as a landlord. Nevertheless, at the center of his philosophy is an awe of natural world and a deepest respect for humanity. Read and reread his poem “I Saw in the Twilight” as ample testimony, and continue capturing other delights from this genius throughout The Essential Tagore, a classic by any standard.

The Resourceful Reporter Part 25: Parting Shots

I conclude this 25-part series on report writing, covering 23 report types that fall into 3 broad categories. I looked 9 descriptive, 9 analytical, and 5 persuasive reports. While each is unique in some respects, they all share common features. The talking points spread throughout the series (e.g., problem, cause, options, solution) should prove useful in reflecting on the world reports when designing them and establish your own standards. With this thought in mind, I offer these finals tips and cautions:

1. Use the talking points as suggestions for getting started, not for following inflexibly.
2. Move, add, or delete talking points to suit your organizational culture and purpose.
3. Mix and match talking points as needed, for instance, borrowing from the conference review for the course review or even the staff appraisal.  
4. Create new reports based on the templates I've created in this series. Notice I've omitted job accomplishments for descriptive reports, industry reviews for analytical reports, and white papers for persuasive reports; however, this series gives you a lot to work from if you need to write these or other reports not in the series.

OK, happy reporting!

The reports in this series:

Descriptive Reports

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews

Analytical Reports

1. Contractor Appraisals
2. Staff Appraisals
3. Self-Appraisals
4. Audit Reports
5. Root-Cause Reports
6. Business Forecasts
7. Project Plans
8. Project Status Reports
9. Project Completion Reports

Persuasive Reports

1. Internal Proposals
2. Justification Reports
3. Business Cases
4. External Proposals
5. Business Plans