SMART WRITING AT WORK
Our HOCs and LOCs integrated system for teaching writing is a simple strategic framework that provides important critical-thinking and writing concepts and skills for students and workers of all ages. It seeks to demystify writing, treating it as a systematic skill that can be learned, much as you would learn golf, mountain climbing, cooking, gardening, or photography. We call it THE NEW BASICS....where the reader/customer is always the focus.
MINDFULNESS, for most people, conjures images of meditation--eyes closed, relaxed, concentrating on each breath in a peaceful environment...
That's fine. Who am I to argue with an ancient, healthy practice? (Some of the earliest written records of meditation [Dhyana], come from the Hindu traditions of Vedantism around 1500 BCE.)
But wait a sec....doesn't MINDFULNESS imply how we interact with other people and with our environment? Doing yoga and closed-eye meditation, as I said, is awesome, but what about practicing mindfulness in our everyday contacts at work, under stress, with co-workers and customers? Can't do that with eyes closed very easily.
Did you ever consider the on-the-job writing you do every day as an opportunity to practice mindfulness? Interaction with others is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to being mindful. So what better way to practice than through our daily workplace writing...or, as I think of it, eyes-wide-open meditation?
If you’re like most people, when I ask you to define CONTENT in a piece of writing, you’d say it’s the information, the facts, the details, the data conveyed in the writing. That’s what almost everyone believes, and everyone is about 25% correct.
CONTENT is better thought of as one of seven systems operating in any piece of writing. CONTENT is a system with four main components. Knowing these four components will help you generate CONTENT that’s more useful to your reader. Here’s how….
If you’ve followed this blog, you know that my NUMBER 1 complaint about how writing is taught in school/college/grad school is that most of the writing students are assigned to do has no real audience beyond the teacher. But when students go to work, they must always write to a real person, usually many real people.
The writing skills students learn in school, writing for no real audience, fall short when they go to work. Having a real reader makes writing suddenly important, risky, valuable, and, for many, frightening.
So please have your students get a lot of practice writing to a real person. Students from the first grade through grad school need to practice, practice, practice, and practice some more writing to a real person. Actually, it’s fun.
Let me first say what they’d learn from this real practice. And then let me give some suggestions for real-writing assignments….
If you want to do Powerful Writing (or Powerful Editing/Reviewing) you should have a systematic approach for developing a document draft and making it truly powerful. This post gives you guidelines for Powerful Writing, for developing any workplace document, from a simple email to a complex report….
I have taught people from all around the world to write better...in English. Just as each of us speaks with an accent, no matter what language we speak, we also write with an accent.
Who owns the English language, anyway?....
Hi. My name is Harvey...and I'm a procrastinator.
...Hi, Harvey...
Today I'd like to share with you a little aha moment about writing. When I have important writing to do, I find myself thinking about it...a lot. As in, need another stalk of string cheese...think, think, think...better run to the store, almost out of dental floss...listen to some music...watch some TV with the sound off. Oh yeah, that thing I have to write. Okay...let's see. Hmm, suddenly a great idea for a screen-play pops into my head:
Naïf ad copywriter, assigned to create a new for-profit religion for atheists, falls hard for the gorgeous woman contracted to kill him when he goes rogue trying to save the world. FARFA! Finally A Religion For Atheists.
Ahem...right...that thing I was supposed to write....
Well, as it turns out, you can waste a whole lot of your precious time, productively, and get yourself to a place where you actually look forward to the actual fingers-on-the-keyboard writing that's just lying there like a bear trap ready to snap your soul in two.
Here's how to make procrastination work for you and improve your writing (kind of like putting globs of whipped cream on your broccoli)....
1) it briefly analyzes the big problem--from first grade through college, students aren't being taught to write as well as society needs them to--and
2) it offers a conceptual and practical solution--a solution that has helped writers write better in the classroom and the workplace over the past 35+ years of my teaching....
