How To Avoid Looking Stupid When You Write

"Am a perfectionist and rarely if if ever forget details."
“Instrumental in ruining entire operation for a Midwest chain store.”
“Received a plague for Salesperson of the Year."

Thanks to Fortune magazine for those fine examples of résumé writing that are likely to end up on a bulletin board but not lead to a job interview. About 15 years ago, when I was on the journalism faculty at Penn State, I started looking into the nascent field of psychology that deals with human error. Why, researchers were asking, do otherwise intelligent people make foolish, expensive, even fatal, mistakes?

Why do nurses put the wrong medication in an IV? Why do doctors operate on the wrong knee so often? About eight wrong-site surgeries are voluntarily reported each month to the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, but they represent only the most serious cases, with 70 percent of them resulting in death, according to the Los Angeles Times.

On a less serious note, but more to the point for our purposes, why do so many writing blunders reach readers, leaving a potentially harmful impression of he or she who taps away at the keyboard? As I tell my writing seminar participants, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Any critical reader -- and writers should always assume that the audience is reading their text closely and carefully -- has a right to ask, upon seeing an egregious grammatical or spelling error (particularly someone’s name): “What else is wrong with this? Can I even trust the content to be accurate?”

A psychologist pioneering in human error research (sorry, but I don’t remember his name) told me that he and his colleagues had learned that errors emit from our brains randomly. For lack of a better term, they called these emissions “erronium,” and they tend, not surprisingly, to accumulate under stress. But he added that the errors don’t have to go into actual use or production, so to speak, thanks to redundancy.

To illustrate: In one of my journalism jobs before Penn State, I covered civil aviation, particularly airline safety. Over the decades since World War II, airline cockpits have gone from four aviators (pilot, copilot, flight engineer and navigator) to three (minus navigator) to two (take out the flight engineer) -- all thanks to advances in avionics, or aviation electronics. But I seriously doubt that we’ll ever go to just the pilot. No matter how automated the cockpit, safety still demands two sets of eyes and two brains to monitor the system.

The same can be said for the control panels at nuclear power plants and the nurse assigned to make sure that the orthopedist is about to open the correct knee. But nursing positions are often understaffed, which leads to stress, and therein lies the problem.

What about writing? Redundancy is at the heart of any newsroom, with at least one editor and usually more scrutinizing copy from even the most seasoned reporters. And considering the thousands of words that flow through the process every day, the system works fairly well.

But then there’s you, the business writer. How can a single individual be redundant? Of course, you can ask someone else to read your work, but that’s not always practical, and besides, will that someone else be a careful editor?

No. It falls on you, and it’s all about quality control. Not just checklist or spell-check quality control, but meticulous self-editing, which may not come easily when you consider how much our ego is tied up in what we write. How do we get around that? When I worked with sophomores, I used a word that I’ve heard many teenagers deploy when speaking dismissively about their peers: Be paranoid. Assume you’ve blundered somewhere along the way, and you’ll find that you have.

This sort of critical self-awareness is particularly relevant because it feels effortless to tap out an email and hit the “send” button -- all literally within a matter of seconds, to judge by some of the unedited slop I get. I know that virtually every time I compose an email or white paper for a client, my mind is racing ahead of my fingers, that I’ve left out a word or misspelled one or even blown it to the extent of changing the message itself. Therefore, I always read my work with great care, keeping these six editing rules –- some content-oriented, some more technical -- in mind:

1. Read for the MESSAGE. Does it say what I want it to say? Do I contradict myself at any point?
2. Read again for ORGANIZATION. Are the paragraphs in the right order? When I change topics, am I starting a new paragraph? Am I repeating myself?
3. Read at the SENTENCE level. Are the sentences in the right order?
4. Read each sentence for INTERNAL CONSTRUCTION. Is everything parallel? Did I use active voice? Does it make sense?
5. Read the WORDS. Replace words that don't convey the message. Avoid repetitive use of any word.
6. Check for and correct ERRORS in punctuation and spelling and typos.

What I’m talking about is not allowing the “what” to overwhelm the “how.”

Finally, I can’t resist another résumé entry from Fortune. Editing isn’t the problem, but the thinking that went into it is intriguing: “Personal interests: donating blood. Fourteen gallons so far.”

Regards,
Dave

Rebirth of a Blog

Back and forth I’ve gone on all this “social media” business, and I’m a long way from making up my mind. Somehow the notion of “tweeting” hasn’t quite penetrated my thinking when it comes to serious and productive marketing. But I am reintroducing my blog. Why I let it slip I don’t know, but I do recall that it made for relaxed and stimulating conversation. Please join me at http://www.businesscommunications.wordpress.com, and react by sounding off on anything touching on business communications, presentation skills and writing skills, and all their promise and pitfalls. I'll continue to share what I know about the news media and how you can gain from press encounters, as well as writing and public speaking for success.