Writing Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Andrew, welcome!

Andrew Brodsky
Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m so excited to dig into some of the wisdom of your book, Ping, and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a particularly surprising discovery you’ve made as you’ve been teaching this stuff, researching this stuff, and putting the book together.

Andrew Brodsky
The most surprising discovery that I’ve seen in my research is that there’s a whole lot more nonverbal information we send in our text-based communication and low-richness communication, like email, instant messaging, than we realize we do. So, when most people talk about it, they’re like, “Well, you don’t send any nonverbal behavior via email,” but we do.

So, typos can relay emotion, time of day a message sent can relay power. There are things like how we interpret emojis is not as straightforward as one would expect. So, there’s a whole lot of other information we don’t even realize we’re sending that other people use to interpret what we’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Andrew, this calls to mind, have you seen this Key & Peele sketch, where they have an escalating misunderstanding?

Andrew Brodsky
I actually use that clip in my class to teach when I teach virtual negotiations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent choice.

Andrew Brodsky
It’s one of my favorite ones.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess that’s part of what makes you one of the world’s best business school professors under 40, Andrew. Kudos.

Andrew Brodsky
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, absolutely, so that’s intriguing there in that there is more that we are sending. I guess we don’t even know that we’re sending it. And then I guess there is still the risk of misinterpretation of those signals, like, “Oh, he sent it at midnight, therefore, this means that,” whereas, that assumption or interpretation could still be off, but some kind of thing got embedded by the time itself of when it was sent.

Andrew Brodsky
One of my favorite studies that researchers have on this, they use an example or metaphor to describe this process. So, what they do is, basically, tap a song out on your desk with your fist, and then imagine what, if you were to tap it out to someone else, what are the odds they’re going to guess it? And most people guess really high percentage. But in reality, very few percentages of people get it right.

The reason being is that when we tap out the song on our desk, we hear the music in our head as we’re tapping it, so it seems really obvious to us. The problem is, when someone’s listening to it, they’re not hearing that same music. They’re coming from their own set of assumptions, interests, and they’re like, “I don’t know what song it is.”

And the same thing happens with our email. When we’re typing out emails, we hear the emotion in our head as we’re typing it, so it seems really obvious to us. But the thing is, when someone else gets it, they’re not hearing the same emotion. For instance, if a boss sends a sarcastic email, they need to be humorous to their subordinate.

If they have an anxious subordinate, they’re going to be like, “Uh-oh, my boss is mad at me, or being condescending,” because they’re coming from somebody that’s very different. So, we all read information, whether it’s emails, or instant messages, with our different tone, so we gotta remember that they’re not hearing the same music we are when we’re writing this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a beautiful comparison point in terms of what’s in our head and what we’re actually transmitting that can go there. And it’s funny, my kids, we just got a keyboard, and they’re experiencing this right now, and they sort of spontaneously played the tapping game, and they were flabbergasted of their own discovery and how their sibling was unable to pick up on the cue, because, indeed, all you have is rhythm when you’re tapping as opposed to pitch, completely missing that I was doing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” because there might be multiple things that would have somewhat similar rhythms.

So, that’s fantastic. Well, so we’re going to dig into a little bit of the pro tips, the do’s and don’ts, and the best practices. But I would love to hear, maybe, just what is at stake here in terms of whether we master this stuff or we limp along and do okay with it, like the average professional?

Andrew Brodsky
So, I’m guessing everyone who’s listening has seen some email from some executive gone viral that’s extremely embarrassing, or those videos during COVID of executives, like, doing a horrible job of laying off people. Like, we’ve all seen these things go crazy viral. But those are the mistakes we generally think about when it comes to virtual communication. Those like big ones that went viral, but there’s a whole lot of other interactions that are meaningful.

They don’t have to go viral for it to impact yourself, your relationship, your career. So just every day, how are you presenting yourself to your boss, to your clients, to your teammates, is meaningful, and these things add up. And, especially when we’re interacting virtually, and we’re not standing in front of the other person, communication serves an important role. So, there’s our work, and in most cases, there’s not objective measures for work, whether you’re in accounting, human resources, whatever else. Most of our jobs don’t have 100% clear objective metrics.

And then on the other side, it’s on evaluating that. And also, it could just be a simple conversation between two people, and they’re trying to evaluate how engaged you are. And the thing is, they’re making subjective evaluations of this, because there’s just no objective way to evaluate most of these things. And the filter between your actual work, your effort, your engagement in conversation, and their evaluations is your communication.

So, that is what drives how people perceive these things. So, making sure you can communicate effectively across any mode has been shown to change outcomes everywhere from building trust, to how productive, or how high a performer you seem, how good of a leader you are, how good your outcomes are in negotiations. These things are impactful because that’s what drives perceptions, often so more times in reality than the actual work or effort you’re putting into the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really rings true. And we, humans, are not perfectly rational. There’s an understatement for you, Andrew, it’s so fascinating, and maybe you can share the actual science behind this to make it all the more real. But I find that our moods, emotions are not giving us reliably accurate information, you know?

And I’m not talking about, like, major sort of mood disorder diagnoses or anything. Just like terms if we are feeling cranky on one day and see the same stimulus, as we’re feeling well-rested and chipper on another, what we interpret about the stimulus is totally different, even though the objective reality or forecast is unchanged by our internal mood states.

And so, then, if there’s little things we’re doing that are annoying people with regard to our use or lack thereof of emojis, our grammar approaches, single spacing, double spacing after a period, the quality of our lighting or camera or microphone, any of these things that don’t really matter do impact the recipient’s mood, and then their evaluation or judgment of you, like, how competent and sharp you are as a professional.

And so, I’ve seen this on both sides of the table. And I’d love it if you could share, is there any super compelling research that shows just how powerful these effects can be?

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, and there’s a ton of things I talk about in my book that, in theory, we shouldn’t have to do, but we all make these judgments of people, even though they’re not really rational. So, one of the good examples is when it comes to video calls, and, you know, we talk about email and instant message, let’s move to video.

There’s been a bunch of studies about video interviewing, and they show that eye contact during video interviews is significantly related to how the interviewer evaluates the interviewee. But here’s the problem, when you’re face-to-face, it’s very easy to maintain eye contact because you’re staring at the other person’s eyes.

For most of us, when we’re doing that on a computer, we’re staring at their face on the screen, so we’re actually making eye contact. But if you’ve got a laptop, if you’ve got a monitor set up where your webcam is above your monitors, for most of us, it looks like we’re looking downward, or we’re looking to the left, or to the right, because we’re looking at the person’s face on our screen as opposed to the webcam, which is kind of dumb because we actually are making eye contact, but to the other person, it looks like you’re just kind of looking off.

So, they might make assessments that, “Hey, this person’s not really engaged, or maybe they’re reading from a script, or they don’t care, or maybe they’re just looking up recipes for dinner tonight.” Whereas. in person, we don’t even have to make those guesses because we can see they’re paying attention. So, there’s like this dual problem virtually where they have to guess more because they can’t see what you’re doing because you’re not in person.

And then you’re trying to maintain eye contact, but it doesn’t necessarily align with your webcam. For this, there’s a bunch of easier and some harder fixes. So, just dragging your video call screen up to right under your webcam can be really useful for aligning. There’s more complex things. You can get a standing mount webcam that stands in the center of your monitor, or maybe just hanging webcams that you can actually stick onto your monitor. But just being attentive to these little cues virtually can be really, really important, even though, honestly, it shouldn’t have to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. No, that’s so well said. And if I could just throw out one more tip. I use, this is a fancy setup, podcast or life, but this, it’s a teleprompter, which is also a display, the Elgato prompter. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Andrew, but I’m looking right at you always because it is a display showing up in the teleprompter mirror immediately in front of the camera lens so that’s, I think, the ultimate.

And I’ve heard people as they talk about reviews of this product, they are amazed at their communities, “It’s like you’re looking right at me. How are you doing that?” And so, I’ve been sharing this with a sales consultant. Because I imagine, if it matters in video interviews, it probably matters in sales conversations too.

Andrew Brodsky
Oh, yeah. I’ve got a more low-tech option myself. I just have a webcam stand that is bendable, so I put it right in the center of my screen. I’m a little less intense with it, but it’s the same thing, because this way, I can look at you and I’m looking at my webcam simultaneously.

But, yeah, these things matter everywhere because, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of like, we feel like we’re on a video call and we feel like someone’s not paying attention to us, and in many cases, they’re not. But this gets back to my point that I was saying, is the way people make these judgments is often more about how you’re communicating acting as opposed to what the reality is in some cases.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is powerful and eye opening. And if you could please share with us the eye contact video interview study, we’ll absolutely link in the show notes. That’s good stuff. And tell us then, are you aware of any cool stories of a professional who really took some of these principles and tips with gusto, and saw a cool transformation when they implemented them?

Andrew Brodsky
One of my favorite ones was an organization I consulted with recently, so this is a large Fortune 100 tech org, and they were having a big problem with communication overload. They had hours and hours of meetings, they were doing emails, like all night long, and it was creating a lot of stress for them. So, one of the things I approach with them is trying to have more structured conversations within teams about “How can we communicate better?”

And there’s some interesting research, for instance, that fits into this about the email urgency bias. And what that research shows is that, when we receive an email, we expect that the sender thinks we’re going to respond, or they want us to respond quicker than they actually care about. So, for instance, if you sent me an email, you probably think, “Ah, if he gets back to me a day, that’s okay.” I get the email. I’m like, “Oh, here’s an important podcast host. I need to respond within 30 minutes,” right? And I think that’s what you’re expecting from me.

And the problem with that is it creates a stress. It creates this feeling of needing to check your email all the time so that we’re interrupting our work, we’re interrupting our time with our family, and it creates all these different issues. So, what I did with a number of teams there is I had conversations with them and said, “Okay, amongst your team, let’s figure out, what medium has what response time? So, as a team, what response time do we want for email? What response time do we want for instant message? If there’s an emergency, how do we do it? Do we do it via text message? Do we do it via an urgent tag on one of these things?”

And in those conversations, as a result of that, they were able to get more focus time because they weren’t constantly having to check their communication and interrupt what they were doing. And multitasking is one of the worst things you can do for your productivity. And just like one related study to this is there’s some research that shows it can take up to a minute after each email to get back in the zone of work.

And it doesn’t sound like a lot to say, “Oh, it takes a minute to get back in focus.” But if you’re like me and sending like 30 or 60 emails a day, that’s like half an hour to an hour each day of just getting back in focus for the tasks. So, by enabling them to better chunk their communication without having to actually constantly be checking email and instant message, they ended up having a lot more time for work, they were more productive.

One of the team leaders came back to me afterwards, and was like, “My family hated me because I was on my smartphone all night long. And now I finally get to enjoy my family time because I know, if there’s an emergency, I’m going to hear the text chime, and I do not have to look at my email or instant message anymore whatsoever during the night, because we’ve actually made the implicit more explicit.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is powerful. And I have ran seminars where I have seen similar results with teams, so I will just put a big check mark on that one, is this assumption about the expectation that is far from reality causes all these angst and interruption and unnecessary multitask and unpleasantness. And it is such a wave of relief for folks when you can have that conversation, like, “Oh, wow, I don’t have to do that? This is amazing.”

So, that’s a great feeling and liberates all kinds of good stuff. Well, that sounds like a master key right there, Andrew, with this stuff, is, “Hey, how about we get aligned on what our expectations and preferences are with regard to how we’re using all these tools?”

Andrew Brodsky
And it’s great, because on the back-end, too, someone’s not taking two weeks to respond to your email because you said, “As a team, hey, we’re going to respond to every email in a day or two.” So, it kind of not only gives us more time to focus. We don’t have that dangling email for over a week because we said, “You need to respond at least a day or 24 hours, even if it’s, ‘I’m going to get back to this by X date,’ so we’re not left wondering.”

And when it comes to virtual interactions, silence is a whole lot more awkward than it is in person because we don’t know what’s going on in person, if they’re clearly thinking. Virtually, we don’t know if they just deleted our email. We don’t know if they don’t care at all. So, having those norms, and then at least within those norms, having a set of practices where we send something within the given time to say, “I’ll get to this by X,” really helps erase all that ambiguity that can harm relationships very seriously in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Cool. Well, how about you take us through your favorite tools and tips for how we do all this stuff masterfully?

Andrew Brodsky
Sure. So, my favorite tool is the framework that I made for this book. So, whenever I read a self-help book, a business book, personally, I really like when there’s a framework because there’s often so many suggestions that I never remember all of them. So, in writing my own book, I did what I like to do, and I need one. So, for my book Ping I’ve got the “Ping” framework.

P for perspective taking, I for initiative, N for nonverbal, G for goals, and all the recommendations and research in the book fits into these four things. So, for instance P for perspective taking, this is the idea that when we are engaging in virtual communication, we tend to end up more self-focused because we’re maybe just looking at text on a screen, or even if we’re having a video call, they’re a small square on our screen as opposed to this big person standing in front of us, so we’re less focused on how the other person’s going to react, how they might think.

You would say things online often that you wouldn’t say to the person when you’re right in front of them because you’re more focused on how they’re going to react when they’re standing physically right in front of you. So, it’s really important to take a moment and try and think about how might someone see this from their perspective.

And going back to that emotion research, one of the good recommendations that came out of that is, if you take your message and read it in the exact opposite tone out loud than you intended. So, if it’s a sarcastic message, read it as serious. If it’s a serious message, read it as sarcastic out loud. Suddenly, people tend to be much less likely to be overconfident about how clear their message is. When they do that, they realize, “Oh, wow, my message is not as clear as I intended it,” and they fix it.

And then I for initiative. The idea here is you need to think about, “What can I add back in here into this mode that might be missing?” So, an example I give in the book of this is small talk. Many of us hate small talk, and for good reason, it’s not productive. And research shows that small talk decreases productivity. But it does have a benefit.

Small talk improves trust. And the reason being is we trust what we know. If I know nothing about you, if I don’t know about your family, what you do for fun, what your hobby is, I don’t feel like I have an understanding of you, so I don’t feel like I can trust you. Small talk is one of these ways that helps us feel like we get to know somebody else and we trust what’s familiar.

So, finding ways to add in a little bit of small talk into your virtual communication, whether just a couple lines of email, asking them, you know, “Hey, I know you mentioned you’re going on a trip. How did it go? Here’s what I did,” can be really, really useful for building that trust, if that’s your goal. I’m not saying write 10 paragraphs of small talk because everyone’s going to hate you for it and it’ll backfire, but the idea here is a little bit of this stuff, taking the initiative to add those things back in, can be incredibly useful.

And the nonverbal behavior, just being attentive to all the different cues you’re sending, and we’ve talked about a bunch already. So, eye contact during video calls, typos, emojis, which I can talk more about if we want, all these different cues and understanding, “What information am I sending without potentially realizing?”

And then, lastly, G for goals. I wish there was, I could just say this is the best mode of communication. There’s one mode to rule them all. It would be a very short book if I did. But the best mode really depends on what your goal is. So, let’s say video calls, for instance. There’s this big debate – cameras on, cameras off.

And my answer to that, when executives or teams or anyone else asks me about that, is it depends on your goal. So, research shows that having your video on can be useful for building relationships, for showing engagement, because it shows, “Hey, I’m listening. I’m paying attention to you.” But on the other side of that, there’s Zoom fatigue or video conferencing fatigue, where research shows that being on video can be really exhausting.

You’re staring at yourself. You’re observing all your nonverbal behaviors. It can be really energy depleting and that gives you less energy in the meeting, less energy afterwards, could lead to burnout. So, there’s these pros and cons. But if you think about it this way, if your goal is to show engagement, build a relationship, camera on. If your goal is to save energy to be able to focus better, then camera off is better.

So, maybe cameras on is better when you’re interacting with someone you don’t know really well. But when your team already has strong impressions of each other, we already know everyone’s engaged, we already have good feelings of each other, and having our camera on or off really isn’t going to change those things for a one-off meeting. It might be better for us all to have our cameras off so we can focus more on the task at hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And you mentioned multitasking being bad news, and my understanding of the research is that if the multitasking is really close to mindless, like, “I am also walking on a treadmill,” or, “I am also folding laundry,” or, “I am also tidying up some of these items on my desk, like the pen goes in the pen drawer, the cups can be gathered and placed to the side.” Like, my understanding of these matters is that you’re actually not having a cognitive deterioration when that is the case. Is that accurate?

Andrew Brodsky
I would say it’s better for some people than others. So, there’s a personality trait like multitasking ability, technically, where it works better for some than others. In some cases, communication can be mindless, but in many cases, the communication is involving something that you’re not immediately working on, so your mind has to switch to a different task in the meantime.

So, it’s not like you could be doing your emails while you’re simultaneously brainstorming something unrelated altogether. If you’re really, really good, maybe you can, but for most of us, it kind of interrupts that process pretty badly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. And when I said mindless, I was referring to the secondary activity, the walking your feet on a treadmill is the mindless piece.

Andrew Brodsky
Oh, of course. Oh, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Such that it’s quite possible to pay attention well if the secondary activity is not communication-related and doesn’t take much conscious attention whatsoever. Is that a fair way to think about multitasking?

Andrew Brodsky
Oh, yeah. And one of the, I think, funnier, more absurd examples I get is, you’d be surprised how many executives have told me that they email from the toilet, where they’ve basically got their smart phone there and they’re taking out their communication. A little bit less exercise fun than being on the treadmill, but, yeah, I mean, I guess you get the job done there, right? So, yeah, so using those times otherwise, like if you can get some physical activity in, that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and that’s kind of how I think about the cameras off-on exactly as you’ve well-articulated in terms of, it is more tiring, it requires more of me, but perhaps if we are building the relationships, then that’s a great use of energy from the team is to do just that, versus, it really would be nice if we gave people a little bit of a break and we’re able to handle a little bit of the things simultaneously so long as they’re not messing up their ability to concentrate.

Andrew Brodsky
That, and if the only way you can keep your team’s attention is to forcing them to keep their webcam on, you’ve got bigger problems than that. You should be having deeper conversations about “Why is our team engagement low? How can we increase it?” If the only way you could do it is forcing people to keep their cameras on, you’re basically fixing the symptom rather than the cause, and you’ve got an underlying team problem there, and you are kind of treating the team more like children in many of those cases, where there isn’t that added value.

And, again, that’s not to say there aren’t situations where having camera on is really useful. I use it for teaching, especially when meeting new people, it’s really important, but there are many situations where it just isn’t adding value and it can really take away from the interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s powerful. Thank you. You’ve got a perspective on strategic silence in meetings. What do you mean by this and how do we do it?

Andrew Brodsky
So, strategic silence can be useful in a whole lot of situations. So, negotiating is often a fun one in these scenarios where silence is this great thing where it causes other people to fill the air. We feel a bit awkward during it, especially during virtual meetings, too. So, if you’re in this situation where you’re hoping someone’s going to disclose something, letting them do some of the talking and just being silent can be really useful. You don’t want to go to an extreme about this.

The other thing, too, is it becomes, in some ways, easier to speak over each other in certain modes of communication. So, some people will say, “Oh, video is pretty much the same as face to face.” And what I’ll say is, “Well, there’s pros and cons to each. There isn’t one better than the other.” But one of the things that happens with video is there’s often this slight lag, you know, we’re talking like milliseconds here.

But the problem with that slight lag is that research has shown that it messes up conversation turn-taking, where you kind of have these more awkward silences, you kind of interrupt each other more, so sometimes having a little bit more of a pause can be useful in video calls just to make sure you’re not constantly interrupting the other person, especially if you’re somewhat of a fast talker like myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And are there any common things that we’re all doing wrong and we should just fix it?

Andrew Brodsky
I think there’s a lot of things I’d say we’re all doing wrong, myself included, but the biggest one that I would say is that we often don’t take the time to stop and think, “Am I approaching this communication the right way?” We’re so busy and overloaded with meetings, with emails, that we don’t pause and say, “Should this really be an email or should this really be a meeting?”

And this lack of mindfulness is one of the main factors that drive people to have hours of wasted meetings each week that should have been email. And on the other side of that, too, that people often forget is there’s a lot of emails that probably should have been meetings. So, like this interaction we’re having now, you’re asking me a bunch of questions, I’m fairly talkative, so each answer is like five plus paragraphs.

If you’d emailed me these, I would probably take days writing up the answers, editing them, crafting them, but we can have this conversation live in under an hour. So, emails can also be really unproductive too in certain situations. But people just do whatever has been done, “So, we always have a meeting for this, so we’re going to do a meeting,” or, “We always have email for this, so we’re doing email,” or, “It’s already an email conversation, so I’m not going to ask to switch to phone saying, ‘Hey, can we get on the phone for a second just to resolve this?’”

So, taking that moment to think, “Is this the right mode and am I using it in the best way possible?” Even though you’re taking some time and losing some productivity to engage in that thought process, it actually saves you a ton of time in the long run and can really help improve your relationships in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that. I also want to get your hot take on these AI meeting tools, the transcribing, the summarizing, what are some pros and cons here?

Andrew Brodsky
When it comes to these AI tools for, let’s say, summarizing for now is what we’re focusing on, I think, again, it kind of cuts both ways. It’s awesome being able to have a summary of the meeting afterwards because it frees your mind up from having to worry about every single thing that’s being said in the meeting. You can focus on the conversation and you can go back afterwards.

The problem is that there’s research on something called cognitive offloading, which is this idea that when we offload tasks to technology, so we just have the technology do it for us, we tend to remember them less and we tend to learn from them less. So, if I have one of these tools summarizing every single meeting, so I’m not making a point of remembering what was said, for the most part. I’m not writing down the notes myself that helps me increase my memory, and I’m probably not even checking those notes afterwards because I know they’re available somewhere.

Then some client comes to me and asks me about something we talked about three weeks ago, but I’ve had tons of meetings since then, and because I wasn’t as focused on remembering what happened during that meeting, I don’t have a good answer. So, we can end up becoming a bit lazy mentally as a result of this.

So, the trick is finding that right balance where you can use them as a resource, but you’re not cognitive offloading so much that you’re not using your brain’s memory or storage itself. You’re only using your computers in that situation. So, you want to get that nice middle ground of using both your brain’s memory and your computer’s memory for storing what was in the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that is a great principle to bear in mind, in general. When we do cognitive offloading to the machine, we learn and remember less, and I think that applies to so much stuff – your GPS, the calculator. I was watching a chess YouTuber, international master, Jonathan Bartholomew, and he said, “I always recommend you analyze your chess games yourself first before you make the computer do it in order to learn more.”

And so, I think, boy, you could apply this in many, many contexts, so that’s a nice little master key right there. And I’ve also observed, sometimes these meeting recorders continue recording when some people have left and, oopsies, the parties did not intend the other people to hear that part of the meeting. Oh, my.

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, there’s definitely been a number of those communication whoopsies. There’s always the funny one, I’m seeing a CEO get up and, suddenly, they don’t have pants on during the call, accidentally. Like, that’s the good meme, right? That started with the naked shorts hashtag, I believe, that actual example there.

So, these virtual communication blunders, in many ways, can be more problematic because virtual communication is just so permanent. Whereas, if all this stuff happened in person, there isn’t going to, generally, be a record of it. So, virtual communication is great because that record’s there when we need it, but, unfortunately, often it’s there when we don’t want it to be there as well, which is part of why it’s so important to get this stuff right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Andrew Brodsky
The big thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is artificial intelligence and actually writing your communication for you. So, as opposed to just summarizing meetings, do you just have it write your emails for you? Do you have it write your messages for you? And in my view, artificial communication can be really useful for the brainstorming, helping to edit, but I, generally, recommend to others that you do want to make sure the communication is your words because most of the time no one’s going to figure out you’re using AI, but they might one time.

Maybe it uses the word you don’t, like, elevate. Maybe you would talk about something in person. Maybe they mentioned they had a car accident the past weekend, and then you just copy and paste an AI email that starts with, “I hope you had a great weekend!”

Pete Mockaitis
“Do you remember what I told you about my trauma?”

Andrew Brodsky
Exactly. Exactly. And the problem is, if there’s one slip-up and they realize that you’ve been using AI for communication, their assumption is going to be, “Well, they’ve been using it every time I communicate with them.” And then their next question is going to be, “Well, why am I even communicating with this person?”

So, there’s such a risk of removing yourself and your own words from the communication that even one slip-up could really, really massively backfire. But I do think this human component of communication will continue to be incredibly valuable, at least for the jobs that require humans in them. If you’re required to be in that job, then people are going to want to communicate with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. This has been my AI thing over and over again. It’s, like, AI can be a handy tool in the drafting phase, like, “Ooh, there’s a great word or phrase or sentence here and there.” But, oh, man, you are asking for trouble if you just outsource the whole of anything to AI without some careful checking, editing, curation.

Andrew Brodsky
Exactly. And AI is never going to know everything that you know, at least until we get to that distant future’s phase, maybe where we get brain chips and all that, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, brain scanning.

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, I think we’re a good aways away from that and from people actually being comfortable with that, even if for some reason that tech companies can get it to work. But the idea here is it’s just not going to know everything you know, so it won’t know everything you know about the other person, it won’t know everything about your goals that you want to achieve, so it just won’t be able to do this as well as you can. And the relational risk of over-relying on these things can be really, really severe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote?

Andrew Brodsky
I’m kind of a cliche one. I like the Golden Rule. So, “Treat others as you would like others to treat you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Andrew Brodsky
It’s one from the ‘60s. It’s about the pratfall effect. This study involved people listening to quiz show contestants, and they had someone get all the questions right, and they had someone get a bunch of questions wrong. The person who got every question right, people rated them as really competent, but not very likable.

It’s like that kid in middle school who was raising their hand all the time and got everything right. You thought they were smart, but kind of everyone hated them. It’s also why I didn’t have too many friends in middle school. But there was a third condition in this study where they had the person get every question right, but they spilled coffee on themselves, and that person was rated as just as competent as the one who got everything right, but just as likable as the person who got some questions wrong.

And the idea here of this is that making mistakes in not your domain of expertise or work expertise can make you seem more human and more approachable. So often at work, we feel this need to put our best foot forward or best face forward, but the key findings from the study is that makes you feel unapproachable, especially if you’re a leader or a manager.

And, actually, showing that, “Hey, I’m a human, I make mistakes,” especially in areas where they don’t matter, so it doesn’t make you look incompetent, can be a really good way for making you seem warmer and more likable in the process. So, don’t try and hide your true self in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m thinking, as a callback, when you’re doing a video interview as a candidate, make sure to spill a beverage.

Andrew Brodsky
I might not do it in that short of an interaction, especially when you’re low power, because I think in the video interviews, they’re searching mostly on confidence, at least in the early rounds of them. But if you’re in a later round, you are kind of with a group socializing, one of those situations, that might be a better situation to try and pull one of those things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m sure we’ll make enough mistakes without having to engineer beverage spills along the way. And a favorite book?

Andrew Brodsky
So, my wife was an indie fantasy author, and so I’m biased. I like her stuff better. So, my favorite book of hers was one called Hex Kitchen. H-E-X K-I-T-C-H-E-N. So, it basically took Hunger Games and “Magic” and “Hell’s Kitchen,” and it was a magical cooking tournament. And for me, getting to read fantasy is just such a nice escape, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I leaned on her expertise in helping to write my book so that the stories are a bit more fun. Because me as an academic with bland lame writing, having her on my side was just incredibly useful in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And a favorite tool?

Andrew Brodsky
My favorite tool probably is one that I don’t necessarily want to admit fully, but it’s probably the undo send function in email, and also the delay delivery function in email. At least for the latter one, I’m not as embarrassed about that one. But I like using the delay delivery one often because I sometimes will just try and knock out all my emails, like at one or two points of a day. And by delaying it and communicating a little bit more frequently, or seeming I’m communicating other times, or it can make me seem more present.

So, as opposed to all my emails going to my boss always only at 10:00 a.m. and never going at any different hours for instance, it might make me look like I’m not doing anything the rest of the day. So, sometimes I’ll strategically have my emails go at different times of the day to be like, “Hey, I’m here all the time.” And if I was giving recommendations to managers, I would talk about how to avoid those biased evaluations.

And this stuff is called productivity theater, and I talk about in the book, but the idea here is, unfortunately, human beings like theater, so knowing how to perform in it can be incredibly valuable to making sure that you’re achieving your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Andrew Brodsky
Going on hikes. There’s a good research that shows just going outdoors, especially when you’re sitting at a computer, and having physical activity can be one of the best ways to disconnect.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?

Andrew Brodsky
When it comes to virtual communication, don’t underestimate the value of removing visual cues. This is what I would call the in-person default bias, where we assume in-person is best, and we compare everything to in-person, but there’s a whole lot of advantages to not meeting in-person, to not having video on, that you can leverage by using email and text-based communication better, the least of which is getting rid of tons and tons of unnecessary meetings in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Andrew Brodsky
So, you can check out my LinkedIn, Andrew Brodsky, you’d find me over there pretty easily. And then if you Google me, you’ll find my website as well where you can reach out to me directly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have any final challenges or calls to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Andrew Brodsky
Yeah, I would say try and think about your communication overload, and not get caught up in it, and take a step away for a moment and try and engage in some meta thinking, a level above, and think about “How can I do this all better?” As opposed to just accepting this stuff as a fact of life and a fact of work, think about “How can I improve my communication habits in ways that will make me more effective and make me happier in the process? Is there ways to do this that I won’t feel as stressed out and I can actually enjoy it more?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Andrew, thank you.

Andrew Brodsky
Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Casey, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Casey Mank
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about writing well. And I learned that even though you do a lot of great teaching of writing, you don’t actually like writing. Is this true and can you elaborate on this?

Casey Mank
This is true and I also think it’s really important I try to tell people this as much and as often as I possibly can, actually, because I think one of the many misconceptions about being a good writer is that good writers are the people who love writing, that it comes naturally to you, you’re born with it, it’s an art, it’s a gift, it’s an inborn talent.

So, sometimes people will say, “Oh, well, you must just love writing,” or, like, “You’re a writer,” and I’m like, “Who are they talking about? Are you talking about me? I don’t love to do this. Writing is hard. It’s not fun to write or edit.” So, I think it’s important that people know, even though I teach this stuff, I think I’m pretty good at it, I can be effective at it, I don’t enjoy the process of writing stuff. I, too, find it kind of hard and unpleasant.

So, it’s important to us to always teach people that writing is something that can be very quantified and very strategic and just about getting the job done. And, in fact, I think writers who are able to see it that way, are often much more effective. Sometimes when I meet people in the course of my work who say, “Oh, I love writing,” those are the people that want to include a lot of extra flowery language and end up with bad business writing, ironically. So, that’s what that means to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Casey, I really love that and find that encouraging because there are times in which I have writing that needs to be done but I am not feeling it, and so sometimes I will procrastinate because there are times that I do feel it but noting that, “No, it’s okay for this to be hard and unpleasant. That’s that.”

And I don’t remember who said it, this quote, was it David Allen or someone who says, “I don’t enjoy the process of writing but I very much enjoy having written,” like you’ve accomplished that thing, and you’re beholding the final product, you go, “Oh, nice.” And so, that’s a good feeling.

Casey Mank
Absolutely, yeah. And if people like writing, that’s great, but I want the people that don’t like writing or never feel motivation, to also know that they can just do it in a workhorse way and it can have great results for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, inspiration landed. Thank you. And can you tell us, in a business context or for professionals, just what’s at stake as to whether one writes fine, okay, versus masterfully, like in the top one, two, three percent of business professionals? How much does it matter?

Casey Mank
Absolutely. So, the important thing to know about writing is that we’re all doing it, and we meet a lot of people that might say, “Oh, I’m not really writer. I’m not in a writing role at work,” but it doesn’t matter what your job is at work, at some point you need to put the things you’ve done and communicate their value in writing.

So, if you are a researcher and you have to write a report, if you’re a salesperson and you have to send sales emails, like, even if that’s not what you think of as your main job, at some point you’re conveying the value of the work you do in a written format. So, actually, when people read the way that you described what you do, if you’re great at what you do, you’re the best, but your writing isn’t very good, they tend to judge your competence if you don’t know you on how you describe what you’ve done.

If you don’t know you, and they’re just reading this like lackluster description of what you’ve done or what you’ve produced, and the way you express yourself isn’t clear, it’s not confident, whatever, they’re thinking, like, “Well, I bet this person isn’t great at their job.” And that might not be true, but actually it’s like fumbling in that last mile when you’re conveying the results of all your great work can be huge.

Pete Mockaitis
That is very well said. I’ve heard it said that there’s research suggesting people judge the effectiveness of a leader or professional who’s leading a meeting based on how well that meeting is going, just because that’s what’s visible, it’s like, “Okay, there you are leading the meeting, this meeting is going poorly, you must not be good at your job,” which is maybe fair or unfair based on any number of dimensions.

Much like with the writing, I find that there’s a number of Amazon products, I’ve had this experience, where I see something, it looks pretty good, it’s like, “Oh, okay, this looks like just what I need. Okay, that’s a good price. Oh, it looks beautiful. Oh, it’s got 14,000 reviews and they’re averaging like 4.7 or something. Okay, this looks great.”

But then when I see that the English is off, it’s like it’s not quite right, and it’s like nobody would say it that way.

This is about a Renpho Cordless Jump Rope. It says, “With a cordless ball, a rope jump can easy to change into a cordless model imitating skipping with a real rope without actually needing to swing a rope. The low-impact equipment offers people who don’t have a large room to work out a way.”

It’s like, okay, there’s a couple moments in there, it’s like, “That’s not right and smooth as…” And so then, I begin to wonder, “Well, if things are fuzzy here when you’re trying to sell me, like where else have they cut corners in terms of like the manufacturing, or the safety, or the quality, or the durability?” When that may be a completely unfair judgment, it’s like, “Hey, this was written by someone in China, maybe his English is not their native language, and they did their best and it wasn’t too bad,” but I’m like, “Hmm, I don’t know about this jump rope anymore based on what I’ve read here.”

Casey Mank
Absolutely. Doesn’t it make you feel like the person who wrote that has never seen a jump rope in their life?

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe.

Casey Mank
And you start to feel suspicious about their expertise about jump ropes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it does. And so, I guess that can be fair, it can be unfair but, nonetheless, it’s a reality in terms of people are judging us based upon the quality of our writing, whether it’s in an email or a PowerPoint, it’s there, and so, okay, I’m with you. We got to take care of some business.

Casey Mank
That’s absolutely right. Yeah, and whether it’s true or accurate or not, it doesn’t matter. You’ve already created that impression in that person’s mind, and their ideas about you, their expectations, their perception of your personal brand, it’s really in a split second that that stuff can happen when they’re reading what you’ve written about your work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so then, you’re on the board of an organization with a really cool name, the Center for Plain Language. Tell us, what is this organization? And what is plain language? And how do we do that?

Casey Mank
That’s right. Well, so our hope as plain language experts, and I will happily tell you more about it, but our hope would be that the name that we give to anything would be completely self-explanatory. So, what do you think the Center for Plain Language does?

Pete Mockaitis
I think they work with people and organizations to facilitate more plain language being used in documents and websites, etc.

Casey Mank
That’s exactly right. That’s what we do, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m really down with that vision. Likewise, Casey, I want to put you on the spot, what do you think the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast is about?

Casey Mank
I think you all genuinely have a really plain language title for your podcast because it instantly tells me that it’s going to be, when I listen to it, it’s going to teach me how to do my job better. And then, if I dig into the details a little bit, I would start to find out how exactly that’s going to happen, but it’s very self-explanatory, which we love in plain language.

Pete Mockaitis
I do, too. I do, too. So, is there a bit of a process in terms of certain steps or best practices by which you arrive at plain language?

Casey Mank
Absolutely, yeah. So, you want to start out when you’re writing anything, and plain language really did start with a lot of government writing, a lot of sort of manuals, legal documents, things like that, but I believe it can be applied to anything. So, start out with whatever document you’re crafting, you’re going to think about not yourself, not your organization, not the information you want to include, actually. You’re going to think about the person who’s going to use this document.

So, yeah, get to know them, we start with them. Think about the person who’s going to use this. Think about exactly what they already know, what their top questions are, and what they need to do. So, whatever you’re writing, I don’t care what it is, what do they need to do once they read it? How are they going to use it? And then, you design your document. There’s a lot of best practices that we get into around how things look, how usable things are, how easy they are, and then, of course, the readability.

So, plain language people tend to think it’s going to be about, like, short sentences and easy words. That’s only half of it. The other half is actually a lot of UX design, so making documents really easy and fast to use. And I’m happy to direct your listeners to where they can learn more of all those best practices but then the key to really close the loop on all of this is you made some assumptions about your audience in the beginning, you tried your best to do great design, very readable writing.

But at the end of the plain language process, you must test your assumptions. So, this is really like the key piece that most people want to ignore, they’re like, “Well, I thought about my audience. I think I know what’s going to work for them, and I think I did it,” and then they kind of like hit send on their document, hit publish on their document, but in plain language content, you have to test before you finalize.

So, you get a couple people, you show the document to them, you say, “Read this,” then you take the document away from them, and you say, “What did you just read?” and they explain it back to you, and you get invaluable information from that. You make changes based on what they missed, what they misunderstood, what they thought was the most important thing but it wasn’t what you actually wanted them to focus on. You make changes and then you actually finalize. So, that’s kind of the plain language process in a nutshell.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, and I think you’ve absolutely nailed it in terms of the final step. I think it’s taking me a while to get here, Casey, but I’m firmly here now. There’s no substitute for that. It is irreplaceable. It is mission critical when it counts. Like, if you’re writing, the thing that you’re writing matters and you want it to have an impact as opposed to, “Hey, this is a joke,” a joke to some friends. Even then I probably want to have an impact, I want them to laugh, but if they don’t, it’s like, “No big deal.”

But I remember just recently, I was writing an Evite invitation for our son’s baptism, and my wife went in there and she said, “Oh, I think made me think that, and this made me think that,” and then so she changed some things. And I think it takes a bit of humility to understand that that is absolutely necessary. It doesn’t mean that I’m dumb or wrong.

And, at the time, I think I was looking at a lot of other editing things in my life, and I was actually just so grateful, I said, “Thank you, honey. This is exactly what has to happen, and there is no other way.” I kid you not, I said those words to her, and she’s like, “This is kind of dramatic, Pete. Okay, sure, no problem.” So, yeah, it just has to happen.

I think that about when I’m looking at instructions for things, like how to build a piece of furniture or a toy assembly, whatever. I do, sometimes, have that reaction, like, “Did you actually test this with anybody? Because I don’t think I’m the only person who would find that very confusing, and I’m assembling this all wrong and feeling great frustration that I have to then undo it, and then redo it again the opposite way.”

Casey Mank
Absolutely. I can’t emphasize enough, there’s no substitute for that. Whatever you think you know about other people’s reaction, you don’t. They’ll always surprise you. And this doesn’t have to be expensive. There are really expensive and elaborate user-testing focus groups and stuff that you can do with the help of an expert, but you can also just pull in, like, your cousin, your mom, somebody down the hall from you at work.

My business partner has several siblings and we have them test sometimes the worksheets and stuff that we use in workshops, and they’ll say, like, “Oh, I really noticed this,” or, “I really was distracted by this,” and we’re like, “What? That? We weren’t even thinking about that when we made the worksheet.”

And so, it’s like you can’t get around your own bias as the author of all the stuff you know and all the stuff you want to happen, so, yeah, it’s invaluable but it doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. It can be informal. You can just ask a friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you mentioned there are some principles that make all the difference in terms of readable writing and the user experience dimensions. I’m guessing it’s kind of like the visual type stuff.

Casey Mank
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you lay it on us here in terms of what are some of the biggest principles that make all the difference?

Casey Mank
Yeah, absolutely. So, if I had to pick, I’ll do maybe like a big two for each of half of this equation because I think two things is always enough for people to learn and remember, in my opinion.

So two big ones for the information design piece, which, you’re right, that’s all about how things look, how easy they look at a gut reaction. So, when people first interact with a document, they’re not beginning by actually reading the language. They’re looking at it as a whole and they get a really, like, instantaneous impression, just like a gut reaction, “This looks easy,” or, “This looks hard.”

So, one of the fastest things you can do to make any document look a bit easier to your reader, which invites them in and makes them think, like, “Yeah, I can deal with this document. It’s not going to overwhelm me,” is just to put more empty negative space on the page. So, you don’t want to hit people with walls of texts. My own personal, if I’m editing something and I see a paragraph that’s going over about four lines on the page, I start to get nervous because when paragraphs get longer, what people do is they just skip the second half of the paragraph.

They read the first line, they think, “I think I’ve got it. I think I know what’s in here,” and they just skip it. So, unless you’re perfectly comfortable with that information being skipped, which is okay, that’s a choice you could make as an editor, but if you’re sitting there thinking like, “No, they will read this,” I have bad news for you, they won’t. They’re not going to read a super long paragraph in most cases.

So, that’s one of the quickest things you can do, is just break up your chunks of information into smaller pieces so they don’t look so visually overwhelming to the reader. And then the other one I would do at the kind of visual level is bottom line up front. I don’t know if you’ve heard this acronym before, the BLUF, it stands for bottom line up front.

Whatever it is that you came to this document to tell your readers, you need to get it really near the top in almost every type of business writing or utilitarian writing. So, this is really different from the way we learn to write in school, it’s also very different from what we learned about good storytelling, so we’re not leading people on. We’re not raising their anticipation and then leading them on a journey of discovery, and then telling them the takeaway at the end.

In plain language writing, it’s like, “Here’s the takeaway. Here’s what you’re going to find in this document.” There’s no mystery. There’s no unfolding of a piquing the curiosity and then taking them on a journey. You’re just telling them what they’re here in the document. And then, actually, if they want to dive into the details and the background and how you got here, that stuff comes after, and they can read it or not. So, thinking about kind of flipping that on its head.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, do we want to use this in all contexts? Or, if we’re about to say something super unpleasant or controversial or that we anticipate our audience is going to vehemently disagree with us about, do we want to still do the bottom-line up-front approach?

Casey Mank
So, there’s a lot of different scenarios I could imagine for this, but my first instinct in a blanket kind of way would be I would do a BLUF there and say, “I’m about to give you some difficult feedback,” and then maybe you can…like, I’m not saying you would start your communication with just like, “Your presentation was horrible,” not like that.

But I would let them know immediately. Say, they’re opening an email, a message, a memo, whatever, they’re going to see, “I’m about to give you some feedback, and we can talk about it more.” Don’t make them think, like, “Oh, wow, why is Pete emailing me today? Maybe he just wants to say hi,” and then they’re like going into the experience not knowing what’s about to happen. Let them know why you’re here right up front. That’s what I would say for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s a story on the user experience. And now how about sentence readability?

Casey Mank
Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s a ton of things that you could avoid and cut out of sentences to make them easier. If people want to go down that rabbit hole, you can check out PlainLanguage.gov. It’s the government’s free resource on plain language, and there’s many things you can do at the sentence level. But the biggest two that are going to impact reading difficulty at the sentence level are sentence length and complexity, and then word choice.

And I think the word choice piece is probably the one that people expect, they’re like, “If I’m using these big difficult words, these jargony terms, that’s going to be hard for people,” but they don’t always remember that just the length and complexity of a sentence’s structure is the other half of the readability formula. So, those two things together will impact the most.

And I think that’s especially useful for people to keep in mind if they must use some difficult terminology because a lot of writers that I work with, they’re like, “Oh, I have to use these science terms, or these fintech terms, or whatever it is. I can’t get rid of them so my writing will never be easy.” But you can still make your sentences shorter, more declarative, more simple, and that will offset the impact of having to use some of those big words or specialized jargon.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what kind of sentence lengths are we talking about? Like, is there a rule of thumb in terms of these many words is getting long?

Casey Mank
Sure. So, after about eight words, sentence comprehension tends to start dropping off. Now, that’s a very short sentence, so we would never recommend that every sentence be eight words but you actually want to think about how much of the meaning of your sentence can people find in those first eight words. That’s one thing we teach people. Is the main noun and the verb of a sentence happening within the first eight words?

And then think about at least varying your sentence length. So, can you throw people a couple of eight- or ten-word sentences in the mix in between long sentences, so it’s not just long sentence after long sentence?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m curious about sometimes it feels like is the word appositives, hmm, that feels fancy, from English class, if there is a phrase that’s hanging out there? So, for example, if I were to say, “Casey Mank, board member of the Center for Plain Language, suggests using sentences around eight words.” Like, that appositive phrase “board member of the Center for Plain Language” in my brain it almost feels bucketed together as one thing. But does that count? How does that count in our word count within sentences?

Casey Mank
Sure, yeah. So, in that example, you are throwing a block in between the subject and the verb.

Pete Mockaitis
I did. Guilty.

Casey Mank
So, yeah, even though it might seem short, your reader’s brain is unconsciously looking for that structure, “Casey Mank recommends…” whatever you said I recommend in that example, and that’s what they’re looking for. And when you put extra words in between the subject and the verb, you do create complexity that readers who have a lower literacy level, maybe English isn’t their first language, they can get a little bit lost there.

So, again, the recommendation in plain language isn’t that you never have a sentence like that with the appositive, as you described it, but rather that you don’t have tons of those, that you vary it up sometimes. So, yes, in answer to your question, you are making it more complex by including that because you’re separating the noun and the verb, so some readers will trip over that a little bit. And you could make it into two sentences, “Casey Mank is a board member at the Center for Plain Language. She recommends…” whatever you said that I recommend.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love that notion of the two sentences. I remember when I took the GMAT exam, there’s a section called “Sentence correction,” and most of those sentences were long and nasty monsters. And I kept looking for the option, “Split this terribly difficult sentence into two sentences.” There never was an option. It was more like, “Which one is technically correct? Ah, got you.”

And so, yeah, I think that’s often one of the best solutions. Can you share with us any other common fixes that just solve for a whole host of sins?

Casey Mank
Yes, so there’s one other one that we really like. So, breaking things into two sentences is number one. In fact, when we get to the grammar section, that is literally number one. That’s what we start with because it solves a lot of things, like you said. Another one, if you want to get a little deeper into sentence structure, would be try to steer away from starting sentences with caveats or exceptions, which is really common in business writing.

Like, if you start to look for it, you’ll see it a lot where people will say, “Not only is this A but it’s also B.” And that little added structure, things like that, or, “After considering all the factors and…” whatever, like, including all that background information at the start of a sentence, that is really difficult because you’re actually delaying when your reader can get to the main subject and verb of the sentence by a lot.

And we have some great examples of this. I wish I had brought one because if I try to think of one on the spot, it’ll be a train wreck, but it’s like you’re asking people to hold all these relationships in mind when they don’t even know what to apply the relationships to yet. So, in plain language writing, you want to start with the simple statement and then build the exception on after that, because it’s easy to apply an exception to something but it’s harder to keep an exception in mind as you’re waiting to figure what it will apply to. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Very much. Very much. Okay. And so, then we got our principles, the word choices. Tell us, are there ways that we quickly measure this? Is the Microsoft Word Flesch Kincaid readability the thing? Or, how do we assess whether or not, broad scale and automatically, our sentence length and complexity is too much or our word choice is too complicated?

Casey Mank
Absolutely. So, plain language folks in particular have a complex relationship with those readability formulas because none of those formulas are perfect, and they don’t kind of replace your human good judgment. So, some plain language specialists really like them. Others feel like they oversimplify things too much.

Sometimes, like if you’re using a Flesch Kincaid tester, and you take out the period at the end of a sentence, it will change the reading. But for a human reader, it wouldn’t really change the experience of like seeing a bullet point that had a period versus no period, something like that. So, they’re not perfect. We love them as, again, not a be-all-and-end-all of readability, but just as a way to get some kind of objective measurement or feedback.

We often show them to writers, we’re introducing them for the first time, and they’re maybe really shocked to find that their writing at like a postgraduate level in a document that, because they are a specialist in whatever industry or niche they’re in, they think this is just like a normal document, but it’s actually incredibly difficult for someone in the general public to understand.

So, we love them for almost the shock value of writers getting to see what level they are truly writing at because they often don’t know. And then just as, again, to see if the edits that you make are making a difference, it’s nice to see that number go down from, like, grade 12 to grade 10, and say, “Okay, I did make a difference with my edits.” Because sometimes you’re moving things around in your writing, and you’re like, “Is this getting better or worse? I can’t even tell.”

So, we do like them. We use them. There are a ton of other tools I can recommend if you’d like to get into that now.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please do.

Casey Mank
Sure. So, we do love Flesch Kincaid, and, as you mentioned, you can enable that in Word.

WebFx.com is another one that we really like for that. You can test texts based on a lot of different readability formulas. It’s really good. There are two other tools that I’ll recommend. These are all free, by the way. One is the Hemingway app, so it’s a style editor. And important to note, it’s not a proofreading software, so don’t assume that things are correct if they’ve been through the Hemingway app. It’s only showing you style elements but it’s really good at catching lengthy difficult sentences, and it will also give you a grade level as well.

And one other that I really like is called the Difficult & Extraneous Word Finder, that’s the name of it. I know it’s kind of a silly long name. The website looks like it’s still from 1990 but it actually still works. And it actually tags the words in your document based on how rare they are compared to most people’s core vocabulary.

And that part is okay but what I love about that tool is actually the long-word finder because it can just help you notice, like, “Wow, that’s a big word. Is there an easier alternative that I could swap in?” So, those are some automated tools that we like.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those are handy, beautiful tools. And now I want to ask about tools along the lines of Grammarly and into the future of artificial intelligence, GPT-3, Jasper.ai. Like, what do we think of all that?

Casey Mank
Yes. So, people often ask us, “Is Grammarly putting you guys out of business training writers?” No, we recommend Grammarly to all our clients. We recommend it in all our workshops as like a final polishing step because Grammarly is really sophisticated now. It can catch a ton of typos, misspellings, wordy sentences, stuff like that.

And what that means to us, this is our take, you can spend less time on proofreading, which a machine can do, and you can save your human brain power for the more strategic questions, like, “Who is the audience for this? What is actually the call to action that I want them to take? How am I going to get them to that step? How is this affecting our relationship?” Those are questions that I still think they’re best suited for a human brain.

The AI question is an interesting one, “How much of that stuff those programs will be able to take over in the future?” But, for now, proofreading, I feel 100% confident, outsourcing a lot of the proofing and the nitty-gritty edits to something like Grammarly. And, by the way, the free version is great. You don’t have to pay for the paid version. Hemingway app can tell you a lot of those things, if you want to use that as a workaround for style.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, then talking about the full-blown artificial intelligence stuff for a moment, I’ve played with it and I’m impressed at what it produces, although it’s not accurate, it doesn’t have any concern for truth or facts, yet it can mimic styles pretty well, I found. And so, I’ve just been scratching my head a little bit, like, “What is the place of this in my writing life? Maybe there’s no place at all, or maybe it’s just to get some opening inspiration to get the wheels turning a little bit.” How do you think about it?

Casey Mank
Yeah. So, I think one thing that could be helpful or interesting there is that people get really stuck staring at a blank page sometimes, not if you have to send an email necessarily but I’m talking more about if you’re writing some sort of content, like a blog or something. You might just be sitting there, staring, like, “I can’t get started.” And we try to teach people ways to just get out of their own way and get a terrible first draft because that’s the thing you need. You need a terrible first draft, and then you can edit.

Actually, all of our writing workshops, it’s a little misleading because they’re actually editing workshops. It’s about how to make something better. It’s not about how to get a terrible draft on the page because, really, you kind of just have to do that. So, I like the possibility that it could produce a pretty terrible block of text for you, and then you could come in. And maybe it would help with some of that writer’s block.

But, on the flipside of that, one concern that I would have is, there’s a really terrible temptation, and we see this a lot with ineffective business writing, workplace writing, to if you have an existing document, and you’re writing something new, and you think, “Oh, somebody already wrote some messaging on that. Let me just copy and paste it. Yay, now I’m done.”

But often, because you’re repurposing it for a different audience and context, it’s not good, it’s not going to work, it’s not going to be effective, and the temptation to copy and paste leads to a lot of bad writing. And when we look at it, it’s like, “Well, who’s the audience? What are you trying to get them to do? Okay, why is this here?” And people will say, “Oh, well, it’s there because it was on the original copy that I got, the source material.” “Well, it would’ve been better if you just started over with the current audience and context in mind.”

So, it worries me that it would encourage people to just say, like, “Look, I have something,” and then the temptation to just kind of keep it and not start over as much as they need to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. That reminds me of when you ask Siri a question, and she doesn’t really have the capability of giving you an answer, but she’s like, “I found this on the web.” And it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s kind of related to what I’m asking, but it isn’t really the answer.” And so, yeah, I do see that a lot in terms of like the lazy business writing, it’s like, “That’s not really an answer, but it’s tangential to an answer.”

Like, I asked someone, “How do I know that you’re actually going to pay a claim, insurance company, if push comes to shove?” And they say, “Well, we’ve got a great financial rating.” It’s like, “Well, that’s good but that’s not really the answer.” And so, I think a lot of business writing seems to fall into that zone of, “It’s kind of relevant to what we’re trying to do here, but it’s not really a bullseye that we’re going for.”

Casey Mank
Absolutely, the temptation. If you’ve got something, the temptation to copy and paste it is so strong but usually does not lead to the outcome that you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us a little bit about the audience response tone approach. How does that unfold?

Casey Mank
Absolutely. Yeah, so first I have to give a big shoutout to Prof. David Lipscomb from Georgetown University, who is the inventor of the ART tool, which we use. And the audience response tone tool helps you think about that big strategic piece. We start all our workshops, all our coaching sessions with it, and I can tell you that people always want to jump over it.

I’m asking them a question, it’s like, “Who’s going to read this? Who are they? What are they going to do?” And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” “Come tell me if I have a comma splice here.” And it’s funny, like people always want to dive into the editing of the actual content, but if they don’t take…it’s like slow down to speed up a tiny bit and actually think about, “Who will read this? What will they do with it?” If you don’t get those things right, it doesn’t matter how polished your text is, it’s not going to create the impact that you want it to.

So, the ART, I mean, going through the pieces, we hope it’s pretty self-explanatory. So, you already said the piece is audience, “Who is this for?” We encourage people to think as in depth as they possibly can about one reader, so not a crowd of a thousand people, but just one person, even if they’re a representative reader.

And, Pete, you actually do this amazingly well on your booking page for podcast guests. I noticed this. I wanted to bring it up. You say, “Imagine our ideal listener,” and you kind of have this profile for like, “She’s this mid-career young woman, and she’s interested in these topics.” And maybe that person exists or maybe she doesn’t, but I could see her reading that description that you put there. So, that’s so much better than just saying, like, “Listeners from Apple podcast.” That doesn’t help you. Yeah, that doesn’t help you tailor the content.

So, doing something like that, really getting in the shoes of the audience, thinking. I like to ask two questions about the audience, “How much do they know your topic?” You can say nothing or you can say everything, but just know how much they know. And then, “How much do they care?” because people who really care are more motivated readers. They’re willing to put in a lot of effort to make their way through a difficult dense document because they deeply care about the information. People who don’t care will not put in any effort. So, if you don’t spoon-feed it to them, they’ll just delete it, not read it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Casey, I love that so much, and you’ve just answered a mystery I’ve been wrestling with for a while, which is, “How are so many top-selling books about chess so poorly written? How is this even possible?” It’s possible because the person who aspires to improve at chess is highly motivated, more so than I am. It’s like, “This is hard. This is a complicated read. I’m doing something else.” And so, I haven’t advanced as much.

But that does explain much. And then you can find that in all kinds of domains, like people really want to get good at options trading, so they’re reading an options trading blog which is very difficult to read. And, yet, if the folks are thinking about all the dollars they could be printing up with their enhanced options trading skills, they’ll put up with it, so I really like that. Thank you.

Casey Mank
I love that example, yeah. So, I love that example of the chess book. I can only imagine how difficult those are. I can only imagine what that’s like to read. But it’s written by someone who loves chess, and it’s read by someone who loves chess, and both of those people are in agreement that they’re going to put in the work to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Casey Mank
So, that’s great. That’s great. But most of the people we’re communicating with in the workplace are not an aspiring chess master. They’re like, “What do you want right now? Why are you in my inbox? I don’t have time to read this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Casey Mank
So, thinking about how much, yeah, thinking about how motivated your reader really is to put in effort. So, that’s the A piece, the audience. The response, you can think in a couple different ways. What are they going to know once they’re done reading? How are they going to feel? And then what are they going to do?

So, important to note that not everything you write has a do piece. Sometimes you truly are just giving FYI, educating people. You’re maybe trying to change their feelings about something but there’s nothing you want them to do when they finish reading. But if there is something you want them to do, “Click this link,” “Donate money,” “Sign a petition,” “Pick a meeting time,” that’s when it becomes really important to make it as easy as humanly possible for them to do that thing because there’s a great chance that they’re going to give up if it becomes hard or confusing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the tone?

Casey Mank
Yup, the tone piece is going to be specific to the audience and the response. So, this isn’t just, “What’s my tone in general?” It’s always context-dependent, which is why it comes last. So, for this particular audience that we’re talking to about this particular topic, and the exact response we want them to do, what’s the tone that’s going to move that audience to that response? So, it’s not just like, “What’s a good business tone?” It’s, “Today, right now, in this document, what’s the appropriate tone?”

We usually ask people to pick three or four adjectives to describe the one. At first, it’s hard to get people to be creative and go beyond, like, informative, clear, professional. Okay, I hope everything you write is informative, clear, and professional. That’s the baseline, but what else? What else can we pull out around tone? And that becomes useful later when you’re editing because you can read every sentence you wrote, and ask yourself, “Is this sentence,” whatever you’re doing, “Is it enthusiastic? Is it cordial? Do I sound expert and do I sound warm?”

You can really kind of filter your entire document through that tone if it’s specific. But if it’s just, “This is going to be professional and clear,” like, it becomes harder to actually make editing decisions based on a vague tone. And last thing about that is it makes it easier for other people to edit your work and give you feedback on your work if you can tell them, “Here’s the audience, here’s the response I want from that audience, and here’s the tone I’m trying to hit. Do you think this document will have that impact and meet those three things?” rather than if you just hand someone you work with a document, and you say, “Hey, is this good?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Casey Mank
Yeah, you’re not going to get helpful specific feedback from them. You’re just going to get them fixing that one semicolon in the bottom paragraph, which isn’t what you really need, so.

Pete Mockaitis
I really love it when…this is, I guess, my sense of humor. I’d like to apply just wildly inappropriate tones to different bits of writing. Like, I saw a cigar catalog once, and it had a lot of things, like, “Winner, winner, chicken dinner. These won’t impress the mucket-y mucks in the boardroom, but under a buck of stick, it’s the perfect yard guard.” It’s like, “Who is this guy talking to?”

And it just cracks me up, and then I just try to imagine taking that tone and putting that on, I don’t know, this podcast, like a podcast episode description for Casey, like, “Wait, what is going on here?” It just feels weird. And, yet, if you’re in the mood to kick back and leisurely select a cigar, it might be perfect.

Casey Mank
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I think that’s good. Well, maybe you can tell me, Casey, I guess the tone that I want is I want folks to feel inspired by a sense of transformative possibility when they read a podcast episode description, like, “Oh, wow, that sounds awesome. I want to know that.” Click play. I guess that’s in the audience we talked about in terms of professionals and such. So, do I just want to use the word inspiring for tone? Or, is there a copywriter word I want to be using for this?

Casey Mank
No, I love that because it doesn’t have to just be a single word, because, crucially, the most important audience for this audience response tone thing is you’re just using it for yourself. This isn’t like a public-facing thing. It’s just the art for you to get on the right page. So, if you want to say to yourself, every time you write the description for an episode, “I want people to feel like, ‘Yeah, I can do this at work,’” that means something to you, and you can use it.

And I imagine you could give that to a colleague, and say, like, “Here’s the vibe I want. Does it come across?” I had one person I work with, one writer, who said, she’s writing an email and people had ignored her instruction several times. And one of the tone things that she told me she was shooting for is, “I’m drawing a line in the sand.”

Now, that is not a single adjective but it meant something to her, it definitely meant something to me, and we kept that in mind, “I’m drawing a line in the sand.” So, if there’s something like that that works for you to think about the tone, I think it’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Certainly. And if it’s just you, the writer that you’re thinking about, then you can say whatever you want. And then, I guess, we do, whoa, it’s like this is so meta, in writing the creative brief itself for your collaborator, you would also be thinking about that audience as copywriter or teammate and their response and tone.

The audience as a copywriter, the response is, I want them to say, “Yes, that sounds like a sweet job I’ll take.” And the tone is, I don’t know, “This should be a lot of fun.” So, cool. Well, Casey, boy, this is exciting stuff. I can dork out forever. Tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Casey Mank
Sure. One writing problem and writing piece of advice that I see a lot and I would love to give people is, you know, because people know what I do, sometimes people in my personal life, my friends and family will say, like, “Hey, help me wordsmith this. I’m about to send something important.” It could be a text, an email, a job application, whatever. Like, “Help me wordsmith this.” And I’m like, “Okay. Well, what are you trying to say?” And they’ll say something to me verbally, and I’ll say, like, “Why don’t you say that?”

And I think people are often disappointed because when they come me, they’re like, “Wordsmith this with me,” and usually I’m just like, “Well, why don’t you just say that?” And I think when people sit down to write, especially professionally, like workplace writing, especially for things that might be important, they go into this weird zone where they just start reaching for all the big words that they know, and like jamming them into sentences, and you get people sending messages, like, “I would love to actualize an opportunity to network with you.”

Like, if you took someone who was really confident and far along in their career, they would send that to someone as, “Hey, let’s chat.” Like, people who actually really know about a topic and very confident, they’d say, like, “Hey, would love to chat.” But people who are right out of college, are like, “I would love to actualize this opportunity to discuss with you,” and nothing signals that you are not confident more than, like, jamming sentences full of big fancy words.

So, I would love to kind of curve that impulse in people. Something weird happens, like they’ll say it beautifully out loud, and as soon as their fingers touch the keyboard, they just kind of like make it weird with all these big words. So, I would love to flag that for people. And start noticing if you’re doing that, stop it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that sounds…actualize opportunity, that really resonates. I’ve gotten a number of emails that folks wanted to explore the potential of creating a collaborative partnership with me. It’s like, “I don’t even know what you mean.”

I think the default responses is just, “I don’t know what this is,” and then move to the next email. And I think that’s sort of an unfortunate reality in terms of when clarity is missing, often the response you get is just no response whatsoever.

Casey Mank
Absolutely, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Casey Mank
Sure. So, this is attributed to Elmore Leonard, who was a novelist and a screenwriter. He did Westerns. And he said, “I like to leave out all the parts that readers skip,” and I’d like to adjust that a little bit for people, which is like try to leave out more of the parts readers skip. I think leave out the parts readers skip, it might sound kind of daunting, but can you just, like, do a little better. I always try to tell people that. Just kick out a few more of the fluffy pieces. So, leave out the parts readers will skip.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Casey Mank
Yes. So, we draw really heavily on research from the Nielsen Norman Group, and one of my favorite couple things that people could start with there, I mean, you could read everything on the site and you’d probably emerge as an amazing communicator on the other side of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds worth doing.

Casey Mank
It’s great, yeah. Take a deep dive, but if you want a couple things to start with, I would recommend “The Impact of Tone on Readers’ Perception of Brand Voice,” which is just it really shows some interesting research about how tone impacts people’s reactions to what they read. And then the other one would be “How Little Do Users Read?” It should really get you in the mood for that, like, don’t include stuff that people are just going to skip over.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Casey Mank
Sure. We have a bunch on writing that we often recommend, Letting Go of the Words by Janice Redish, who is a plain language educator, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, Brief by Joe McCormack, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. And then, not a book, but, again, PlainLanguage.gov, free government resource on clear communication. We recommend that almost more than any book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a favorite tool you use regularly to be awesome at your job?

Casey Mank
So, just the ones that I recommended already would be my go-tos: Hemingway editor, Hemingway app; Grammarly, of course, which we do like and we do co-sign people using people, especially in your emails, it can just fix those typos for you; Difficult and Extraneous Word Finder. Those are pretty much the big writing tools that we like to recommend to people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Casey Mank
Sure. So, I do productivity habit that I don’t think it came from anywhere else. It’s my own thing. You’ve probably heard of like Pomodoro, which I think is 25 on and five off. But when I have a task that I’m deeply procrastinating on, I like to start out by doing five minutes on and five minutes off, which people have said to me, like, “That’s not enough time on.” But it really helps me get into something at first if I think, like, “I’m going to do this for five minutes,” and then I get to watch Netflix for five minutes, because I feel like you can do anything hard for five minutes.

And, usually, what ends up happening is I get into, like, making my PowerPoint or something, and the alarm goes off, and I just snooze it, and I’m like, “No, I’m rolling now. I want to keep working on it.” But for the first, like, getting into something that feels too big or difficult, five minutes on, five minutes off can kind of like get me moving. So, that’s my method.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Casey Mank
Yes. So, one that has come up in workshops is, like, “If you’re saying everything is important, you’re saying nothing is important.” And when it comes to writing, that can manifest in a couple different ways but one is, like, if you’re bolding key information and you’re just, like, bold an entire paragraph, you’re no longer emphasizing something.

Or, if we’re working with someone, and we say, “Okay, you really need to figure out what’s most important, and then delete the other stuff,” and they just say, like, “No, everything is important. I need the reader to read every word.” Well, that’s not going to happen, so if you’re saying everything is important, then nothing is important.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Casey Mank
Probably connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can email me casey@boldtype.us, and I love to get bad writing of the internet. So, if you are just, like, going about your day in your life, and you see something really poorly written online that’s public-facing, please send it to me. I can use it as befores and afters in my workshops.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Casey, I suppose we should’ve asked, what is Bold Type? And how can you help us?

Casey Mank
Oh, well, okay. Not the bottom line up front at all, huh? So, my company, Bold Type, as you might’ve guessed from everything we’ve talked about, teaches workplace writing skills. That’s the only type of training we do. We do workshops on plain language writing, obviously, email writing, how to edit your own writing, how to give other writers feedback on the writing that they have produced, how to be better at getting feedback on your writing, presentation, PowerPoint writings, and we do some executive coaching as people are moving into more writing-intensive roles at work and things like that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Casey Mank
I do. For the next week or so, could you try to cut every email that you send in half? And I know that might sound hard, but think about if you’ve ever been asked to write a professional bio for whatever you’re doing, and someone says, “I need a 50-word bio,” and you have to, like, cut your bio down. After you’ve done that, it’s actually hard to go back to the longer bio because you realize, like, “I didn’t need all of this.” So, every email you send, can you take out about half the words? You probably can. That’s my challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Good. Well, Casey, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and good writing.

Casey Mank
Thanks so much, Pete. This was really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Daphne, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Thanks for inviting me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to get your take, I understand you’ve been working as a writing coach for the past 25 years, but it sounds like you hated writing until 20 years ago, so the first five years, I guess, were not pleasant. What’s the story here?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, the story is I kind of grew up in the newspaper business. My parents owned a weekly newspaper and I worked there as an indentured servant for many years. And then, when I left, I went to join a large metropolitan daily newspaper, and I was just so anxious to get out of the family business. I didn’t pay too much attention to what I was walking into.

And, actually, it was good in a lot of ways. They hired me as an editor, which was a job I was born to do. I’m just a natural editor. I started editing when I was in high school. I would edit all my friends’ papers. I loved editing my own work, other people’s work. It just didn’t matter. I just loved editing and I was really good at it.

So, I got the job at this daily newspaper, and they mostly had me edit. But every once in a while, they would ask me to write something and, oh, my gosh, that was terrifying because I hated writing. And I was in a room, and in those days, newspapers were much bigger than they are now, so there were about a hundred people. All these grizzled veterans who would sit and bang away at the keyboard and produce copy in 10 minutes without blinking an eye, and I would be asked to write, I don’t know, 500 words, and I would sweat over it, and I hated it, and I found it so difficult that I just really didn’t enjoy it one iota whenever I was asked to write. So, I would dash back to the editing job as fast as I humanly could.

And then when I left the newspaper business to have my children, I didn’t go back. I went back briefly after my mat-leave and then decided, “No, I need to get out,” so I left. And I should say I’m a mother of triplets, so having a child was a bit of a big deal. I was having three children, not only one, and so I left the newspaper business and I decided to be a freelancer. And when you freelance, you have to do whatever is sent your way.

And so, I had to do a certain amount of writing, and I just hated it. I found it so difficult and time-consuming and horrible that I kind of took myself aside, looked myself in the mirror, and said, “Daphne, you have to stop doing it this way.” So, I spent about a year researching, talking to people, reading books, exploring everything I could find about the writing business until I could figure out a way I could do it that made it enjoyable. And once I’ve done that, then I started coaching other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a very intriguing opening there, so I’ll bite, Daphne. So, what’s the trick? What was the missing element that makes writing enjoyable?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, I think there are two things. The biggest thing I found is that many people, me included, by the way, many people mix up the different steps of writing. So, they will write a little bit and then they’ll edit. Or they will start to edit while they’re writing, and that is just a really, really bad thing to do because what happens is that we have different parts of our brain that are good at different tasks. So, there’s a part of our brain that is really, really good at linear logical tasks like editing. And then there’s another part of our brain that’s really good at creative tasks, like writing.

But if you try to write with the editing part of your brain, the job is going to be horrible and very slow and painful, and that’s what I found I had done for many years. I was trying to write with the wrong part of my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that’s resonant and I think I’ve discovered this when I wrote. So, I’ve written two books, not super relevant to being awesome at your job so I don’t bring them up very often. But when I was writing them, I very much experienced that notion that the whole brain space associated with what’s conducive to generating a whole bunch of words versus what’s conducive to making those words make sense and be sharp are quite different.

And so, I even noticed, like, if I had like a beer or a Red Bull, you know, they’re drugs, they would impact my brain in such that, hey, one beer was great for me drafting words and then not feeling so worked up about them and critical. It lowered my inhibitions of what I was putting on a page. I guess some writers have taken that too far historically, so careful, yeah.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, Ernest Hemingway had something to say about that. He said, “Write drunk, edit sober.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And I would say, hey, even edit caffeinated. It’s like you’re super sharp, it’s like, “Hmm, yeah, I don’t know about that word there. It’s sort of hopped up.” So, well-said. It’s tempting at the same time though, it’s like you see something that’s bad and you want to almost jump in to fix it immediately, “Oh, I can’t let that exist.” So, what’s going on psychologically? We probably heard this advice before, “Hey, draft first then edit later,” but we don’t do it. What’s that about?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, a great many of my clients struggle with this because I’ve worked with people, I work with professional writers, and I work with a lot of academics, I work with anyone who wants to write something. But the academics, in particular, have a really hard time letting go of something that they know is wrong in the page, and they can’t trust themselves to fix it later. But what do you say to them? And this does seem to help if they really think about it, is that if you edit while you are writing, you are making a decision to do something at the worst possible time because when you’re writing, you have done your research, you spent a lot of time thinking about what it is you’re writing. You’ve done the writing yourself, for goodness’ sakes, so you are maximally different from your readers.

So, your readers are coming to your finished project cold. They haven’t given it the thought you have, they haven’t done the research you have, so they’re going to have different questions and different ways of looking at things than you do. And if you can’t get yourself closer to the mindset of your readers, then your writing isn’t going to be as effective with them. So, if you edit while you write, you’re way too close to the material to be an effective editor.

Pete Mockaitis
Daphne, that just makes so much sense to me. I love it. I’m 100% convinced by that argument. Thank you. Cool. Well, so great perspective right there. So, separating, I guess, the task, the writing piece from the editing piece is key to making things more enjoyable. And what else?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, another thing that I promote with many of the people I work with is mind-mapping. Have you ever mind mapped, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I have but I haven’t used any of the cool software. My handwriting is a bit atrocious.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Oh. Well, you know what, you and I were separated at birth because my handwriting is so bad, I mean, I say my handwriting makes it look like I’m an arthritic 93-year old. But if you stop worrying about the quality of your handwriting, you’re actually way better off mind mapping by hand than you are with software because there is a certain mindset that you want to be in when you’re mind mapping and that is the creative part of your brain. And that’s why I so strongly suggest that people stop outlining because outlining sticks you in the linear logical part of your brain, the part of your brain where you want to research and edit, but not the part of the brain where you want to write.

And mind mapping, on the other hand, puts you in that creative space. And so, what you need to do is you need to relax. When I’m mind mapping, I like to visualize myself lying on a hammock in the sunshine. So, that’s the kind of relaxed, easygoing, devil-may-care attitude you should have when you’re mind mapping. You don’t want to be anxious about it, you don’t want to be stressed, you just want to be very relaxed. And people who are sitting at a keyboard aren’t nearly as relaxed as people who are sitting on a couch, or in a bed, or somewhere where they can put their feet up and really relax. That’s the type of place you want to be when you’re mind mapping. Not at a keyboard.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I also want to get your take. I think with my poor handwriting, part of it is when I look at mind maps, well, one, it looks so cool, and gorgeous, and illustrated, and multicolored, and lovely. And, two, they’re just sort of a lot of stuff there in terms of I feel like I got to go get tiny on my little 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper in order to fit it all onto that page. And so, doing my poor handwriting compounded with tininess.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Oh, it gets even worse, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “What did I even write there?” So, help me out, Daphne, what do we do?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yes. So, what I would say to you is, first of all, start with a bigger piece of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
So, just buy 11×17. All right.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Eleven by seventeen or go to Michaels craft store and get yourself some unprinted on newsprint, or go to a butcher and get some butcher paper, and stretch it out over the biggest table in your house or in your office or at a library, and make the mind map as big as it needs to be for you to feel comfortable and for you to be able to write in a size that allows you to read it easily and it allows your wrist not to feel seized up.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. All right. Permission received and granted. All right, so cool. So, get a great big paper. I love it when the solution is to buy something, Daphne, because it’s so much easier than changing my activities and behavior, so cool. So, buy something. And what else?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, the other thing I would say about mind mapping, people often like the idea of it but then they get to the reality of it and they don’t quite know how it works, how it transforms from a mind map into a piece of writing.

One of the things that happens is that people sometimes get stalled with mind mapping because what I say is that you should take your piece of paper, whatever size it is, turn it sideways, it’s really important that it be sideways because that opens up all sorts of room around the side of the page which we’re not used to, and so that’s inherently liberating or freeing to us, and it allows our mind to understand that it can go off in a bunch of different directions, which is great.

Write a question in the center of the page. So, don’t just write a topic. Most of the books on mind mapping are by a guy named Tony Bazon, very smart guy. He’s written something like 49 books on mind mapping so he’s probably the worldwide expert on it right now. But he says to write a topic in the center of the page.

I disagree with that because I found with the people I worked with that if you write a question, it’s going to be much more provocative to you, and you want to provoke your brain, you want to be able to have so many ideas that they’re spilling out of you and you’re having a hard time keeping up with them. So, questions will help you do that. A mind map should take somewhere between three to five minutes to do, so it’s not time consuming.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah, it’s really fast. It’s really fast. And the other important thing is not to edit yourself while you’re mind mapping because what happens is people will come up with these interesting crazy ideas and then they’ll start to second-guess themselves, they’ll say, “Oh, do I really want to write about that? Does that make sense here?” Don’t allow yourself to question yourself that way. If an idea springs to your brain, write it down. Don’t ask yourself whether it makes any sense, just write it down.

So, I have an interesting story about this. A number of years ago, I got a call from a Canadian copywriter. I didn’t know him, but he phoned me to thank me for my little booklet on mind mapping. My newsletter, you’ll get a little booklet on mind mapping. And so, he did that because he had been approached by a big-named publisher and invited to do a book on copywriting. And he was concerned, quite cleverly and rightfully, I thought, that he was, essentially, a freelancer, he had a lot of clients, and he was worried that if you signed up to do this book, he was going end up leaving his clients in a lurch, which would not be good for his business in the long term. So, that’s why he Googled to find out about writing faster, and that’s how he found me.

And he got my booklet on mind mapping, and so he decided, “Oh, if I can mind map my book, maybe I can write it fast enough so that my clients won’t get neglected.” So, he did that. And one day he was doing a mind map for a particular chapter on copywriting, remember? And the idea of making pancakes sprung into his brain. Now, it’s not that he was hungry at the time, just copywriting, making pancakes, something connected there in his brain, and he thought, “This is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. Pancakes have nothing to do with copywriting,” and he almost didn’t write it down, but he heard my metaphorical voice, because we hadn’t met at this point. He heard my metaphorical voice at the back of his brain and saying, “Don’t second-guess yourself. Write down everything.” He wrote it down, and it became the organizing metaphor for one of his chapters.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And it’s wild how sometimes those things make all the difference. I’m thinking about Mawi Asgedom, our guest from episode number 1. One of his most resonant pieces of creation ever was talking about the turbo button with playing video games. And so, a lot of his work is for youth and teenagers, and it’s a very powerful metaphor in terms of folks who want to dig deep and find the ability to take some action, and kick it up to a higher level, and they play video games, and so it’s like, “Oh, the turbo button.” It really just connects and resonates, versus that’s also easy to discard.

Like, I was thinking about playing video games, and the turbo button on the controller, say, “Now that’s dumb.” You might discard that quickly. But that’s helpful in terms of hearing when you make the mind map, it doesn’t take that much time, and the crazy ideas that you get might just be the winning ones that enrich things.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yes, exactly. I mean, the thing is that when you write, you need that creativity. That’s what you want. That’s what we’re all hungry for. And the problem is if you compare the act of writing from an outline, which is so dull and boring and feel so obligatory and horrible, compare that to the act of mind mapping, which is fun and interesting and fast. And what I say to people is when you’re mind mapping, what you’re looking for is what I call the aha experience.

So, the aha experience is when, all of a sudden, you’re overcome with the desire to write. The, “Oh, yeah, now I know what I want to say.” And it’s like your fingers are itching to get on the keyboard. And when that happens, I say, you should start writing right away whether your mind map is finished or not because the sole job of a mind map is to inspire you to write. And once you’re inspired, it’s done its job so don’t stop writing because you haven’t finished your mind map. It’s not an outline. Just because something is written on your mind map doesn’t mean you have to use it. And just because it’s not written on your mind map doesn’t mean you can’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is handy. Well, Daphne, you got me all worked up. So, let’s talk about, so specifically in the context of work, professionals, and that stuff. So, they might be already objecting, the listeners, in terms of, saying, “Well, I’m not writing a really cool novel, Daphne. I’ve got to put together a report, a proposal, a tricky email.” So, does that change the game at all with regard to mind mapping or the process?

Daphne Gray-Grant
You know what, I have to say it doesn’t because I do these presentations on mind mapping quite regularly, and I have a little slide in my PowerPoint deck that says it works equally well for nonfiction. I have never written a word of fiction in my life, and I use mind mapping every single day. All I write is nonfiction, and I use mind mapping every day.

Here’s another interesting story. A number of years ago, I had to do a series of articles for our corporation, and they were super short. They were 175 to 225 words max, so really short, fast, mostly easy to write. And I had kind of a working rule in my mind at the time, which was that if my article that I was writing is less than 500 words, I didn’t need to bother with a mind map. So, there I was with this working rule that I didn’t need to bother with a mind map because the article was only 175 words and, honest to goodness, I had such a terrible time with this article. I spent more than an hour on it, which is embarrassing to me because I’m a pretty fast writer now, and, “What, an hour for 175 words? That’s crazy.” And I couldn’t get the piece finished.

So, finally, out of sheer desperation, I decided to do a mind map, and the mind map took me less than three minutes to do, and finishing the story took me less than five minutes once I’d done the mind map. It was just like, “Oh, now I know how to solve this problem.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is fascinating and so compelling, in fact, I want to dig deeper now into the mind map, so thank you. All right. So, you get a big space, and maybe 11×17, maybe it’s a butcher block paper, but it’s something, at least if you have my problem, 11×17 doesn’t cut it. So, you turn it sideways, you put a question in the middle. And then what do we do? What are some of the dos and don’ts here for flowing from there?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Okay. So, I just want to emphasize that the paper really does need to be turned sideways, that matters. And I say this because I regularly lead workshops, and there’ll be a hundred people in the room, and we’ll do a mind map together, and then I’ll tell them, “Here’s a topic. I want you all to do a mind map on your own.” And then I’ll walk around the room, and I’ve told them three or four times that the paper needs to be turned sideways. And, sure enough, out of a hundred people, five will not have the paper turned sideways. So, that’s a really important thing to do.

The next thing, put a question in the center of the page and draw a circle around it. Something about the act of drawing a circle is like completing your thought, and say, “Okay, yeah, so I’m signed up for this.” So, you draw a circle around it. And then the next thing that comes to your mind, write it down on that page, draw a circle around that, and link it to the center idea, to the center question.

And then the next thing that comes to your mind, write it down on the page and link it to either the center idea if that’s what inspired it, or to the first child of the center idea. So, you want to kind of link these ideas with lines. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
It does. And I tell you what, it really reduces some of my resistance. Because when I looked at finished mind maps, one, they’re gorgeous with the multi-colors and the illustrations, and it seems so darned clear in terms of, “Oh, yes, these are some of the subcomponents of whatever.” It’s like, “Okay, like they’re showing off.”

But as you described it, it’s a way easier in terms of, “I’m going to be having random thoughts. I’m going to write them down, and then I’m going to link them.” And so then, I guess I wonder if, so in the case of the pancakes. So, they have that idea, and then it doesn’t seem to connect to anything, what do we do with that?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, you just let it sit there for a while and you keep mind mapping. You keep mind mapping until you have, what I call, the aha experience. And I just want to back up and address something you said a minute ago or so, Pete. If you could see my mind maps, you would understand how truly ugly mind maps can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you, Daphne.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Mine are hideous. I have horrible handwriting, I sometimes use colors if I’m really desperate to inspire my brain, but mostly I just use a pencil, and my mind maps look terrible, they look boring, and my handwriting is hard to read. But guess what? They still work.

Anyways. So, what you do is you keep mind mapping for three to five minutes until you have the aha experience or run out of things to say. And if you run out of things to say without having the aha experience, well, then you do a second mind map, and you take that first mind map and you use it to identify a different question to put in the center of the page for the second mind map, and then you spend another three to five minutes doing the second mind map. And if you don’t have the aha experience at the end of the second mind map, guess what I’m going to say? You do a third mind map.

And if you don’t have the aha experience at the end of the third mind map, then you do a fourth. And if you don’t have the aha experience at the end of the fourth, then you do a fifth. You just keep doing that until you have the aha experience. It’s really pretty simple. And people sometimes are a bit horrified when they don’t understand that a mind map is three to five minutes. So, in 30 minutes, you can do six to 10 mind maps really easily.

And, honest to goodness, I have known people who will sit and stare at a blank screen for 30 minutes. Doing the mind map is way more fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, so while I’m thinking now, I’m thinking about one of our producers, Marco, shout out, he’s great. And so, I’m wondering if we’re doing some work associated with, hey, let’s just say it’s this very interview. We’re going to distill it, summarize some of the finest nuggets for distribution to our email list. I’m thinking someone is doing that kind of writing work, a summary of something. In a way it doesn’t require a sudden jolt of inspiration, or maybe you would disagree. I’d love your take on that. If our work is associated with summarizing or answering a series of questions in a proposal or an email, how do mind maps serve us there?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah, so the thing about mind mapping is it’s a really useful flexible technique that can be adapted to a great many uses. So, I know one thing, I like to use mind mapping for if I’m planning an event or a party, mind mapping is the best thing to use because you’re allowed to let your mind go off in any direction. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to plan an event or a party, but one minute you’re thinking about drinks, the next minute you’re thinking about decorations, the next minute you’re thinking about who’s going to be invited, then you’re thinking about music. There’s so many directions you can go in and mind map is just very flexible. It allows you to note all those things down without contorting your mind into twisted positions like you have to with an outline.

So, it would be very useful for, say, as you said, if you wanted to write a summary of our call today, yeah, mind mapping would work really well for that. It would be really, really easy and, you’re quite right, if what you’re aiming at is a summary, then you don’t need the aha experience for that. You just need the main points noted down.

Pete Mockaitis
But you’re saying that it can be valuable in the sense of just seeing what left to mind in reflecting upon this conversation or transcript can generate some thoughts there in terms of that’s something that’s worth mentioning. And then, as you draw the connections, you could say, “Oh,” and then there might be some sub-bullets in that, some piece of the summary, so understood. So, not looking for a jolt of inspiration, but doing so can still give us some benefits associated with getting some organization and seeing what really is worth mentioning and pops there.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Absolutely. And I know some university students who like to take notes with mind mapping. Now, I’ve never had the nerve to try that myself but the people who do it swear by it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s maybe the first context I’ve heard about mind mapping, I thought, “That just kind of sounds hard.” Okay, cool. Well, thank you. You have made me a convert after some mind mapping skepticisms. So, okay, cool. There’s so much I want to talk to you about and, wow, where to go? All right. So, let’s say let’s talk about work, and usually I hit the why point earlier in the interview but we’re having too much fun. So, tell me, so if you’re not in a creative career, like you are an engineer or a project manager, can you make a case for just how important is it to write effectively? Like, is an expense report that’s not super succinct and brilliant in its writing, just fine, what’s the benefit and how do we think about what’s good enough?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, I think most people probably underestimate the impact that their writing has on others. As a society, we’re extremely judgmental. And I try to be very careful and respectful when I read other people’s writing, but I know there are some people that they see someone who has spelled “its” when what they should’ve said was “it’s,” they’re going to make all sorts of assumptions about the intelligence and the education level of that person. And those assumptions may be totally wrong.

One of my children is severely dyslexic. He’s incredibly smart, really, really gifted actually, but if you read his emails or his writings, he’s quite careful now, he works professionally and he uses software to check his spelling and all of those kinds of things, but it’s taken him a number of years to get to that point. And so, people are often judged quite harshly by their clients, by their bosses, by their coworkers based on how well they write.

And from a less judgmental point of view but from an effectiveness point of view, if you are someone who is trying to sell something to other people, if you don’t know how to write a good petty email that grabs the interest of the person and doesn’t wear out their eyeballs or test their patience, you’re going to be less successful as a salesperson.

So, it’s all about communication, and that’s really one of the key skills in our society. So, if you feel uncomfortable with writing, or if you hate writing, or if you procrastinate about it all the time, then, really, it’s worth taking a look at those natural tendencies you have and trying to make writing more of a friend to yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly, that’s compelling. And so, let’s talk about some of those bits on if we’re writing email, we want to grab attention. What are your pro tips there?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Oh, okay. So, the first is make sure your subject line says what the email is about. Oh, my goodness, I find it so frustrating because I use my email as a kind of a filing system, and I will remember, of course, who sent me an email about something, but then I’ll type in their name in that little search bar and I’ll get the last 200 emails from them. And I’ll look at the subject line, and I have to open every flipping email to find the one I want because they don’t have a subject line that made sense, that relates to the content they put in the email. So, you’re going to be far friendlier to your clients, to your bosses, to your coworkers if you make sure the subject line really expresses what the email is about.

Another thing I would say is that many people don’t indent frequently enough. So, I have so much experience in the newspaper business, I am accustomed to indenting every couple of sentences. And when I get an email that’s, say, 500 words long with no indents, it makes my eyes bug out. And so, frequently what I will do is I will send the email to myself again, and I will just add a bunch of indents because, frankly, I don’t want to read something unless it’s indented.

Now, one of the problems many people have is that they were wrongly persuaded by their Grade 10 English teacher that there are some very important, hard-to-understand rules about what constitutes an accurate and effective paragraph. I just say throw that stuff out the window. Paragraphing is a visual aid. When you have lots of nice white spaces where people can rest their eyes when they’re tired, they’re going to be much more enthusiastic about reading what you have to say. So, just arbitrarily put a new paragraph every couple of lines or so. It’s going to make your writing look much less intimidating.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’m on board. And so then, I also want to get your take, when we are in the editing phase, boy, what are some the top mistakes or words and phrases that need to go because we could be much more concise without them? If you can sort of…this is your license to rant, Daphne. So, top things you see all the time that need to go or get fixed pronto.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Well, I think the number one thing, for me, is that most people write sentences that are way too long. And this is particularly true in corporate environments. I’ve worked with a lot of engineers, and engineers, by and large, write sentences that are far, far, far too long. So, there’s been a lot of research done on sentence length, and one of the things I can tell you, a metric I can give you, is that the optimum sentence length, as an average, is 14 to 18 words.

Now, that might sound pretty short to you, but understand that when I say that, I’m using the word average, so I’m not saying that every sentence should be 14 to 18 words. I’m saying that it’s perfectly acceptable to have the occasional 40-word sentence but you need to balance it off with some one- to five-word sentences. And as long as you have that balance, then it’s going to be very readable to your readers. But if you don’t have that balance, they’re going to have to work way, way too hard to read it.

And so, what I often suggest to people is that they use some software that is downloadable on the internet, some of which you can pay for, most of which you can get for free, or at least use some form of it for free, that will automatically calculate your sentence length average, because you don’t want to have to do that kind of counting yourself manually. That would be way too much of a drag.

So, the software I recommend, there’s one called Count Wordsworth, and that’s free. You just copy and paste your text into the box and hit, I can’t remember what the button says. It might say process or something like that. You hit the button, and then underneath, the second measurement will tell you what your sentence length average is. And if it’s greater than 18 words, then understand that you need to go back to that piece and you need to shorten some of those sentences.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I also have been using the Hemingway Editor as well.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Oh, yes. You know what, I want to rant about the Hemingway Editor.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, then take it away.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Okay. Well, the Hemingway Editor is really fun to use and I promoted it quite heartily for a number of years. But then I eventually realized that the Hemingway Editor makes every long sentence a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
It highlights it. You feel like you have to do something about it.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yes, yes. And, in fact, every long sentence is not a problem. In fact, it’s more of a problem to have too many sentences that are exactly the same length. So, writing is a form of music in a way. If you take some writing and you read it out loud, you’ll hear that it has a natural rhythm, and you want a sense of rhythm in your writing. And if you write all your sentences to be exactly the same length, that’s going to mess with your rhythm. So, that’s what happens with people who pay too much attention to the Hemingway Editor.

Now, the Hemingway Editor is really good at a couple of things. So, I would say ignore what it says about sentences that are too long, so those are the red and yellow measurements, but really pay attention to the green ones because that’s the passive voice. And passive voice, where you hide the actor of the sentence, so I’m going to explain this slowly and clearly because a lot of people don’t understand passive voice. It’s not a test.

Pete Mockaitis
The passive voice is used by many.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yes, it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Zing. Okay, go ahead. Take it away.

Daphne Gray-Grant
So, my favorite passive sentence is “Mistakes were made.” So, that was said by a number of presidents on both sides of the aisle, and, basically, it’s kind of a term that allows you to hide who was doing the mistake-making. So, that’s one reason why you want to avoid passive voice. But the other is, if you think about it, the world’s best writing allows the reader to form visual images in their own mind’s eye. And if you refuse to give people a visual image or the subject of the sentence, then that is going to make it really hard for them to form those visual images. So, it makes the job of reading much harder for the reader if you have too many passive voice sentences in there. So, that’s the main reason why I suggest turning them into active voice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I am well on board and I’m impressed with your knowledge of Hemingway, that off the top of your head you knew the green was the highlight they use for passive voice.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah. The purple one is quite good too. That’s words that are unnecessarily complex. So, my hobby horse is “utilize.” Why does anyone say utilize? “Use” is a perfectly good three-letter word.

Pete Mockaitis
I got a kick out of it in consulting. There’s a lot of “leveraging” going on. Instead of “using”…

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah, I know. I know.

Pete Mockaitis
I think leveraging really does have a nice meaning in particular contexts associated with, “Oh, when we use this thing, we can do so much more than when we didn’t do this thing, just like with a big lever.” But it can very quickly get overused.

Daphne Gray-Grant
For sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, please, any other rants in terms of big mistakes that happen a lot that need to stop?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Oh, just let me think for a second. Sentences that are too long, passive voice. Oh, you know what? This is a really good one. Words ending in T-I-O-N. So, words ending in T-I-O-N, like creation, they take a perfectly good verb, create, and they turn it into a noun. And so, once you have that noun, then you have to add another verb to the sentence because it’s not a sentence without a verb, right?

And so, usually, to deal with those T-I-O-N words, you have to use a really boring verb like is, or was, or has, or have, and that’s going to make your sentence far wordier than it needs to be, so that leads to longer than necessary sentences. And verbs like is and was and has are hard to visualize so they don’t give you really interesting sentences. So, one of the things I like to do, if I’m editing something for someone, I will type T-I-O-N in the search box and I’ll go through the piece, and I will justify every word ending in T-I-O-N or I’ll change it if I can.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Daphne, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Oh, I can’t think of anything else right now.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, then could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Daphne Gray-Grant
One of my favorites, all-time favorite quote has been attributed to at least six people. So, without really knowing who said it, here goes, “I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes at 9:00 every morning.”

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve looked that up before because I think there’s so many variations too, and it’s like, “And I make darn sure it strikes at, you know, this time.”

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah. I always attribute it to Peter De Vries but then I found out that William Faulkner and Somerset Maugham said something almost exactly the same. So, I’m clear about saying it’s been attributed to at least six people now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah. So, many of the procrastinators I worked with give me lots of reasons for delaying writing. And one excuse I hear quite a bit is perfectionism. But 30 years of research and hundreds of studies have shown that that is not actually true. So, one of the big researchers on this topic is a professor in the Netherlands named Henri Schouwenburg but for anyone who doesn’t want to read peer-reviewed journals, you can learn about it in a plan English kind of way in a book by Piers Steel called The Procrastination Equation.

So, what that research shows, is that you’re not likely to be messed up by perfectionism when you’re having a hard time writing. What you need to do is turn off your phone, stop checking Facebook, stop worrying about whether you really know how to write, and just start writing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Can I give you two?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Okay. Well, for someone at a typical job, I highly recommend the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. So, what I like about this book is it explains how to build good habits and get rid of bad ones. But, more importantly, to me, as a writing coach, it’s one of the best-written books I’ve ever read. It’s so engaging and I love the way that he reports on science through the lens of storytelling. So, I just couldn’t put it down. Really, really great book.

The second book I want to recommend is aimed at grad students and people who work in academic settings, and that book is The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. So, this book presents a really compelling argument that most academics spend far too much time writing and instead would be more productive if they curtailed their writing time. So, I really love counterintuitive arguments like that, and it’s a fast and easy read, and I recommend it to anyone who feels they’re spending too much time in writing and, particularly, if they’re in academic.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite tool?

Daphne Gray-Grant
For me, that’s the Pomodoro. Are you familiar with the Pomodoro?

Pete Mockaitis
Is that the 25-minute timer?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Absolutely. So, ample things I’ll say about the Pomodoro. The idea is that you pledge to spend 25 minutes on a particular task and you do it without interruptions. So, you don’t allow other people to interrupt you, and one way you can do this is to wear headphones even if you’re in a big open-area office. If you put headphones on, most people won’t bother you, and you have a timer operating while you’re doing this.

Now, when I started the Pomodoro about 12 years ago, I think, now, I thought the idea of a noisy timer was the kookiest thing I had ever heard so I didn’t do it. And then I had a friend who started the Pomodoro at the same time. So, we used to meet for coffee once a week. And we started the Pomodoro, we met for coffee a week later. And I walked into the coffee shop and she reaches into her purse, and she pulls out a timer in the shape of a chicken, and she was so excited and delighted by it. I just looked at her in horror and said, “I can’t believe you’re doing that. How can you write with that thing making a noise?”

And she looked me in the eye, and she said, “Oh, I find it a comforting wall of sound.” And something about the poetry of that phrase kind of appealed to me so I decided to try it, and I went and found a timer. I’m just going to play it for you right now so you can hear. Do you hear that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah. So, I work with that going all day long. So, I go from one task to the next, I have a little day plan on a clipboard beside my desk, and I will spend 25 minutes writing something, doing something, editing something, with that timer going. And I find the timer really, really keeps me focused. And when I had a hard time writing initially, I found that maybe the timer just occupied enough space in my brain to make me forget about how much I hated writing and just allowed me to write without worrying about that. But I find the noise really helpful, very, very productive.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And we had a previous guest, I think it was Rahaf Harfoush, who mentioned she likes listening to white noise from the Star Trek: The Next Generation Engine Idling, and so I hunted it down on YouTube and, sure enough, I really like it because it kind of reminds me as a youngster I liked the show, and it just sort of is comforting in terms of, “Oh, all those interesting people in that Starship, you know, this is what they hear all the time in their fictional world.”

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah, indeed.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Daphne Gray-Grant
I think, you know what, it’s my…I don’t even know what to call it. Every morning, the first thing I do is I have a little chart in Microsoft Word that has all the day divided by half hours. And before I start my work, I plan how I’m going to spend each of those half hours. Actually, it’s only, each of those is 25 minutes because I take a break of five minutes between each task.

So, I have found that I probably tripled my productivity by doing this, and it’s a really, really great habit, and I don’t feel comfortable now until I have a daily plan. And once I have the daily plan, I can look at it and I can see I’m going to get everything accomplished during the day, and that gives me a sense of comfort and ease that makes my work day possible.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Daphne, I’m also intrigued by this in terms of sometimes I really like to hunker down for an hour, an hour and a half, uninterrupted. And so, you’ve got these 25-minute timer, the 5-minute breaks, and I guess right now we’ve spoken for 46 minutes straight. How do you navigate that part of things?

Daphne Gray-Grant
So, you’re entered in my little calendar, actually, for two 25-minute counts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we’re almost running out.

Daphne Gray-Grant
I know. You know what, fortunately, I don’t have anything urgent afterwards, so I can play with the calendar a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about is there a particular nugget, something that you’re known for and people quote back to you often?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yes. I have this expression for what I call the first draft that anyone writes, and that’s a crappy first draft. And what I often emphasize to my clients is that they need to understand the first draft of anything you write should be really bad, and that’s why I call it the crappy first draft. And if it’s not crappy enough, then that’s a problem because that’s a sign you’ve been editing as you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Yeah, you want a crappy first draft. When people tell me, they say, “Oh, I’ve got a first draft but it’s really crappy,” and I say, “Congratulations! That’s what you want.”

Pete Mockaitis
I really dig that. We had a previous guest, David Kadavy, who, I don’t know if he invented this term, but he refers to the first draft, instead of a rough draft, a barf draft. That’s just very visceral.

Daphne Gray-Grant
That’s good, yes. That’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Daphne Gray-Grant
On my website www.PublicationCoach.com. So, that site contains hundreds of articles and dozens of videos on every aspect of writing. And if you go there, then please be sure to sign up for my free weekly newsletter. It goes all around the world. Just enter your name and your email address on the little form on my homepage, and, in return, you’ll not only get my free weekly newsletter, you’ll also get a free booklet on mind mapping.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And, Daphne, do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Daphne Gray-Grant
Indeed. I would say start with a really small habit. So, there’s no time that is too small, even one to five minutes a day is enough to begin writing. Focus on the habit rather than the end product, because once you have a habit in place, you can achieve great results.

Pete Mockaitis
Daphne, this has been lots of fun. I wish you lots of luck with your writing and your coaching of writers, and all your adventures.

Daphne Gray-Grant
Thanks so much, Pete. Great talking to you.