What your English Teacher forgot to tell you!

Those halcyon days of school, learning and growing up.  Fondly remembered by some loathed by others.  Whatever your view there is one fact that cannot be challenged. 

Your English teacher taught you good grammar but not how to communicate.

What do I mean by that sweeping statement?

When you present to the board or to a group of prospects it is highly unlikely you will fall back on those scholarly grammatical skills.  But there is worse to come. 

Often we all fall into bad communication habits.  We fill them with industry shorthand and jargon, just because you can.  Worse still, stuffing the presentation with meaningless errms, and ums and obviously or whatever. Or saying yes, no (it has to be one or the other, it can’t be both)

As an example lets take a look at a CV - your CV.  After all, most of us have written a CV to get a job.  When you wrote it what was your purpose?  How much thought did you put in to what the reader would be thinking?  What frame of mind is the HR person going to be in when they read it?

If you are like me, these were not issues I considered.  Hit ‘em with some facts and bowl them over with your history.  That was my modus operandi.

Now let’s look at it from the HR persons point of life. 

Ask yourself this. Are the pleased to get to their desk to find 67 CV’s in a neat pile all demanding attention. 

Are they going to get home with a bag full of entertaining reading for the evening?  

Or are they likely to be read by someone who may have had a bad journey to work and because of the weather, traffic or home issue, means they are now behind for the day?

Best you think it’s the latter.

Write your CV to get someone’s attention quickly and keep them interested and informed.  It really doesn’t matter what frame of mind they are in, your CV will be read.  

Now take the feelings of the time pressed HR person and imagine they are a time pressed business person (is there any other?).  How do you now look at your communications to them? 

Are they full of grammatically correct long sentences? Think about the last legal letter you read, factually correct, grammatically correct.  But almost unintelligible and full of long clauses using words you don’t fully understand.

Would you read communication sent to you if it resembled a legal contract?

Or do you write short interest packed statements followed up by bullet points? All written in a way the reader gets it first time.

When writing any communication message just think your reader is pressed for time and you have to get the interesting stuff up front or – chances are yours will be like the quickly flicked through CV and left on the pile.

This approach is even more important when presenting.  Death by PowerPoint anyone?

To avoid this it’s best to know what your audience expects of you.  Meet that expectation.  Keep them interested and involved and you are on your way to success.

I recently saw a biography of an industry specialist on their web site.  His message was fairly clear except he said he had done just about every job in the organisation except sales.  

What was his purpose of telling me that?  What I was after was an indication of what he could do, not what he couldn’t.

Lots of brochures, sales messages and company literature is written with little idea of what the prospect wants.  Often it’s full of what we want to TELL you. 

And sometimes all that does is make us dream for those sunny trouble free school days all over again.

Paul Johnstone is a Speaker, Trainer and Paradigm Shaker. Founder of The Paradigm Shakers and a Subject Matter Expert.

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