Change this one thing to make 2025 a success

Author : Rob Ashton

Posted : 14 / 01 / 25

Many of us are still hoovering up pine needles from the living room carpet. There may even be a lone chocolate rattling around the Quality Street tin on the coffee table. (Orange Cream, anyone?) But countless New Year’s resolutions made when the fairy lights were still twinkling have gone the same way as the tree they once adorned.

Abandoned, discarded. (Not dragged to the council recycling point, obviously.)

Do not despair, though. There are still a couple of weeks to go before Dry January turns into Wet February. And there’s one change you can make that really could make 2025 stand out for all the right reasons.

Even better, it involves no self-sacrifice.

No forking out for a gym membership that you use for just a month or two (only to find by April that you’re lumbered with a direct debit for the occasional £200 swim).

No struggling to log every meal or snack in a calorie-counting app.

No pounding the dark streets in the rain or wrestling with self-denial.

Everybody wins

In fact, the only thing you need to cut out is the odd word or two. Because yes, I am talking about resolving to change how you write.

Now, before you accuse me of being delirious from mince-pie withdrawal, hear me out.

When we change how we approach writing, we improve pretty much everything.

Good ideas get a hearing and finally stand a chance of making a difference.

Projects move forward quickly, as each person involved sees exactly what they need to do to play their part.

Relationships improve, as we stop firing snot-o-gram texts at each other or writing emails that unintentionally inflame tense situations.

And everybody wins if we persuade our colleagues to change too, because everybody writes.

Suddenly, we have more time. No more wasting hours wading through documents stuffed with pointless phrases that make them twice as long as they need to be.

Silver bullet

Silver bullets are rare, but this really is one of them.

The reason that changing our approach to writing has such a wide impact is that, almost without noticing, we’ve become reliant on writing for so much of our communication.

Just think of how you spend most of your time at work and you’ll probably notice how much of it involves typing or reading words on a screen.

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It’s not just documents. Email, direct messages, comments, texts and live chat are all a form of writing. And when things go wrong, the writing is often to blame (at least partly).

A message is misread because it was poorly worded. A project goes awry because instructions were unclear. A colleague takes feedback the wrong way because a written comment should really have been a conversation.

How much better would life be if we addressed issues like these?

Anything but basic

The flip side is that ignoring them means things stay the same or get worse.

And unfortunately, that’s what usually happens, because few people give a second thought to how we write.

Most see it as a low-level activity that we all should just be able to do. Yet when writing goes wrong, it’s not because those who do it lack a basic ability. It’s because writing is anything but basic.

Writing is not a natural activity, like talking. Our brains evolved to speak and listen, not to read and write. That’s why learning to read takes so long and only happens through active instruction. (Learning to speak is usually a much quicker, largely passive process and requires only that we hear other people speaking.)

Improves everything

Writing is a technical skill – and one that we can all improve. And failing to recognise that also often means that those who do know they need help are too ashamed to ask for it.

This is an opportunity to make everything better that’s hiding in plain sight.

What if we no longer classed writing skills as a low-level topic and started to write for how humans actually read? How much good would that do?

If you’re still looking for a new year’s resolution, there are worse places to start. Because changing how you write really could change everything.

Image credit: Andy Dean Photography / Shutterstock