Why writing so often goes wrong

If you ever struggle with writing at work, take comfort in knowing that to do it at all should be impossible.

In fact, the whole idea of communicating through the written word sounds preposterous when you break it down.

If someone were to pitch it as a business idea on Dragons’ Den or Shark Tank, it would never get backing.

You can almost hear the incredulous reaction of one of the would-be investors, as they frown behind a pile of cash.

‘So you’re telling me you type dots and squiggles on a screen, and whoever sees them later hears the thoughts that were in your head when you wrote them?’

‘Sorry, but it’ll never work,’ they grumble. ‘And for that reason, I’m out.’
 

Time travel

Just think about it. To write anything is to try to convey thoughts between two people when only one of them is present. It even involves a degree of time travel.

It’s like a conversation in which either person must remain silent for hours or days before taking their turn to speak. (Psychologists call this asynchronous communication.)

And this is as true for a lowly live chat message as for a vital safety instruction that could save countless lives.

Little wonder most of us struggle to pull it off.
 

Fraught with danger

To achieve the miracle of writing that works, we have to imagine that the other person is with us. And this involves more than a little guesswork.

Without the luxuries of tone and facial expressions to help us interpret other people’s words, we’re bound to stumble occasionally.

Humour and sarcasm, for example, are both fraught with danger when we’re sending someone a direct message, as they’re so easy to misinterpret.

While we might solve this with the odd emoji in a text, these are unlikely to increase our chances in a bid for a multimillion-pound contract.
 

Telepathy

The consequences of falling short in this attempt at text-based telepathy can prove very costly.

The first head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, once wrote ‘watch the borders’ on a report he’d been given.

This sent his staff scurrying to check security on the USA’s frontiers with Canada and Mexico, as no-one felt brave enough to question his orders. (He was famously short tempered.)

It was only several days later that they realised Hoover had merely been commenting on the lack of white space in the document itself, since he liked to scribble his comments in the margins. (The science writer David Robson recounts the story in his excellent book The Laws of Connection.)
 

No choice

The trouble is that we’ve no choice.

When we’re sat at our desk, typing away in isolation, we can only imagine how our words might land with the person who will eventually read them.

We won’t see the nod at one sentence that tells us they agree so far.

We won’t see the frown that says we should back up a bit or clarify what we’re saying.

We’ll hear none of the ‘hmms’ and ‘ahhs’ that we rely on in a spoken conversation to help us steer it to a successful outcome.
 

Oiled wheels

There’s even evidence that oxytocin – the hormone that normally helps oil the wheels of all human interaction – is released when we hear a human voice. But it’s not released when we read the same words.

So it’s not surprising that our messages sometimes backfire or that our proposals fail to land.

Even less so that the words we type in solitude often don’t connect with our reader.

When it’s just us, a keyboard and a screen, it’s a wonder that writing ever works at all.

A miracle in three steps

We take writing in the workplace for granted. We treat it as a basic skill; something we should just be able to do.

But it goes wrong all the time.

Workplace cooperation relies on good communication. So if you want to change your results, here are three ways to change your writing.
 

1. Ditch the Documentese

Documentese is the strange, arcane language that clogs the arteries of any organisation, slowing the flow of good ideas. (Like when we write ‘leverage our knowledge assets’ instead of ‘use what we know’.) Use this guide to make your documents more readable.
 

2. Step into the reader’s shoes

When faced with a deadline, we often just want to get the damn thing written. And this can make us lose sight of the person who will read it.

I explained how to refocus on the reader’s needs in this previous issue, which included a downloadable reader-profile questionnaire.
 

3. Speak to someone

When possible, jumping on a quick call to talk about your document with the reader will dramatically improve its chances of success.

Even just chatting to a colleague about it can help clarify your thoughts.

Don’t forget that we evolved to speak and listen, not to read and write.
 

Here to help

And remember that our experts are always here to help you directly through tailored training and coaching. All you need to do is ask.

Image credit: Reshetnikov_art / Shutterstock

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Author: Rob Ashton

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Rob Ashton is the founder of Emphasis and posts mainly about writing and the brain – a topic he's been researching for seven years. You can read more of his work in Writing Matters – our weekly bulletin of career-building writing advice backed by science.