+44 (0)1273 732 888
Blog
Why the way we write is such a touchy topic
Author : Rob Ashton
Posted : 30 / 07 / 24
Share this:
Telling someone they need help with their writing rarely lands well.
You may be right. They may even agree with you. But they’ll still probably feel at least a little wounded if you point it out.
The trouble is that, deep down, we think writing is something we should be able to just do – like dressing ourselves or walking.
Yet when we don’t get the response to a message or document that we were hoping for, the problem often lies with how we wrote it.
Writing is a far more complex skill than most of us realise.
Unlike speaking and listening, reading and writing are not natural processes.
We’re born with the ability to communicate using our voices – just ask any new parent how hard it is to ignore their crying baby.
And our brains come pre-configured to learn our first language simply by listening to other people speak. It’s even how we pick up the fundamentals of grammar.
(Like when toddlers say ‘thinked’ or ‘seed’ instead of ‘thought’ or ‘saw’. They’ve worked out that adding ‘d’ on to a verb is how we usually form the past tense in English.)
Reading, however, isn’t quite so simple.
I could stare at Hebrew or Arabic for years and still not have the faintest idea what it meant. I’d only be able to understand it if someone carefully explained it to me.
In fact, learning to read and write even in our first language is incredibly complex. It involves completely rewiring the brain.
It means joining together neurological structures that we’d naturally use for other things, like connecting our visual system to our hearing system. (We often ‘hear’ words in our heads before we write them.)
Little wonder then that it takes 10 to 12 years to do it.
But reading is still an imperfect process, even in adults. So there’s usually a higher risk of misunderstandings when we’re writing to someone than if we’re speaking to them.
And that’s if they even read it at all – written communications are far easier to ignore than people who are speaking to us directly.
This is no trivial issue.
In the Digital Age, most communication relies on writing, even if we don’t think of it that way. Live chat, texting and direct messaging all involve typing words on a screen – writing, in other words.
Internal comms systems such as Teams Chat or Slack are mainly text-based too. And most organisations rely heavily on written reports and proposals when making key decisions.
In fact, often the only way to influence anyone above your immediate line manager is to write a document that they’ll (hopefully) read.
So the more you think about it, the more you see that it’s writing all the way. It’s hard to think of another professional skill that’s so central to everything we do.
Most writing can be improved if you know how.
And there are lots of ways to do it, as we’ve seen over the last few weeks. They range from removing pointlessly complex words and phrases (which I call Documentese) to changing the way we describe data.
All are based on how our brains really process written information. (And we can handle a lot less of that than we realise, as I explained recently.)
You’ll also find a full range of (free) practical guides to writing all types of document on our Knowledge Hub.
Image credit: Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock
Advice and tips (149)
Grammar (61)
Choose your words wisely (47)
Plain English (25)
Psychology and linguistics (24)
Uncategorised (21)
Language abuse (21)
60-second fix (21)
Reader-centred writing (16)
Punctuation (15)
Online and social media (15)
Technology (15)
News from Emphasis (13)
Spellings (13)
Jargon (12)
Presentations and speeches (11)
Report writing (10)
International issues (10)
Podcast (10)
Design and formatting (9)
Technical writing (9)
Courses for companies (8)
Letters and CVs (8)
Graduates (6)
Quizzes (6)
Proofreading (6)
Customer relations (6)
Numbers and finance (6)
Videos (5)
Literacy and education (5)
Development of English (4)
Legal writing (4)
Twitter (4)
Writing news stories (4)
Style guide (4)
Wordplay (4)
Advertising (4)
Email (3)
MCA (3)
Partners (3)
PDF downloads (2)
Pitches and proposals (2)
Team leaders and managers (2)
Conferences and exhibitions (2)
Editing (2)
FAQ (2)
Internal communication (1)
Artificial intelligence (1)
Policies and procedures (1)
Learning and development (1)
webinars (1)
Book reviews (1)
Writing for media (1)
Tutorial (1)
More topics