Business Writing Skills Can Bring Out The Thinker In Us, and Presentation Skills Should Be Muted In Volume

Writing: An Opportunity, Not A Chore

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." Joan Didion, author

  The lady's right on the money. I drive the point home in all my business communication (writing skills and presentation skills) training: Writing is thinking. Don't view it as a frustrating technical exercise in grammar, a series of hurdles to trip over as you dump your jumbled thoughts on a blank legal pad or screen, hoping that they'll eventually come together in some loose confederation.

  Writing allows you to think -- really think over time -- about what you know and what you might need to find out before you put your thoughts in some logical order. Please indulge me as I offer an example close to home:

  I have a 19-year-old son named Will. He's a promising sophomore baseball pitcher at a fine public liberal arts college in Maine. (Fortunately, he's adopted. Had be been our biological child, he'd probably be third-string Chess Club.) Will is a decent student -- nothing exceptional, but shrewd enough to use the English language in ways that satisfy his professors.

  When he was in high school, we used to talk back and forth about his pitching tactics, which I found riveting because baseball is far and away my favorite sport. But talk is usually spontaneous and anecdotal, and doesn't always frame itself into a context that takes in precedents and projects future behavior.

  Now our contact is mostly by email, which turns Will into a practical (non-academic) writer who knows that the usual abbreviated electronic lingo young people pass back and forth won't work for someone of my generation. So now when I ask him how baseball practice is going, he has to think, which led last spring to the best "conversation" we've ever had about pitching. Here's what he wrote after I inquired about a practice session:

  "I was receiving a lot of advice and help from older guys, so I needed to filter the stuff that was going to help me and the stuff I could fix another time...I just kept the fastball knee-high, outside corner, which has got me here. I have also gained enough confidence to throw inside...I messed around with some grips, so now I have a tailing fastball and a running fastball, sort of like a cutter/forkball...My changeup sucked yesterday...I need to work on the grip and [get] more practice spotting it.

   "So to answer your question, the last guys I started with curves or outside or inside fastballs. Then worked a harder fastball up in the zone or maybe another curve outside. Then I would just blow one by or maybe throw a deuce [curve] that would fall in for a strike. They were all strike three-looking, so they watched the fastball or then watched the curve."

  Never before in the six or seven years he's been pitching competitively has Will put so much thought into any discussion we've had on mound tactics -- itself a form of on-the-spot analysis matched in sports only by golf when it comes to creative judgments. (Again, the crucial element is having the time.) The writing challenge allowed him to put it all together and think about where he is and where he wants to be.

  Email does the same for all of us. It turns us into writers, an unmatched opportunity to show just how smart we really are.

Stop Yelling At Me

  That's right. I'm not looking to buy a used car at unbelievable rock-bottom prices or send in $19.95 for an amazing gadget that'll suck food residue out of the bottom of the dishwasher and double as a self-administered dental hygiene device. Shouting may work (it must work; else why would they keep doing it?) for car pitch men or guys with British accents hawking the latest techno-mop on cable TV, but that doesn't mean you have to yell.

  No, when it comes to presentation or public speaking skills, what I teach in seminars is straightforward: Be yourself.

  I recently sat through a breakfast meeting presentation by a renowned local motivational speaker who irritated the stuffing out of me. So excited was he about his secrets of small business success that his voice quickly turned into a hoarse rant well beyond the acoustical limits of a medium-size church hall.

  It didn't stop there. As he turned to and from a flip chart in a frenzied rush, he couldn't keep his hands from jerking up in tandem with every point he made. Inside 10 minutes, he was reaching for a handkerchief to wipe perspiration from his face on what was a cool late-summer morning.

  As you may have guessed, I was distracted and lost track of his message. The gestures, the pace, the visible results of exertion, they all kept me from listening closely to what were probably valuable lessons about management.

 (By the way, I do give him credit for using the flip chart. Had he throttled back on his tone and gestures and kept eye contact around the room, we would have followed him with eyes and ears as he turned to the flip chart to make key points. That's a far cry from PowerPoint, where the lights go down, eye contact fades into the gloom and the speaker stands there, transfixed by the need to keep turning away from us and reading from the huge, domineering screen.)

  The key, again, is to be yourself. Not too long ago, I guided a VA hospital CEO in the Midwest through a videotaped "60 Minutes"-type interview, with a few "gotcha" questions thrown in for good measure. Being a quiet, almost bashful professional, she found that she could relax and speak in a normal tone of voice that projected self-assurance and competence. The result pleased her and she came to accept and control her natural nervousness.