Communicado: Business Communications Blog

My colleague Robert Good recently wrote about creating effective report introductions - a difficult task at the best of times. Another area that can fall into the difficult category is report writing headings. There are quite a few questions about this from writers. I've briefly answered the most frequently-asked below:

In the last of his introductory blog posts giving speed reading tips, Alex our Speed Reading Coach, explains how to measure your reading speed and what the results mean. Over to you, Alex...

In the second of his posts introducing speed reading tips, Alex Garcez our Speed Reading Coach explains the differences between using the left side of the brain and the right side when you are reading. Alex, over to you...

Today, we're delighted to introduce you to our guest blogger Alex Garcez, aka The Speed Reading Coach. Over to you Alex...

You know already that when I'm banging on about better business writing, I focus relentlessly on the needs of the audience. I do this because I know that clearly written, well-structured content improves comprehension and enables audiences to read content more quickly and efficiently. In my ideal world, all content would be clearly written and well-structured. In the real world, of course, it rarely is.

So one of the things frequently on my mind is what to do when you are a reader (rather than a writer) and you are faced with a mass of poorly written unstructured content (or indeed a mass of well-written but poorly structured content) and you have no choice but to wade through it.

Speed reading is a solution that's been floating around on the edge of my universe for some time, but if I'm honest I've always been a little sceptical.  Could it really work? Anyway, a few months ago, I finally decided to take the plunge and give it go - and I'm now convinced it does work.

My guide on this recent journey has been Alex Garcez, also known as the Speed Reading Coach.

Here at Pacific Blue, we've decided to team up with Alex and over the next few weeks he will be a guest blogger, bringing us some background information about speed reading and providing a series of speed reading tips to introduce you to his proven techniques.

When you stop to think about it, the benefits of being able to read faster are blindingly obvious. You can look at it two ways. Either you could take the view that reading faster lets you get your reading done more efficiently and frees you up to do more of the things you want to do. Or you could take the view that reading faster enables you to absorb more knowledge and expertise than you are currently able to.

Interestingly, Alex tells me that a joint study by the US Department of Labor and Yahoo has identified a link between the number of business books people read and their relative earning power. The study concluded that people who read a minimum of 7 business books a year earn around 2.3 times more than those who just read one.

Whatever your motivation for wanting to read faster, it seems to me it's a bit of a no-brainer. So watch out as Alex reveals some of his speed reading tips over the coming weeks.

And if you can't wait, we are now running speed reading courses with Alex.

• carry out an audience analysis
• give serious consideration to your content and how it should be organised
• see the document's creation as an important and time-consuming task (of course, this last point can be both good and bad)

Finally, viewed from the audience's perspective, would you sign off an important business case proposed only by email? Unlikely, I think.

So next time you are faced with the task of writing a report or document and you hear Bette Midler's question echoing in your head, remember the alternative: dysfunctional, email hell.

Yes, you did read that title correctly. And in case you think I've lost my marbles, I promise you I haven't! Ask anyone who has worked with me. If there's some complex document or report writing to be done, my wall gets covered with brightly coloured post-it notes.

'Why?' is a question you may well be asking? In previous posts, I've mentioned some of the benefits of and techniques for writing in a more structured way.

Using post-it notes is really about taking a structured approach to writing to the next level - the document level.

You see, each post-it note I use represents a chunk or module of content. I have a heading for each module written on the post-it note, so I know the approximate content it represents. I also use larger post-it notes to define topics (groups of related modules) and a different size again to define groups of related topics. These bigger sized notes also have headings written on them. I also find it useful to have different coloured post-its for each of these different levels of content.

Perhaps you are beginning to see that this seeming madness isn't quite so mad after all. If you are still bemused, let me explain a bit more. Using post-it notes allows me to experiment with a variety of structures and sequences for my content. I can move them around on my wall and consider several options for the structure and sequence before I've written a word. In other words, I get a birds-eye view of the content and different ways of organising it without being bogged down in the detail.

It's also a great way of getting some instant reviews or feedback from colleagues. Give them a first draft document with a request to review the structure and they have to read the whole thing before they can make an informed judgment. Get them to take a look at your post-it note outline on the spot, talk them through it briefly and they can give you some feedback in a matter of minutes.

Once I'm happy with an outline, I can easily capture the structure in a Word document and start filling in the detail. And I can write the content in any order I like. If I'm waiting for content for particular modules or topics from someone else, I can still go ahead and write the parts of the document where I have content already.

So next time you visit the stationery cupboard choose a few different sized post-it notes in different colours. Your colleagues may raise their eyebrows, but you can be confident you'll be raising your report writing game.

Well, you may have noticed we’ve been absent from publishing in the blogosphere for a couple of months; but not absent from monitoring its goings on.

In case you aren’t aware, my colleague Robert Good has been doing a grand job keeping our Business Communications Hub ticking over in recent weeks.

I was amused by a recent post he linked to commenting on the thoughts of Britain’s luvy-in-chief, Stephen Fry in one of his podcasts.

Apparently, business report writing certainly shouldn’t be focusing on grammar and punctuation; and business writers should be trying to embrace the richness of the English language because, in his view, business writing has squeezed all life out of the language.

Here’s the problem. Stephen is hugely talented, with an Oxbridge education. He’s a man who makes his living out of embracing the richness of the language. He loves the language, is totally confident in his command of it and makes it work beautifully to his advantage.

People with this kind of talent are first, fairly rare and second, prone to forget that not everyone shares their talent for linguistic playfulness and curiosity.

The term blended learning seems to have been around for ever. It's one of those concepts that appears highly attractive and it's something that various  people and organisations have flirted with on and off for a long time, but to me, it never really seems to have taken hold. (By the way, I'd love to be proved wrong on this one - so if you are a person or organisation seriously using blended learning, I'd love to hear about it).

Also, I suspect it's one of those terms  that means different things to different people. For what it's worth, I've always thought of it as a way of bringing together e-learning and classroom training.

Perhaps part of the problem with my version of blended learning is that it aims to bring together two very different approaches to learning. Maybe it's too much to expect people with a definite preference for either e-learning or classroom training to suddenly be okay with learning from both approaches.