Communicado: Business Communications Blog

If you've met me (while attending one of our courses, for example),  you might have heard me talk about my time working overseas as a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teacher.

This was in a slightly less politically correct age. Now, there's probably a law against what I'm about to describe, but in those days most TEFL staff rooms had a dog-eared piece of paper tacked to the wall for teachers to record 'howlers'.  'Howlers' were instances of a moment in class when one of your students would make a mistake and unknowingly say something rude or ridiculous. What they said would want to make you laugh out loud - hence the name, 'howler'.

Most of these 'howlers' tended to be rude rather than ridiculous, and of the few I can still remember, they are far too risque to repeat to high-minded Communicado blog readers!

I've recently been reminded of these 'howlers' for a couple of reasons. A few days ago I noticed a post on our Business Communications Hub from Lynn Gartner Johnson's Business Writing Blog which was talking about correcting writing errors made by non-native speakers.  We've also recently teamed-up with a company called Video Teachers to offer live, online language learning programmes. So the whole question of applying language teaching methodologies (of which error-correction is a major element) has also been on my mind.

My reason for writing this post is to add a bit more to answer the question posed by Lynn on her blog. Namely,  should we correct the language mistakes of non-native speakers?

In the confines of the language-learning classroom (either real or virtual), correcting errors is, of course, one of the things a teacher is required to do. So for a diligent TEFL teacher, the question is not do you correct, but how much do you correct. Some students are so error prone that if you stopped to correct every mistake, the poor devils would never utter a complete sentence without your intervention. So it's all a matter of balancing the need to instill accuracy against the desire to encourage fluency.

But what about outside a structured language learning environment? Should you correct?  

Lynn cites one of her course delegates as saying he wished someone had corrected a recurring mistake of his long ago. He's clearly a language learner who cares about being accurate, and is grateful to you for pointing out his error.  However, there are language learners who just love to talk (or write), get  irritated at being corrected and in the end just burble on regardless. Sure, if pressed, they pay lip-service to the need for accuracy but basically they are not that bothered. Over time, these learners  rarely improve significantly. They are just happy to communicate - however inaccurately.

So personally, I don't think there's a clear cut answer to Lynn's question. Some people will be eternally grateful for your corrections, some will be irritated, some just won't care! Take your pick.

However, having said all that, once you've been trained as a TEFL teacher, there's a small part of you that never stops being aTEFL teacher. And unfortunately, I'm living proof -  because I have to confess that from time-to-time, I do find myself going into TEFL teacher correction (or teach) mode without even thinking about it.

Sometimes in restaurants or shops, (much to the embarrassment of some of my friends) if there's a bit of communication difficulty with a member of staff with minimal English, I sometimes just can't help myself - or at least that's my story!

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.

If you buy into the idea of writing reports in a more modular way  – and I hope you will, there are many, many advantages to be gained from this approach. Here are just a few:

Increased readability
In a previous post, I mentioned how your readers will thank you if you start writing in shorter sentences. The same is true for writing reports in modular units or paragraphs. These shorter, better focused units are a pleasure for your audiences. You are only asking them to think about and process one idea at a time.

Going back a few years, Jakob Nielsen did some tests around this. He discovered that overall it was possible to increase readers’ ability to quickly skim read and comprehend a piece of text by a staggering 125%!

Increased ‘finadability’
I use ‘findability’ because if I use the word ‘accessibility’, people think I’m referring to issues for readers with some kind of disability. Increasing accessibility for such an audience is, of course,  a no brainer. However, we seem to forget that making it easier for everyone to find a small piece of text within a bigger whole is also a no brainer.

How often have you spent ages wading through a long report trying to find a vital paragraph buried somewhere in the middle of  page 176! As I suggested previously, dramatically increasing your use of meaningful headings reduces this kind of audience frustration to a minimum.

Keeps you on track
The biggest danger for any writer of pretty much anything is that they will lose the plot part way through; or get carried away and provide too much detail; or get bored and not provide enough detail for their intended  audience.

There’s no better way to keep your report writing on track and avoid all the dangers just listed by writing short modular units. If you are thinking (and planning) modular the whole way through the writing process, it’s much harder  to screw up.

Structuring and organising content is easier
If you are creating an outline structure using modular units of content, it makes the overall planning and structuring much easier.  It also makes experimentation with and revision of that structure much easier, too.  

This might sound counter-intuitive. After all, most writing processes teach a top-down approach. But if you start with a bunch of smaller units (identified through good audience analysis) it’s actually easier to build these smaller units into bigger wholes rather than the other way around. You’ll almost certainly get a more audience-focused result, too. Top-down structures are much more likely to be writer-focused.

Writing with colleagues is easier to manage
You may be one of the many people working with colleagues in a professional report writing capacity. If so, you are probably producing relatively long, complex pieces of content. This can often be a frustrating process for all parties concerned. How do you pull together the different bits of content that each person has written?

First of all, planning and writing in modular units makes it much easier to assign specific, targeted content to specific people.  Second, pulling together those units into a meaningful sequence is also much easier . Finally, this approach provides more flexibility to experiment with alternative structures.

 

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