5 Strategies

Communicating in professional situations demands your attention to ensure you make and leave the kind of reputation you want. Building on the foundations, these communication strategies and techniques equip you with tools to create communications and respond to situations objectively and with an audience focus.

Direct and Indirect Strategies

These strategies refer to where you deliver “news” in your communication. You decide where to place that news based on how you think your audience will respond to the information. Most frequently used for person-to-person writing, these two organization methods are valuable to remember for both written and oral communications.

After completing the audience analysis, you should have a good idea how your audience will receive your information. If you anticipate a positive reception, the news is delivered up front and the background material or reasons follow it. If, however, you believe the audience will not respond positively to the news, then it is best to shift your purpose and make sure to provide the reasons prior to delivering what can be termed “bad news”.

As the communicator, it is your responsibility to manage the reception of the information and deciding when and how to deliver the news can shift how an audience receives it. When you provide the reasons before the main point you are buffering the news, or action. It allows you to seek agreement from the audience on smaller points to help explain the course of action that follows.

Think of a time when you asked someone for a favour when you weren’t sure the answer would be “yes”. You probably put the reasons before the request: you used the indirect strategy.

There are many times when delivering what may be perceived as “bad news” needs to be done before the explanations and buffer. If there is no negative response anticipated, if there is reason to believe the audience already knows the news is coming, or any other reason for the emotional response being reduced.

The placement of the information is always dependent upon how you think the audience will respond.

Comparison Strategies

Comparing two or more items is something we do regularly when shopping, choosing clothing, or activities. In writing, there are two specific ways of handling comparisons to make it easier to ensure equitable comparisons and clear information.

It is essential that in any comparison, the items selected can truly be compared and the criteria for evaluating them is equal to each. For example, when evaluating what house pet to select, comparing a dog and a dolphin is not a valid comparison as a dolphin doesn’t really qualify as a house pet. When selecting criteria for the evaluation, those points need to be equally valid to the item. Evaluating a laptop and desktop computer on portability is not treating the items for comparison equally: desktop computers are designed to be set up in one location while laptop computers are designed to be taken where you go.

When conducting a comparison make sure you are clear on the items you are evaluating and the criteria you are using. Be specific about the end goal for the evaluation as well.

The Block method focuses on the items to be evaluated and then speaks to the criteria. The Point-by-Point method focuses on the criteria used to evaluate and then deals with each item in the discussion.

For example, if we were to evaluate cell phones as the items, Apple 10 cell phone and Samsung S11, we could select camera, storage, battery life, and cost as criteria. These are similar items with similar claims. We need a new cell phone and these are the criteria most important to us. In fact, we order them from most important to least: cost, camera, battery, and storage.

The Block method would involve an introduction as to the purpose of the evaluation, outline the criteria used, and develop the information in paragraph form. The first body paragraph would discuss the Apple 10 cell phone in terms of cost, camera, battery, and storage. The next body paragraph would discuss the Samsung S11 in terms of cost, camera, battery, and storage. The conclusion recommends a purchase based on the external criteria established.

The Point-by-Point comparison introduces the topic and purpose though places the information with the criteria being most important elements – cost, camera, battery, and storage and the brands to be evaluated as secondary. Development of the body paragraphs starts with the criteria then a discussion of each item in that criteria paragraph.

Write for the Audience

It is also important to make sure your writing is easy for the audience to understand. While that may not always seem simple to calculate, there are tools to help you assess your writing in terms of how much education would be necessary for a person to read and understand.

FOG indexes or readability scales provide the writer a way to measure the readability of a piece of writing: how many years of education a reader would need to comprehend the writing. In the 1940s, American Rudolph Flesch consulted with the Associated Press on ways to increase readability of the newspapers. He developed the Flesch Reading Ease system that provided a percentage score: the higher the score, the lower the reading grade level needed. By the 1970s, the US Navy adapted the Flesch process and adopted the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level reading score. The Navy evaluates training manuals with the system prior to distribution to determine how readable the manuals are [1]. Both these systems use the number of words in a sentence and the number of words with three syllables or more. Both these systems appear in the Word program as part of the Spelling and Grammar check, under Readability Statistics.

To read and understand the paragraph above, you need at least 11 years of education.

Robert Gunning created a simpler readability scale in the 1950s that is frequently used today. Gunning’s FOG Index requires 100 consecutive words from a passage. The next step is to count the number of sentences (a mid-sentence ending of the 100 words counts as one) and divide 100 by the number of sentences. This provides you with the average words per sentence (AWS). The next step is to count the number of hard words (those with three syllables or more, not including proper nouns or three-syllable words created by added ed, ing, es) in the 100 words passage. Add the average words per sentences to the total number of hard words and then multiple that number by .4 to determine the Gunning FOG score [2].

The Gunning FOG score on the above passage is 9.84 years of education. The Flesch-Kincaid scale is 9.86.

These readability scores help you analyze your writing to meet the anticipated level of your reader or audience. More important is that it provides you with specific ways to write for your audience. Longer, more complicated sentence structures with more hard -syllable words results in a writing that requires more education years in order to understand. Shorter sentences with fewer hard-syllable words ensures a lower FOG index and writing that requires fewer years of education to understand.

You write naturally at your own education level. If in doubt about the readability level of your audience, be clear and simple.

Other factors can influence the ability of the reader to understand writing. External noise, internal distractions, and reading in a language that is not your first can also make understanding more difficult. Simpler text makes it easier to understand.

Active versus Passive

Active writing has the subject of the sentence doing the action. It is clear, specific, and to the point.

Kim submitted the essay on time.

Passive writing allows the writer to remove the person or thing doing (or not doing) the action and removes any potential blame. The action is done to the subject. Frequently, the past tense is used when writing in the passive form.

The essay was submitted on time.

Both are valid: the writer chooses which is most appropriate for the context and purpose. In particular, when the audience may have a negative response to the communication, it is sometimes necessary to use the passive construction.

Active: We reject your application for credit.

Passive: Your application for credit cannot be approved at this time.

If you aren’t sure if you wrote in the passive or active, first find the action (verb) of the sentence, then determine if the subject is doing the action (Active) or if the action being done to the subject (Passive).

You View

To write for the audience also means putting the reader or audience in the center.

Instead of “I like your shirt,” which is really about what the speaker likes, use the You View and a compliment becomes relevant to the person you are speaking to: “Your shirt looks fantastic”.

It can be as simple as checking how many times you refer to yourself (I, me, mine, my) compared to “you”. The more you focus on your audience, the more your audience will stay focused on your writing.

Parallel Structure

You may not know how a list is wrong, but it will feel ‘off’.  When creating a list of two or more things, you write the list using the same grammatical structure or form for each item.   If you have a list of nouns, keep them all nouns: lions, and tigers, and bears.  You lose parallel structure by adding adjectives for only one of the items: lions, and stripey tigers, and bears.  If you are going to describe one, describe all: fluffy lions, stripey tigers, and lumpy bears.

You use parallel structure to make the reading easier for your audience.  It keeps your writing coherent and unified.

Tone

Tone in writing refers to the writer’s attitude to the subject and reader, and your word choice and sentence structure conveys it. When there are several consecutive short sentences together, the writer can sound angry. Using words the audience may be unfamiliar with makes the writer sound pretentious and worse, can make the meaning unclear.