How Do You Look In Cyberspace?

So much has been said and written about the Digital Revolution and how the Internet, email, social networking and YouTube.com have changed how we communicate. It’s fast and portable. It’s also very visible. Once you post, tweet or email, your message can be sent around the world. Image is more dependent on the written word than ever before. Just think about it. While we used to spend much more time communicating face-to-face and over the telephone, we are now sending emails, posting on Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites. Websites, blogs, web marketing, webinars, web-based training—all depend on written words, and lots of them.

A person’s personality or image used to be judged mainly in person. Now it is how you look in the various online media. How well you can communicate in writing for the most part is how the world perceives you. Your grasp of the language, sentence structure, grammar, spelling--all those pesky things you hated in grammar school--are more important than ever.

If you can’t tell a pronoun from a preposition, here are some ways you can improve your written communications skills:

1. Take a writing course. Many colleges, universities and technical schools offer creative and business writing courses. You can also take courses online. It may seem like a boring way to spend your free time, but learning how to write well is something you can use every day in every aspect of your life.
2. Ask for an editor. I had a colleague who admitted to be a terrible writer and speller. He was a senior manager but his emails read like a first-grader. It almost cost him his job. After a few fractured emails, I offered and he accepted my help as an informal editor. He sent his emails to me, and I put them in proper English. I also gave him feedback so he could improve over time.
3. Buy a Style Guide. “The Elements of Style,” by Strunk and White, is the classic for all writers and editors. This has everything you need to know about where to put the quotation marks (inside or outside the period at the end of a sentence) and the proper use of prepositions, adverbs and adjectives. It’s a small book that packs a big return. There are also style books used by professional writers, such as the Associated Press and Chicago Stylebooks. These give details on how to write for newspapers and other publications.
4. Write. Nothing improves your writing than practice.
5. Self-edit. Save communications as a draft, let them sit and then revisit with a fresh eye. Run them through spell check, but remember—in order to choose the right word, you have to have some idea of how to spell it. Which brings me to the next suggestion.
6. Buy a dictionary or use the online version. I find that a hard copy on my desk is much easier.
7. Read good writing. Classic literature or magazine articles from major publications have gone through rounds of editing and are good examples of how to write well.

 

Mary Nestor-Harper, SPHR, is a consultant, blogger, motivational speaker and freelance writer for communicationsjobs.net. Based in Savannah, GA, her work has appeared in Training magazine, Training & Development magazine, Supervision, BiS Magazine and The Savannah Morning News. When she’s not writing, she enjoys singing Alto II with the Savannah Philharmonic Chorus and helping clients discover what they love and spend their life on it. You can read more of her blogs at communicationsjobsblog.com and view additional job postings on Nexxt.