Last month I had the pleasure of taking our newest course, Freewriting for Business, on its maiden voyage. I designed the course with this principle to guide me: by the end of the two days, I wanted participants to see how different writing could be if they relax into it, how enjoyable, delightful, even therapeutic. It didn’t have to be the strangled and strangling experience some people fight against.

Attending the course were six of the most open-minded, open-hearted participants a facilitator could hope for, and I watched them blossom as they progressed through short, playful exercises that I think of as the equivalent of scales on an instrument. They built stories collaboratively, tried ‘automatic’ writing, and crafted postcard stories from groups of ten words. We analyzed characters from classic literature to cultivate creative empathy, a skill used by fiction writers that one participant said would help her be ‘more compassionate’ when writing at work. I did put them through their paces—they hand-wrote pages and pages over the two days—but there was laughter, revelation and loosening up. We started to sound like an orchestra getting ready to play.

I was gratified to learn that they did feel differently toward writing by the end of the two days. They were excited about writing again, their composition muscles limber and ready for action. They felt that writing was something they could do, something that they might even enjoy.

Music to my ears.

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” –  George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill. “Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second … if there is one.” –  Winston Churchill, in response.

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.”
“That depends, Sir,” said Disraeli ,  ”whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”

“He had delusions of adequacy.” –  Walter Kerr

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” –  Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”  Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” –  William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” –  Moses Hadas

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” –  Mark Twain

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.”     -  Oscar Wilde

“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” –  Stephen Bishop

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” –  John Bright

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.”     -  Irvin S. Cobb

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.”     -  Samuel Johnson

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” –  Paul Keating

“In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.” –   Charles, Count Talleyrand

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” –  Forrest Tucker

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”  –  Mark Twain

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”    -  Oscar Wilde

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” –  Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” –   Billy Wilder

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”  Groucho Marx

If you’ve resolved to improve your writing this year, the best place to start might be by strengthening your will power.

That was my resolution this year and even with the baby steps I’ve taken, I’m enjoying all kinds of benefits.

I exercise great willpower in some areas, but when I have to deliver on an important project or meet a deadline (which is almost always) I ignore everything else in my life. I let the clothes accumulate on the chair in my bedroom, papers pile up on my desk, and I ignore household chores that need to be done. I tell myself I’m temporarily tuning out all the little stuff in my life to help me focus on the big stuff. But in the back of my mind I feel anxious when I look at the growing piles and lists I know I have to clean up. And when something unexpected occurs, I get very stressed.

Willpower, it turns out, is a muscle. We fatigue it with overuse, and we use it all sorts of ways every day: to make decisions, to control emotions, thoughts and impulses, and to perform at a high level. Like any muscle, willpower can be strengthened. Who knew?

The secret is to procrastinate less and exercise a low but constant level of self-control. This lets you cope better when something unexpected happens that requires a great deal of willpower. Makes sense, right? It’s easier to reach the peak when you’re already halfway up. And having greater control over your life means you can focus fully on any task without getting anxious about stuff that’s piling up around you, because it isn’t piling up. Productivity experts promise you can have a mind like water. I want that.

I decided to start small—in my bedroom. It’s wasn’t so messy, really, but I made a point of never wasting a trip. Whenever I walk from the bed to the bathroom, I take the hair clips with me and put them in their place. Trips past the chair to the closet? Pick up away any clothes on the way. It only takes a tiny amount of discipline at a time and the payback is huge: my room is a peaceful oasis. Now I’m working on my office—I am training myself to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done technique. While my system is not perfect yet, I now have a clean desk and don’t worry about important things slipping through the cracks. My mind is clear and I’m finding it easier to be fully present.

When it comes to writing, though I never procrastinate. probably because I enjoy it and starting early is a habit. But I know lots of people do procrastinate. Leaving your writing until the last minute makes it a painful experience. As the deadline approaches, your anxiety grows, you don’t have enough time to write well, and you erode your self-confidence. The solution is easy: start early and schedule baby steps along the way. Way less pain and a way better result. Try this method for approaching writing projects, especially the big important ones:

1. Clarify your purpose. What is the end result you want?
2. Quickly jot down what you already know or need to convey.
3. Gather the information you need to fill in any gaps and make an outline.
4. Create a rough first draft.
5. Allow time for the draft to cool.
6. Revise at least twice—once for structure and overall strategy.
7. Revise again for style, grammar, mechanics.

You’ll find the whole experience less daunting. Even better, your writing will be good—you’ll get what you want, you’ll impress your readers and your confidence will grow. So do yourself a favour: resolve to start early, and take small, manageable steps. Work that muscle!

Managers play a huge part in the successful transfer of learning. Recently a manager who cares deeply about helping her staff improve their writing skills asked us for ways she can help. Here are some suggestions:

One minute essay. Ask your staff to write a one minute essay describing the main points learned in the course. Writing helps consolidate key points and clarify what you learned.

Ask for the checklists. We provide job aids designed to help writers assess their own drafts and give structured, pointed feedback to their colleagues. It’s also a great coaching tool for managers. Your staff will be able to explain how to use them.

Ask to see their personal action plans. In every course we give, learners have an opportunity to review what they are learning and compile a list of the strategies they want to use in their personal practice. Ask to see this list. It will be a long list, so have your staff articulate three key learning objectives and watch for their progress.

Reinforce the good. Give praise when it’s deserved. Positive feedback is a great confidence builder and it’s good to remember that we can learn as much from hearing about what we’re doing right as from what we’re doing wrong.

Have them teach you something. The best way to learn something really well is to teach it to someone. Ask your staff to explain two or three of the key lessons they learned.

Share really good work. Show your commitment to positive change by trumpeting successes. If someone on your team writes a great email, share it with the team. People love praise. It will make everyone work harder and will set a benchmark for what you’re looking for. It also shows you are serious about improvement.

Give feedback with sensitivity. We know our writing reveals a lot about us, so when you give feedback do it carefully. Point out the positives first, then the problems. When you give your feedback, remember that if a document needs to be restructured or rewritten, if the content is wrong, there’s no point in correcting grammar and punctuation. That’s wasting everyone’s time.

Model great writing yourself. Make sure you are modeling a plain, warm, professional, style yourself. Avoid cliches, the gratuitous use of big words and a wordy style. Instead, use plain language. Not sure what that entails? Ask your staff. They’ll be able to tell you.

Collective nouns are words that are singular in form but refer to a group of people, things or animals.

For instance, we can refer to one sheep or two sheep, but if we have a lot of sheep we refer to the multitude as a flock of sheep. Flock is a collective noun.

Some common collective nouns we see in business writing are board, company, committee, class, corporation, council, department, firm, group, majority, minority, organization, staff, and team. Company names are also treated as collective nouns.

Collective nouns get tricky grammatically because although they represent a group of people, animals or things, we treat them as singular grammatically. At least most the time.

To make things a bit more complicated, Canadian and American grammars treat collective nouns differently from British grammar. Here’s how it works.

The North American Way

1. If the collectivity is acting as a unit where all the members are doing the same thing, treat the collective noun as singular. This is usually the case. So we say The Board of Directors meets on Friday, or The client service team is attending a conference.
2. If the members of the group are acting as individuals, treat the collective noun as a plural. The Board of Directors are coming from all over the country to meet in Winnipeg next month or The committee are signing the contract. We’d also say The team are debating among themselves.

The British Way

1. In Britain, it is more common to pair a collective noun with a plural verb.  “The team have finished the project.” By using the plural verb, the writer stresses the individual members of the team working together to finish the project. Their accomplishment (the project) is collective, and while the emphasis is not on their individual identities, they are at the same time still discrete individuals; the word choice “team have” manages to convey both their collective and discrete identities simultaneously. Pretty subtle, just like that semicolon I just sneaked in.
2. It’s also common in British usage to hear sports broadcasters say things like Madrid are winning the match. In North America, we wouldn’t hear broadcasters say Toronto are taking more shots on net than Montreal.

Practical Advice

If you’re writing to a Canadian or American reader, either use the singular verb. But if you are in doubt or you think the sentence sounds awkward, REWRITE it:

In many cases, it sounds more natural to change the subject to a plural form by adding a word like members:

• The orchestra members are tuning their instruments.
• The cast members have been practising their lines.
• The staff members disagree on the proposal.

Collective Nounds Can be Fun

Here are some wonderful examples of animal collectivities:

Congregation of alligators (or magpies)

Shrewdness of apes

Cloud of bats

Dissimulation of birds

Glaring of cats

Murder of crows

Piteousness of doves

Waddling of ducks

Convocation of eagles

Tower of giraffes

Kettle of hawks (flying in large numbers)

Cackle of hyenas

Plague of insects

Scold of jays

Smack of jellyfish

Exaltation of larks

Barrel of monkeys (I thought this was a game!!)

Parliament of owls

Pandemonium of parrots

Ostentation of peacocks

Murmuration of starlings (fun to say)

Is it true, as Cecil Rhodes said, that “to be born an English-speaker is to win one of the top prizes in life’s lottery”? Do native English speakers have such a huge advantage over non-native English speakers?

You would think we English speakers are lucky, since English has become the lingua franca of the world with the rise of globalism and the internet. English is the common bond that enables a Spanish UN Peacekeeper to communicate with an Indian soldier when the Spaniard speaks no Punjabi and the Indian no Spanish.

But if you listen carefully, you’ll notice that the Spaniard and the Punjabi speak a certain type of English. It’s a simplified form of English—with a  small vocabulary and a simple grammatical structure. It’s been named Globish by Jean-Paul Nerriére, a retired vice president of IBM, who realized that at multi-national meetings non-native English speakers communicated better with each other than they did with native English speakers because they spoke a common language. Nerriére codified this language and describes it on this video.

According to Nerriére, to participate in global business where international meetings are the norm, native English speakers need to make the effort to speak like everyone else. This means they need to

• Use a limited number of words , and  choose plain, simple words
• Keep sentences short and grammatically simple
• Repeat ideas
• Avoid metaphors and colourful expressions
• Avoid negative questions
• Avoid all humour
• Avoid acronyms
• Avoid idioms
• Use gestures and visual aids to reinforce your message

Being a native English-speaker is certainly an advantage, since English has become the lingua franca of the world. But that doesn’t mean you should flaunt your skills to non-native speakers.

Above all, be mindful of your audience. If you are speaking or writing to someone who speaks English as a non-native, remember you have nothing to gain by demonstrating your dexterity with English. Keep things simple and plain and your message will be heard around the world.

Congratulations to R Don for winning this writing contest. The challenge was to rewrite this paragraph:

If experience results seem excessive or aberrant compared to historical information, detailed reports may be ordered so that an analysis of the claim components can be completed. We try to determine what is driving the claims in order to proact to potential problem areas. Component information may be detailed in a table or pie graph.

And here’s the brilliant rewrite:

Do you need more information to understand or analyze discrepancies in claims? We can provide this in tables or pie graph format.

Well done!

English has grown by borrowing new words from other languages. It’s rich, dense and deep and many of the words we use everyday have unexpected sources. Novelist Penelope Lively describes English as “a museum inside our heads.” In Moon Tiger, she writes: “Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. . . . We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.”

Try this quiz to see if you can identify the source of some interesting English words.

I just got back from a Thanksgiving weekend visit to New York and stayed at the historic Algonquin Hotel. It’s most famous for being the place where members of the Algonquin round table met each day for lunch from 1919 to 1929 or so.

Aside from its great location and historic charm, the hotel had other fun features--wall paper that was covered with New Yorker cartoons and quotes and anecdotes on the door of each room. It was fun just prowling the corridors to read the doors and wallpaper. The front desk didn't have a list of the door quotes, but I found a few other good ones for you online. Check out the links to the writers'  bios--this is a pretty interesting group. I especially enjoyed reading about Dorothy Parker. You'll also probably notice that I like her quotes best too:

Robert Sherwood, reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: “They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part.”

George S. Kaufman: Once when asked by a press agent, “How do I get my leading lady’s name into your newspaper?” Kaufman replied, “Shoot her.”

Heywood Broun: "The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins."

Broun: "I doubt whether the world holds for any one a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream."

Broun: "Sports do not build character. They reveal it."

Broun: "The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins."

Robert Benchley: "A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.

Benchley: "I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine."

Benchley: "I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author."

Benchley: "I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry."

Dorothy Parker: “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.”

Parker: "Four be the things I’d have been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt."

Parker: "I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid."

Parker: "Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."

Parker: "The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cheque enclosed."

Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Parker:

"I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host."

Parker: "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

When asked to use the word horticulture during a game of Can-You-Give-Me-A-Sentence, Parker replied: You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

Of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Parker said: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force

Parker: "Brevity is the soul of lingerie."

Which one do you like best?

“I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position.”

“I’m not really out of the office. I’m just ignoring you.”

“You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t have received anything at all.”

“Sorry to have missed you but I am at the doctors having my brain removed so that I may be promoted to management.”

“I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from vacation on 4/18. Please be patient and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.”

“Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first ten words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.”

“The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try sending again.’” (The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-duh-viduals did this over and over).

“Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.”

“Hi. I’m thinking about what you’ve just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my response.”

“Hi! I’m busy negotiating the salary for my new job. Don’t bother to leave me any messages.”

“I’ve run away to join a different circus.”

“I will be out of the office for the next 2 weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as ‘Loretta’ instead of ‘Steve’”