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.

Examples of what I saw at the follow-up session, and how these questions affected their revisions:

An email to a consultant asking a series of questions about a technical process. The first draft was a casual, rambling stream of consciousness, in which the writer asked a question, then adds a couple more that come to mind while he is writing. The fix: revise the opening of the message to explain you have 3 questions about the ABC process, number the questions clearly, and then update the subject line (maybe “Three questions about ABC”) to let the reader know what to expect. The reader then can easily embed the answers into the original message. It takes only a few minutes for the writer to revise, and saves the reader time and frustration.

An email to a supplier about coordinating an event. The email contains three small questions, and confirms another piece of information. Instead of one email to the reader containing everything, write four separate emails. Why? If you separate the different questions, requests and information into separate emails, the reader can respond quickly where possible. If you don’t have ready answers to every question in a multi-issue email, it’s easy to sit on it until you have everything you need. Better to answer what you can quickly. It’s also easier to file and retrieve information that is clearly labeled and not buried in an email with a useless subject line, like “Information” or “Follow up.”

A technical report recommending a change of software to manage a vital business process. The original document is well organized with all the key information a decision maker would need in the Executive Summary. The only problem is it’s very technical and studded with acronyms. The decision makers are the Board Members, who are unfamiliar with your jargon. The solution: assume your readers are ignorant, but not stupid. Avoid using technical language they might not understand, especially acronyms. Using acronyms might save you a few keystrokes and buy you credibility with your colleagues, but they frustrate readers who aren’t familiar with them. The solution: use the acronyms in your draft, then use the Find/Replace function in MS Word to spell them out. Even better, instead of an acronym, use a descriptive term, like the Agreement, or the Enterprise System.

A letter to a lawyer describing your analysis of a problem and the next steps you will take. This writer (a charming guy) had abandoned his earlier legalese style (yay!) but had rebounded to extremely spare prose, thinking the opposite of a legalese style is one that was condensed to the point where it felt dehydrated. The solution: relax, use a conversational style and tell the reader a story—what you did, what you found, and what you have done as a result. Unpack it, expand it, be conversational. The letter is a record, part of a file, and needs to tell its chapter of the story clearly.

Documentation of a change to proprietary software. The changes were listed on the page in separate paragraphs. What was missing was any context—the document needed a title and an introduction, so a reader who picks it up now or in the future knows why and when the changes were made. It also would help to number the changes themselves so they could be scanned quickly and referenced easily.

What impressed me about the day was how different each of the documents I reviewed was from each other. The revisions were different too. What was the same was the thinking process and questions that helped my learners see ways to improve their writing.

Take a look at something you wrote recently. Now put yourself in the place of your reader. Consider for a moment what their prior knowledge is, why they need to read your message, what they will do with it, and how you can best present it to make their job easier. What changes would you make?

Here are four tips that will help ensure your comments lead to positive change without hurting any feelings:

1. Clarify what your colleague wants you to read for. Do they want a substantive edit, where you suggest changing the structure, or do they want a quick proofread? Also, find out what their deadline is. If the deadline is one hour away, there’s no point suggesting substantive changes.
2. Always try to point out something positive, and give your positive comments the same weight you give your criticism. It’s difficult to see the positive on your first read–much easier to see the flaws, so read it through twice. This ensures they will repeat the positive next time they write and makes them more receptive to your other comments.
3. Express your comments from a reader’s point of view. Instead of saying “This sentence is unclear” say something like, “When I was reading this section, I found this sentence unclear.”
4. Resist the urge to impose your personal writing style on the writer. Allow others to have their own voice. (Hard to do!)