007 Ken O’Quinn on Writing with Clarity

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals – doing work you love, work that matters.

Today’s guest is Ken O’Quinn from Writing with Clarity.

Communication skills are a key competency for almost all jobs in today’s world. In a 2012 poll by the Society of Human Resources Management, writing in English was the number one reported basic or core skill gap and the third largest applied skill gap of applicants.

So we asked Ken O’Quinn from Writing with Clarity to talk with us today about communicating clearly and persuasively.

Before become a writing coach, Ken worked as a journalist and now he focuses on helping businesses craft professional oral and written messages that build credibility and influence their audiences.

From the interview…

… everyone can learn to be a better writer. I think the biggest problem people have or the biggest challenge for people is that they need to make the commitment to be conscientious and to think about the principles and techniques of good writing every time they sit down to the keyboard.

… The biggest difference is that oral communication is not planned. It is not organized before hand, nor is it edited when we are done. Oral conversation is spontaneous. We just speak.

Whereas, in writing there is a higher standard for writing because readers expect that you will think about it before you write it and you will clean it up before you send it to them, which means, removing words they don’t need to read and making it clear and efficient and easy to breeze through and removing embarrassing mistakes and grammar and punctuation. We tolerate a lot as listeners because, again, it is natural, spontaneous speech and we say whatever is on the end of our tongue but people expect more when they read your work.

… The two biggest problems are wordiness and a lack of clarity.

Wordiness can contribute to a lack of clarity because the more words you stuff into a sentence or a paragraph, the more you camouflage what your main thought is.

If you just take wordiness, where does it come from? When we write often, we write the way we speak. Now, for a lot of people, they have heard at some point in their life, often more than once, write the way you talk. When people give that advice they don’t really want you to write the way we talk because we butcher the language when we talk and use many more words than we need. What they actually mean is to use a conversational tone, which you should.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above post.

Influencing Your Audience by Ken O’Quinn (pdf)

Recommend Resources from Ken O’Quinn

Mentioned by Tom

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