Getting clear on your point
I’ve been working hard this week on a coaching guide for writing with confidence at work. More on that to follow, but for now I’m looking for some help with a section I was writing last night.
It’s on clarity (yes, that old chestnut) and I was thinking of ways to talk people through shifting perspective in order to get clear on their point.
One of the things I do when I’m coaching is work out how I do something, then try and describe it – in as many different ways as I can in the hope that one of them will ‘click’ for the person at the other end.
So I started by working out what I do to get clear on my point – normally well before I start to write. This is what I came up with:
Move away: Shifting location, even just to another desk, gets you away from that up-close proximity to your ideas, material, research, drafts, deadlines. Move away, grab a coffee, go for a walk, then come back to it.
Doodle: I nearly always have to jot down ideas on pen and paper to get the most important point – and to work out the connection between otherwise random-looking words and ideas. Sometimes that’s jotting down key words – and seeing which ones jump out – or mind-mapping. I guess a picture would work too (if I could draw)
Slow down: it’s hard to get clear when you’re racing around, doing or thinking about a million and one other things. You need to slow down, take a few breaths, to get things into a sharper focus
Focus on the reader: shift your focus from your words to the reader that you’re writing for and think about what you’re going to say from their perspective. What do they already know? What do they need to know? What’s the clearest and easiest way to get them there?
Hover over your words: I find this one a little hard to explain but I imagine myself hovering over my words, notes, ideas until I can see the pattern, the connection or the point. Kind of like imagining you’re an eagle, soaring, watching for your prey, or a magpie, looking for the shiny object to steal and make your own
Tell it in 5: I’ve talked about this one before. It’s a way of challenging yourself to get to the heart, the essence of your writing by boiling it down to one sentence – or even better 10 words – or why not just 5.
Tell it in a different way: People can get hung up on the idea of writing something – but can tell you what the ‘point’ is quite easily if they’re producing it in a different format – an e-mail, voice mail, phone conversation, chat over coffee. If that sounds like you, try imagining yourself telling it in that easy, natural way – then write it down
That was my list. But I’m sure there are other suggestions that I could add.
What techniques do you use get things into perspective – to get clear on your point?
This post is a contribution to the October series on writing with clarity. I’m developing the coaching toolkit as part of my writing coach portfolio.
Joanna Young, The Confident Writing Coach
Because our words count
Photo credits: stock.xchng
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