Finding the right tone for your writing can sometimes feel tricky, especially in professional contexts, and especially if you regularly switch your writing for different audiences or forms.
Often advice about tone is focused on the intent of your writing, or your audience’s needs, or even the expectations around the writing genre or form.
And I don’t disagree. I think about those things too! (I’ve even developed a framework to help think through these things — you can find it here). But what these suggestions miss is considering feelings. Considering how you want your writing to feel is crucial in finding your writing tone. And I’ve got just the tip to help you.
First — why is it important to consider feelings?
Writing and communicating are not only about relaying information but also about relationships. The tone you establish — choosing particular words or phrases to evoke emotions, perspectives, or attitudes — will help set up how readers will come to understand and relate to you or your organization, as well as the ideas you wish to communicate.
Do you want people to feel impressed? Connected? Warm? Like things are under control? All of these anticipated feelings (and more) are totally valid — depending what you want to convey with your tone, and the kind of relationship you hope to enter into with your reader.
But this idea about feelings might still feel a bit vague. Like, “I have to think about feelings when I write?? How does that help me? Isn’t that kinda flaky?”
I have a hack that helps me get more concrete about feelings and vibes as I write — and maybe it will help you too.
When I write, I imagine about a place or location in combination with particular people to help me set the right tone.
Being in a bar with my besties is a very different feeling from facilitating a small grad seminar in a university seminar room. Problem solving with my colleagues in a board room is a very different vibe from hanging out in a sunny park with my girlfriends.
Imagining each of these places combined with certain people helps me write in particular ways to evoke the feelings or vibes of that place and those people.
To be clear, imagining a “location-people” combo likely won’t exactly correlate to your actual audience. For example, maybe you’re writing for a hospital blog — and your actual audience is patients and their families. Maybe you are aiming for a warm, straightforward tone. To help this concept become more concrete, you could choose to imagine hanging out in front of a fire with your dad, or sitting on a patio having coffee with a very specific friend. Your actual reader will likely not be your dad, as much as I’m sure he loves everything you write! The specific location-person combo invokes certain feelings and language for you as the writer, and you can focus on how you might speak in that setting, and how those feelings might translate into your current writing project.
Being very specific about that location-people combo brings the idea of the feeling — as warm and straightforward, which might seem abstract — into something very tangible — imagining that chat with your dad by the fire.
As a final thought
The thing about imagining a location-people combo is that nobody ever has to know what combo you chose. There is no quiz! And the point is not for your reader to be able to actually guess it (“ah yes, they were thinking about that chat by the fire…”). This is strictly something for you as the writer, to help you find that “right” vibe — so you can imagine and write the words and phrases that will set up the strongest relationship between you and your readers, and set the stage that they might feel certain things as they engage with the ideas.
We are inundated with mis- and dis-information, and this is why human-written, research-based thought leadership is crucial.
Thought leadership from trusted experts helps us all make sense of how research can be beneficial. Data don’t speak for themselves. We need help understanding, interpreting, and figuring out what to do with it.
Thought leadership is about situating yourself as that trusted expert. In the current public trust recession, we need leaders to demonstrate they’ve got our backs by helping us discern how insights might be applied towards a better world and future. As such a leader, engaging in broader conversations in your field contributes to decision-making, partnership development, and public thought.
How do you “do” thought leadership?
Thought leadership requires different skills and aims from writing up research findings.
I recommend starting with two intentions:
1) be focused (you can’t do or share everything all at once!), and
2) build trust based on authentic relationships, communication, and consistency.
Be Focused
Start by identifying one exciting or even controversial aspect of your research. Consider what might be most intriguing, counter-intuitive, insightful. What might challenge conventional thinking, or help your audience see the issue in a new way? Build your narrative around this.
To help keep your narrative focused, consider what is most essential to share about this particular finding or aspect of your research and stick to that. As researchers and scholars we want to dive into the nuances, but this can sometimes overwhelm your audience. Focus on clear, accessible, concise language, structured through story to reveal actionable insights. Linking to peer-reviewed publications can help readers feel confident about the solid foundation your thought leadership is grounded in.
For example, in my blog post about habits, I wanted to encourage thinking that our world is made up of things we each do as ‘collective habits.’ I wanted to challenge the idea that habits are exclusively a personal practice. To put the ideas into action, I drew on a couple of examples to highlight why changing habits should not only be about making your own life better, but to make our world safer and prosperous for everyone. As an avenue for thought leadership, the ideas in this blog post weren’t just for their own sake, but so they could be applied.
As another example, you can look to this very blog post – the one you are reading right now! I have introduced my take on thought leadership and why it’s important, and have also offered ways for you to apply those ideas.
Build Trust
Trust develops when relationships are built and confirmed by experience over time.
As you embark on developing trust with your audience and community, engaging in clear, sound thought leadership consistently is imperative. This doesn’t necessarily mean daily social media posts (although it could be, if that’s your jam!). Instead focus on building a regular, sustainable practice of publicly sharing and responding to ideas. This helps your audience and community trust that you are committed to your relationship with them. You can think about what might be sustainable for you, including getting outside support.
Thought leadership can have an immediate impact, but it is also a long game. In the same way that your research is part of a broader scientific landscape, thought leadership also takes place in broader community, policy, and business conversations. In this way, you are listening and responding to points of tension, identified needs, and your audience’s queries.
You can also think about how you might use different platforms to engage in those conversations – each smaller piece of content that you share (a blog or a LinkedIn post, a podcast interview, etc.) can build on and link back to previous work. Your audience will have a myriad of ways to engage with your research and ideas.
Nobody likes watery soup. Or coffee. Or hot chocolate. And it’s probably safe to say that nobody likes a watery learning opportunity. Or art. Or writing.
But is it possible to make your teaching, art, writing, communication (you name it!) accessible and clear to people without watering down? If watering down ideas is something we generally want to avoid, how do we do that while also making things within reach.
Enter the metaphor ‘lifting up.’
But before we go there, what do I mean by ‘watering down’?
This is the practice of infusing so much of what’s not essential to your idea/message/content, with the intent of making it attainable, that the thing itself is really basic, not nuanced, or even unpalatable. Add too much water, and there is no taste.
With ‘lifting up,’ you focus on your idea and then elevate it with just enough data or details to make it accessible.
You buoy your idea/message/content with enough support for people to see it clearly among the waves. The ideas, or whatever your key points are, need some details to make them understandable and to instill the trust of your audience. The details shouldn’t overtake – you still want to see that main analysis or key point – but rather they should lift up.
How do you know what kinds of details, or how many, to include to illuminate those main points? This is where it’s helpful to think about your audience and where they are in their learning or experience with the topic. What would help to make the main ideas most accessible to these particular people? If your audience is early in their experience with the topic, too many details will get in the way or bog things down. If they are seasoned, not enough details will not stretch their learning. I’ve written more about this here.
Providing details can also instill trust. It’s one thing to make a statement about your topic, but including details – data, definitions, stories, experiences, etc. – will help exemplify what you mean and that your analysis is grounded. You aren’t just randomly stating things; your ideas are substantiated with information.
What can this look like?
Here’s an example from my PhD study.
My dissertation was a study of performance methodology. I was theorizing the ways that theatre/performance artists – actors, playwrights, directors and others – use their bodies and/or embodied experiences, including social and cultural location, as a large part of interpreting, analysing, and representing or expressing in time and space, in relationship to other people’s experiences whose stories are the basis for the performance.
For those of you who are artists or involved in performance, you might read this and think “uh, YA, what ELSE would we be doing??” But I was aiming to theorize this for a specific audience – for folks in the social and health sciences who understand and engage in research in very different ways. You can find the outputs from this study (eg, the published articles), here, here, and here.*
As my example, I’m going to take one concept from my study called foolish disrupting.
When performance artists are aiming to analyze and interpret their character’s experiences (based on a real person) they need to foolishly disrupt themselves. As part of performing someone else’s experience, a performance artist has to physically and emotionally “try out” or experiment as part of their analysis of that other person’s experience; this requires a parallel analysis of their own experiences and body as well. As they experiment, they’re probably going to look and feel a bit silly and they may even get it wrong; but they have to do it anyway. Being wrong (or likely being wrong) is an important part of creatively analysing and helps to better understand because you’ll learn something.
What do I mean by “trying out” that other person/character’s experience? Let’s look at an actor’s work – actors use their bodies and their voices as their “tools.” Their work is literally to move their bodies and speak, to enact, as part of analysing and telling a story. When analysing and interpreting, actors will do oodles of research (talking to people, reading, etc), but they also have to experiment with their bodies. Just try or do things. In rehearsal they might try out different postures, change their breathing and their voice based on their imagined understanding of the research about that person/character – by doing this, they are also disrupting their own embodied way of being in the world. This means the actor needs to be pretty brave and willing to be very vulnerable as this work can be disorienting.
Here’s something more specific. Let’s pretend I’m an actor. I may be a middle-class middle aged woman in the early 21st century living in Toronto, but my character is based on a real person, a poor, middle-aged woman living in Communist/Post-WWII Hungary. I’ll do research about that time and place historically (etc), talk to people who lived in Hungary in the mid-20th century and pay attention to their emotions and words as they share their stories, among other research. But at some point I will have to experiment with putting those ideas into my body. I’ll try walking, sitting, changing my posture and the way I speak. It might be a bit awkward, and I’m probably going to look, feel and sound a bit ridiculous at first. But I’m going to have to do it anyway, and foolishly disrupt my own body as part of my work.
Of course, I share this about foolish disrupting to help think through the main point of this post.
How to ‘lift up’ ideas rather than water down. How to provide enough details to support my main idea to both clarify that idea, but also instill trust.
With my PhD study example, I’ve tried to keep you, my audience, in mind. I’m assuming an intelligent, creative, non-academic, professional audience, with a wide range of understandings of the arts and arts processes. And I’ve chosen my language and details accordingly. I’ve also considered the form – this is a blog post, not a long form magazine article or an academic publication.
If you compare what I’ve written in this post with my academic articles, you’ll see I have assumed different audiences. With my academic articles, I was assuming an academic audience from the social sciences, and even the health sciences, who traditionally work predominantly with text, language, writing, and even sometimes numbers.
I’ve tried to include just enough information or details to lift up the main idea of foolish disrupting. I’ve included some thinking and definition around this concept, and I’ve also provided one concrete example of what foolish disrupting can look like by highlighting differences and similarities between my own social and cultural location, with that of a fictional character who lived a very different life.
Was it enough? Too much? What do you think?
*If you have trouble accessing these articles, drop me an email! I’ll help you out. julia@thejuliagray.ca
A client once shared with me that when she thinks about writing something new she feels dread. (yes, DREAD!)
As a seasoned professional, internationally renowned with decades of experience under her belt, she uses writing as a regular part of her work – grant writing, project proposals, website copy, among so many other things. And yet, she dreaded the idea of starting a writing project.
“How do I start?” she asked, “Actually, where do I start??”
If you have similar feelings of dread, fear not!
While certainly not the only way to start to write, here is my preferred method of starting a non-fiction project (including academic, or any research-based writing, as well as more complex professional writing):
Start in the middle and work your way out.
If this sounds like chaos, it’s really not. Here me out.
Let’s say you’ve made good headway into the first stage of your process – you’ve done some research or exploratory work, and you have a sense of what you need to include. (If you’re interested to know more about the three stages of writing, you can access a pdf of my Writing Roadmaphere – full disclosure, you’ll also be signing up for my newsletter).
But now the time has come to actually put metaphorical pen to paper (or, start stage two – writing itself). But where to begin? You have all these ideas!?! Where and how to begin to organize them!?!
Overwhelming, right? My advice?
Pick your most resonant idea, and write it down.
Don’t worry if that first idea is the “best” idea, or the clearest idea, or even if it’s terrible. Don’t worry about your main argument, or how you will wrap up with a conclusion. Just get at least one idea down on the page. Now you have something to work with. Then, drawing from your research and exploratory stage, you can then put down other ideasaround that first idea.
Writing is an analytic and creative process. There is uncertainty about what the specific and final outcome will be. Given this, sometimes the important thing is to put down the ideas you are most certain about, even if you are not very certain.
It can be powerful to start to see your ideas in front of you, because then you can start to move them around. You start to almost literally “see” them differently, and thus understand them differently. As you critically assess the ideas and words, you will start to see more clearly how they’re related, including which ideas are most relevant and which are extraneous. You can add or remove language to highlight the relationships.
The structure of the writing project forms as you analyse the ideas and their relationships. You will start to make decisions about what ideas should introduce or follow others to help your reader follow. As the structure forms, you will also start to comprehend where the holes are – and you can fill these in. For ideas that are still early or not yet fully formed, adding a placeholder statement like “Add paragraph here about the ways creativity is embodied” (or whatever) will trigger your memory when you return to that idea/paragraph at a later time.
Again, the idea is to get something down, and move through a process of linking ideas by expanding and removing language, working towards structure and clarity for your reader.
To sum up
It’s true that sometimes the “just leap blindly” approach can work when you feel that you are avoiding writing – but I think that’s rare and it’s not what I’m advocating for here. I think some planning and preparing for your writing can help you feel less overwhelmed (I’ll flag my Writing Roadmap again, which can help with planning).
As I mentioned earlier, writing is an analytic and creative process; but it is also iterative. It is not always linear (in fact, I have rarely found it linear). If you do become overwhelmed or confused during the process, there is nothing stopping you from taking a step back. In fact, I would encourage it. The overwhelm and the confusion can feel frustrating, but it is totally normal. Don’t despair! And don’t give up.
What’s the best way to think about your reader when you’re in the middle of your writing process? Should you think about your reader? And if you should, how might you go about doing that?
My short answer is: it depends.
It depends a lot on the type of writing you are doing.
To explain more about what I mean, I’ll address how you might think about your reader in two contexts: 1) in professional writing, and 2) in creative writing.
Professional writing
When I say “professional writing,” I don’t mean writing as your profession. I mean writing in professional contexts, which pretty much applies to anyone who has any kind of profession. If you are writing to clients and colleagues, if you are writing to communicate as part of your work, then you are writing in professional contexts.
To boil it down, professional writing is about being direct and clear. Because of this, I usually think of my reader often.
I tend to think very regularly about things like: what the reader’s experience might be in relationship to the topic, how much knowledge they bring, and their potential perspective. I think about how much extra context I might need to include in what I’m writing, among other things. So, the reader is very much at the front of my thinking as I’m going through the professional writing process.
Creative Writing
With creative writing you are trying to create a different kind of relationship with your reader through what you are producing. You may be engaging them intellectually, but also potentially emotionally. You are likely using different devices, such as metaphor, alliteration, narrative or dramatic structure, among others. Your relationship with your future reader may not necessarily be so direct as it is in professional writing. There may be a kind of playfulness, experimentation and uncertainty with you creative writing process as well.
Given these contexts, I tend to try not to think about my reader, especially early in my process when I’m in that playful, exploratory stage. In the early stages I am usually still figuring things out about what I am even writing.
What can you think about, if not your reader?
I recommend three things.
The first is the material. That could be the ideas, the feelings, the context, the particular historical moment, any social issues, cultural values, political slant, political critique, among many other contexts.
Especially early in your creative process, you may not know all of the pieces yet. You might just have an inkling, or you may have a taste. Perhaps you are working with an image that is starting off your exploration. Ultimately, there could be a lot of uncertainty, so you want to focus on a rich exploration and any additional research to better understand how different contexts might or might not link together.
The second thing you want to consider is yourself. Pay attention to yourself and your relationship to the material, to the social issues, to the historical context, to the cultural values, to those feelings, and your own response to ideas and feelings, among other pieces.
The third thing you want to attend to is the form. Is this poetry? Is this a short story? A novel? A play? The form will have certain structures that can help you, and that you can push against and play around with. You want to be aware of those conventions so you can engage with them well and strategically, and so you can ultimately engage your reader or audience through your project.
So those three things: the material, yourself, and the form.
I think there can almost be a danger in thinking about the reader too early because there is the risk you will start to contrive your writing towards your preconceived ideas of what you think your reader might want. This has the potential to take away from your focus on the material and contexts of what you are writing, as well as the form you are working within.
You need to be focusing on what the project needs.
David Bowie famously said that, when he was creating, he would not play to the gallery. He was not creating for other people. He was creating for himself and to understand his own relationship with the world; his own relationship to social issues and cultural values, among other aspects.
When I hear something like that from someone who is really good at their craft, I pay attention.
I take this to mean that he doesn’t necessarily think about his audience at the forefront of his creative process. Rather he’s using his own life experience as a frame to be able to interpret.
That said, I am not opposed to challenging that idea just a little bit. At some point you, as the creator, can start to think about your audience. This happens when you start to think about questions like: what’s the best way to craft this story? What is going to resonate in a strong way?
Indirectly, these are questions about your audience and your reader.
But what’s important about those questions is that they don’t become about giving the reader exactly what you think they might want. You can use those questions to think critically about crafting a really good piece of writing.
If you liked this post, you may also be interested in my YouTube video: What about your reader?
Also, sign up for my newsletter! No spam. And you can unsubscribe at any time. Here’s a link.
I was chatting with a former student recently about giving a guest lecture. As a new grad student, he was in the throes of preparing to give his first and was asking for advice (so exciting!).
My big overarching message to him:
Less is more.
For reals.
I see a whole lotta “more is more” out there in the world, and let me tell you, it really isn’t. More is often way too much. Crafting a good presentation isn’t an all you can eat buffet (which can be awesome!). It’s about helping people learn and engage, which is a different kind of value than being stuffed.
Your audience really needs “just enough” information to understand the big ideas or main skills that you are trying to engage them with. In a lecture or presentation especially, there is only so much information a person can take in. So while you might be super excited to share All The Things (“look at all those exciting WEEDS!”), your audience is often just trying to wrap their brains around what you’re even talking about. This is especially true if you are speaking across disciplines or industries, or to audiences that are newer to your topic.
How do you make sure you are giving “just enough” as part of designing a good presentation? Here are some ideas:
Focus on the change you hope will happen for your audience through your presentation. What do you hope they’ll take away? Where do you hope they’ll end up? Think high level, and keep it high – use descriptions, examples and details ONLY to highlight those higher level aims.
Build in pauses. If you are using PowerPoint, add a 5-10 second pause after each slide change to give people the chance to look before you start speaking again. Sometimes I literally write into my speaking notes “sip water here” so the audience has a moment to breathe and reflect on what I just said.
Use different types of strategies to engage your audience rather than just giving information, like a traditional lecture. Tell a story, ask them a question or two, discuss something visual (chart, image, whatever is relevant!). This will also slow you down.
Write your presentation to an approximate word count – this is especially useful if you are newer to presenting. How do you figure out the number of words? Set your timer for one minute, and start reading a page or two of text aloud at a nice, conversational pace (read: chill). When the timer goes off, count the number of words and write it down (highlight what you’ve read on your screen and use the “word count” feature to help you!). Repeat this several times with different text, and take the average of the word count totals. Then multiply your average “spoken words per minute” by the number of minutes you have to present to find the approximate word count for your presentation (so, if you speak approximately 150 per minute, and you have a 10 minute presentation, you should write a presentation that is approximately 1500 words).
Build your presentation for less time than you have been allotted. You’ve been told you have 45 minutes? Create a 40 minute lecture.
When you have a good draft, practice and time yourself. Edit accordingly.
Want to stay in touch? Subscribe to my newsletter! No Spam. And you can unsubscribe at any time. Here is a link.
I get a lot of questions from folks considering leaving academia about what work will be like on The Other Side. The crux of what they seem to be asking is: “Will I continue to be independent? Will I have agency?”
When I was contemplating leaving, these were some of my biggest fears too.
Academia was actually the second stage of my career. I had worked as an independent artist and creative entrepreneur before turning to academia, so I had an inkling that my skills and contributions from that part of my life would likely be of use. But my sovereignty as a creative and a thinker was important to me, and imagining what work might be like on the outside left me worried that I would be constrained by the 9-5 life.
For some perspective, I was burning out in academia.
You’ve likely heard it before:
Very mixed past academic work experiences that were peppered with great colleagues, a good deal of meaningful research and teaching, and some truly exploitive and demoralizing experiences fueled by gaslighting that overtook the good stuff
Unsustainable and fluctuating income and employment (by the time I left I had landed a contract, part-time non-tenure track role, that I bolstered with additional research and writing contracts – these contracts followed a pandemic-induced 18-month period of unemployment after a dismaying postdoc)
And a professional future which looked even more bleak given the state of higher education at the time (which is now, in 2025, looking even worse), despite accolades, accomplishments, and very hard work over most of my professional career.
I won’t dwell on the decision-making other than to say that, practically speaking, I knew I had to leave.
Once I was resolved, I had to find my path out. I reflected not just on what I could do and where I could go, but what work would look likeand what that would mean for my life. In academia, I was used to having a fair amount of agency in terms of how I structured my days, my comings and goings, how I formulated my research and designed my teaching. Wouldn’t a “regular job” be confining? I’d just be doing someone else’s bidding, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t it be… boring?
Now that I’m on The Other Side, I’ve found that the answer is “kinda,” but also “not really.” I also now reflect that academia wasn’t nearly as independent as I perceived.
Teaching/work schedules, funding body priorities, institutional values/priorities, organizational expectations about in-person or hybrid work, the particular contract shaping your role – these and more affect the kind of agency you as an individual worker have in your workplace. This is true in academia as much as it is outside.
At the time of writing this post, I have been working for my current employer for approximately 17 months – my provincial government in Canada. In my role, I have both some agency and also some limitations (as to be expected).
Sure, I work approximately 9-5, but I’ll emphasize the word “approximately.” I have the flexibility to start a little later or earlier depending on what’s going on in my life. As long as I’m putting in the time, attending all my meetings, available when my manager needs me, and getting the work done, my manager generally doesn’t hover. My employer requires that I be in the office three days a week, but I can choose which days I’m in or not. Plus, when my laptop shuts at the end of the day, I don’t touch it until morning.
Of course, not all workplaces on the outside are like this, but this has been my experience so far.
Is the work deeply meaningful and fulfilling all the time? Nope. Is it sometimes meaningful, do I work with excellent colleagues, have a steady income, and feel like I’m contributing to something decent in a way that is sustainable for my life? Very much so.
All of this to say, I am finding my way.
My current full-time job has offered me an important step to a more sustainable life. It’s opened up space in different ways: I worked with a therapist to help me process my grief and career transition, I’ve picked up hobbies, I workout 5 days a week, I have started a newsletter which is fueled by my program of research and teaching, specifically about building creative and humanity-centred lives and workplaces, and I’ve started to take on some writing, editing, and coaching clients.
To return to my colleagues’ initial query, “Will I have agency?” My answer is Yes.
Imagine trying to cook a full-course meal in one go—without prepping ingredients, measuring anything, or even turning on the stove first. Overwhelming, right?
The same can be said for writing.
Maybe you know that writing is an awesome and powerful thing, but you also kind of dread it. And maybe you think sitting down in one go and writing as much as you can all at once will lessen the pain… (believe me, I’ve done it!)
But this approach can backfire. It usually makes things harder.
Why?
It’s relying on sheer will to get the project done. In reality, writing takes several interrelated stages. Not planning for those stages, or at minimum not being aware of them, can leave you feeling like you have to hunker down, power through, and hope that words will fly out of your fingers on the keyboard. Not an effective strategy!
Understanding the three-stages of writing can help you organize yourself and improve your writing: your process, your time, your energy, and your technique.
These three-stages can be applied to any writing process – from writing a professional email, to writing your newest opus. Each stage will look different depending on the form, but the same overarching stages still apply.
Stage 1 – Information Gathering / Research
What are you writing about? Take time to collect some information to include in your writing.
The type information you collect is going to look different depending on the form of your project. Collecting data that you will publish in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is going to look very different from noticing and documenting personal experiences that will inform your poetry. But ultimately these different approaches are all types of “research.”
Stage 2 – Writing / Analysis
This is the stage most of us associate with writing (aka “sitting down and plunking words into the keyboard”). I like to think of this stage more broadly as “analysis”.
Why?
Writing is analysis. This means you are making sense of the information you’ve gathered and shaping it into your writing project so others will engage with the ideas. Selecting language, or putting words to the information, is one part of the work. But you also need to consider how the ideas will be organized, how the project will be structured so the ideas and material will be received by your reader/audience.
But more than that, this stage takes place beyond sitting at your computer and typing – and this is why I like to think of this stage more broadly as “analysis.” You’ll make connections between ideas in the strangest of places, away from your keyboard. Like in the grocery line, walking your kids to school, making dinner, etc. Suddenly you have an idea, or you see a link! This kind of thinking or processing “counts” as analysis.
When this happens, jot the idea in your notebook, or take a voice note. You can come back to it when you’re sitting at your computer, and the analysis will continue, as you continue to put words to the ideas.
Stage 3 – Feedback
The last stage is feedback. Is this resonating with people? Is it making sense to them? Is it engaging them in the ways that you’re hoping it’s going to engage?
You can act as your own “feedback provider” – meaning that you can step away from your writing, and return to it with fresh eyes. This way you can try to read your draft as someone new would read it (and adapt your writing based on what you are seeing/reading). But for some projects, particularly longer ones, you will likely want to get feedback from another person at different stages of your process.
You want to think carefully about who you ask for feedback. You’ll need someone who can provide good, rich feedback and help your work become stronger. But you also want to think about how they provide that feedback. Lots of people, frankly, aren’t that great at the “how” part. They might know about their own response. But they may not be strong at crafting their thoughts in ways that will help you learn and grow, and that will help you apply those ideas to your project.
Some additional thoughts
Of course, these three stages are not quite so linear in practice. You don’t do all of your research at once, put a little bow around it when the stage is done, and move on to your writing stage.
But even though the process isn’t that neat, it’s still helpful to think about these overarching stages as a reference point. So when you’re in the middle of your writing and you do become overwhelmed or tired, you have a framework to help guide you.
For example, maybe you’ve been working on a particular section for a long time and it’s starting to feel frustrating and overwhelming. You can take a step back, look at these stages to help orient yourself, and then ask: “Where am I in these three stages?”
Maybe you’re feeling overwhelmed because you feel too close to what you’ve been writing. It would be helpful to revisit the research that you did, and dive into that material again, to see it in a new way.
Or maybe you realize that you don’t have enough information to proceed, and you’re frustrated because you don’t have enough “fuel.” You decide to go back to that research stage to collect more information, do a little bit more digging and exploring.
Or maybe you’re feeling frustrated and tired because you’ve taken your writing as far as you can, but you also know it’s not done. You decide you need some feedback, so that you can return to writing with some different perspectives.
Hopefully this gives you a sense that, while the process isn’t linear, understanding these different stages can help you improve your writing by planning and orienting yourself in the midst of your writing.
The idea of developing good habits is de rigueur these days.
Personally, I am a “general” fan of personal habits. I like some good predictability and structure in my days. I brush my teeth every morning, I get outside every day, I eat my veggies. Habits help me free up my thinking for more pressing issues, like helping my kiddo with math homework, and tackling climate change.
With that said, I have some issues with the gleeful embrace of micro-managing one’s habits in the quest for increased productivity, and/or for increased individual wealth and success. But that critique is for another blog post entirely. This post is about shifting our thinking about habits socially and collectively.
One of the top books these days touting the awesomeness of habits is Atomic Habits, by James Clear. I’ve just started reading it, and it’s been a useful read so far. Notice I said useful, and not totally amazing. While Clear does provide some very accessible and convincing advice about why healthy/productive habits are “good” and how to develop them well, what grates me about this book is its almost exclusive focus on individuals.
“Uuumm, Julia,” you might be thinking, “did you not just cite some individual habits that you, yourself, practice every day? How can individual habits be a problem?” YES! Of course, individuals have habits, and individuals can develop more useful habits so we can each live a fulfilling life in whatever way works for each of us.
Most “helpful” (or self-help) books focus on how we can each individually do things differently to help ourselves, as individuals, be “better” or “more successful.” Clear’s book is no exception.
But I’m more interested to think about each of our individual actions put together make up our collective world. Like, when we each hop in our car to drive to the store (as an individual behaviour, or practice), collectively we are contributing to increased pollution, and lowering our collective demand for accessible public transit, or other sustainable modes of transportation like bike lanes.
Here’s an example from Atomic Habits that got me thinking.
Clear discusses a Japanese safety practice in their rail system called Pointing-and-Calling (p. 63). Truthfully my dudes, I’m married to a transit nerd, so I was actually aware of this practice already… (taking public transit as a family is often wonderfully and woefully embarrassing for our children).
Before a train departs a station, each staff member points at and calls out a series of things, and having identified each detail aloud (like, pointing at the timetable when the train will depart, and stating the exact, current time), will call out “all clear!” once satisfied all the details are safe (or stop the train from leaving if there is a problem). It’s a practice each individual does to bring unconscious patterns and events to a conscious level. It’s easier to see if there is a problem when you are using all your senses (see it, hear it, touch it, etc), and vocalizing it; you can do something about the problem if you see it in the first place.
Frankly, I do this at home in the mornings, as we are all trying to get out the door (“Keys!” [pats pocket], “Wallet!” [checks bag]).
Clear uses this Japanese railway example to highlight how unconscious behaviours individually need conscious attention as part of improving individual habits. It’s harder to develop a better habit, if you don’t see how current habits might be problems. But what Clear misses from the railway example is that the individual actions of these staff members are for the collective good. To make their system safer, so other individuals within the system can be safe. In the Japanese rail system, cultural values have helped them organize a process where each individual must act, do things, use their senses in combination with their voices, in order to help everyone else. (other rail systems have taken up similar practices, by the way… it is pretty cool!).
Here’s another example, albeit totally different.
I took my younger kiddo to see the Barbie movie with her friend. I loved this film (so many things to love about it).
The filmmakers powerfully use story to make the patterns and habits of patriarchal society transparent. Sometimes it’s hard to see patriarchy as a problem because we are so enmeshed with it; it’s almost like the air we breathe. But through the story, we experience (meaning: we sense and feel) different ways patriarchal systems/structures turn Barbie and other women into objects, don’t value emotions alongside rational thought, create processes and ways of interacting that help men thrive, along with other things. We see how certain values are enacted and repeated by individuals to create a particular culture where men are uplifted, and women, non-binary and trans folks are not. Characters in the film eventually come to articulate different ways that women and others are oppressed in a patriarchal society (for example, saying: “It is literally impossible to be a woman… Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong,” and “But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful” and “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us” among other gems), and some characters are actually “deprogrammed” from the patriarchy (which was one of my kiddo’s favourite parts!).
This combination of engaging our senses and feelings and thoughts through the story, and through the characters using their voices to articulate what they experience, is very powerful for all of us to see patriarchy as a problem. The point is not for individuals to develop better individual habits in their own bubbles, to thrive on their own. By creating better individual habits (like, offering compassion to ourselves and others, slowing down and considering relationships among different parts of life in decision making, seeing how small daily actions affect our world and adjusting them accordingly, among so many), we can also create better systems and processes for everyone’s benefit. By seeing the problem, we can do something about it collectively.
You’ve been invited to give a guest lecture/workshop/presentation (yay!) but the prospect causes you to break into sweats (ack!).
The good news is that people think highly of you and value your expertise – they have invited you to share your awesomeness! And the other good news is that you don’t have to cram all your knowledge into that 30/45/60-ish minute session to keep people engaged and help them learn stuff. You really don’t.
In this post, I’ll share a few things that I use in my own teaching and facilitation to help you think through how to design an awesome session, whether it’s a hands-on workshop, a guest lecture or a keynote presentation.
First, it’s helpful to think about these six things.
Your topic. This might seem obvious – yes, of course you’re going to do your session on a topic – but, someimes it can be deceptively hard to select. You can think about what your expertise is, and what the particular audience might learn from you.
Your audience. Of course, you can’t know for certain the exact people in your audience, but you can imagine them. You can think about age/generation, career status (e.g. early, mid, seasoned), field or profession, culture, geography, and your own alignments or differences with your audience, among other things. For example, I often work with people in healthcare – as an artist I need to think about potential differences in how we work, and some assumptions I might be making about terms or processes. Having a sense of who your audience is will help you make decisions about your session.
The form. Whether you are giving a keynote, workshop, guest lecture, on-line, in person, etc., thinking about the form can help you think about how you want to engage people in different ways (more below on strategies!). It’s helpful to pay attention to what people expect from the form (a keynote is different from a hands-on workshop, for example), but you can also use or disrupt expectations in different ways.
Change or transformation. As you think about the change you hope your audience will go through, consider where you anticipate your audience is starting from related to your topic, and where do you want them to end up? Your session becomes about that in-between part. How will you engage them so that they move through some kind of transformation, ending up in a different place?
Your session might be about building practical skills, or it might be about ideas and thinking differently, but thinking about a “starting place,” an “ending place,” and the change you hope will take place, still applies regardless.
Strategies: how will you get there? It can be useful to brainstorm a whole bunch of different ways to engage people – a lot more than you will actually use – as part of thinking through what might be strongest. The specific strategies you select depend on all the other different factors – your topic, the audience, the form, etc. As you think about strategies, you can continue to return to: what is the change you anticipate this particular audience might go through?
Time frame. Whatever the amount of time you have, try to plan for less. Give yourself a buffer. If you have 45 minutes, then plan for 40. It’s also useful to leave time at the end of your session for questions, or a wrap-up – and if you have more time than you anticipate, you can have a longer discussion, or even just end early (and everyone will love you!). Whatever you do, stay within your allotted time. For reals. I’ve included some strategies below for how you can design your session to help you stay on time.
And actually – I’ve developed a free, downloadable tip-sheet that covers these ideas and will help you design your session further. You can find it here.
Next, you’ll want to put these ideas into your session.
Now that you’ve started on these different aspects, you need to pull it all together. Below are some ideas about structure.
I think of this as a Sandwich.
Introduction: your first piece of bread, or the bottom of the bun. How are you going to introduce this topic to this particular audience? You can, of course, just state your topic and learning objectives at the start of your session. Depending on the audience, spelling it out can work really well. But you don’t have to do that.
Maybe you are doing a hands-on workshop, and your topic has to do with helping people become more aware of their own bodies and emotions while they are working. If your audience is dancers, you could start with a meditation and a physical warm up, and then, after these activities, articulate the aims of your workshop. But if you are working with physicians, you will probably want to introduce the same topic in a different way, maybe through a story, or by introducing yourself and your expertise. Your introduction should give your specific audience a sense of the topic, but also a sense of the kind of strategies you will be using throughout your session. It’s like a sample of what the rest of your sandwich will taste like.
Your content and strategies: the meat and veggies. These are the various selected strategies you will use to engage people with your topic, thinking about the change you hope your audience will go through.
I plan my sessions into chunks of time, and allot a different strategy for each chunk. For example, for 5 minutes I will share a story, for 7-8 minutes people will break into groups and share their own stories, then we will return to the larger group for 10-12 minutes – etc.
This “chunking” is useful for a couple of reasons.
You can clearly see whether your activities align with your aims. What are the actual strategies you plan to use, how much time have you allotted for each, and will these strategies help this audience move through change you are hoping for? Let’s return to the example of helping people become more aware of their bodies and emotions while working. If you notice that the strategies you’ve chosen only involve people talking, you will want to revise what you are doing to include activities where people are engaging and paying attention to their bodies (such as breathing exercises).
It can help you keep on time when you come to facilitate the session. If something goes awry during the session, and you find that you’re short 10 minutes (“the wrong room was booked, no one can find the key, oh they chaos!”), then you can easily look at the structure of your session and adapt quickly. It’s easier to pull out a section on the fly, and much easier to adapt in the moment, when you have planned your session into smaller chunks of time.
Whatever you do, remember that more is not necessarily better. Be sure to build in pauses, or breaks, so people have time and space to process.
Conclusion: the top of your bun. You can help people digest your metaphorical sandwich, including what the session has been about, or what their transformation has been. Hopefully, your audience will continue to process the material after they leave your session, and apply it out in the world. Through your conclusion, you can help them transition what they’ve learned.
As a few ideas, you could field some questions, or invite people to have discussions amongst themselves and then open it up to the larger group, or if you’re short on time, simply make a statement like: “We don’t have time for a discussion, but these are the things that I’m hoping that you will take away with you…”
Also, you can leave your contact information. This invites people to continue the connection after your session. It’s almost like continuing a conversation.
Be sure not to sell your conclusion short – sometimes that processing time can be just as important, if not more important, than the bulk of your session where you share information.
In case you missed it, here’s my free, downloadable tip sheet!