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.
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
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.
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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!