Tag: writing

Finding the right writing tone

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.

Thought Leadership for Knowledge Mobilization

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.

Don’t water down your ideas, lift them up

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

How and where to start writing

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 Roadmap here – 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 ideas around 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.

Should you think about your reader in your writing process?

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.

Why writing in one sitting can overwhelm you

(but you have options!)

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.  

Was this useful?  You might like my freebie ‘The Writing Roadmap: A Simple 3-Stage Guide to Clarify Your Process’. 

Also, check out my YouTube video: Overwhelmed by Writing? Try This Instead!