|CHAPTER 4|
Watch Your Words—and Your Emails
Q: (What’s) the one thing a gate agent should never say?
A: “Unfortunately.” At JetBlue, we say “As it turns out.”
—Interview with ROBIN HAYES,
CEO of JetBlue (Wall Street Journal, 8/10/16)
“I don’t believe in email. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I prefer calling and hanging up.”
—CARRIE BRADSHAW (from HBO’s Sex and the City)
Avoid Jargon
“Do you want to hear about the 16 perils?” the salesperson asked me.
“Not especially,” I said. I’d initiated this phone call, with a well-known company, to get a competitive bid on home insurance. My policy was up for renewal.
But the salesperson’s approach surprised me. “Is your current policy,” he asked, “an HO-3 or an HO-5?”
I had no idea. HO-3 sounded like HO-HO-HO. It was industry jargon, meaningful to the agent, but gobbledygook to everyone else.
“Why don’t I just tell you what an HO-3 covers,” he said. (The 16 perils!) “Then you and I can brainstorm whether anything is missing.”
Brainstorming seemed like a shaky way to buy insurance, sort of like going on a quiz show: “Guess what’s missing from this policy? That’s right, FLOOD INSURANCE!”
But maybe it was a good way to sell insurance because, let’s face it, the minute you think about your house being vandalized, or burned to the ground, or whirled away by tornados, you definitely want vast quantities of insurance.
So eventually, he read the 16 perils. I noted there was nothing about snakes. That was disappointing; I’m very motivated to avoid snakes and would definitely buy a HO-HO-HO policy that offered a no-snakes guarantee.
I decided to get another quote.
The next (and last) salesperson never mentioned HO-3 and never mentioned the 16 perils. But she did ask at least 16 questions about my house.
Her message: We’re going to thoroughly understand your home so we can give you the right protection. (Be the audience.)
And I took it. Even though there was nothing about snakes.
Avoid Most Acronyms
The other day, I came across the acronym HOMES, which is supposed to help you remember the five Great Lakes.
I’d completely forgotten about HOMES. The truth is, I don’t think about the Great Lakes as often as I should. They’re obviously important, why else did we memorize them?
But even after I saw HOMES, I still couldn’t name them all. I decided to do some research.
“Can you name the Great Lakes?” I asked my wife.
She proceeded to rattle off all five.
“How’d you do that?” I asked.
“Simple,” she said. “HOMES.”
Clearly, some acronyms work for some people.
My problem with HOMES is that it’s got nothing to do with lakes, unless your home is completely flooded—“Let’s get out of here, honey, all the rooms are like lakes!”—or you happen to live in a houseboat.
An acronym for the Great Lakes should be relevant, like WATER, or DROWN. Either one would work just fine, we’d simply have to rename most of the lakes to fit.
That’s the thing about acronyms: they’re often a forced fit.
But a few make sense. SMART spells out five criteria for an effective goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bounded). No force fit there; smart goals sound right and are used everywhere.
I like SOAR, which I just used a few pages back.
MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, works despite the misspelling. MADD is emotional, which makes it memorable, and the emotion fits the crime.
I also have a soft spot for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are creative acronyms—nicknames really—that sound less like mortgage agencies and more like a pleasant couple you’d meet at a square dance. Perhaps near the Great Lakes.
But in general, the world is cluttered with acronyms—over 5 million, according to acronymfinder.com. Pick up any business book, and you’re bound to run into some bad ones.
Use acronyms sparingly. Not everyone loves them, and some people, when they hear one, just don’t feel at HOMES.
Use Strong Words
“Your years of service are appreciated,” a manager told me recently.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t referring to my years of service, since we’d only just met a few minutes earlier.
I had asked him, and the other managers in the workshop I was leading, to write a motivational message to an employee.
The problem with this manager’s message: passive voice. We don’t know who’s doing the appreciating. And the only thing being appreciated is time. Apparently, his employee clocked in year after year, after year.
A stronger message to this employee: “I really value your expertise and know-how. For example, last week when you . . .” (provide an example or two).
How strong are your messages?
Passive voice, in writing, takes the life right out of a sentence. But passive voice is not just a writing problem.
Do you ever speak with a passive voice?
Let’s consider four examples involving Henry, a hypothetical bank robber:
1. “I’ll try to rob the bank,” Henry says.
From a writing standpoint, that’s ok. But when spoken, it’s weak.
Try is a tip-off that Henry will never rob the bank. He’ll probably never even go into the bank, he won’t even use the ATM. Soon, Henry will be asking you to lend him money, saying he’ll try to pay you back soon.
Good luck with that.
2. “The bank was robbed,” Henry says.
By whom? This is classic passive voice. Henry has vanished from the sentence. Sure, he robbed the bank, but now he refuses to take credit.
3. “My stupid boss made me rob the bank,” Henry says.
Don’t you just want to go up to Henry, shake him, and say, “Henry, for god’s sake, stop blaming other people in the organization. Take responsibility for your life, man.”
4. “I robbed the bank.”
Finally, Henry has spoken with an active voice.
And in 10–20 years, when Henry is released from jail, perhaps his boss will be there to thank him for his years of service.
Are you a leader? Of course you are. So then sound like one. Not “mistakes were made,” but “I made mistakes, and here’s what I’m doing to fix them.”
Otherwise, you rob energy.
Swearing at Work?
A U.S. CEO was rebuked by his board for “salty language”.1 I read the story over breakfast, while abroad.
The breakfast was a buffet, lots of choices, and the woman at the next table was conflicted. She began with noble intentions: a dry omelet and a few rice cakes. Rice cakes, if you’ve never tried them, are similar to eating Styrofoam packaging material, but with less calories.
She nibbled at the omelet, nibbled at the rice cakes, then pushed her plate as far away as possible and got up.
A few minutes later, she returned with a new plate featuring an impressive stack of pancakes and several juicy strips of bacon.
If Freud had been there, he would have noted the never-ending struggle between what he called the id (your raw drives) and the superego (your disciplined, controlled side).
The problem with swearing at work is that it looks like you’ve got a loose, out-of-control id. But work is about control, starting each day when the alarm goes off—oh, no!—and you force yourself out of bed.
Does that mean that you should never swear, that you should commit instead to a restricted, rice cake–like verbal diet?
At some companies, swearing is the norm. A woman exec told me her male colleagues used to chide her for not swearing. She finally left.
Let’s assume that’s not the norm where you work. Consider your choices:
• Swearing at others. This one is easy: don’t.
• Swearing to impress others. People with a high need for power, noted psychologist David McClelland, often use provocative language.
The motive here is simply to get a reaction. It doesn’t really matter to you whether others like you or your language.
But maybe it should.
• Swearing at a situation. There are “moments in life,” says psychologist Steven Pinker, “when the point for politeness has passed.”
Imagine a bad day. First, your computer crashes. Then the stock market crashes. Then your airplane crashes. At some point, you might say something stronger than darn.
But here’s the thing. If you’re a leader, people notice everything you do, from what goes into your mouth to what comes out.
And everything you do communicates your standards.
Lose Your Train of Thought? Try These Words
Suppose you’re in the middle of a presentation when, suddenly, you can’t think of a certain word, or you lose your train of thought. Maybe you’ve misplaced the entire railroad.
Perfectly natural, happens to everyone.
So you reach for a filler word, such as um. Nothing wrong with an occasional um. No one will notice unless, for some reason, they’re counting every um you utter, which, I admit, is an intriguing hobby.
But it doesn’t need to be yours.
Getting to zero ums should not be your life’s work. Actually, if you never say um, you’ll sound scripted and robotic. The goal: keep your ums under the radar. A few ums will go undetected.
There are worse filler words. For example: like or you know. Worse because they get noticed faster. Consider like.
Good use: “This tastes like potato salad.”
Personally, I’d like to know if this really is potato salad, because maybe it started out as something entirely different, such as apple strudel, and then took a bad turn.
But from a usage perspective, we’re fine.
Bad use: “I told my girlfriend that I like really loved her, and she was like, ‘I like you too,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t want to be liked. In fact, I really dislike that.’” (Like appears five times; only two are correct.)
Now let’s look at you know.
Good use: Let’s say you’re at a party, and your host says, “You know Dorothy, don’t you? Dorothy makes that wonderful potato salad.”
And you say, “Of course I know Dorothy!” while thinking, Dorothy? Who’s Dorothy?
Bad use: “It’s, you know, embarrassing when you can’t remember someone, you know?”
Both you knows are unnecessary. If we say, “It’s embarrassing when you can’t remember someone you know” (without the comma), that’s better. We’re obviously talking about Dorothy.
There are better words than um. Try these filler words instead: well, now, so, and.
For example: “Um, you must be Dorothy” becomes “Well, you must be Dorothy.”
You can overuse any word. Sometimes I overuse so. So do others. So, reports the New York Times, is the new sentence opener.2
But just because everyone says so doesn’t make it ok. In other words, “So what?”
Eventually, you may want to go beyond filler words. The simplest solution when unsure what to say next: pause. Pausing marks you as a calm professional.
Even if it feels strange, like you just ate some dubious potato salad.
Write Bad Badly
“I’ve got writer’s block,” an executive tells me. She’s got to deliver a five-minute speech to 500 people, and she hasn’t written a thing.
But she knows what she wants to avoid.
“I don’t want to be clichéd, predictable, or boring,” she says. “Or too dramatic, or too rehearsed. Also, I don’t want to wear the wrong shoes.”
That’s the problem, and it’s got nothing to do with footwear. Her internal editor is out of control.
Internal editor? Remember the one we discussed earlier (page 7, Say More)? It’s your natural concern that everything you write, or say, be excellent. Having an internal editor is essential, except for one thing: it screws up the early stages of creating anything.
Writing is difficult enough, even for accomplished authors. “The struggle with writing is over,” wrote Philip Roth, author of 31 books, on a Post-it note to himself. He’d finally decided, at almost 80 years old, to retire. “I look at that note every morning, and it gives me such strength.”3
Anyone who writes anything—a report, a proposal, a fortune cookie—knows the struggle.
I struggle with birthday cards, even though the entire point of buying a birthday card is to get someone else to express your sentiments.
But you’ve still got to write something.
The solution to the writing struggle is always the same: get something down on paper—anything. Anything beats nothing.
How to start?
Write without stopping (similar to the earlier advice about speaking nonstop). Set a time limit, say five minutes, and then keep your hands moving on the keyboard, or your pen moving across the paper, even if it’s only to write:
a. “I have nothing to say. Absolutely nothing. Furthermore, I still have nothing to say.”
b. “Paul’s advice is completely useless.”
c. “Happy birthday, you’re 49 years old! A year from now, you could be dead! Have a nice day.”
Talk it out. Instead of writing, speak into your smart phone’s dictation app, or leave yourself a long voice mail. Sometimes it’s easier to talk than write. But talk without stopping.
Commit to writing badly. Make that your goal. The worse your writing is—spelling mistakes, bad grammar, incoherent thoughts—the better.
When you let yourself write badly, you loosen up and the words flow. Then, but not before, you’ve got something to edit.
All writing is rewriting. That’s the best writing advice I ever got. But first, you’ve got to get something down. Create first, edit later.
Sharpen Your Emails by 10
1. Capture attention with your subject line.
“Are you about to date a convicted felon?” asks a recent email.
That’s an intriguing question, spiced with romance and danger. I’m tempted to pluck this email right out of my spam folder and read it.
But I don’t.
Why should anyone read your emails? There are 1,000 reasons not to, starting with the 1,000 other emails in everyone’s inbox.
Every email competes for attention. Asking a question is one way to capture it.
2. Update your subject line.
“Let’s postpone today’s call.” That subject line—for a call later today that’s not being postponed—was originally written for last week’s postponed call. And then never changed.
Updating the subject line is like changing your underwear. Do it at least daily.
3. Manage your emotions.
“I just read your stupid, stupid tip,” emailed a reader, apparently unimpressed by my work. “I can’t believe you feel good about writing something as stupid as that, and publishing it no less.”
Please don’t send emails when you’re upset—let’s assume your message will be forwarded to everyone and last forever—even if what you’re upset about is how many stupid, stupid emails you’re getting.
4. Don’t email everyone.
205 billion emails were sent and received in 2015—daily.4 You probably feel like you received most of them.
Reply to all? Please don’t.
5. Avoid most abbreviations.
J = joking; IJ = I’m joking; YMBJ = you must be joking.
YMMV, which means “your mileage may vary,” and also, more loosely, “your results may vary,” is the “most popular slang looked up today.”5
For example: “Whenever I date a convicted felon, it’s always very exciting. YMMV.”
Do you assume everyone knows these abbreviations? YMBJ.
6. Follow up.
You send someone an email but don’t hear back. Don’t assume the other person got it, opened it, read it, understood it, or remembered it.
And don’t assume their lack of response means anything personal, or anything at all, other than they’re drowning in a tsunami of 205 billion emails a day.
So follow up a few days later. And when you do, try something different (see #7).
7. Consider the phone.
Yes, email is fast, but sometimes a phone call, or short hallway conversation, is faster.
Sometimes putting a note in a bottle and hurling it out to sea feels faster than playing email ping pong all day.
And don’t forget the old-fashioned letter. No one sends them anymore, which means no one’s getting 205 billion of them. Your message will be read.
8. Respond.
Respond to emails quickly. Even if it’s just to let the other person know you won’t be responding quickly.
9. Adapt your style.
When you email, you’re operating from one of two styles: letter-writing or texting.
a. If you’re a letter-writer, like me, you dress up your emails with greetings and closings. And you write in sensible paragraphs. I usually start with Hi, which is the email version of Dear. I miss Dear.
b. If you’re a text person, you’re not going anywhere near Hi or Dear, but you might do an occasional Hey.
Suppose you email me: “Hi Paul, I just read your stupid, stupid tip. Cheers!” That sounds warmer than “Hey stupid.”
But the point is to adapt your style to the other person. If you send me an email with Dear, I’ll probably write Dear back. And if you skip the greeting, I’ll do the same.
10. Edit, edit, edit.
Get right to the point in the first sentence or two. If you’ve got additional info, consider adding a paragraph called “details.”
For example: I’ll be out of the office for the next few years.
Details: Last night, I dated a convicted felon—he’d just escaped!—and after an exciting, all-night car chase, we ended up in a Mexican prison. I’ll be back in the office, assuming good behavior, in 5–10 years.
Ok, you’re out of the office. That’s the main thing.