Writing Matters

The Case for Authentic Writing Training

Four reasons for using relevant e-mails and writing exercises when helping customer service agents improve their writing skills

• NOTE: In this post, I am making the case for authentic writing training for customer service agents. But I believe these four reasons apply to writing training for all types of employees.
  

If you want your customer service agents to write high quality e-mail to customers, and you’re planning to invest time and money in writing skills training for your agents, be sure the training materials are relevant to the work they do and the training provider understands the writing demands of the agents’ job.

Reason 1: Relevant training materials and exercises enable agents to transfer skills from training to the job.
It’s not enough to have agents improve their writing skills in the confines of the training room. For the training to be worthwhile, agents must be able to apply the writing skills learned during the training to the job. Thus, the more similar the training materials are to the actual writing agents do, the better the transfer will be. For example, agents should practice grammar and punctuation skills by editing e-mail samples not project proposals or monthly reports. 

Reason 2: Customer service agents’ work requires a specific set of writing skills, ones which are not interchangeable with skills required of other employees.
Each job requires its own kind of writing. Auditors need to summarize findings, marketers need to persuade readers to buy, and human resources professionals need to explain benefits packages to employees. Customer service agents need a specific set of writing skills, too. They must be able to anticipate and answer customers’ questions, use a tone that builds rapport between the customer and company, and integrate canned answers into free-form text. A worthwhile, authentic training program will help agents develop the writing skills they will actually use, not just the “generic” writing skills any employee might need.

Reason 3: Relevant writing training reduces agents’ resistance.
Some agents may be resistant to training that helps them improve basic writing skills such as grammar and punctuation. They may feel that their employer lacks trust in them or that the training is unnecessary.  They may even be somewhat embarrassed that their writing skills need refreshing or worried that they’ll be dismissed from their job because their writing skills are poor. Providing training that’s relevant to their job, training that uses work-related e-mail examples rather than generic business writing examples or Composition 101 examples, can reduce their resistance. When they see that the writing skills they’ll learn during the training are directly related to the work they do every day, they become more open to learning.

Reason 4: Relevant training materials become a useful reference tool after the training is complete.
The training materials—notebook, handouts, exercises, etc.—will guide agents’ learning during the actual training, and, if they are relevant, these materials can be useful after the training. For example, many writing guides will contain a list of frequently misused or misspelled words. Such a list can be useful to agents one month after the training, or even six months after the training, if it is a list of work-related words.

What are your thoughts on the topic of authentic writing training? What kinds of learning experiences make writing training real for the work you do? Post here or e-mail me with your thoughts.

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

We're So Over It: Rereading a Snarky 1997 Magazine Article About E-WRITE

While fulfilling my New Year's resolution to purge a filing cabinet jammed with papers, I came across a tattered photocopy of an article about E-WRITE that appeared in the "Fast Forward" feature in the February 1997 issue of Working Woman magazine. Our business was only about six months old at the time, and we were thrilled to be interviewed for the magazine. But we weren't thrilled when the article came out; we were stunned. What we thought would be a celebration of our forward-thinking woman-owned training business was, instead, a major mock-fest.

Apparently, the idea that we were charging four figures for a day-long e-mail writing course for 25 people seriously offended the author: "They get $2,000 for a day's worth of advice on how to tighten sentences and shorten paragraphs on-line." The piece portrayed us as snake oil saleswomen: "O'Flahavan and Rudick admit they have no technological expertise, but they sure know how to exploit the cyberboom." Not content to belittle us herself, the author recruited experts to corroborate that our business idea was merely opportunistic. She quoted Joanne Serling, an account manager at Wilson McHenry in New York, skeptically stating "If you can't write, you've got bigger problems than any e-mail course can fix" and Malcolm CasSelle, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who said "If you ride a fad, you can write your own price tag." (You can download the 1997 article, which I've retyped, so you don't have to squint at the image.)

Thirteen years later, this nasty article makes me smile with pride:

• We were right and Working Woman magazine was wrong. People do need, and do value, e-mail writing training. Our curriculum and our client list have grown. We're thriving, even in tough economic times.
• In 1997, we didn't even have business cards, but we did have clients. Only six months old, we were doing business with Lockheed Martin and Cable & Wireless. Not too shabby.
• The author compared us to "Mrs. Bunmaster, your tenth-grade English teacher." Well, in a former career I was a tenth-grade English teacher. I was honored to be compared to one in 1997 and I am today.
• The author used quotation marks around the word expertise, as in e-write's "expertise." Well, expertise grows with time. In 2010, our expertise is real; we're authors of a book on e-mail writing, and I'll be giving e-mail-related presentations at three national conferences during the first half of the year: Annual Call Center Exhibition, HDI 2010, and the  Government Customer Support Conference. No quotation marks needed.
• We shared page 16 of the magazine with Tony Bennett.

Do you have any interesting business artifacts from 1997 that you'd like to share? Sometimes, looking back is the best way to get ahead!

-- Leslie O'Flahavan

Five Truths I've Learned in My Role as Writing Coach

I've been a writing teacher for 25 years, and I've taught in just about every setting you can imagine: high schools and colleges, contact centers, corporate boardrooms, libraries, power companies, and even a plastic cup manufacturing plant. (Don't ask.)

Lately I have been providing one-on-one writing coaching for staff at the National Association of Realtors, the College Board, the American Society of Civil Engineers, Pan American Health Organization and, soon, the National Museum of the American Indian. Usually, I meet with the coach-ee in person for an hour and then follow up with weekly coaching sessions by phone. I have found these coaching sessions so professionally satisfying and so productive that I took some time to reflect on coaching. Here are the five truths I've learned in my role as writing coach:

1. People suffer tremendous doubt about their ability to write well enough on the job. In fact, there's so much suffering going on that I am sometimes surprised anyone gets any writing done at all. In these do-more-with-less times, people suffer because they have too many writing tasks to complete in too little time. But they also suffer because they are quite sure they don't write well enough, and they dread the inevitable exposure. They're convinced that everyone else finds writing easy, that not being able to write well has held them back professionally, that it's better to reuse the old version of whatever they must write than to risk writing it their own way and doing it wrong. Coaching helps them suffer a bit less, and, as we all know, it's hard to be productive if you're in pain.
2. Good writers are made, not born. The people I work with become better writers during our coaching sessions. The direct, individualized instruction combined with my nurturing of their confidence helps them break bad writing habits and build new, successful ones. After coaching, they write more quickly, more effectively. They suffer less. In short, they improve. Certainly there are some writers whose eloquence and grace are innate, but most workplace writers become better the old-fashioned way: instruction + practice + feedback. I've never met a person who couldn't improve his or her writing skills, and I have found that coaching is one of the best ways to "make" a better writer.
   
3. Managers should provide employees with model documents. Most of the people I coach are eager (desperate?) for models of the types of documents they must write. They would really like to see a sample of what their managers consider a model report, memo, or e-mail. They want to please their managers. They are willing to adopt their manager's writing style, even succumb to the manager's whims, but they need to know what their managers want. But many managers stubbornly refuse to provide models. They think that the writer shouldn't need a model or that a model will stifle creativity and initiative. Some managers won't provide a model document, or a sample of what they're looking for, because they don't know what they want. In essence, they exploiting the writer in their requests for multiple drafts. My experiences as a writing coach have proven to me that managers who provide model documents set their writers up for success. (Not to mention that providing a model keeps the manager honest...)
4. Specific praise leads to improvement. Negative comments they've received on their writing have actually made most people so cynical that they perceive praise as nothing more than the moving walkway toward criticism. When their managers say "Your first draft is pretty good," they hear "Now that we've gotten the thin compliment out of the way, let's get down to some hard-hitting criticism." During coaching, I take the time to let my client know exactly what he or she is doing well. I never give vague praise. I never say "This is a good draft of the memo" without continuing "because you've used headings to make it scannable, and you've included a few well-chosen statistics, such as annual income, to convince your reader." Specific praise is practical as well as "nice." Once writers clearly understand which successful writing tactics they have under their belts, they will repeat and adapt these tactics in new situations.
5. Intimacy fosters learning. Usually, I do the first coaching session in person and the rest by phone. Because two-way, active listening is easier on the phone, these sessions are intimate, calm, engaged, and personal. I've received, and kept, many confidences during writing coaching sessions. I've been privy to people's fears and shared in their accomplishments. Coaching has been an honor for me because my clients have been so open.

Writing coaching works. I'm amazed at how much we accomplish in each coaching session. One participant wrote me an e-mail after our last session. She said:

"Thank you so much for your help today. I find our discussions valuable and I hope it doesn’t seem too much like a therapy session! It is really helpful for me to discuss these issues with some who can be objective and honest. Your advice and suggestions have been great."

So gratifying!

-- Leslie O'Flahavan