Hi!
Make words work for you this week
👇
1/ Quote I’ve been thinking about 📣
"There is one golden rule to bear in mind always: that we should try to put ourselves in the position of our correspondent, to imagine his feelings as he writes his letters, and to gauge his reaction as he receives ours.
If we put ourselves in the other man's shoes we shall speedily detect how unconvincing our letters can seem, or how much we may be taking for granted"
Inland Revenue Staff Instruction
It’s hard to write without bias and easy to forget our reader.
The first step to fighting assumptions is to acknowledge them, which means being self-aware and humble.
But, biases are great impersonators of rational thought. And without deliberate clipping, they can overgrow and stifle.
There’s even 1 called the bias blind spot—a tendency to see ourselves as less biased than other people 🤦♂️ We all think we’re special, right?
So, although completely unwrapping the vines of human nature may be impossible, the least we should do is deliberately study our writing for them.
2/ Some tweet about writing 🐦
Writing isn’t just for writers. It’s for everyone, because words are the thing we use to make things happen. In another sense, we’re all writers.
I often wonder how many ideas I’ve lost, opportunities I’ve squandered, and potential I’ve suffocated with bad writing. All persuasion and education occurs through the use of words—a lot of the time, the written word.
Are you making the written word work in your favour?
Have a good week 🙌
John