communication Archives - Nickels English Solutions

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The Industry Leaders Fund

March 23, 2016 / admin / Comments Off

Leaders, we need you!

If there’s one thing South Australia needs at the moment, it’s more employment. Too often we hear about jobs being lost from so many industries, and with the looming losses associated with the closure of Holden, we need more and better leaders to look for opportunities for growth and diversification.

I recently did some work for a great South Australian organisation called the Industry Leaders Fund, which is well placed to help local organisations in these challenging and changing times.

It offers grants of up to $50000 for eligible people to participate in programs to advance their skills as leaders. By improving and expanding the organisations in which these leaders work, the goal is to stimulate growth in the South Australian economy. We’ll all benefit from that!

Past grant recipients are from diverse industries, and have attended many different training programs in Australia and overseas. They work in industries such as wine, engineering, food processing and production, industrial automation, biotechnology, defence, packaging and civil aviation. They have attended courses at Mt Eliza, Harvard and Stanford, have completed the Company Directors Course, been trained in Lean 6-Sigma, and have joined industry tours studying world’s best practice.

Those who have been fortunate to receive grants also benefit from ongoing involvement with the ILF.

This is the time to apply

If this sounds like something you, or a colleague, could benefit from, have a look at the eligibility criteria, and if appropriate, consider applying. The ILF CEO, Geoff Vogt, welcomes calls from anyone thinking about applying. You can ring him on 8394 0017 to discuss your eligibility and for guidance on preparing a competitive application. If you’re selected, you’ll benefit personally, and your organisation, associated businesses, and the state as a whole also stand to gain from this experience. Applications are open now, and close May 31, so this is the perfect time to take advantage of this opportunity.

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Embrace simplicity in your writing!

February 4, 2016 / admin / Comments Off

The reason for writing is to communicate, even if only with oneself.

I often see writing where the writer seems to have forgotten their purpose, and appears to be writing to display their intelligence, vocabulary or to otherwise attempt to impress. This does not aid communication.

If the reader feels they need to have swallowed a dictionary, they’ll give up.

Complicated sentence structures give the reader another reason to give up. The writer might be falling into their own grammatical traps, getting tangled up, making mistakes, generating ambiguity. Mistakes do not make a writer look intelligent. Ambiguity does not deliver the message. It’s far more impressive to write simply and correctly. Just look at Ernest Hemingway’s books: his themes are not simple, yet his style is both simple and evocative.

‘One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.’ – Quintilian

Venturing into a thesaurus to add variety to writing is a good idea, but also fraught with the danger of choosing a word with a different meaning, or one that is so obscure it won’t be widely understood. The thesaurus will have several lists of alternatives, according to the sense of the original word and what type of word it is. Because we love to use nouns as verbs, parts of verbs as adjectives etc. in English, it’s easy to pick the wrong word. Choose carefully. Don’t select the first word that sounds interesting.

If an everyday word has exactly the right meaning, why not use it? Everyone will understand it. However, if a less common word is just right, and a simpler word is not, go for it.

I often see words that aren’t quite right. They might sound similar to the correct word, but mean something completely different. This could be because of a typo, and the spell checker has made its best guess at the word, but offered something quite inappropriate. Take care with its suggestions! If you have any doubt about a word’s meaning, look it up in a reputable dictionary. This will improve your writing for ever.

Another thing to keep in mind is the length of a text. We receive a mountain of emails, and read articles and posts online. There’s so much to read that there isn’t time for it all. A piece only needs to be as long as necessary to fulfil its purpose. Once you’ve said what you have to say, stop.

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Punctuation: rhythm and meaning

October 12, 2015 / admin / Comments Off

There are certainly prominent writers who would disagree, but I believe punctuation is important.

Punctuation can give rhythm to a piece of writing, allowing the reader some breathing space, some thinking space. Short sentences can be emphatic. They can be punchy. If there are too many, it can become annoying and require too much repetition which also can become annoying. Overly long sentences can be confusing, as well as being difficult to write and punctuate correctly.

As for meaning, even a comma in or out of a sentence can make a huge difference to its meaning. This blog post gives a few examples of the importance of commas and other basic punctuation marks, as well as offering a few chuckles.

Have a look at this excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Warning! It’s a little racy. In the final 24000-odd words, there is not a shred of punctuation, not even an apostrophe! I’m not going to criticise such a respected writer, although I would point out that this extreme style can be quite exhausting for the reader, and possibly ambiguous, borne out by the number of reading guides that have been published to aid understanding of this piece.

In creative writing that’s fine, if that’s the author’s intention. It’s not such a good thing when the writing is for business or academic purposes, where clear, concise, unambiguous communication is important. It’s even worse if the topic is safety, or science, where there is no room for misunderstandings.

When writing for digital media, it’s important to bear in mind that attention spans are short, and few people will read something exhausting.

Here are a few more humorous examples of the difference a bit of punctuation makes. These are the best entries in a competition to write two thank you letters using the same words, but different punctuation, giving rise to different meanings