Six Key Communication Skills for Records and Information Managers

Kenneth Laurence Neal

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781843347828
• eBook ISBN: 9781780634630
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de la información

Excellent business communication skills are especially important for information management professionals, particularly records managers, who have to communicate a complex idea: how an effective program can help the organization be better prepared for litigation, and do it in a way that is persuasive in order to win records program support and budget. Six Key Communication Skills for Records and Information Managers explores those skills that enable records and information to have a better chance of advancing their programs and their careers. Following an introduction from the author, this book will focus on six key communication skills: be brief, be clear, be receptive, be strategic, be credible and be persuasive. Honing these skills will enable readers to more effectively obtain support for strategic programs, communicate more effectively with senior management, IT personnel and staff, and master key forms of business communication including written, verbal and formal presentations. The final chapter will highlight one of the most practical applications of applying the skills for records and information managers: the business case. Based on real events, the business cases spotlighted involve executives who persuaded organizations to adopt new programs. These case histories bring to life many of the six keys to effective communication.- Addresses communication skills specifically for records and information managers while clarifying how these skills can also benefit professionals in any discipline- Includes case history examples of how communications skills made a difference in business and/or personal success- Focuses on written, verbal and presentation skills, where many books emphasize only one of these areas

1

Be brief: how brief?

Abstract

Being brief can add power and clarity to your writing. While there are no strict rules or one formula for being brief, there are guidelines. One is to keep in mind examples of great speeches or presentations, such as the Gettysburg Address or Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story, that are memorable because they said what needed to be said with relatively few words. The Flesch Reading Ease Score is another way to more quantitatively assess how difficult it is to read a section of text. With these guidelines in mind, two best practices for being brief in written and verbal communication include cutting extraneous words and writing as if you are talking to a friend.

Key words

brevity in writing

readability

Flesch Reading Ease Score

cut extraneous words

best practices for being brief

six-word challenge

“I will be brief. Not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the world’s shortest speech. He said, ‘I will be so brief I have already finished,’ and he sat down.”

(Edward O. Wilson)

While the opening quote about Salvador Dali is one of my favorites, I’m not suggesting you use it as a model for your next executive presentation. It does, however, make an important point. Being brief can add power and clarity to your written and spoken words. Being brief can increase your chances of getting your message across – and your proposals accepted.

Guidelines for brevity

There’s no strict formula for being brief. Every document, speech or presentation you deliver will be unique within the context of the situation. One guideline I follow is to remember that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a masterpiece of brevity. One of the most famous speeches in American history, it totaled 270 words. Few people remember that it was so brief because he said what needed to be said with great eloquence and few words, and then he sat down.

Recalling the context of the speech is enlightening. The Battle of Gettysburg was a bloody victory for the Union, resulting in the death of more than 45,000 soldiers. The battle also marked the beginning of the end of the Confederacy. America needed its president to offer words that could help foster healing and encourage peace.

Lincoln, however, was not the main speaker that day at the dedication of the cemetery. The keynote address was given by the famous orator Edward Everett. He delivered a speech of 13,500 words that took about two hours – 50 times the length of Lincoln’s speech. Yet it was Lincoln’s words that took their place in history.

There is another guideline I follow that helps me remember the power of brevity. As recounted in the play, Papa, Ernest Hemingway claims that he won $10 by meeting a challenge to write a story in six words. What were those six words? “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” I’m willing to bet that the six words just elicited some feelings.

There are variations of the “six-word challenge” to this day. Two years ago, a New York Times blog column published an article about the results of “The Six-Word Memoir Contest” (Parker-Pope, 2011). Readers were challenged to explain their mother, someone else’s mother or motherhood in general in six words. The contest drew 7000 submissions. Six winners were featured in the blog column. Here are three of the winning six-word memoirs that I particularly like:

Not entirely happy until completely discontent.

Friends finally. But not on Facebook.

She deserves more than six words.

The six-word challenge is a great and fun way to practice brevity in writing. You might try challenging yourself as well as your records or IT staff. For example, imagine I was a member of your records management staff and you challenged the team to explain why an effective records management program is important. I might focus on the risk reduction benefits of records management and submit this: “Good records. Program tight. Sleep tonight.” Give it a try; you may enjoy the challenge and at the same time gain a new appreciation for the power of brevity.

It’s not easy being brief

Yet despite the Gettysburg Address, Hemingway’s very short story, the six-word memoir contest and many other examples I can cite, all of us are continuously challenged to be brief, particularly in our writing. In the book Why Business Peoples Speak like Idiots (Fugere et al., 2005),¹ the authors offer an interesting take on the reason for what they humorously refer to as “document obesity:”

“There’s a reason we get beat up with hour-long presentations and four-minute voicemails with endings that no one ever listens to. Length implies that some work went into the production. It takes time to write 50 pages about something, but if we turn in five pages, it looks as though we haven’t put much time into the job.

High school teachers use this technique. A term paper must be 20 pages and have two pages of footnotes, from at least five different sources. In some ways, this is a useful guideline for high school students who might have no way of knowing how many pages it would take to cover topic X. It also weeds out the students who don’t want to do any real work, because it’s (slightly) easier to crank out five pages of garbage than 15 pages.

But guidelines like these are not so useful in the business world where the objective isn’t to spend a minimum amount of 12 hours in the library. The objective is to connect, convince, and make money.”

Make your writing more readable

While these and other examples might be helpful, there’s another guideline that provides a more quantitative way to think about how to make your writing more readable. The Flesch Reading Ease Score and the Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level measure your writing’s readability. Basically, these tests provide a method to calculate the difficulty of reading a section of text, as measured by the education level required of the reader.

Dr. Rudolph Flesch developed his Flesch Reading Ease Score in 1946. It is based on a complex formula that tallies what he called a document’s readability score. The scores are plotted on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the easiest to read. (It is next to impossible to write something that scores 100 outside of possibly “See spot run.”) Table 1.1 offers some examples that show Flesch Readability Scores in practice.

Table 1.1

Flesch Readability Score

Publication	Flesch Readability Score
Comic books	92
Sports Illustrated magazine	63
Wall Street Journal	43
The IRS Tax Code	−6

What you may find surprising is that the average person reads and comprehends – and is therefore most likely to be persuaded – at about the 6th and 7th grade reading level. If copywriters keep their written content within a Flesch Reading Ease Score of 60–70 (the reading ability of an average 13 to 15-year-old student), they are more likely to reach, satisfy, convince and convert the greatest amount of people.²

The Flesch Reading Ease Score, which takes into account sentence and word length, indicates sentences longer than 21 words prove challenging and that when the average syllable count of words in a given text approaches two, reading ease declines. Compare the following examples:

It was decided that the gymnasium be locked after the institution’s operating hours in an effort to thwart the local vandals’ destruction. (Flesch Reading Ease 38.3; Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 12.0)

with

To stop the vandalism at the gym, Mr. Brown decided to keep it locked after school. (Flesch Reading Ease 82.2; Flesch-Kincaid Grade level 5.7; McGahan, 2013)

Three best practices for being brief

1. Cut extraneous words

According to the Flesch Reading Ease Score, short sentences are more memorable than long ones. Keeping this in mind, one best practice to ensure you maximize readability is to cut extraneous words. Keeping sentences within a maximum of 18 words is a good rule of thumb. Here is an example:

Before	This year, after a careful fine-tuning of our records management budget, we were able to reduce our program costs by a grand total of $30,000 (26 words).
After	This year we saved $30,000 in records manageme...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Introduction: why communication skills for records and information managers?
• 1: Be brief: how brief?
• 2: Be clear: is my proposal full of jargon?
• 3: Be receptive: am I asking questions and listening?
• 4: Be strategic: what am I trying to achieve?
• 5: Be credible: why should you believe me?
• 6: Be persuasive: are you persuaded yet?
• 7: Case histories: why should you adopt my business case?
• Conclusion: communicate as well as you can
• References
• Index