Hi there, I’m Emily! 👋 Welcome to Hired Humanities, a biweekly newsletter devoted to helping humanities students build careers on their own terms.
Hey, readers! How are you doing? It’s been a wild few weeks with everything from the Derek Chauvin verdict to the terrible coronavirus news coming from other parts of the world. I hope you’re doing what you can for yourself and staying well.
Today we’re talking about communication. Though it’s a subject that’s cropped up several times on Hired Humanities, I’ve never dedicated an entire issue to it. I suppose I’ve been nervous to address it head-on, in part because I worry that discussing it will invite critiques about my style. That anxiety is just one of many reasons to cover it here, especially because it can be difficult to let go of perfectionism even after you leave academia. But the good news is that understanding the difference between what’s valued in business and academic communication makes it easier to quiet your inner critic. On top of that, it’ll make you a stronger communicator, regardless of where your career path takes you.
When your writing is your work, the stakes feel high each time you put your pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. In graduate school, I internalized that each mistake was costly, that each sentence had to be perfectly wrought for my ideas to be worthwhile. And it made writing hard. It took me ages to complete assignments because I’d write and rewrite paragraphs repeatedly, hoping that each minute adjustment would make what I was saying incrementally better.
I thought I was leaving that struggle behind with academia, but I was wrong. Emails became the new papers when I landed my first job in PR. And I’m not even talking about writing pitches, which are a whole other ballgame— I’m talking about the internal emails that are integral to the day-to-day operations of a business. I’d agonize over subject lines (does it really capture the contents of this email?) and rewrite simple replies multiple times (will I seem angry if I don’t include an exclamation point?). I’d even wake up at night thinking about whether I messed up a response.
One could argue that this agonizing was symptomatic of many things, from insecurity in my new role to gender stereotypes, but it tracks so closely with my experience in graduate school that I can’t disentangle it from academic perfectionism. It’s lessened as I’ve gotten more experienced and confident in my alt-academic career, but I could have saved a lot of time and prevented a lot of worries had I known more about what actually mattered earlier on.
And that, my friends, brings me to the present. Below you’ll find three things that I wish I knew about business communication before starting a career outside academia. I hope that this issue will give you permission to relax a bit when it comes to making mistakes, but also provide you with some tips on how to make your communication more impactful.
Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
Clarity is what makes you a good communicator
I used to think that I just wasn’t smart enough to “get” some scholarship, but I have come to realize many academics aren’t effective at communicating their ideas. One particularly memorable example of this was when a visiting professor assigned us some “light” introductory reading for the first class. After spending five hours trying to understand the first page, I admitted defeat and showed up to the seminar hoping I had gleaned enough to fake my way through the discussion. Low and behold, the professor admitted that she didn’t even fully understand what the author was saying.
This is an extreme case, but the point is that being a good scholar does not mean you are a clear communicator. But in business, you won’t get far if you aren’t one. When people are strapped for time and are juggling different priorities, the last thing they want to do is have to re-read an email five times to understand it or ask you to repeat yourself in a meeting.
Whenever I’m writing an email or document at work, I try and run through this checklist to make sure I’m making things as clear as possible:
Are there any extraneous words I can eliminate?
Can someone reading this quickly get the gist of it?
Do I make any calls to action (i.e. a request that needs a response) clear?
Knowing your audience is key
When you’re in academia, you don’t write for and engage with many different audiences. Sure, you may need to simplify your research for your undergraduate students, but for the most part, you’re creating content for other experts in your field. You don’t need to think that critically about their knowledge gaps, or why they’re reading what you’re writing in the first place.
When you enter the business world, you must interact with colleagues on different teams and job levels, and they all carry different amounts of knowledge and different motivations. While your teammate needs to know all the details of your project and timelines, your CEO may only need a quick summary. Additionally, if you’re taking on a client-facing role, you’ll need to be even more thoughtful when it comes to what gets shared and what gets left out.
Understanding what exactly someone needs to know is something that many people struggle with. One way to approach this is to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Think about how they will use the information you’re sharing with them. If they just need to be informed of what’s going on, stick to the basics. If they need to make an important decision based on your information, provide what they need to know to do so effectively. In cases like this, sometimes people will need your opinion, but other times you’ll just need to be the facilitator. Make sure to think through what role you’re playing before you hit “reply.”
Mistakes truly aren’t the end of the world
You have made typos, and you will continue to make typos. It happens to all of us because we’re human. And if you don’t believe me, I guarantee you can find some on Hired Humanities. (Shoutout to my friends who catch them after issues go live— you know exactly who you are.)
In all seriousness, you shouldn’t freak out if you mess up occasionally. Yes, you want to aim for clearly written text, and yes, there are some types of documents where you do not want typos (like a resume or cover letter), but when it comes to communications with your colleagues, it’s not worth beating yourself up over an occasional stray punctuation mark. Most people won’t even think twice about it, and no one is going to question your intelligence or mark up your email with a red pen. What matters most is that you’re moving the conversation along and getting stuff done.
A parting note
Thanks for tuning in this week! Please don't hesitate to drop me a line if you have questions or feedback. And, if you think someone else in your life would love to receive this newsletter in their inbox, feel free to spread the word.
As ever,
Emily
Reading List
A few of my favorite links
🎧 Speaking of anxiety, this episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast for NYT was particularly intriguing.
🚩 HBR has some practical advice on managing red flags on your resume.
📺. Have you seen “Shadow and Bone” yet? NPR’s review of “Shadow and Bone” hits the nail on the head.