Wes Kao: recommendation

Transcript context

…Not allowed. ... it's a book called It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences by June Casagrande, I think is her name. So we'll link this in the show notes. And another one is Better Business Writing by Harvard Business Press. They have a whole series on leadership, managing up, writing, et cetera. And I recommend those two books usually to new team members who join because they cover more of the craft of creating strong sentences, paragraphs, arguments and thinking about the logic of what you're saying. A lot of times when we write a sentence, there's actually already a point of view or there's a point of view baked in, but you don't want it to be an accidental point of view. I was just talking to my team member about this, she asked me to give her some feedback on something that she wrote and the way that she had written her paragraph was leading for the reader. It was about an offsite that we have coming up and she talked about whether we should change a WeWork location, something like that. So this is actually super useful, tactical stuff for Slack messages, if you're DMing someone, if you're texting someone, you can use these principles basically everywhere. And so it was a Slack message about changing WeWork locations and the way that she had phrased it, the obvious conclusion was, oh, well, we should just stick with our current one. And so I asked her, is that your recommendation? Because if it is then great, because you're leading the reader to that conclusion. But if it's not, you're asking a leading question that is skewing the results of this question. And so it turned out that she was open. She didn't really have an opinion. And so we thought, okay, how do we adjust this so that it'll get a more objective response? And then we talked about it some more and thought it's actually better, if you do share a recommendation here, it's easier for the reader. So how do we then adjust it some more so that the recommendation is intentional within that paragraph? I know it's not quite a soundbite, but I see this a lot in people's writing is that there's these either sentence structures that add more cognitive load to the reader or have a little bit of confusion, and it's a technical issue actually. It's like the which or some clause explains something directly before it, but they actually meant for that clause to describe something 10 words before at the beginning of the sentence, right? It's hard without a visual, but anyway, both of those books talk about the mechanics and the technical aspects of writing and the craft of writing really well. at the beginning of the sentence, right? It's hard without a visual, but anyway, both of those books talk about the mechanics and the technical aspects of writing and the craft of writing really well. And I guess my spiky point of view is that more people should learn the craft of writing and the technical aspects of writing, not just look at what other people are doing to try to get audience engagement, but to actually improve your ability to precisely say what you mean and convey the level of conviction that you have and not accidentally mislead people with your words, because you didn't know that the way you wrote something could potentially mislead them.…

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