Benjamine Knight is the COO of Pro Rhetoric, LLC—the company that houses Vital Speeches of the Day and the Professional Speechwriters Association.
Among many other rare skills, Benjamine is—and I don't use this term lightly—an exquisite correspondent with our customers, our partners and our vendors. We've worked together for years and I still marvel (stop, read and marvel) at the diplomacy, clarity, pitch-perfection and economy of her routine emails. They get across the emotion and the message with warmth, politeness and just the right sense of urgency. And unlike the paragraph you are reading, Benjamine's communications are not one single word longer than they need to be.
Benjamine is the best professional correspondent I have ever worked with.
But she's not a professional writer, and there's a difference. A couple of times over the years, Benjamine has read Writing Boots pieces or other Murray correspondence to fellow writers that make fun of some of the things she does in writing.
She's profligate with exclamation points, for instance.
It's possible that she occasionally begins sentences with "Hopefully."
She frequently follows a request with, "Thanks in advance."
And—mostly in exchanges with our closest colleagues—Benjamine is an emotiqueen.
She has occasionally wondered if I wish she would stop committing what I clearly think are sins of writing.
I've had to think about that, and I finally came up with the answer to why I don't want her to go changing a single punctuation mark:
The sins she commits are sins only professional writers care about.
But wait—all of our customers are professional writers.
Yes—but these are sins that writers will despise only when they're committed by other professional writers. (A speechwriter once wrote me, "Oh my God, David Murray just sent me a winky-face.")
And in fact if a non-professional writer communicated with a professional writer without the exclamation points and the other standard-issue e-geegaws, I fear the professional writer would feel the correspondence was cold.
And as Benjamine demonstrates, "When I write 'thanks, in advance' I really mean it! And when I use an exclamation point it's because I'm the enthusiastically friendly and approachable COO ;)"
Forever, hopefully.
But writer: Do two standards exist in your head for communicating—one with professional writers, and one with non-professional writers, however much you respect them? And assuming you do—and we'll keep this right here—do you ever break your own professional-writer standards, and throw in an exclamation mark or some crazy ALL-CAPS to a non-writer, where you wouldn't use them with me?
I SOMETIMES DO!
Do you?
Oh definitely!!!! (I had to do that — sorry)
I have my writer voice and my everybody else voice.
I also subdivide that to my work voice, my non-work voice, various work voices to various colleagues I feel various levels of personal connection to … it goes on and on.
I don’t think I ever really gave it much thought until I read this post, though.
Depends on the where.
A routine email, or a personal Facebook post is, in my estimation, a very different form of communication than a newsletter, web content etc. which people look to for clarity and credibility.
Expecting people to follow Strunk and White in what is generally casual communication (even though it is written) is like expecting people to be perfectly grammatical when we speak.
So, yes, my expectations of professionalism vary, but not based on who is communicating with me, but through what channel they are communicating to me.
If the channel/communication is casual, I overlook misspellings, subtle errors of grammar etc. But if the venue is a professional one, I may raise one eyebrow.
Punch me in the arm during a baseball game we’re watching, I say. But don’t do it when we’re at the opera.
Jeff, good thoughts.
It strikes me as an e-correspondence category of code-switching:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
It also strikes me that professional writers have to do it (or allow ourselves to do it) far more than we used to.
Twenty years ago or even 10, I resisted emojis, etc. and felt it was terribly lazy to use them, especially for someone who had the fine writing skills to convey tone via words—and good words—alone.
I don’t know if I ran out of TIME for that, or PATIENCE, or ANY SENSE THAT IT MATTERED.
But I ran out of SOMETHING, because I code-switch to non-writer mode all the time—and as Gerry pointed out, above, with infinite situational variety.
I don’t think it’s dumbed down my formal writing. But maybe I’m not the best judge of that LOL!!!!!!!!