How to Write About What Went Wrong
You know you didn’t measure up. Your nonprofit didn’t meet its objectives, or you made a mistake on your customer’s order, or maybe someone even complained to your boss about you. No one’s perfect; it may have been an honest mistake, or there may have been unforeseen circumstances that transformed a simple task into something like trying to fly a kite on a windless day, or sitting on the ground in a perfect breeze, muttering and grumbling as you picked at the knotted mass of the kite’s tail. Whatever it was, something went wrong and you need to write to a stakeholder about it. What do you do?
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How Your Writing Can
Build Community to Change the World
To truly change our cultural practices and values, we need to bring people together to share and live a new vision. We need to create community. This Flight Log will look at the need for community on three levels – societal, individual, and organizational – and how you can structure your messaging to address all three.
Continue Reading »Two Little Words that Create Community
- On April 08, 2014
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How you frame your work in speech and writing can make all the difference. If your messaging fosters a sense of community, people will want to be involved. Certain words can subtly and powerfully undermine the atmosphere of equality and mutual support on which real community is based, while other words just as quietly and compellingly boost community feeling, transforming how people feel and what they do. Replacing just two tiny, common words can dramatically shift both your messaging and your results, so that people feel eager and gratified to be part of your community and support you.
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Don’t Just Avoid It:
How to Counteract Stereotype in Writing
People are sensitive, and that means not only that they are easily hurt, but that they perceive a great deal of subtlety and are often influenced by nuances of which they aren’t even consciously aware. In writing, outright bigotry is often easy to spot and avoid, but sometimes we subtly support stereotypes, stigmas, and dehumanization without even realizing it. Here are two techniques for increasing your awareness of how writing can either embolden stereotypes or replace them with humanitarian concepts.
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