Written Communication – tests, techniques and results

In the communication workshop series, we also covered written communications. Being an offshore software development company, written communication is very important for us. Most of the business is over email – internal and external. So we wanted to create a breakthrough in the written communication skills of our team as well.

We started with a small exercise to find out the current skills in written communication. You would write a small essay – a page full – about your favorite color. Once people did that, we exchanged the essays with the buddy and asked for a review. People came up with many suggestions and praises. This gave us a first shot of feedback. Overall, people were experiencing the following hurdles:

• Incomprehensive flow of thoughts
• Grammatical mistakes: punctuation, capitalization etc.
• Insufficient vocabulary
• Writer’s block: for some it was too hard to write about their favorite color

Equipped with these insights, we started on the remedies. The flow of thoughts was not too much of a problem since people could always edit their emails or documents. At the same time the “introduction, body and conclusion structure” was made clear to the team.

Grammatical mistakes are tough to crack. We asked people to re-read the document before sending it out. And even to show it to their buddies for a review. A peer review generally clears up most of the grammatical mistakes. Spelling mistakes were easy to correct with the help of automated spell checkers.

How do you develop vocabulary? Well, the only answer to that is to read more. The more you read, the more you learn. The more you read, the stronger your vocabulary can get. Some people also took up the assignment of learning a few new words every day. They would not only learn the new word, but also its synonyms and antonyms. This expanded their understanding of the language.

The writer’s block is simply that – a mental block. It is all in the mind. It is not real. It does not hurt to write a bad piece. It may hurt if you don’t write at all! We asked some people to translate an article from their mother tongue to English everyday, some were to write up an article on the subject they liked, and almost all took up the assignment to post their daily learning on our internal knowledge management system.

Practices like this created outstanding results. I don’t think the team is afraid of written communication now. Most have developed better writing skills. Their emails are now well written, their overall communication too has been a breakthrough.

As a matter of fact, when I look back at the communication levels three months back, I can clearly see the sea change. Did I tell you I am so happy with this?