You Need to Communicate Better - 5 Tips from a Journalist

There's a reason why journalists are so good at communication.

I worked at a little TV station in Sherman, Texas just out of college. KXII-TV hired me to produce the noon and 5pm newscasts.

Every day, it was my job to decide what stories to air and to write a significant portion of the show. I wrote everything from reporter introductions, to commercial break tosses, to re-writes of full stories from the Associated Press wires.

I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. And I thought I was prepared for the amount of writing. I also thought that -- because I went to journalism school and had written my butt off -- my writing was good.

Little did I know the truth. My writing sucked.

Every day, around 3:30pm, my 5pm anchor started reading the stories I stacked in our rundown. (A rundown is the order of the show.) His desk was on the other side of the newsroom -- the farthest away it could be. When he came across something I wrote that he didn't like he would yell across the newsroom. It sounded something like:

"Tomlinson! What the heck? What is this story? Re-write it."

He did this over and over again. He brutally edited my stories, pointing out -- quite publicly -- everything that needed to change.

To be fair, he was very good at his job. Our newscast was very popular. We were number one, and when he got on the air, everything flowed smoothly.

Yes, the public editing was hard to endure. No, I don't recommend humiliation as a tool. But I got better as a writer.

TV News is brutal, y'all.

You can write better, and you probably need to

Daily writing -- fast and furiously, with tons of editing -- taught me to be a better writer. And I think I'm pretty damn good at it.

I read lots of bad writing. We're talking sub-par communication. It's everywhere. It's all over LinkedIn, blog articles, and even published books.

It doesn't have to be like this, folks.

You can and should write better. Even my writing can be better.

What I consider good writing uses all of the tips I'm about to share with you. These are the things I learned in my brutal and intense journalism career as well as what I've learned since from years of continual practice.

If you follow these tips and practice, your writing will improve, too.

Tell a story

What's the easiest way to remember something? Put it in a story.

Every journalist tells a story. There's a reason for this: Humans are hard-wired to understand and engage with stories.

For thousands of years, people told stories orally from generation to generation. In fact, researchers believe the people who created the earliest known cave art made it to tell stories to each other.

Some oral stories were eventually written down. The earliest known story -- Gilgamesh -- was later recorded as a poem in Sumerian cuneiform. Other examples of stories from oral tradition include The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf, and the tradition spans globally.

Stories engage people.

Want to bore someone? Spout off a bunch of text. Want to capture the imagination? Tell a story. The best nonfiction books I've ever read tell stories. One of my favorite books is The Wonder of Birds by Jim Robbins. Each chapter starts with a story that draws you in.

What story can you tell when you explain a concept or write a simple post? Feeling stuck? Here are some tips:

• Choose an authentic story. Did it happen to you or to someone you know? Is it unique?
• Make it relatable. Will another human relate emotionally?
• Avoid cliches. Are you repeating the same, tired stories many others have told? For example, have you heard the one about a driver who steals a older person's parking space and gives them the finger? Then he shows up to his job interview and -- guess what? -- the interviewer is that older person? Yeah, we've all heard that one.

Be brief

Stop fluffing up what you have to say. The key to effective communication is brevity.

In grad school, I wrote a paper on peak-end rule and my instructor complained, "Oh, the words!" He reluctantly gave me an "A" even though he hated how much I wrote. As much as I want to protest, he was right. It was too much, and too many words distracted from my idea.

You can probably cut your sentences in half and still communicate your idea.

For example:

Draft 1: It can be as simple as rewriting your sentence from passive to active voice.

Draft 2: Simply write in active instead of passive voice.

Say it with clarity

Choose your words for clarity, not to show off how smart you are.

The English language has so many words to choose from. Many words mean the same thing. Other words communicate similar but slightly different meanings.

Make sure you choose the right one. And when in doubt, use the word that most people will understand. These words are typically simpler and shorter.

But avoid jargon. As the website plainlanguage.gov explains:

Jargon is unnecessarily complicated language used to impress, rather than to inform, your audience.

I couldn't have said it better.

Here are some examples of jargon:

• Game changer
• Paradigm shift
• Boil the ocean
• Core competencies
• Thinking outside the box

It's OK to speak plainly.

Oh, and be careful of writing from AI tools like ChatGPT. They are TERRIBLE about jargon and lack of clarity. Don't accept the first draft.

Write conversationally

When you're talking with a friend, why would you EVER say, "Could you hand me that cup? I would like to utilize it to drink coffee."

I learned to write conversationally because of broadcast news. People on the radio and TV speak to you like you're having a conversation with them.

Conversations are intimate experiences. They feel relatable and familiar. They connect people to one another.

Reading your writing aloud helps you write conversationally. If you ever enter a newsroom full of reporters and producers, you're likely to see a lot of moving lips and hear murmuring. That's because they say it out loud to make sure it sounds right.

I read my work out loud and edit when I trip over a word or sentence. It has to sound right. You can't tell if it sounds right unless you get out of your head and read text out loud.

Edit ferociously

I thought I was pretty good at writing until I arrived in Houston for my associate producer job at KPRC (News 2). The station hired me to help write the 6pm and 10pm newscasts.

My 6pm producer started assigning me one or two news stories in the show. Then after each show, I found extensive notes from the producer in my email about all the things I did wrong in my writing.

Every. Day.

Then one day -- maybe a year after I started -- there were no notes. She never sent anything again, and I was so happy that she thought my writing had improved enough to meet her standards.

I learned to write better because she edited my work ferociously. Eventually I learned to edit my own work with brutality.

Every news story goes through an editing process. Reporters, producers, anchors and managers are all supposed to read other people's work. When you see a typo on the screen or hear a misstep, it's often because it either escaped attention or a bunch of people didn't edit quite carefully enough.

How to edit ferociously

1) Find someone you can trust to provide honest feedback

Back in my producer days, I had anchors and producers around to edit my work. These days, I'm not as fortunate.

When I have a high-profile talk, I hire Jim Comer to help me edit. He's an experienced speechwriter and communications coach who will put my talk through six or seven edits. He edited "Rethinking User Personas," and I credit him for how good it turned out.

But I can't always afford to hire someone. So I have a few friends and family members who will tell me when something -- like a blog article -- sucks.

The ability to appreciate editing took years of practice. Back in elementary and middle school, my dad edited my papers. He was an English major and a good writer, so he insisted on helping. I used to dread the editing sessions where he would pick apart my words and grill me with questions. I only realized how helpful those sessions actually were when I got to college.

I'm now at the point where I feel uncomfortable when I don't receive a lot of editing.

2) Edit multiple times

Editing your own work is dicey. I've read too many self-published books where it was obvious the author was the only editor and really didn't know how to edit.

But editing your own writing is the most cost and time-effective method.

To edit and improve a piece of my own writing requires me to step away from my own ego and edit my own work like I would another person's.

For example, I've already edited this article three times. That means I've read it out loud three times, and I've picked it apart, rearranged, removed words and rewritten sentences. I'll put it through at least another round.

3) Remove sentences that don't add to the core idea

The more I read a piece of my writing, the easier it becomes to recognize when a sentence or idea doesn't add anything. At that point, kill it.

It's OK to let it go. I just removed four sentences in my fourth round of editing. They were repetitious.

4) Proofread, proofread, proofread

Typos happen. Your job is to minimize the damage. But the longer your stare at words, the easier it is to miss stuff. Here are some ideas to help catch spelling and punctuation mistakes:

1) Hire a proofreader. I recommend this for any self-published author.

2) Lean into tools with spellcheck and AI grammar tools. Google docs can automatically make suggestions when it sees missing words or when the grammar doesn't make sense. I have team members who love Grammarly. Use them to their fullest potential. But know they don't catch every mistake.

3) Read sentences or paragraphs backward. When you read backwards, your brain can't easily fill in the gaps. That means you're more likely to notice typos and mistakes that your chosen tool didn't catch.

Now go forth and write better

So there you have it. These are my tips and tricks for better writing. AI may one day write better than we can, but it is not this day.

In the meantime, let's train ChatGPT to write better by putting better work out there.