"Because I Have A Voice"

The title of this post are the words of King George VI as told in the movie "The King's Speech." It's a wonderful movie and one I highly recommend, especially to communications professionals.

It's easy to forget that communications does not come naturally to everyone. When we live and breath it as part of our daily work, we an easily take it for granted. In this movie, Colin Firth had me sitting forward, gripping the arms of my theatre seat and almost gasping for air as he struggled, in his portrayal of King George VI, to utter a few simple phrases. The affliction was worse depending on who and how many people he was addressing.

It's heart wrenching to realize how many people really struggle, every day of their lives, to have their voice heard. A voice can mean a lot of different things too - it can mean the straightforward act of speaking, or it an mean the plight of a minority group trying to be heard by the masses. It can be a child who doesn't get attention or love, despite all the toys and clothes heaped on it. A voice can be a stand against abuse or neglect. We all have a voice - but are we able to make it heard?

The movie "The King's Speech" touched me on so many levels, certainly as a communicator who helps others get their voice heard, but also as the daughter and friend of women who have died of cancer, and as the witness of bullying in the workplace. It touched me as the ex-wife of an alcoholic, and as the aunt of a beautiful, intelligent teenager.

Because I have a voice, I share my knowledge and experience here on this blog, and in my work and personal life. I encourage you to let your voice be heard too.

The Comparable Value of Life Experience

As a veteran communications professional, I've had responsibility to hire junior communicators during my career. One question that comes up regularly is whether a university degree adds to an applicant's qualifications. On the surface, the answer would be yes. But what if an other applicant, with no university degree, has other valuable skills or assets? How should those be judged when narrowing your selection?

For myself - I feel I have something better than a university degree from 25+ years ago. When I graduated from high school, I went to Europe for a year as an exchange student in Sweden. While most of my friends were partying it up through their first year of university, I was learning an entirely new culture, new language and independence that has stayed with me ever since. While my high school friends spent the second through fourth years of university catching up on grades so that they could graduate, I had joined the Canadian Armed Forces and was learning about team work - something you cannot survive basic training without - and self-discipline. During my three and a half years in the military, I learned about national pride, international awareness, structure, and of course communications in the most literal sense of the word as I was a telecommunications operator.

I don't discount for a second the value of a university degree. I would like to have one. But I would want it in addition, not instead of, my life experience and a double diploma from a well known and highly regarded technical college and I have taken a lot of university courses as a part time student. However, I also have something way more valuable than a degree. I have accreditation from the International Association of Business Communicators. Like the shoemaker's children, communicators seem not to be all that great at communicating how truly valuable an ABC (accredited business communicator) title is. I'm here to tell you how valuable it is.

First of all - you need to have a minimum of nine years hands on, full-time experience working in the communicatons/public relations field before you can even begin the accreditation process. Once you have that, you are required to submit a portfolio of your work with full and detailed case studies demonstrating what your role was in the work, what the objectives were, what was achieved and how you evaluated it. That is a lot of work - and that portfolio is then judged by top international communicators. Only if you pass this first test do you go on to the written and oral exams which are also marked by top international communicators. Achieving your ABC means you have met stringent international standards in the communications field. As a CEO, would you rather have on your senior management team - someone who earned their bachelor of arts degree in the 1980's or someone who has achieved international communications accreditation?

In the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, one company is lauded for its stance on education. "Nucor illustrates a key point. In determining 'the right people,' the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience. Not that specific knowledge or skills are unimportant, but they viewed these traits as more teachable or at least learnable, whereas they believed dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values are ingrained."

I love that I have the life experience, from military to travel to education to work, that I do have. I grew up in a house where my dad would get up at 2 in the morning and uncomplainingly go out in a blizzard or terrible rain storm to fix a downed telephone line. I grew up in a house where being frugal was not a fad, it was how we survived. I grew up in a house where my mom made sure we ate breakfast and made us lunch before she went to work for minimum wage and tips at the curling rink restaurant most evenings. I love the work ethic and life experience I have come to call my own. How lucky I feel to be who I am.

The Christmas Card Debate

There is a debate raging right now in offices across the country. It's an annual debate and one that started about 15 years ago with the increased use of electronic communications. Should we or shouldn't we send out Christmas cards (the secondary debate is should we or shouldn't we call them Season's Greetings cards).

I am going to start sounding like a broken record but in this case, that's a good thing. I'm being consistent. Whether or not your company sends out Christmas cards in the mail depends on what your brand is all about. When you have a solidly defined brand, a lot of the questions become much easier to answer in areas such as communications, marketing, human resource management and so on.

For example, when I was at St. Boniface Hospital Foundation, we had established that our brand was first and foremost about compassion. Everything the hospital, research and foundation stood for was in support of human compassion for those who were ill or were family or friends of the ill person. So as much as I personally don't like to send or receive Christmas cards, it made a lot of sense that as a Foundation we should send out Christmas cards to our biggest supporters - both donors, volunteers and suppliers.

Back it up a few years to when I was at Agricore United where we had established our brand was integrity. Everything we did was done with integrity - how we interacted with our farmer customers, how we interacted with government, with competitors, with suppliers - had to be done with integrity, adhering to moral and ethical principles. Among those ethical principles was a commitment to controlling costs. There was little advantage for us as a corporation to send out copious amounts of Christmas cards. It was contrary to our brand. However, sending out a handful of personal greetings to key customers and supporters from individual officers of the company did make sense. Did it have to be cards? Not necessarily - many of those greetings were made by phone which is more personal.

The debate on whether to send or not to send Christmas cards is going to carry on for years to come and now there is an added wrinkle in the mix -- the option to send an e-card. I suggest that you think about how you feel when you get an e-card from someone you regularly do business with before deciding if you want to send one out to your regular customers and suppliers. It may be more cost effective, but does it have the personal touch you are intending in the first place when deciding to send out cards?

If, after reading this entire blog, you are still unsure what your company should do I have one final suggestion for your Christmas card dilemma. Calculate the cost of printing and mailing the cards, add in the time required for your staff to sign, address and stamp the cards. Take that entire total and make a donation to a cause that is closely aligned with your organization's mission. Then add a post script line to automatically come up on every email going out from your company throughout the month of December that says something like: "To honour our clients, suppliers and supporters, ABC Company has made a donation to DEF Charity this holiday season. Thank you for your continued support."

Don't forget to put the same message on your website - front and centre - with a small explanation of why you chose to go this route, including some information on the charity and its mandate. You can also provide a comment box so that visitors to your site can let you know what they think of this idea - evaluation is the key to quality future planning.

In a Crisis

Anybody who thinks sitting down and banging out a crisis communications plan on their computer is the end of that project has a lot to learn. Mostly because a crisis communications plan (CCP) is a living document and it is never at an end.

Well, arguably once you have to implement a CCP full scale you might consider it to have reached an end, but that just means you have all that real life experience with which to start a new CCP.

My experience with CCPs is quite extensive, having worked in two industries that face very serious, dangerous situations daily (forestry and agriculture) and another two industries that face very serious, reputation damaging situations daily (insurance and finance). Different types of crisis, but often the same type of response. And that response starts long, long before the crisis.

This is where having a truly strong brand in place makes a world of difference. If you have built a brand that includes a strong commitment to the community and social responsibility, based on actions not just words, it becomes much easier to manage public opinion in a crisis. And if, while building that strong brand, you have also built a solid relationship with the media based on the basics of media relations you'll find in another post on my blog, you're in a good position to call upon them to help you get out your message when in a crisis.

The thing with crisis is that you never know exactly what is going to be thrown at you - but if you and your colleagues on the crisis response team have done your homework - you have a pretty good guess. Preparation and planning involves a lot of 'what if' scenarios and research. The best crisis response team that I have been a part of was led by Mike Maida, a member of Agricore United's Risk Assessment Department. He was relentless (in a very good way) in making sure we had examined every possible crisis and disaster that we could face. It was great leg work and when we had a collision of an anhydrous ammonia truck with a civilian vehicle, we knew what to do. Everybody knew what their role was and who to call. It was a horrible situation that was made just a little bit less horrible by a quick and compassionate response from the company.

Most CCPs are designed for a massive disaster, such as an earthquake or explosion at your headquarters. It's a good way to think worst case scenario, whereby your entire plan would have to be implemented. In reality, though, most crisis are going to be a bit smaller in scale and will call upon only a portion of the entire plan. And taking it one step further, you could spend a lot of time drafting that plan, meeting with your crisis response team regularly to make sure it is current and understood, and never have to use it. That would be the ideal situation.

Brand Consistency

It takes a lot of work to establish a brand - both with your employees and the public. However, it can take very little to undermine it. One of the easiest, quickest ways to undermine your brand is to show inconsistency in what you are delivering to your audience.

Some people find it hard to understand why this is so important - why is something like always using the same font, for example, necessary? These are the same people who will unwittingly erode your brand by making little changes to suit their personal tastes. That's bad news.

A good example of this is a former colleague who was responsible for sending invitations to various stakeholders. The invitations were to brunches, lunches and special events. To ensure consistency of the brand, I had templates created for a variety of documents, including an invitation template. The template included the correct logo, approved corporate colours and the approved, single font in the body. It was easy enough to use: simply place your cursor on the area that needed updated (ie. date, location) and fill in the new information. The font stayed the same.

For this former colleague, however, invitations represented a chance for her to stretch her creative muscles. On one invitation she had sent out, prior to the template creation, she used five different fonts, a variety of colours and clip art. Not a very professional representation of the organization.

Even with the invitation template, this person, like some you will work with, still needed to have it explained why she couldn't use more than one font on an invitation. She really wanted to use a variety of fonts and script types to 'dress up' the invitation. She needed to understand that consistency, even in use of font, helps to show that the organization you work for is also consistent. Being consitent is a very good attribute for any company - so long as you are consistently good at what you do. Being consistent removes the guess work for your audiences -they learn what to expect from you and grow to appreciate and demand that consistency.

Whether it is using the same font, the same layout, the same logo, greeting with the same positive attitude and smile or serving the same delicious food or drink, a consistent brand is a winning brand.

Branding - So Much More Than a Logo

One of the main challenges of working in communications is helping an organization to identify what its brand is and then reinforcing that brand over and over again. For too many people a brand is easily dismissed as being the logo or colors - that is the visual identity of a company, not its brand.

Brand at its purest is an organization's "personality". It doesn't start with how you want to be seen - it starts with how you are already being seen. What is the impression people have when they think of "ABC Company"? Do they have a feeling of delight, warmth, compassion or is it more likely to be a feeling of antipathy, fear, distaste? And who wants to give that second impression to their customers unless you're the Mob?

The best way to determine what your brand is at this given time is to do a lot of research - ask your customers, your employees, your suppliers. Everyone has a different relationship with your company so will have slightly different viewpoints. Once you know what people already feel about your company, determine from that what you want to keep (reinforce) and what you want to toss (regroup).

Building a brand to be what you want takes a lot of work and very little of it actually comes from the communications department. Certainly all the materials prepared by communicators must have the tone and message that you want to reinforce. However, building the brand starts with your people - how does your receptionist greet guests, customers, suppliers? How do your people act at meetings? How do your people treat suppliers? Who are your ambassadors and what are they saying about your company? If you can get to the point where your customers are your ambassadors, recommending you because you represent exactly what they want in the type of service you provide, you have achieved brand nirvana.

If people on your team can't accept the brand that you want your company to represent - then they aren't going to be very good at living and breathing that brand. But before deciding that it is time for them to move on, be fair and give them a chance to really understand what your brand is - what is that feeling you want your customers to have when they think of your company? If your people still can't grasp that, then it is time for them to move on while you build your team with the right people with the right attitude.

It's not unusual to want to be a brand that makes people feel really good and positive feelings - but not every type of service or product is going to instil those kind of feelings. The important thing in identifying what your brand is, is to first be very honest with yourself about what you provide, and what is possible. Then dream. Then build. Then achieve. Branding is so much more than a logo, isn't it?

Too Much Information

I admit I am guilty of tuning out - tuning out the news that is. In recent weeks there has been repeated stories in the newspaper and television news about a dog neglect situation near Winnipeg. You would think that as a communicator and news junkie that I would want to hear all about it and have my two cents put in. But no - I simply cannot handle hearing about someone neglecting animals, especially dogs, but any animals in any way. The fact that this is to such a horrific degree as to be 'news worthy' just turns my stomach. Literally, I change the channel, skip the page and have not informed myself about the situation at all. Forgive me for not being a better advocate for animals.

A strong advocate would learn everything and be vocal about change, about legislation, about penalties. A strong advocate would offer to take some of those poor, neglected dogs into their own homes and nurse them back to health and a long and happy life in a loving home.

I'm not that strong advocate but boy do I ever admire the people who are. For me, it hurts, physically, to see that kind of neglect and pain heaped on defenceless animals. All I can do is cuddle my Cleo and promise her she will never, ever be subjected to that kind of cruelty or abuse at my hands. But thank you to those advocates who do take care of the neglected and abused - in my books - you are akin to Saints.

To email or not to email

So often it is easier for people who are very computer literate and accustomed to talking by keyboard to send an email rather than have a face to face meeting. Especially if the topic under discussion could present some form of conflict, minor or otherwise. Probably the best way to handle a situation like this is just to suck it up and go talk to the other person and you'll discover that it wasn't such a big deal after all. We human beings are very good at imagining the boogy man is much bigger than it is.

But there are those times when an email is a good way to communicate something - to one or a group of people. Many times I have been on the receiving end of emails that just make me shake my head and wonder if the person who wrote it took the time to self-edit before sending. Pretty sure they didn't. Pretty sure I have to constantly remind myself to do this too. Once you get typing BAM you can say a lot of things in a few, often insulting, paragraphs. Might not be your intention but there you have it.

When it comes to emails, no matter to whom or about what, always read it before you hit the send button. Check for spelling and punctuation, sure, because your email represents you. However, what is really important is to read it as if you were the receiver. How would you react to what you are saying? Is there a better way to say something so that it doesn't lose the message but doesn't come across as insulting, blaming, uncaring or belligerent? Do you have to use the words "must" or can you change that to read "should consider". Harsh directives by email get an equally harsh reaction so if you can soften it, try to do so.

Being Part of the Solution

I spent the last two days being part of a rapid improvement event (RIE) which is part of the St-Boniface Hospital transformation - the road to perfect care. It was fabulous. The goal of our particular RIE was to come up with solutions to get former patients and their family members more involved in the transformation of St-Boniface Hospital. It was two days of brainstorming, discussion and solution finding. I loved it.

I'm not going to delve into everything discussed but I will say that, as always, it comes down to good communication. We've done quite a lot of work over the past four months to get the message out to the public that we are looking for their stories, their experiences and their help in making improvements that focus on improving the patient experience. Public service announcements, information inserts in patient surveys, some radio promotion. Ultimately, though, the best way to get a former patient to take part in this kind of exercise is to ask them personally. That means a really good communication with frontline health care workers who work with patients and their families every day.

It's pretty exciting to be part of this kind of event. To feel like you're contributing to something that is going to have an actual benefit for you and your family in the future. As one of my colleagues noted during today's session - we all need health care at some point in our lives. It would be nice to believe that we're never going to have to be in hospital for anything other than good things like having babies - but that's unlikely. If we can keep working toward perfect patient care at St-Boniface Hospital - it will benefit future St-Boniface Hospital patients, sure, but the lessons learned here will be shared throughout the region and the country since St B is one of only a small handful (I think three) of hospitals in Canada doing this work.

We're already seeing huge improvements in the emergency department and surgery and that's just the beginning. With the very important input of former patients and their families, the work being done will become even more focused on their experiences, past and future. As a communicator, I feel very lucky to be part of something so important and so far reaching.

Communication equals customer service

This past weekend my sister and I took my niece to one of Winnipeg's finer clothing establishments in search of a dress for the grade eight grad dance. We had a lot of fun oohing and ahing over the fabulous dresses at Swank Boutique - mostly because every single item my niece tried on looked amazing on her. But what made it even more fun was the customer service we received while at the boutique.

Randy was the guy who helped us out and he was doing what most of us strive to do every day in our working lives - communicating. First, he observed our shopping 'style'. Neither my sister nor I, nor my niece for that matter, like to have sales clerks in our face or stalking us while we try to decide if there is anything in the store we want to take to the dressing room. Randy gave us space while we toured around, pulling out various dresses for my niece to look at.

Once we had a couple of possibilities, Randy immediately set us up with a changing room and then offered his opinion when my niece tried on the first dress (it looked fabulous, of course). He asked a few questions about what the dress was for, observed how she seemed to be feeling in what was picked for her, and then he started bringing a variety of other dresses for her to try on. Notable in this was that he mostly stuck to the sales racks, which is where we had focused our initial search. I don't know how he did it, but he found great dresses that we completely overlooked.

Then, once she was down to just a few choices, he made it about her. Not about mom. Not about auntie. About the 14 year old who was going to be wearing the dress and what did she like and how did she feel. I was really impressed. We left the store with a dress that my niece absolutely loves and that she can wear for more than the one occassion. It wasn't the dress I would have chosen - good thing since I'm 30 years older than her! But she's happy and that's because Randy at Swank used excellent communications skills to provide outstanding customer service.

The moral of this post is that communications is EVERYWHERE and something we should all be striving to master, not just those of us who have the word 'communications' in our job titles.

We want a pitcher...not a belly itcher!

Okay so this blog post has nothing to do with baseball other than it is being written during baseball season and it's about pitching. Pitching news stories that is.



There may have been a time when there were so many reporters working at the various media outlets that getting them to cover your story was like, well, shooting fish in a barrel. Not the case since I've been working in communications. With so many cut backs in news departments across the country, most reporters are expected to produce multiple stories every day in multiple formats (think tv and web or radio and web or print and web). Reporters simply don't have the time to research stories from idea through to three minute feature anymore. In fact, 90 seconds is the maximum story you can expect on tv news broadcasts and 20 seconds is exceptional for radio.


That's why professional business communicators (like me) are so important to helping getting an organization's stories into the mainstream news. And that's where putting together a solid pitch comes in. It has nothing to do with throwing a baseball, but you are lobbing a story idea across the home plate to the reporter. It's important that your pitch is well developed and provides the reporter with not only the gist of the story, but statistics or any other back up research to support your claim, a list of potential interview subjects that you have confirmed are available and for television especially, a list of visuals that will support the story being pitched.


If it feels like you're doing the reporter's job - yes, in many ways you are. But if you don't do it, they won't likely cover your story unless it is a bad news story. Good news stories need you to do the legwork so that the reporter can come in, get the goods, get out and get it published.


Pitching your story starts with building a relationship with the right journalists in your community. Once that relationship is established, the journalist is more likely to receive your pitches with enthusiasm rather than skepticism. I find the best way to start making a pitch, once I've got the story already developed and researched, is to call the journalist and tell them you have an idea, give the gist and promise to follow up with a more detailed email. That detailed email is what your journalist is going to use when he or she pitches the idea at their news meeting, so you want it to be very appealing and very well developed.


Sometimes there is just too much other news happening on the day you pitch your story so you'll be shelved. Don't give up! Ask the journalist if there was interest and if the next day or later in the week would work better for them. You'll know if interest isn't there. Remember though - if you pitch a story to one journalist, you can't be pitching it to all and sundry hoping it sticks with someone. That's burning your contacts. However, if there is no interest from your original contact you are free to move on to your next contact to pitch the story. Just always remember that different media have different audiences so make sure what you're pitching is appropriate to that journalist's audience.


Warm up, windmill, spit ball, slider, knuckleball - whatever pitching terminology you go for - get out there and start pitching and quit belly itching (where in the world did we come up with that chant when we were kids?)

Follow Your Bliss

Sometimes I am amazed at how lucky I am to be doing for a career what I want to be doing. Sure, there are days (sometimes lots in a row) that I hate my job for whatever reason, usually because I'm dealing with people who I can't mind meld with. But those bad times are made up for by the many, many good times in marketing and communications. In fact, most people want to be doing my job so much they try to do it for me.

It seems very romantic to be involved in creating television and radio advertisements and to work with the media. Creativity is exciting and can be very refreshing. However, to get to that really incredible finished product, like the ads created for St-Boniface Hospital, takes a lot of work, negotiation, input from the agency, input from the client, input from people who are considered stakeholders (see my blog on research). When it all gels - you get a product like the Hope and Healing campaign.

Other times my job is about sending off copy and design instructions and then waiting for something to come back to review, then sending changes, then back, then forth, then back, then forth. Lots of that goes on. Lots of phone calls to get information. Lots of meetings to confirm information. Lots of sales calls from vendors who want us to try their product or service.

As much as I love writing and really enjoyed having that as a big part of my job in the past, as I've advanced in my career writing has become a bit of a luxury. It requires concentration and being able to set aside chunks of time for interviews, research and then actually sitting down and writing. Fortunately, there are a number of really good freelance writers available to help with the bigger projects. I still get a real sense of satisfaction when I write something, review it and realize, "Hey, I'm darn good at this." Then I move on to the many other demands of directing a marketing and communications department.

For someone who is trying to decide if marketing and communications (public relations, public affairs, media relations) is something they want to pursue as a career, I would suggest they ask themselves three questions:
1. Am I interested in other people and what they do?
2. Do I like feeling the stress and thrill of having to meet deadlines?
3. Can I rise above being told by everyone from the janitors to the accountants telling me what will work in order to get to what my education and experience has taught me WILL work?

If you can answer yes to those three questions, you could be on your way to enjoying a fulfilling career in marketing and communications.

What We Know to Be True

When it comes to communicating with a broad audience, knowing them is the first step in reaching them. The smaller the audience the easier it is to know what will resonate with them. But when you're dealing with thousands of people, you can waste a lot of money on ineffectual communications and marketing if you haven't done your research on what makes the majority of them 'tick'.

There really is no such thing as a homogenous group - we are all individuals, and we all think and react with our own individual bias or emotion. While some research can be too broad sweeping - so much so that it really gives you no direction at all, pursuing a communications or marketing initiative without some basic knowledge is a big no-no. Individuality aside, good research will find the trends and commonalities that help you to better know your audience as a whole.

You can usually tell that you need research done when you're having a meeting with a group of people who keep saying things like "They probably think..." "They probably want..." "I think they're ..." "I think they might...". Not the most solid analysis to base a $5000 campaign on let alone a $100,000 campaign.

Some research is already done for us and if you have a good sense of the demographic of your audience, you can rely to some extent on sources like Statistics Canada to make some assumptions. In fundraising, for example, existing research generally shows that older people give to health care and younger people give to animal welfare. You can draw a conclusion that older people feel their mortality a bit stronger while younger people are still pretty emotional about their pets.

However, what if you want to reach an audience that is a mish mash of old and young? Working and retired and still in school? Multi-cultural? Multi-lingual? If you have a good list of questions and a good sampling of your entire prospective audience, then you're going to end up with some good answers to what will reach them best.

I'm no expert in developing those questions - that's why I hire outstanding research firms (like Viewpoints Ltd in Winnipeg for example). That's their job. My job is to take those results, the firm's analysis of them, and create the marketing and communications miracles that will resonate with my target audiences. And incidentally, the projects I've worked on over the past two decades that were based on solid research ALWAYS resonated with the audience.

Communicating Through Conversation

Oh man, I don't know what to say to these people. I'm just going to sit here in my corner and pretend I'm wearing invisibility spray.

Starting a conversation or breaking in on a conversation can be very tough. When I took Dale Carnegie classes 25 years ago we were taught that people loved to talk about themselves, so let them. That's all well and good but you do have to contribute to a conversation to be part of it. Otherwise you start giving people the 'stalker alert' heebie jeebies.

Single person households in the United States increased by 21 percent in the 1990's which might explain why our converational skill set seems to be waning. We have nobody at home to practice conversation with. Well I do - I talk to my dog all the time. I say 'walk' and she runs around in circles. I say 'treat' and she runs around in circles. You can see where this is going.

But conversation with real people requires a bit more skill than a conversation with a dog or cat. I recently picked up a book called The Art of Conversation by Catherine Blyth. She's a funny British woman with some very witty observations about conversation. Her book provides everything from tips on small talk to appropriate topics to the fine art of flattery. At the end of each chapter, she also provides "The Typology of Bores, Chores and Other Conversational Beasts". If you find yourself described in this box, you need to rethink your conversational skill set. Blyth gives rules for each situation and I have to say that reading this little bible of information is fun, it's also very useful.

One thing Blyth and Carnegie agree on is that good listeners make good conversationalists. That doesn't mean you stand (or sit) there with your eyes glazed over nodding. It means you're actually hearing what the other person is saying and your responses continue the conversation, rather than steering it in another direction.

What to talk about
You can be a good conversationalist with just a little work on your part. If you have a dinner party or event to attend, during the day switch your radio to a news station at the top of the hour and listen to the five minute news cast. Read the newspaper - not just the horoscopes and sports, but other sections like entertainment and business. And something that will really make it easy for you to start or carry on a conversation is to have information about something that interests you.

Online is a natural place to look up information about so much stuff - what interests you? Start googling - home decor, home renovations, cars, pets, travel, French cuisine, movies, books, gardening, making stained glass windows, building bird houses. Find out some information on what makes you tick so that you can actually be informed. You'll be amazed at how much better you can communicate when you can have a conversation.

A Questionable Lead

The lead sentence of any written piece is unquestionably the most important sentence, so starting it with a question seems, well, rather questionable.

Tongue twisters aside, catching your audience's attention and then holding it is the main role of the lead sentence. If you ask a question, particularly a close ended (yes/no) question, then you are taking a huge risk of immediately losing a large percentage of your audience.

It's much better to lead into your article with the facts. We learn it in journalism school and we need to remember it- lead with the five w's and you rarely go wrong. Who is this about, when did it happen, where did it happen, what happened and why did it happen? The challenge as a writer is to make those five w's have enough flair to catch your audience and enough information to keep them reading.

There are dozens of books to read on writing a good lead but one you might want to check out is News writing By George A. Hough. Of course, a good lead isn't restricted to writing a news release or news article -- it's important when writing an email message, a letter, even a memo. Because bottom line, if you're going to invest your time in writing something, you want your audience to feel invested in reading it -- all of it.