Goodwill
**The sections below on reader benefits, you-viewpoint, and positive emphasis are heavily indebted to Isobel M. Findlay and Kitty O. Locker, Business Communication Now, 4th Canadian ed. (Toronto: McGraw Hill, 2018).
This unit is all about “building positive relationships through communication.” This is also known as goodwill, “positive feelings or reactions by the reader” (168), and it is wholly dependent upon accurate audience analysis. A positive reaction is much easier to elicit when you have good news, but a good communicator strives to have positive emphasis no matter how bad the news might be.
Reader benefits
The first way to look at building positive relationships is through reader (or audience) benefits. Reader benefits are any benefits or advantages a reader might gain by being persuaded by your message, by using your company, buying your products, or accepting your ideas. Think about what motivates people, what pleases people, and see what you have to offer. Most negative messages will not be able to offer reader benefits, but some negative messages (as we will see later in the course) can contain alternatives which make the negative message easier to accept.
1) Adapt reader benefits to the audience: this should be obvious, but different audiences will be moved by different benefits. Locker and Findlay use the example of a manufacturer and its product: people will need one set of benefits to buy the product, but retailers will need another set to be persuaded to stock it and give it prominent shelf space. The two things aren’t unrelated, but they are clearly different. Even in the same scenario (different sets of consumers, for example), different reader benefits will come into play. If you’re attempting to convince your parents to buy you a car, the successful persuasive argument might be different for each parent. In general terms, readers might not always recognize all the benefits of an action (think about an election, for example).
2) Stress intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivators: this concept is related to tangible and intangible rewards, which we’ll mention again in Unit 6. Intrinsic motivators come automatically with the reader’s action: if the product is purchased, the policy followed, or the action taken, the reader will get that benefit. If, on the other hand, the benefit is extrinsic, then the benefit is given in addition to any intrinsic benefits. Think of this as a bonus item (free scarf with purchase over $50) or a reward (free waterbottle to everyone who raises over $100). In employment terms, think of the difference between financial compensation and job satisfaction. Pay is really an extrinsic motivator (though getting paid at some level should happen automatically in exchange for labour), but intrinsic motivators are often more important for overall job satisfaction (feeling part of a team, making a difference, benefiting others in some way, etc.).
3) Prove reader benefits and provide enough detail: your message has to make sure that the benefit will occur and that the reader understands the benefit. If the reader has no idea of the benefit (I never knew PDFs could be edited), the benefit needs explaining. The benefit may not be immediate (and thus needs clarifying). The reader might also not immediately see the benefit, meaning you need sufficient detail that it becomes clear and persuasive.
4) Phrase reader benefits in “you-viewpoint”: we’ll say more about you-viewpoint in a moment, but this simply means that you should make sure that your message looks at the situation from the reader’s point of view. RLC define you-viewpoint as “a focus on the perspective of the reader” (168).
You-viewpoint
How do we ensure that a message considers the communication situation from the audience’s perspective?
1) Talk about the reader, not about yourself: the examples here are often simply a matter of replacing “I” and company names with “you.” Look at Skills-Building Exercise #7: “We are happy to report approval of your application for membership in our club.” Attention to you-viewpoint (and other edits!) would make this a better sentence: “Your membership has been approved.” This is a straightforward sentence-level example, but compare the two messages to Jane from Beth (RLC, pp. 169-70). The bad news is still there, but the you-viewpoint makes the reader far more likely to accept the bad news without having an unfavourable view of the writer.
2) Refer to the audience’s message or request specifically: make it clear in your message that you know specifically who your audience is and why you’re writing.
3) Don’t talk about feelings except to congratulate or offer sympathy: your reader probably doesn’t care how you feel about a situation, and never assuming how a reader will feel is always a good idea. Look at Skills-Building Exercise #2: “We will be pleased to deliver your order by the 12th.” This works for this point and a previous one. Remove your feelings and remove yourself: “Your order will arrive by the 12th.”
4) In positive situations, use “you” more than “I” and use “we” when it includes the reader: if you are a union representative and you have negotiated a good raise for your members, how should you report it? “We have negotiated a 5% salary increase for each of the three years of the new contract” or “Your salary will be increased 5% per year for three years.”
5) In negative situations, avoid “you”; use the passive voice and impersonal expressions to avoid assigning blame: we will have more to say about the passive voice in our grammar sections, but the following examples will make this clear. “You made no allowance for inflation in your estimate” is a sentence that ignores you-viewpoint because it uses “you” in a negative situation. If we rewrite this sentence from active to passive, we can remove the agent and thus avoid blaming the audience: “No allowance for inflation has been made in this estimate.” If we make the sentence impersonal instead of passive, we could also avoid assigning blame: “This estimate makes no allowance for inflation.”
Positive emphasis
1) Avoid negative words and words with negative connotations: in general, this advice means that you should phrase things in the least negative way possible. RLC say “use positive words,” and caution specifically against words such as “mistake,” “failure,” “refuse,” “cannot,” “blame,” and “fault.” For example, Skills-Building Exercise #1 reads as follows: “Your misunderstanding of our January 7 email caused you to make this mistake.” The negative words here (“caused” is not necessarily negative in all instances, but the verb isn’t the best choice in this sentence) are underlined. How could this be rewritten? The sentence also has a problem with the way it uses “you” in a negative situation, doesn’t it? Sometimes, rewriting a sentence like this is easier with a little more information (what exactly happened, and what was in the email?), but if your email were misunderstood, that may well be your fault. Let the email take responsibility, and make the diction (word choice) less negative: “Our email of January 7 may not have been clear.” However, I don’t think that’s a particularly good sentence either. With more information, I suspect the whole sentence could, in fact, be omitted from the message. All that sentence really does is blame the audience and remind the audience of its error.
Here’s a second example: “We have failed to finished the trail maintenance we had scheduled for Saturday.” An easy step is to get rid of “failed”: “We didn’t finish Saturday’s trail maintenance.” Depending on the importance of the “Saturday” detail, one could also just say when the maintenance will be done: “We will finish the trail maintenance on Sunday morning.”
Here’s a third: “Please, don’t be late.” Put positively, if you must say it, that imperative is better as follows: “Please, be on time.”
2) Focus on what the reader can do: this is very much linked to the first point, avoiding negative words and connotations. Instead of saying what cannot be done, say what can. Put negatively, one might say: “Part-time students do not qualify for this scholarship.” Why not put it positively and say that “Only full-time students qualify for the scholarship” (the “only” is negative, but it is also necessary to avoid misinterpretation). This is a good place also to remember to offer alternatives. If you must say no to a request, are you able to offer something else that might work?
3) Justify negative information by giving a reason or linking it to a reader benefit: if readers are getting some kind of benefit that they will acknowledge as a benefit, point it out to help reduce the impact of negative information. For example, if you are the owner of a gym that is not open 24 hours, you might explain that as follows: “In order to keep membership costs down, we are only open from 4am until midnight.”
4) If a negative is truly unimportant, omit it: you should omit negative information that readers do not need, that readers already know (for example, if you’ve already communicated that information), or that readers will find trivial (of only minor consequence).
5) Put negative information in the middle: this one is important, and we’ve talked about the principle already with respect to reading patterns. RLC call this “emphasis by position,” and the principle applies in all communication, even when a negative is not involved. Where are a message’s primary points of emphasis? The beginning and the end. Negatives, therefore, should go in the middle: in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of a message. Make the negative as concise as possible (give it as little space as possible), and do not repeat it elsewhere in the message.
Negative information sometimes must be communicated. Being straightforward and clear about negatives, when they occur, sometimes helps build credibility. If a company cannot start my renovation for three months, I want to know that when I sign the contract: being honest about the negative goes a long way. However, most of the time, framing the negative in the most positive way possible makes for communication that preserves goodwill.
Bias-free language
Perhaps you have heard the old riddle about the surgeon and the son. The riddle goes like this:
A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!”
Some people find this difficult to explain, and those people have a sexist view of the world (and those people can self-identify in many different ways). If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that the “riddle” has at least a couple of solutions. The surgeon could be the boy’s mother, or the boy could have two fathers, for example.
Being an effective communicator means removing bias (or discriminatory wording) from everything you write.
1) Use non-sexist and non-biased language and pronouns: You might remember this quote from Plato from Unit 1, although it was slightly different there:
“Our whole previous discussion has proved that speeches, whether their aim is to instruct or to persuade, cannot be scientifically constructed, in so far as their nature allows of scientific treatment at all, unless the following conditions are fulfilled. In the first place, he must know the truth about any subject he deals with, either in speech or writing; he must be able to define it generically, and having defined it to divide it into its various specific kinds until he reaches the limit of divisibility. Next, he must analyze on the same principles the nature of the soul, and discover what type of speech is suitable for each type of soul. Finally, he must arrange and organize his speech accordingly, addressing a simple speech to a simple soul, but to those which are more complex something of a greater complexity which embraces the whole range of tones.”
The problem is that the passage genders the orator only as male. English does not have a singular pronoun that is suitable to describe a human being without also attaching gender to that person. We have to choose “he” or “she.” Recently, “they” has come to be used in situations in which gender is deliberately not specified (i.e., “they” is used as if it were singular) or for people who identify as neither “he” nor “she.” Deciding what to do in these situations will sometimes be a matter of audience analysis, but I believe it is always possible to use non-sexist language.
You may also recognize that most invitations now offer a place to a partner or guest instead of a husband or wife. Be as inclusive as possible when you communicate.
2) Be thoughtful about stereotypes and disabilities: RLC give advice about stereotyping by race, nationality, age, and sexual orientation. They also ask you to consider how your words might typecast people with disabilities. Don’t identify anyone by race, nationality, age, or sexual orientation, and don’t (this goes back to the first point) prioritize or normalize any one race, etc. Sometimes you may need to talk about certain nationalities or disabilities, and the best thing to know if you do is that the most sensitive way to communicate these differences is constantly changing. Being a good communicator means doing the research to remove all bias and discrimination from your messages. Remember to think of everything: if you include an image that shows people using your product, for example, what does it say if everyone in the image is white?
A note on ethics
If you’ve read the chapter and this material thoughtfully, you may have questions. One question might have to do with ethics. How ethical is it to downplay, conceal, and omit negative information? In a way, much of what this unit on goodwill and positive relationships recommends is manipulating your audience to make that audience feel better about you. This is an excellent and important question. You’ll notice that RLC don’t devote much time to the ethics of this unit, suggesting only that you “use positive emphasis ethically” and avoid dishonesty. The line is certainly fine. I encourage you to go back to thinking about goals in communication: you will have short-term goals (the current message) and long-term goals (building your company, building your personal reputation, etc.). Ask yourself how these goals interact, and choose your path accordingly.
Grammar: punctuation, part 1 (the comma)
Readings
For this week, read or re-read CWH, section 15, and RLC, pp. A-2 to A-13.
Uses of the comma
We’ve already talked about the misuse of commas in the common error of the comma splice, and we saw how commas may (or may not) be used after introductory words, phrases, or clauses. I believe these are the two most common comma problems, but a third is not far behind, and that’s using one comma where the situation demands two. Let’s review all three of these:
1) One way to join two independent clauses (or two sentences) is with a coordinating conjunction and a comma. So, if you use “for,” “and,” “nor,” “but, “or,” “yet,” or “so” (these are the only seven coordinating conjunctions in English) to join two sentences, then you need to add a comma before the coordinating conjunction.
The day was hot. I was sweating.
The day was hot, so I was sweating.
The day was hot, and I was sweating.
People often confuse an independent clause with a subject or predicate (a clause must have both).
John went out to the car, and then called his wife.
“Then called his wife” is not an independent clause (what we have here is a compound predicate), so no comma should be used. This is an important thing to remember. Not matter how long the phrases (or clauses) are, any two things that are coordinate and are not sentences should not include a comma.
2) Use commas to set apart introductory words, phrases, and clauses:
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
During the storm, the cat huddled under the porch.
Despite desiring deeply to rush to his side, she sat on the porch, listening to the rain.
The final example has both an introductory phrase and a concluding phrase (both modifying “she”), both set apart by commas. You’ll see a lot of discussion about whether or not to use the comma after short introductory words or phrases. In my opinion, you should use those commas in professional communication.
3) Whenever you have a parenthetical element (word, phrase, or clause) that is fully within the sentence (i.e., not at the beginning or end), you need two commas to separate it from the rest of the sentence. The word “parenthetical” comes from “parentheses,” which are these marks (). I use them a lot, and I’d never use just one. The same is true for commas used this way.
The squat, brown sedan, which had been parked in the same spot for weeks, was covered in rotten pears.
Gord and Nancy, for what reason I don’t know, stood knee-deep in the swamp with shovels and rope.
The one-legged boy left England on November 10, 1918, sailing at last for home.
Remember, however, that the word “however” has multiple uses.
The first example brings up a caution about this use of the comma. The relative clause “which had been parked in the same spot for weeks,” because “which” is used here and because it is set off with commas, is considered non-restrictive. In other words, the basic meaning of the sentence does not change if we remove it. If, however, we were to switch the pronoun to “that,” this would become restrictive and commas should not be used.
The squat, brown sedan that had been parked in the same spot for weeks was covered in rotten pears.
In this sentence, we might assume the area to contain more than one squat, brown sedan, so the “that” clause restricts the meaning to the one sedan that had been parked in the same spot for weeks (see CWH, Section 7a for more on this).
One occasion on which to avoid commas
Correlative conjunctions should (almost) never have a comma. Correlative conjunctions are pairs of words that “correlate” two parts of a sentence. Correlative conjunctions include “either/or,” “neither/nor,” “whether/or,” “both/and,” “not/but,” and “not only/but also.” Your CWH has many examples of the correlative conjunction used correctly (pp. 128-30), but it does contain some ambiguity (a mistake) on comma use in its examples. Effectively, the correlative conjunction is just another way of joining two elements (like any conjunction): remember that we don’t use a comma with two words, phrases, or clauses joined by “and” or “or” (for example), unless we are in fact joining two sentences (then we need a comma in the resulting compound sentence). Here are three sentences from the CWH (p. 128):
1. She not only plays well but also sings well. (correct: no comma)
2. Not only does she play well, but she also sings well. (correct: comma)
3. He was not only smart, but also charming. (incorrect: get rid of the comma)
What’s different about sentence #2? Well, “she [also] sings well” can stand alone as an independent clause. Only in cases like that should a sentence with correlative conjunctions in it use a comma before the second of the pair. What happens, effectively, is that the correlative becomes partly a coordinating conjunction. This would also be true in a sentence like “Either you go to school, or you go to work.” If either example feels unwieldy, sentences like this can always be rewritten, and sometimes rewriting is better for style:
She plays well and sings well. (or She both plays well and sings well.)
You will either go to school or go to work.
As a secondary rule, make sure that when you use the first of the pair of a correlative conjunction that you also use the second (“not only” should precede a full “but also,” written together unless [as in sentence #2] sense demands breaking up the two words).
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