Monday Mastery: Put down the megaphone
Human beings are not waste baskets for words.
Welcome to Monday Mastery, a series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.
“… instead of being engaged in an exchange of life energy with other human beings, we see ourselves becoming waste baskets for their words." I read that in Marshall B. Rosenberg’s classic book, Nonviolent Communication, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Waste baskets for their words.
How many of us have written to audiences just to get something off our chest or out of our head?
I’m guilty, for sure.
Here’s something strange to think about, though:
We might not have done that if we were face-to-face and one-on-one with those people.
We wouldn’t just walk up to someone — even someone we know — and start talking at them.
No, the conversation evolves more organically when we’re eye-to-eye with a human being. We begin the conversation with a warm greeting. We meander into a topic. And as we talk, we figure out what they need to hear from us, and how they need to hear it. We adapt our communication to meet the needs of the person and the conversation.
When we’re behind a computer screen, though, it can feel like we’re throwing words to the wind. Even if we know the audience on the other side of the screen, the mere fact that there’s distance between us makes us communicate differently.
The result is what I call the megaphone effect.
We communicate at people instead of with them.
It’s terribly easy to do!
And luckily, it’s a habit that’s easy to break with one small change:
Imagine you are writing to a single person — someone whom you know.
A brother. A friend. A colleague. A client.
Write to an individual.
It’ll feel to your readers more like you’re in a conversation — and less like you’re blasting your words through an internet megaphone.