How writing helps you think clearly & communicate better with Dr Susan Mandala

Well, hello and welcome to the Super Connected Show, where I'm delighted to be joined by doctor Susan Mandala, who is an independent writing and language consultant and the founder of Writing Works Consulting, which is a business that you started in twenty twenty four after twenty four years working as an associate professor at the University of Sunderland, specializing in the choice of language and the development of writing and thinking skills. Hi, Susan, how you doing? Hi Paul, thank you so much for that and thank you for this opportunity.

I'm doing well. Thank you good. Yeah, I mean that you do have an impressive career. So I mean I'm not really doing you justice for everything that you've done so far and all the knowledge and insights that you've gotten.

No doubt you're going to share soon. But do you just want to I know we had a conversation the other the day trying to distill what it is that you actually do, but want to give us a bit of a bit of an insight into what you are doing through your consultancy. Yes, where to start? Well, I suppose when I'm at a networking event, what I always say is that I run a training company and that I design and develop workshops in writing, thinking, and language awareness for professionals in the public and private sector, academics and creative writers.

But what that boils down to across all of those fields is as an academic and both now as a consultant and ended trainer. One of the things I noticed is that people are very very good at collecting information and generating ideas. People love that and you know, and that's a good thing that you know, we need that. So if you sit with a group of students or a group of professionals, or a group of academics and say, okay, think of as many I you know, put some ideas on the table about this, you know, and people will do that very readily.

You can get a lot of great material, and people are good at finding material. You send people off on a quest. Everyone loves a quest, so people will go and then they have lots of stuff. And people are good at editing material, so they can, you know, take a text and edit it.

But there's a bit in the middle, which is the really important bit, and that is both a thinking and a writing skill, and it's about figuring out why the stuff you have generated or collected is important? Why does it matter? And that means often in academic speak we call it figuring out what your argument is, and and across other fields it can mean, well, what does this stuff add up to? What you know?

Is there? What recommendation is suggested by all of this stuff? What evaluation? What stance should we take?

What is it that this stuff is telling us? And the stuff is just stuff? Information is just information. Numbers are just numbers.

Ideas are just ideas. It's kind of our job as the author to say, why does it matter? And to put that into a format that is then able to influence or persuade someone else, so that you take a set of ideas and say, here's the information I collected, here's why it's important, Here's what I think should be done with it. What do you think?

And that's kind of how knowledge goes forward, whether you're in an office or whether you're an academic or whatever it is that you do. And I've noticed, I've just noticed over the years, going back twenty twenty five years, that that skill in the middle is often missing, and people really struggle with that. You know, what do I do with all the stuff? And people are still struggling with that, and that as I went on in my academic career, I became aware it just dawned on me that the most important thing that I did was teaching people how to do that, how to collect a body of material and form an independent, authentic, credible point of view that was true to that point of view, but that was true to that material, and also important to say that.

That's the skill. And I've discovered that it's not only students that need that, but many people in many professions are good at what they do. But when there's a task such as, oh, go and research this, or oh write a report on this, or oh we need an assessment of that, which does happen many often in our workplaces, that that's much harder for people to do. So I get in there with people, We roll up our sleeves and we say, all right, here's the stuff.

What are we going to do now? And I teach people thinking analysis, argument mapping. We might talk a little bit about that if you like the difference between mind maps and argument maps. But that's what I do.

Paul, Yeah, anyone's left listening to ask the next question? Yeah, well, obviously I think it's really important what it is that you do and the ability to do what you're trying to help people do as well. Right, because I've definitely seen it over many, many So let's think about it. I've been working.

I've my own business for ten years, but I've been working for over twenty five years. I've been in lots of teams, different organizations, right, so many meetings, so many events, and usually what happens is someone says, oh, we need a scribe, we need a note taker, and it's like whoever volunteers, or sometimes they don't volunteer, they just get told you're doing it because and often it's someone who's maybe quite junior or doesn't really understand the subject matter, so they don't necessarily know why they're doing what they're doing, or how to collect the information that they need.

Or what to do with it. So, yes, it's a really important skill to be able to collate all this information, not just in meetings, but you know, it could be from multiple sources, pulling it together and then putting it into a format that is a useful format for people to do something with, to make a decision from, or to support an action. And yeah, so am I right. Yeah, I was just just thinking.

As you said that, it reminded me of a couple of things which are really important. Is that even with the minutes, the person who takes the minutes is in a very key position because the person who takes the minutes is the person who decides essentially what happened. Yeah, I've had minutes before whether well that didn't happen or that you've completely missed out the whole section there. Why have you?

Have you done that deliberately or is it just an oversight or to include that and not something else and not. This right, So that's an important point there. In the wider sense is the ethics and responsibility of this writing and thinking task that we have. It's an important thing to do because we're sitting with a body of information and as the author and I authors are very we think of authors as people who write books and get them published, or journalists or things like this.

But if you write something for an audience, that's you're an author. So if you're writing an internal report for a team at work, you're an author. And authorship there is a responsibility there. There's a professional responsibility, but there's also an ethical responsibility because you're in a sense the keeper of that information.

So you've collected the information. It could be that only you have access to it, or only a small people have access to it, or different people have different parts of access. But the bit that you are looking at, you need to look at that and say, have I dealt with that fairly? Right?

You don't get to leave stuff out just because it's inconvenient. You know, you need to deal with everything that's there. So that's a skill and also one of the other things that you mention there is choice. So as writers and speakers, anytime we use language, we're making choices and we're not aware sometimes that we make a choice.

But anytime we write or say something, it is a choice. What we actually say or write is a choice amongst other ways that we could have said or written it. Indeed, in fact, to say it or write it is a choice, because we could remain silent, we could not write it, we could not say it. So it's always a set of choices, and sometimes we're aware of those choices.

Many times we aren't. And the more important you're writing task, the more important a conscious control of those choices is. Because if you're writing policy, if you're writing a strategy, if you're writing an assessment, if you're writing an evaluation, these things have the potential to impact many, many lives in material ways. That piece of writing will have an influence on other people's lives.

It doesn't just sit there. It interacts with the world and fundamental ways. And so being aware of how you what you write, what choices have you made? And that has to do with not only have I made a good argument?

Have I made a solid argument? Do I feel that I have been just and fair with the evidence? Am I willing to put my name to this? That's a set of choices, And also there's a set of choices about the language you use and how you're going to express things.

I think when we were talking we talked about the active and the passive voice. Many people remember from grammar class and wish they hadn't had to learn it, because you know, it can be complex. But the important thing to know about that is that in the active voice, you are naming the person who did something. In the passive voice, you are concentrating on the thing that was done.

And that choice is very important and you need to know that. As the author said, well, which is more appropriate in this piece of writing. Do I need to make responsibility maximally explicit or is it better not to? What?

And why am I making that decision? So knowing that you have a choice in the way that you say things, the way that you write things, and knowing what the effects of those choices are, and that that's really what my field is, what you know, the effects of the of choices in language that we make. And I'll say one more thing. You know, I started my career looking at the language of literature, which I loved and I still love.

So that's what I analyzed, and most of my academic publications are in that field. But the longer I went on the lot, I realized, well, yes, I love fiction, I love drama. These are wonderful things and it's absolutely important that we have them. But in terms of the kind of writing that really affects people's lives in a fundamental way, a lot of our workplace writing is very impactful, and we often don't think of it as being strategic writing or artful writing in the same way as a piece of literature.

But we need to take it just as seriously, I think as authors. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point you made. There. I know I was when I when I was promoting this interview before, and I used the quote I think where I was from.

But it's apparently from the book about rischloeus like the pen is mightier than the sword. But I thought that was quite an appropriate thing to say. But it it is so powerful, isn't it. The words that we use in the language, the use in the writing, in what we choose to include and exclude, and what we put in the order that we put it in as well, is so important.

And I think a lot of people don't really enough consideration into this toy. They just just regurgitate. They just put stuff out there, and they just yeah, information out there, just. Get it out there.

Yeah. But and I think that I think to a certain extent what winds up happening is writing is a process, and people kind of forget that. And it's not really their fault because I think a lot of forces in education and otherwise sort of say, you know, just just get it out. But writing is a process, and it requires to do it well.

It requires drafting, and drafting really is a process, at least in my experience, Drafting is a way of having a dialogue with yourself about what you think, so you know you're a piece of writing should ideally go through multiple drafts, and each draft is wow, what's a it's kind of like ordered bout of sort of generation and destruction. So you come up with a draft and then you take from that draft what is useful That draft should tell you. Ah, those are the important things.

That's where I'm going with this. Here's where I need to do more work, so that a draft is a dialogue with yourself. And the first draft should be awful. I think it was Hemingway who said, you know, the first draft of anything really is just awful.

He said a different word, but you know belive so I won't repeat it, but the first draft of anything is awful. And sometimes I think people can be frightened of that. But you know, because the bars to share the work because they think they're going to be judged harshly for that book. But you're right, it's you're only going to get better.

But that's your job. That process. Yeah, it's the first draft. Its job is to be awful because you're just getting your thoughts down and really, unless you want to show it to somebody, nobody should unless you're working in that kind of environment, nobody needs to see the first couple of drafts.

You just sort of hash it out with yourself, Okay, what do I think what's important from this? Because not everything we write down in a draft will be worth keeping, you might do. I used to write first drafts and it would go right in the bin. And some people think, oh God, but what a waste of time.

I'm like, well, no, because you needed a process for how to get those ideas from your head onto your paper. And it's lovely to think that we think things and then we write them down, but it never seems to work that way. There's our thoughts are more chaotic than the orderly process of writing. So you drafting is this interplay between scheduled chaos and order until you finally figure out, ah, this is what I think.

That's my argument. My position is this, you know whatever your position is, but you don't think of it out of nothing. It's a dialogue with yourself and the material you've collected and the knowledge that you have, and you come to a position and you say, okay, right, that's my position. Now I can start ordering the evidence that I have for it.

And so many people and that's another thing. I'm not sure we teach drafting well enough. And so when I'm working with people on their writing and doing workshops, and there's always a phase where I demonstrate drafting and what what drafting should tell you? What you should be doing with that.

M Yeah, I'm not I'm not saying too much about what about. But my partner, I've told her she part of her role. She she collates information from multiple departments, different senior leaders, less senior, like lots and lots of people are involved in documentary tree polls together and she's she's just seemingly amazing at doing this right because it's it's so complex, like how many people are involved and all the stakeholders involved, and she has to get well visu all. There's a challenge of getting the information from some of these people who are just busy and maybe reluctant to share some information or or want to be portrayed in a certain way anyway she has to That's one challenge, getting all the information together and then putting it together in a format that can be shared and then discussed again multiple rounds, multiple drafts before it finally comes together into an impressive document that she can be proud of and everyone else can be proud of and people can get behind as well because it's it's so it does have a big impact on what happens next, so important, and so thankfully she's very good at what she does.

But but yeah, it's it's not easy, and. Yeah, it's a complex task and it needs to be done well because, as you say, these documents make things happen, or they should make things happen, and they need to make the right things happen. And if they're not doing in that, then you know, a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of resource goes into something that sits in a drawer and everyone is still at square one. And and the that's what I think is a real loss because the you know, the ideas are good.

You know, people will have good ideas, but how do we turn them into action? How do we turn them into results? How do we turn them into strategy? How do how do you know what?

That's a writing and thinking process. Yeah, you're not just to just doing it for the sake of it. Hopefully we want people have to do something with with with. What you're writing.

So yeah, it's it's stressful. What she does, and her colleagues do. But but the end result is worthwhile. Yes, I know we're alive, but we're just gonna have to go with it.

I need to plug in my charger. I'll just go for it. Yeah, that's fine, But it's okay. I'll just keep I'll just keep talking that she's back there, you go.

Here, I go. I just this is the world we live in. H So sorry about that. Okay, that's that's what everyone will remember.

The lady who didn't have her charger. That's that's I'm going to use to promote it. It was only it was only a few seconds. So when I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you a little bit about buzzwords and jargon.

Oh is that important? Can that be useful? I think they are. We might call them necessary.

Evils, like shorthand for for people who are in the know, aren't they But if but if you're trying to the wide up. People, I think about that, buzzwords are well, okay, buzzwords are a tool. They're a tool, so let's give them a certain neutrality. They're just a tool.

And what they do is that they kind of sit there and they evoke a vision that's what we might say a buzzword does and in a handy little label. And labels are very important that we wouldn't be able to go forward in life without labels. But that's a very interesting thing. Labels are generally speaking, nouns, so they're things, their names of things.

And the old fashioned word for a noun was a substantive, which relates to substance. We give you know, so you name something, you give it subs st right, But it's always important to remember that when we're naming, it's a label, and a label is different from the thing. So we might have a buzzword which is about Oh, here's one of my favorite buzzwords. You ready, from my new world as an entrepreneur, adding value.

It's very important to add value. And I thought about this because that's a word I heard a lot in my new world as a solopreneur. You know, your job is to add value. And I took that very seriously.

Now, in one sense, that becomes a buzzword. Oh yes, you must add value. How you're adding value, But what the buzzword should do is really, at least for me, I was thinking about, Okay, if I'm going to add value. I can't just write documents that say oh yes, and I add value, like I couldn't put on my website.

You know that that be meaningless because the buzzword needs to be backed up with something real. There needs to be something behind the buzzword. So I started thinking seriously. Every job I did, I said, well, okay, if I'm supposed to be adding value, I opened up a document I started writing, and I said, okay, in this job, how am I adding value?

And how will I assess that it was actually valuable? Right? And so those those thinking and writing steps behind the buzzword give the buzzword some validity. But a lot of times buzzwords get a bad name because people use them without anything behind them, and then and then they really are just they're just very empty.

They're just shells. So I think the example that we were talking about earlier was you know, oh, yes, we need to we need to think about this critically. So you know, you need to put forward a critical position. So you write in my critical position, you know, when you use the word critical as many times as you can.

But really, with a good buzzword, you shouldn't have to use it. You should be. That thing you're writing to demonstrate that you are taking a critical look, you know, rather than you having to say critical fifteen times. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really good explanation in Yeah, so you hear things all the time, and you does everyone agree on what that the meaning of that buzzword is. That's another thing. Isn't it mean something slightly different? It can shift over time, you know that as the word kind of gets out and it is used more and more times, it doesn't the meaning doesn't remain stable.

That can become fuzzy, and so it's good to revisit them, and it's also good to interrogate them. I think, as you said, you know, is this still our value? We're just used to this buzzword. You know, when was the last time we really thought about what it meant and what our actions are in relation to that?

Yeah? I love it, and yeah, just just on acronyms, I suppose, not acronyms jargon. It's it's like when you're in the club. I suppose if you're like an expert in a chosen field, you might use these this jargon just a shorthand just because you know everyone, everyone surely knows what this is.

Because we're all experts, yeah, but if you're trying to reach a non expert audience or like the general public, you need to be aware of that. And again that's something that my partner has to regularly say to people, like what you know, there's an internal document and there's an external document. We need to take that out or we need. To explain not better so that people who just don't want in our in our world can actually do something with this.

I think the mark of somebody who really understands things. And this is something that you can listen for in your own prose. I think as a writer, this is something when my when I when my prose is awkward and just unwieldly and you know, clunky. There's a good term for us, clunky.

You know, it's just it's awkward. It barely makes sense to me. You know, this is you know, maybe four other people are going to know what I mean. And you know, but if this is for a general audience, you know that is you know, you are kind of dropping the ball there, right if you don't address that.

And it doesn't mean that what you're doing is wrong or bad. It just means there's a signal in your own prose, and it you could sit and rewrite it one hundred times and you would get one hundred different versions of that clunky, awkward thing. Because the issue at that point is not your prose. The issue is your understanding of the issue, and so the job you need to do is to go and get a fuller understanding of that issue, in whatever way that is.

In my academic life, I would sometimes go and write myself an essay on something. You know, if I was grappling with a new term that was new to me and I was like, well, what are they doing over there in this you know, new thing that I've never heard of, And of course it's not new, it's just something i've never heard of. I'm like, well, you know, the first instinct is, oh, I should ignore that. I don't know what that is, so I'll ignore it.

But that that's the wrong instinct. Go find out what it is, and then you can decide will I deal with that or will I not? And then if you do need to deal with it, if you make that again a decision, well I need to fully understand this, and so immerse yourself in it. Write yourself an essay, watch documentaries, talk to people take your best friend out for a coffee and say I want to explain something to you.

Let's see if this makes sense. You know you're long suffering best friend. Whatever way that you have to increase your understanding of that thing, and then you have another go of trying to write it out. And at the point I mean you can write it out in a way that is clear and simple but not simplistic, then you know you understand it, and then you know it's ready for a general audience.

And so when I was explaining technical linguistic items, whenever I was writing something for publication, that was my goal. Is this true to what this technical item is, you know and the master's understanding of that, but is it also understandable in a clear way to someone reading this who might not be an expert in linguistics but is an expert in drama, or an expert in medicine, or whoever might read whatever it is I'm writing. So I think that is when you can be clear and succinct and simple, then you know that, then you know you understand it.

Yeah, no, I love that. I know you've when you spoke one of our platform events, you did a great genuinely great talk at one of our Platform events in Newcastle. But I've seen you talk about online as well, about how writing can help you understand and think more clearly. So that's a really good, good important point that you that you've made.

There. That it's it is only through to putting your thoughts down on paper or on a laptop or a digital format that you can you can understand what you actually think. Yeah, and letting yourself, letting yourself go through multiple iterations and learning from each iteration. Mm hmmm.

You know that's the important point. I think sometimes people give up because it's frustrating in the middle. Yeah, but lots of things worth doing are frustrating in the middle. Here's here's a phrase dumbing down.

Where people, oh, they're either encourage you to dumb it down or they tell you that you've dumbed it down too much. And it's it's that's not what we're talking about here. It is about, like you say, rite more clearly and making it simple to understand without being simplistic. Yeah, And and that's that's your state of understanding.

When you understand something thoroughly and well, then you don't have to there'll be no dumbing it down. No, you will just be able to state it. I think this relates. I think this also relates to the fine art of preparing an executive briefing.

Yeah, right, so, and that is a very interesting task. And who would have thought that. You know, I started my career all those decades ago studying the language of literature, and it turns out that executive briefings just as interesting. So so, you know, a massive report is produced and the report will have an argument, should have an argument.

The report is arguing for something to happen or not happen, and the executive the executive summary is the clear, succinct and significant point of that report. You don't want the executive briefing to be dumbed down. You don't want it to be random. You don't want it to be a description of points you happen to remember.

You don't want it to be a set of things you wished had been in the report but weren't there. You know, the executive briefing is the is an account of the main of your argument and the main evidence for it. And that's not a dumbing down process. That's a clarity process.

That's a distilling of what is most important here and what is the clearest way to express it? And then you know, and then that briefing can allude to detail elsewhere if if that's if that's necessary right, So it's not it's not combing down, it's it's providing clarity. M h. Now you're very good at explaining this, understandably because of your your background.

But yeah, totally. I think we told about the other day as well. How I've I've spent a bit of time working in corporates many years ago, and senior people would ask for a one pager. They didn't have the time to really get into the detail of of something or spend enough time on something.

They just wanted a snapshot summary of what was happening, and that was it's deffinew times. I thought, well, that's a bit how do you really understand what's going on here if you're just looking at a one pager or a single slide of something. But I suppose it's making sure that you, like you say, it's clarity, and you and you and you pull out the key points there. They just definitely seen a People don't like surprises.

They like to know, They like to know what's going on. They don't necessarily need to know how it's being pulled together or how it's been done, but they need to know what's happening so they can discuss it in a senior leadership meeting or an external briefing. And think about what a responsibility that is for the person preparing the executive briefing, and in order to do that well, in order to do that effectively, so that that executive briefing informs the next bit of the process in a good way, in a productive way, it needs to be not only clear, it needs to have the right information in it.

And the right information in it will be the steps of an argument, because you can take an eighty page report and the argument the framework that holds it all together will be one main point. We argue that project X should go forward, whatever project X is, and then they'll be between five and ten points of evidence for why it should go forward. It should go forward because we have found a necessity in this area. It should go forward, because our projections show that the following benefits with a crew.

It should go forward because and so those points can be listed right. And I was at a great I was doing a great session with a group of academics and you were talking about steps in the argument, and there was a wonderful question. Someone said, oh, well, you know we've all worked with some information, and you know all of us have between you know, five and seven steps. Is it always that number of steps?

And that's like how long is a piece of string? But it is interesting because two steps is not enough. It's not complex enough. You're not done thinking.

And so if you just put your thing out into the world in that state, it's it's not complex enough really to do you justice or to feed anything else, to lead to anything else. But twenty seven steps is too many that you know, you've not got to the heart of what's important. And if you've got that many, if you've got twenty seven points still on your summer, you're thirty or you know you've not you're again, you're not finished. You've not gone the whole way through your thought process to distill what is most important.

Here is my point. This is the evidence from my point. And there's a difference between evidence which are sub sub points, and then underneath each sub point you can have the granular proof, right, but that doesn't need to be in the summary. No One will remember that that's what the document is for.

You need the main point and you need the sub points, and it is you know, I think we've said this before. It's enormous responsibility. M You know that the person who's going to read your summary and do something with it is trusting you as the author to prepare that. Yeah, and you know, you know, and if people think, oh, what a boring task, You're riding a trailer, you know, the trailer of a movie to do the same thing.

Yeah, well that's a good way of looking at it, because yeah, a great trailer for a movie can can be the difference between a box office hit and a disaster. Sometimes at least get people through the door. There's a real art in that, isn't there. It's so important, Like I know, I don't keep saying this, but I'm thinking of like so many situations where people need to be able to do this or they would benefit from being able to do this better.

Even thinking like board meetings, you know, when you when you've got. Executives together or board board members together, shareholder meetings or briefings with the market even just articulating your message. You know, well, in a marketing communication, you know that. I've definitely met people who are technically very good at what they do, and they try to write technically on their website or the communications, Like you don't need to show off or prove that you're good at what you do, Like we kind of trust that you can do what you do.

But you're trying to reach Sometimes you're trying to reach other people like like yourself, but often you're trying to reach a non technical business owner leader who's making a decision about whether you use your your product or service. So you need to be able to write in a in a simple way, in a in a in a clearer way. But yeah, like public sector, private sector, third sector organizations trying to write a report to their funders as well to show what they've done and demonstrate impact, like what positive impacts hopefully they've had.

But a truthful, a truthful report as well, because no one, especially in that world, that no one wants to hear, oh yeah, everything's amazing. You gave us some money and like we've we've we've cured the cured all the problems in the world. People know that that's not that's not necessarily true. Yeah, yeah, and that goes back to what we were talking about, you know, ethically making those decisions about the evidence that you have and writing in a in a way.

One of the an interesting chapter that I had published was about how the Nolan Principles of public life. I think anyone who's the public servant will know the Nolan principles. It's about behaving well when you have a public responsibility, being open, being honest, being transparent. I think they're about twelve of them.

And one of the arguments I made in this chapter is that when we are writing in the public sector, the Nolan principles apply to our prose, even even to quite small decisions about what we decide to leave in and what we decide to leave out, and about how we express things, and that the clarity that we use, and that also goes back to knowing your stuff when when we're writing. So and I thought that was interesting when I was thinking about that, because it just started as a thought about experiment for me.

Do the Nolan ap PRIs suppose if we write as public servants? So do you know with the Nolan principles apply? And I found that they did. So it's an interesting chapter to write.

So how can people is that a book that you published. Is that? Is that available? Can anyone get that?

Or it was? It was my pleasure to write that chapter for the Associatiation of They publish a volume every year and they get people to write chapters in it, and I write one. And if you go to my LinkedIn profile, there's a list of my publications and you can find the link to the publisher there. Okay, and so I think that's how you would access that.

Okay? Cool? Could you could you just say the title again? Because I think it broke up slightly when you said it.

So what what's the title that? Yeah? Well, now, the association that collates and puts the volume together is the Association of Education Advisors, right, the Association of Education Advisors, that's the ao e A, and they publish a volume every year, and I wrote a chapter in one of their volumes. I think it was two years ago.

And on my LinkedIn profile you can see my publications and it will be listed there. So good. Well, I wouldn't well, I'm going to include links underneath this for everyone to follow as well, but I would encourage people to follow you on on LinkedIn as well, because you do write some really interesting articles on their I mean, you do regularly write some good, good ones, but I no, you wrote a good one not that long, a about the m dash, which I didn't know anything about. I'd heard people mention in the m dash and how that was a telltale sign of something being generated in AI potentially, But yeah, you were.

You were sort of kind of you singing the praises of the m dash or sort of like the lost art of the mdash. I love the m dash part I love the m dash And that was a fun post to write because I, you know, and I felt, I'm like what and I am. I discovered the m dash as a school child studying the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and it gave her writing such verb and such energy, you know, and sometimes you need, you know, more of a dramatic pause in your writing before you go on to the next bit.

And when used judiciously, you know they are exactly the right piece of punctuation. And how did I put it in the post? So you know you're reading that, you know, learning punctuation, so you've got you know, the the full stop for something final, the comma for a pause, you know, the semicolon or the colon for an introduction and then but the dash allows you to do something much more dramatic, you know, So if you're going to present, you know, a conclusion from something that follows, you know, a conclusion that follows from something you've said in a dramatic way, you know, to it's almost like a thunderclap sort of punctuation.

And that that can be useful. That can be useful in many ways, and it gives you writing energy and I think it's about your personality as well as a writer. One of the things I think we don't talk enough about is style, and we all have our own style when we write, and that that's you know, particular to us. And I do think sometimes because when we're you know, I don't know if you wanted to bring AI up at all, but.

Here it is as well move on to that. I guess that's where the comment was gone, because yeah, I never heard the name or the before until I start seeing people saying, oh, look out for an m dash because that shows that it was generated. Because yeah, I was, I was like, well, no, I'm still going to I've been using the mdash since I was eleven, and you know, and Ai was science fiction and still you know, so. I'm like, why why should I, as a human writer?

And that's another thing. Suddenly we have to see a human writer to distinguish ourselves from this other thing that now writes and that's new. That's new that people started saying, well in human writing, and well, why should I, as a human being that writes, you know, have to change the way I write because an AI uses the dash? I mean, I didn't have to change the way I wrote because other authors use dashes, you know.

And so suddenly now but we can't sound like this, and you know, and I don't know that. I've actually sort of got very far in my thinking on this, and I'm like why. But one of the things I think is why should we be so afraid of sounding like an AI? If we were secure in how we sounded, that would not worry us.

And so I'm quite happy with the way I use M dashes. So some people are, you know, but I've seen some people sort of say these M dashes are mine, And now we sort of have to clarify I'm using my own M dashes. You know, whatever AI is can bring to the world, you know, this was one of the unintended consequences that we now have to think about. Think about that, and maybe thinking about our own use of the M dash you know is a good thing.

Maybe you know it's brought to conscious awareness. Like as you said, you weren't really very aware of the dash as a name thing before this, before this. Hyphens, Yeah, but not like Latin. Is that an end an end?

And M is like the width of a letter M. Again, I wouldn't have known any of this. I hadn't if I hadn't read your LinkedIn posts. I think it's really good that you're writing.

And I'll tell you what. Keep your eyes peeled, because the next one I have planned is on the parenthesis. The brackets. The things we write in brackets supposedly because they're not important because we put them in brackets, but yet we still feel it's important to put them there, and we bracket them off.

And so I shall be writing a post on what we really put in brackets and what that means. I'll tell you here's here's something that I am that I do a lot of in my partner gets annoyed when I will, I will often say and slash or yeah it could be this, or it could be that, and I do that quite often, and she's like, why are you doing that to make a decision, It's like, no, because I want to get a cost that it could be that, or it could be that. So what am I wrong in doing that? Should I?

Should? I not do that? What I think? You know?

You see that a lot in style? Yeah, I do do that? Long are your style? And it's also as for so many of these things, linking words are more than just pieces of grammar.

They are an index to how you're thinking. And so you're putting your thoughts together in an interesting relationship. Yeah, you know. So in those cases, you're saying, it could be all of these things and you know, or it could be one of them.

So there's a true choice there between all of them or one of them, and so you are holding open. You are making maximally explicit that choice, which is a fine thing to do because sometimes sometimes it's both. And so if you want to be maximally clear, that makes sense. Yeah, good, thank you.

I feel better. Maybe I do do it too much. I don't know, but often i'm especially when it comes to marketing communications, I'm often say the same words and phrases, but I'm timing it out from squat every time. But it's just I've got into the habit of saying and or, Like I'm basical saying this someone, can you do this?

And or I'm leaving it to you to decide. It'd be great if you did both, but if you only want to do one, that's fine. That's what I'm saying to people. And I think, and there it is for me.

I think what that means about you. What you've just I think revealed there in your use of that particular stylistic feature is I'm leaving it to you. This is your choice. I will not impose my choice on you.

Yeah, And that I think is that's an interesting That's an interesting for me. Those things are fascinating, the way that a choice you're making your style is indicating something about the way you're looking at the world and the way you're thinking, and that the way you are approaching your audience. Yeah, no, good. One thing I often say is oh sorry, go ahead.

No going going, Sorry, I keep cutting in. No. No. One thing I often say, and I'm not the only one who says this, but language is always up to something, it's always doing something.

We are always doing something with language, and as a writing and language awareness consultant, I think my main job is helping people to realize what that thing is. What what do you want this to do? You know, and you've written this, and what does this thing actually do? So I often you know, what is the language up to and increasing our awareness of that so that our writing can become more effective.

M you're getting made to think. You're definitely getting me to think more about what I'm saying, what I'm writing it ever since I met you so and heard you speak so. No, it's it's it's good, it's important what you do. And so that's why I'm keen for you to do this and help spread the word and get more people who know about what you do.

So apart from following you on LinkedIn and reading your posts and checking out some of your publications, I know you do workshops and you do Do you do team training or do you do individual training? Or what's your How can people work with you? Ah? Yes, well I have a series of workshops that people can sign up for on event right, So if you're a creative writer or an academic or researcher, I have workshops that I run online via zoom and the registration, as we say it is through event right.

So my creative my language awareness and creative writing workshops are a little different from what you would normally get as a creative writer, but they're very interesting and people seem to really benefit from them. So those are in event Right, and I'm just about to put a whole new batch up, so you can go on to event right and find them, and you can also go via my website and there's there'll be there's a link as well to that, and then I have a specialist signature workshop, and that is how to really write your literature review.

So if you're an academic, a PhD student, a new researcher, often the hardest part is wading through the massive body of researching your field and figuring out, well, why does my research question need to be asked? What is it about this field work in this field that means my research question is necessary? And that's a fundamental thing to be able to show. That's one of the most important things.

It goes to originality and people often struggle with that, and I do a workshop on what you really need to do to sort that out and that and there's two ways that you can do that. You can either sign up as an individual researcher for one of my workshops online. But if there are any research managers or anyone who manages training in a university, you can contact me through my website or my email say you know, gosh, you know we want some training for our researchers. Can you do us a workshop on you know that, the craft of writing, the craft of research writing.

So universities can get in touch. If they have staff development days, you can sign up for my workshops if you are if you commission training for your organization, you can get in touch with me and say, you know, we were thinking about doing something on X y Z, could you do this for us. I also have sometimes half day's training or a workshop or a day long course might not be an So I also have project support and consultancy services. And that's much more of a that's a longer term, a longer term project, and that would be a needs analysis.

I would do, well, this is the issue that I think you have. This is what I would design to address it. I could deliver that. There could be follow up support, and that's kind of like a different that's a bigger package.

But those are the I think those are the three basic ways that people can access me. So I am on LinkedIn and so I do write regularly about what I do, and you know what my thoughts are on LinkedIn, and people can go to my website for a full write up of what I offer. I do have a series of workshops that I offer and you can have a look at them online. They are at the list here.

But it's writing literature, reviews, writing well at university, dealing with language data as a social researcher. So if you want to get more out of your all social researchers, many of them they collect language data, interviews, narratives. This is all language, So what are more interesting ways to get more out of that data. I have a workshop on writing, thinking and when not to use AI just because it's there, should we use it?

That? You know, so thinking about that that part of the equation. And then I do stuff on report writing. We've talked a lot about that in this interview.

My workshop for creative writers. And then for the education sector. I do CPD, particularly around teaching grammar. What we need to know about grammar to teach it well, and grammar for writing.

So that's the range of things I do. I don't know if you were looking for that list of services. Yeah, well you do a lot in but it's it's really valuable what you do. So I know obviously LinkedIn what's what's your web address?

Again? Oh you're challenging me there, Hold on the spot. I always keep it in a series of links so that I always get it right. Is it writing Works Consulting dot com.

W w W dot Writing Works Consulting dot co dot. Uk Right, brilliant? Okay, well, I will include links underneath this as well. But I thinking as well, I know you've before when I was saying you've you've given lots of talks, not necessarily online, but like at events.

Definitely think I should be doing more of this. I think you're you're so knowledgeable and insightful that more people should be getting you to do podcasts and video interviews and speaking at events as well. I was thinking as well, maybe book festivals as well, getting you on stage given a talk or interviewing an author as well or a writer. I think you'd be really good at that.

Any book festival organizers watching this are listening to this, I'll encourage them to get into a jo even an author who likes what you what you're all about, get you to interview them on stage. I have done that before and it was really really very interesting, sort of a very interesting conversation with a creative writer and in conversation with event and talking about well, as an analyst, this is what I saw in your language, you know, And one of the questions was, you know, how much of it did you consciously put there?

And how much of it just emerged? And if it just emerged, which where did it come from? And so that that was a really sort of you know, interesting conversation about that. And and you know, I'm glad to say that you would like to see me up there because I would love to be you know, up there.

I think, uh, bringing my workshops, you know, to wider literary festivals, my language awareness and creative workshops, I think that would be something very different for writers and also something that would be a value to them in expanding their toolkit, h expanding their repertoire. And I do like to give talks, so you know, yeah, anyone looking for a talk on language. Life out loud? That was it's going to happen.

I totally believe this. If you want something that tell tell people, and then you'll be surprised who's listening, who's Yeah, well then I know, I know you touched on a bit and we did mention a bit of am just going to end a little bit with them? How I think you said it the other day. How people are now starting to use it as a verb.

They say, oh, let's just. AI, yes and just here comes. But it's everything. Hopefully anyone who's listened to this or watch this will will realize it's it's too important to just abdicate responsibility to an AI tool to do a lot of this work.

Yes, it could, it could help summarize, or it could even take notes from the meeting so that everything's all the information is collected, But to decide what information to then use in the in a report or a publication is too important to just give over to an AI because we're not doing the thinking there. We are just relying on a on a tool, a digital thing that doesn't really understand it doesn't have the context or the background knowledge to know what to do with it correctly.

Yeah, and I think a lot about that, you know, Ever since it first came on the scene, and you know, as you said, you know, it was just a couple of days ago when I first heard it as a verb, you know, and I thought, it's now in people's spontaneous conversation, that this is a this marks a it's a bit of a milestone, and how embedded something is in our lives. So it's a verb now, you know, to AI, something will no doubt make itself into a dictionary. And also I think, you know, I think I first started thinking about this when I gave that talk for a platform, when you gave me that opportunity for which I'm still very very grateful and thinking about, well, yes it can do all these things, but if we let it do those things, what are we giving up inch by inch that over time?

So you think you are. So if you generate your ideas, throw them all down on paper, that's great, that's excellent. But all of those are and relationships and to go back to our earlier point, that might be or relationships this and this and this or this or this or this or this. But that's a very simplistic.

It's a very simple way to connect information, to connect ideas. I think this and this and this and this and this and this and this or to you know, these are all the things we could do. We could do this and this and this and this. Right, so you put all that down and you think, right, I just need the AI to structure it for me and make it more formal.

But what you're then doing is letting the AI decide how those ideas relate to each other. You're letting the AI decide well, that seems to be the main idea, and the evidence seems to be this, and that's the heavy lifting bit of your thinking. And so if you're letting the AI do that, you're not doing that, and over time you kind of lose the ability to do that. You do it less and less well over time, and then there's the temptation or I'll just get the AI to do it.

And also all of the other things that we spoke about the responsibility for that argument, the responsibility for how those thoughts fit together. You know, you're kind of abdicating that. And my argument is not that we shouldn't use it, but that we should be fully aware of what we are asking the AI to do when it comes to writing and thinking before we make those decisions. And one that's very interesting is getting an AI to summarize documents.

And there might be good reasons to do that, but if you haven't read something yourself, you don't know what it says. That's just it, you know, And that's the same Somebody said, well, what if you just get another person to read it. I'm like, well, it's the same issue. Anytime you depend on someone else's summary of something, you're one step away from the actual thing.

And there are times in life when we need to be sure we've read the original, and so we need to make that judgment rather than saying, oh, here's this tool that can extract the ten most important points. Well, and then even you know, you're not deciding what those ten points are, but you know, and then that that could be consequential. So I just think greater awareness when it comes to writing and thinking and reading about what we are giving away when we get a tool to do that for us rather than doing it ourselves.

Yeah, yeah, it's an important point, and that that's again, that's why I was so pleased that you made that at the platform event. And that that you're making it again today. Because I'm not I'm not allowed, I'm not against technology, but I want, Yeah, I feel a responsibility when I put on these events and do things like this podcast and interviews that people have their eyes wide open and they know what they're getting into and what the pros and cons of something are instead of just blindly Russian into something without thinking through what the potential downside could be.

Yeah, And someone suggested something I was listening to that one way, you know, an interesting thing to do would be to write something yourself and then to get AI to write it and compare it. You know that that would be meaningful. You know, what have I produced? What is the AI version?

What's the difference? And I did an experiment quite like that from a talk I did about a year ago now, and it was a one to do with reading. And there's a very famous article in my field that I first started reading as a master student and taught it, you know, as an academic. And so I would reread that article every year or just about.

And every time I went to it, you know, there was I would see something new because I'm not the same person when I read it. So I thought, oh, you know, now it's this thing called AI and people are sort of really you know, championing AI can give you summarise. And so this was a paper that I knew very very well, but I read it again, you know, for this little experiment I was doing this individual experiment. I read it again, wrote my own summary, and then I got the AI to chat GPT.

I think it was to do a summary of that paper for me, and I compared them, and I thought, and it was interesting because the AI gave me the summary of ten million summaries of this of this article, which is well known and it will be on every introductory linguistics course, you know, anywhere. And so it was like I got, you know, I got a master handout fashioned from you know, millions of handouts, you know. And so what the AI gave me was the the points that everybody remembers about that article.

But that's different from what's actually in the article, you know. And so I thought, wow, So there's a there's a level of richness which is not there in the summary. That's the danger of summaries. And also there was nothing of the original author's style, his particular way of writing, which can be maddening, you know, to like pick apart, you know, what the actual sentence says.

You know that he had a very particular style. But when I read the original article, when I'm reading the original article by a person, I'm in touch through the prose with the living reading person who wrote that article. There's there's a communication there. It's a communication between their mind and yours.

Yeah, exactly, Yeah, there's a there's a meeting there, even though they might be you know, they might have lived centuries ago and I'm reading it now, but there's a you know, there's a humanity in that. And then you the AI one, and you know, it was algrammatically correct. It was clear there's there's nothing wrong with the style per se. But I began to think, what am I in touch with here?

While I'm interacting with this style? What what? What? What am I?

What am I interacting with? And the answer was, I'm not sure I've arrived at an answer. I'm not sure there's an easy answer to that. But the whatever it was in the style of the original author of this article, you know, I was having a human response to that, you know, and it just whereas the the AI summary was much more like, I don't know, reading a street sign, And technically a person might write a street sign, but it's you know, it was there was more that level.

You know, you're reading a street sign, You're not really that, you know, it's the information that that that you're looking at, that that is coming across that. That's the maximal thing. And reading this account from the AI, and it was one of the comments that I had on that was, well, you get that you could get the AI to you know, write me a full summary, write me a summary of the least remembered points. Well, yes, you could do all that, but you have to know to do that.

Mm hmm. That's different from saying write me a summary of And many people will start with the prompt to write me a summary of Yeah, and even it doesn't matter. I'm of the view you can write the most complex prompt in the world, but if you haven't read it yourself, you still don't know what it says. No, And so there are you know sometimes that you know, we can be overwhelmed by the amount of things that we have to read, and so there could be an argument whereas if you if there are eighty thousand papers on a topic and you want to deal with all eighty thousand, then you might have a process where some of it is automated, but when we do that, we still need to know we haven't read it ourselves.

Look, very you're very good at this, excellent to that. I'm there. I'm hoping that people. I'm hoping a lot of people watch and listen to this, and I will do my best to spread the word and get lots of people to watch and listen to it, because I think it's really important.

I've said this multiple times, really important what you're doing and what you're saying, and more people shall be aware of it. So thank you, Susan. I really enjoyed that, and I think, well, I think we'll end it there. And thank you, m thank.

You, and I have a great day and we'll spread. This far and wide you too, And before we go, can I just say that I think you are one of the great blessings that has flown into my life. So it's very kind of you to say that. Thank you.

Thank you all right, thank you, appreciate you. Thanks by hears. Bye.