Improve your communications through the buddy system

Without a doubt, you cannot be a good marketer if you are not a good communicator. The two go together like Paris Hilton and a stiff martini. And part of any communications arsenal is an ability to write well.

While we would like you to hire us to write everything so you don’t have to worry about it, we know that no matter how much work you gave us, you would still have to write budgets, memos, email messages and a thousands other things. You must be a good writer.

To improve your skills, you have to read all the right books and take all the right workshops, of course. Why waste time walking into walls teaching yourself when you can take a full-day seminar and save yourself the grief? Look at it this way: what you spend on the seminar, you probably save in medical bills. But even with that, things such as typos, grammar errors and the like will still slip through the cracks. What can you do to stop that?

Get a buddy.

And we’re not talking about a let’s-get-a-beer-after-work type of buddy. We are talking about someone who, like you, is interested in good communications.

At Adams Jette, everything gets peer-reviewed before it goes out the door. And this is more than a proofread. We look for issues of grammar, diction and style. We looked for clarity, consistency, quality of writing and what we call “understandability.”

As professionals, we certainly have an advantage, but no matter who you are, you can take your writing up several notches just by getting someone else to look it over. Does what you wrote make sense? Is it choppy? Are there any obvious errors? Your “buddy” will likely spot them.

You’ll be surprised not so much at how much you don’t know (although that might surprise you, too), but at how much you simply missed. And you’ll also be surprised, if you’re someone else’s buddy, how much you can teach others—even those you thought might be better writers than you.

You have to be prepared to accept the criticism in the light that it’s offered, of course, but the things you learn from your colleagues will be with you for life. And when you are producing excellent prose, you’ll also be producing excellent marketing.