You don’t get good at much of anything without practice.  Lots of practice.  And that includes getting good at writing, speaking…communicating.

This semester, I started a new practice in my speech classes.  I’ve “toyed” with it before, but now it is a regular part of my classes.  I have the students begin each class writing a paragraph.  (I give them a first sentence paragraph starter).  Then, I have them go through their paragraphs, and underline the key words that they will speak with special verbal emphasis.  Then, I have them read their paragraphs aloud to each other, in groups of two or three.  And then, I get a few of them to read their paragraphs aloud to the entire class.

Call this Communication 101 Practice/Exercise work.  And, it does work.  My students get a little more comfortable speaking, they get better at creating an easy-to-follow flow of thoughts, and they don’t seem to rebel.  In fact, a couple of students have thanked me for the exercise.

I “came up with this” on my own, but I suspect I got the idea from breathing the air around me.  A lot of folks are talking about the need for writing and speaking upgrades in our education arena.  It is now coming from so many sources that we might call this a movement.  If you are a leader in a company, if you are a teacher, if you are a parent, this is a movement to welcome.  Here are two current articles worth reading, to reinforce this sense that this is something that is in the air…

First,  here are a few excerpts from the Linda Tulloch article, Why I Took My Child Out of Public School:  The “writing revolution” may be on its way. But for some parents, it’s not coming fast enough.  

What we’ve both seen, in the course of our careers, is that good writing matters. While the weak writers may get hired — job interviews rarely require a writing sample — once the candidates get the job, they don’t tend to go far. Soon after they start work, they are asked to prepare a presentation or simply send an email. Then, the trouble begins.

Writing longer pieces — presentations, for example — only confirms the negative impression weak writers make in the workplace. While they might be very intelligent, their inability to clearly and concisely advocate their position on paper completely undermines their reputation. As a result, others become reluctant to have them on their team. Even individuals in verbally focused careers such as sales need to write pitches and send frequent follow-up correspondence.

When employers discover that an employee is a weak writer, they often feel that their hands are tied. From a training perspective, writing is not a skill that one can pick up quickly on the job. It needs to be progressively learned and perfected over the course of many years. (emphasis added).

When my husband and I were children in the public education system, we routinely wrote five to six paragraph essays across several subjects. We also learned proper handwriting, a skill that’s far too underrated today. (One cannot use the computer to fill out a worksheet or critique a colleague’s hard-copy document.) In addition, we rarely took multiple choice tests, instead tackling open-ended questions that required at least full-sentence answers. None of this is the case in many schools today. What’s particularly frustrating to us is seeing these shortcomings in a school district like ours, one that has far fewer obstacles than a lower-income school like New Dorp.

That New Dorp reference comes from this article, kind of the “big article” about this at the moment:  The Writing Revolution by Peg Tyre.  Here’s a taste:

The school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page. If nothing else, DeAngelis and her teachers decided, beginning in the fall of 2009, New Dorp students would learn to write well.

Notice again these lines:

Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects.

Good, understandable, engaging communication skills are never a negative, and are a much-needed positive for practically any job you can name.  And you don’t develop these skills without working at them.  It takes practice, drills, exercises, with lots of coaching and help and corrective suggestions and positive reinforcement to get good at this.

And, I suspect that the need to “practice” these skills does not stop at the graduation ceremony.  If you need to make presentations, if you need to write coherent e-mails or reports, then it might do you some good to practice your writing and speaking.  Don’t you think?