Tool kit: Digital communication

- There are two activities in this toolkit. In the first, you'll self-evaluate some of your recent writing. In the second you experiment with improved instructions for your AI writing assistant. So for the first activity, let's do an audit to practice your digital communication. Go to your email sent folder or to your collaboration space and print out the last five messages you wrote. Next, go through and label each of the printouts with the words, message, action, and details where you find them, highlight any claims or assertions you've made. And then in the same color, highlight relevant supporting evidence, such as voice of customer data and expert's opinion, case studies, or financial and statistical analysis. Finally, use this chart to evaluate each of your labeled messages. Give yourself a plus if your message was spot on for the criteria. A check if you did okay, and a minus if this area needed some work. Did you find your action request in the first or second sentence of your message? How clear is the action? Would your reader know exactly what to do next? Do you have credible evidence to support any assertions that you make? What did you want your reader to think, feel, and do? And does your word choice create the right tone for that message? Did you tailor to the knowledge level of your reader? Was every word in the email necessary or can you be more concise? Did you include helpful formatting, such as bulleted lists, text boxes, headers, and bold font? Finally, read each of your messages, searching for grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors. Did you find anything? Once you've completed the chart, notice where your minus signs tend to be. Focus in on those problem areas before you hit send again. Now for activity two, provide your AI writing assistant two prompts. In your second, be sure to include a clear goal for your writing that is what you hope to achieve, and include specific instructions. Now notice the difference in the responses. For example, in my first prompt, I wrote, "Write a letter to my boss asking if I can go to the Annual Association for Business Communication Conference." The AI generated response was seven paragraphs long. Yikes, my reader appreciates brevity. Some phrasing was very formal, like, I hope this letter finds you well, and I am writing to request your permission, and I kindly request that. This level of formality doesn't sound like me. I prompted three times with increasingly more specific instructions, like be more conversational. My boss and I are friends. Keep it under a half a page. Include bullet points for the key reasons I should go. The responses got better and better, and by the third or fourth iteration, I got a letter that sounded like me and had a more appropriate tone for my reader. The beauty of an AI assistant is that you can ask for as many iterations as you want and they're fast. With a well prompted AI ally by your side and with careful self-evaluation, you and others will see an evolution in your writing.