Jay Wren

Great Grammar is So Easy to Practice and So Rewarding for Those Who Do

Great Grammar is So Easy to Practice and So Rewarding for Those Who Do.

Little grammatical mistakes are so easy to make and can be so costly to the speaker or writer when those mistakes come to represent a person’s professional profile.

The purpose of this article is to highlight words that mask speaking and writing errors.

When speaking, there is no technology to aid us. We either choose the correct words, or we do not.

With today’s technology, writers have help in proofreading documents before publishing or emailing them. On the other side, writers have the disadvantage of having their grammatical errors highlighted in the document when the reader opens it. Using technology to proofread and improve the quality of your writing is so easy to do. Failing to use that technology can make you look sloppy, uneducated, unintelligent, and your document may disappear into the reader’s deleted folder.

Easy Steps to Great Grammar

All skills take initial development to acquire and regular practice to maintain. To acquire and strengthen your grammar is easy with the free online resources like this very website and others that provide ideas on becoming more successful in business or any other public setting today.

Developing great grammar does not have to be complicated. I have avoided using grammatical terminology in this article. I want the focus to be on words that mask errors.

Using the same process of simply becoming familiar with words that mask mistakes can help you keep the development of your grammatical skills simple. Unless you plan to teach grammar or find intrinsic value in developing a broader vocabulary in grammar, you might just ignore the grammatical terms in any article or textbook and focus on the examples that you find in the resources you are using.

Speaking with Grammatical Accuracy

To use accurate grammar in speaking, there is just one area of development: word selection. The speaker simply needs to know which words are correct to express an idea.

Again, the most effective and fastest way to develop accurate word selection is to highlight mistakes that occur most often. I am going to label this frequently made grammatical error “the ESPN Too©.” Half the American sports commentators on live broadcasts make this simple grammatical error during on a regular basis. Just putting them in the situation of having to choose the correct use of the words “between” or “among” as well as the words that follow those two words, and the sports commentators will make the incorrect choices. Frankly, these sportscasters are not alone.

The words “between” and “among” are doubly confusing in terms of which words follow them and which of the two words to use in which situation.

The word “between” indicates that the matter is between two people. The word “among” indicates that the matter is among three or more people.

Try to remember that the words that follow the word “between” are the words “him, her, and me.”

The words that follow the word “among” are the words “him,” “her,” “me,” “themselves,” and “ourselves”

As awkward and as subliterate as the following statements may appear, these statements are grammatically correct:

“This matter is between him and her.”
“This matter is among her, him, and me.”
“The team members want to keep the secret among themselves.”

Comparisons: Words with two Syllables

To create comparisons with one-syllable and two-syllable-words, add “er” or “est to the end of the word. Here are examples.

This car is fast. This second car is faster. The third car is fastest.
This flower is pretty. These flowers are prettier. Of all the flowers, these flowers are the prettiest.

Comparisons Words with Three or More Syllables

To create comparisons with words with three or more syllables, use the words “more” and “most” in front of the word used for comparison. This English professor is intelligent. The math professor is more intelligent. The music professor is the most intelligent of the three professors.

Writing with Grammatical Accuracy

Developing writing skills that contain great grammar is different from developing speaking skills that contain great grammar. However, writing complicates word selection with the issue of similar sounding words: Affect / Effect, Break / Brake, Capital / Capitol, Compliment / Complement, Desert / Dessert, Guest / Guessed
Heard / Herd, Illusion / Allusion, New / Knew, Principle / Principal, Rain / Reign, and so forth.

Rather than trying to learn every set of similar sounding words you can find in English (English language is redundant.), you might just become aware of your own tendencies in word selection. For reason, I developed the habit of adding a syllable to the spelling the of word “athlete.” I intuitively tend to type the word “ath-e-lete.” So, I try to watch for that type of error in my writing.

Avoiding Apostrophes

Writers enjoy using an informal style and will use apostrophes to replace letters as part of that style of writing. However, this practice can mask writing mistakes.
One of the most common instances of apostrophes creating confusion and masking writing errors comes when a writer is trying to choose whether to use “its” or “it’s.”

Forget about learning the grammar as to which words to choose. Just try to stay away from using apostrophes to replace letters. Business writing is not informal anyway.

So, try this method. Just type, “It is.” If the two words “it is” do not express what you are trying to express, then the word “its” is the correct word to use between the choices of “its” or “it’s”. Does that make sense?

Having to focus on whether you should type “there, their, or they’re,” you can reduce the risk of errors creeping into your writing with the statement, “They are.”

Your quick wit indicates that you are smart.

Learning as a Lifestyle

I continue to read articles on basic grammar and watch for my own mental blocks that can mask errors in grammar. Speaking and writing correctly is critical to the success of anyone’s career. Practicing great grammar is so easy to do and so rewarding.

Simple, Effective Business-Writing and Public-Speaking Principles

ANGLO-SAXON WORDS
The basic principles for business writing and public speaking is to get accurate information to reading or listening audience. The best communicators select words that will ensure that their message is easy to understand. For business and public speaking, the power of their material is in the subject matter.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Simple sentences are the easiest to understand. These types of sentences express the action of one person, animal, or object creating one action or more actions. The cat meowed. The dog barked and howled.

Compound sentences have two subjects performing two separate actions. The cat meowed, and the dog barked.

In a complex sentence, the communicator is using a phrase to describe the action in the sentence. Complex sentences help the writers and speakers express time and location. After sundown, the cat meowed. When the cat meowed, the dog barked.

Adjective clauses enable a writer to define or describe the subject of the sentence. The dog that barked is a small.

The more complicated the writer or speaker makes a sentence, the more risk the person makes brings to making the information to understand. Example: As Mary approached Jim on the left and the lion eased into view just over the horizon on the right and Jim’s arms began to tire from the heavy load of the four water pails, Jim breathed deeply, trembling and straining to find his focus and maintain faith that any action at all, however quick on his part, to reach the gun was worthwhile, and he called to Mary to leave immediately, so that he could deal independently and with total focus on frightening the lion through shouting or move to grab the gun and in doing so move away from the lion and yet reduce the likelihood that he could intimidate the lion and frighten the lion away.

Simple, factual adjectives can be helpful in writing. The red books are encyclopedias.
However, there are many adjectives that just waste space in business writing. In business writing and speaking, select adjectives for the following purposes.

Effectiveness
Simplicity
Accuracy
Honesty
Relevance
Conciseness
Professionalism
Courteous tone
Completeness

Creating Connections on Membership Sites: a Professional Network or a Database?

Creating connections on membership sites helps brand and market your career.

THE TIME TO SET UP AN ONLINE NETWORK IS BEFORE YOU NEED IT.
As your career progresses, one of the choices you may need to make is how to connect effectively with people online.

Many people take an intuitive approach relative to where they are in their career.

However, waiting until you need a network to build it can leave you stranded when you most need support. From a career perspective, the time to develop your network is to spend a few minutes on a consistent basis reviewing and editing your professional profile and giving consideration to people you may want to add to your connections.

Viewing how you will use your network over the next five years can help you understand what type of network you want to develop.

THE PROFESSIONAL NETWORK
Do you want to limit your connections to people who can directly help your career? Then you want to create a professional network. You will want to be selective to target the people who can connect you with other people who can help you become more successful.

Your options may include questions like these questions:

Does the person share your values?
Does the person have connections with people you want for your connections?
Will the association of this person’s career with your career help you?
Is the person someone who can put you in contact with valuable and influential people?
Is the person someone who can mentor or advise you?

At the same time, you want the people you are selecting to be people who will see the value in connecting with you. Make each invitation individual and personally written for each connection. Express in the invitation that the person has experiences and successes that are the same as other people in your network.

THE PROFESSIONAL DATABASE
Do you want to be able to have immediate access to as many people as possible and yet control who can see your contacts? If so, then you are developing a professional database. You create a profile that promotes the idea that you are willing to accept invitations from anyone. You want to be an open networker and join groups that promote open networking.

An issue for developing an online database is controlling how much other members of the membership site can know about the people you have in your online list of contacts. As an open networker, you can still protect your database to a fairly large degree. Just adjust the privacy settings so that you alone can see who is in your network. Even with tens of thousands of contacts, you can block people from seeing your contacts.

One of the main differences between a professional network and an online database is a difference in property value. Professional networks have real commercial value to the person who has built the network. Said another way, you can sell databases.

SO WHAT’S THE POINT?
The point is that your view and uses of your network may change with the evolution of your career, yet as a professional you should include developing your online profile as part of your total career management system.

What have you found that works for you in the development of your online network?

Be Extraordinary: 3 Ways to Turn Your Day into a Celebration!

TALK HAPPY

I worked with a great guy who was always fun to see. He is the only man who ever called me “Sunshine.”

This name was not even a man crush kind of thing. My buddy just greeted all people with a smile and some enthusiastic greeting or another. For me the greeting was “Good morning, Sunshine.”

My buddy always had fantastic days. Along the way, he enjoyed tremendous success over equally and even more capable people. The reason for his success to me was very simple. Given the option of the people available to join a team, especially a team in a stressful, challenging, long-term project, managers would obviously choose the person with all the skills to do a great job.

In a very simple way, every business day can go better by my greeting people with the most positive yet appropriate greeting possible.

MAKE GRATITUDE LISTS

Happiness is an inside job.

I have seen people develop lifetime habits for the sole purpose of staying mentally healthy. I know of one mental health professional who, for his own sake, writes down one thing a day for which he is grateful.

At the end of the week, he compiles a list from the seven words. Once a month, he picks the top five things from his gratitude list and puts these words on another gratitude list for the month.

Once a year, he goes over what is now a list of 60 things for which he is grateful and picks the top five things for which he is happy every year. He has gone through this process for years.

He treats the human mind the way a physical therapist works with a human limb.

My glass is always full. It always has been. I am the one who is responsible for filling my own glass. I have held that responsibility since I was three years old. If I do not like the level in my glass, I fill it.

Mentally it is my job to keep my glass full as well.

However, what I am talking about is a celebration.

When I behave like I am happy, I become happy. Sunshine, exercise, and a healthy diet make me smile. Clapping my hands and dancing energize me. I do not have to wait until I am at some special event to have a party. I can have one without disturbing other people nearly any time I want.

EXERCISE WITH JOY

I used to see the happy runner. He was an interesting, colorful guy. I am not sure how many hours he ran a day. I saw him more than once on a street where I did not regularly go, so I conclude he must have been out there running a great deal.

He wore bright shorts, tank tops, shoes, and waved at the motorist. He was always smiling and having his own party as he ran down the side walk of a local major thoroughfare.

He was happy. He was like my friend who used to call me “Sunshine.” He created his own celebration. He was like so many people, you included, in that he was extraordinary at creating his own celebration.

The Most Important Interview Question You Will Ever Be Asked

I have read that the most important interview question you will ever be asked is what is your greatest accomplishment.

To me that is akin to someone’s idea of what is Mozart’s greatest work and Babe Ruth’s greatest game. Each person will have his or own idea of greatest anything. The most important part of interview preparation is to check your accomplishments along with a great deal of other material before going into an interview.

Then take a deep breath and be flexible. Interviews are like major league baseball. Who knows what pitch is coming next? Hopefully it is not a wild fast ball going straight to the ear hole in your helmet. Often the pitcher does not know where the next pitch is going until it gets there. So prepare. Take a deep breath. Stay loose. Trust yourself.

Be extraordinary: you will do a great job!

The Benefits of Creating Your Own Career Plan

The Benefits of Creating Your Own Career Plan

A CAREER PLAN CREATES DIRECTION.
In a sense, everyone has a career plan. Some people just do not know what it is or where that plan leads.

When entering kindergarten or first grade, children begin to participate in a career plan. The school system laid out the plan. The result is that students with no further plans of their own often find themselves dropping out of school or finishing school to take whatever job is available.

The specifics of your career plan are relative to where you are in your career. If you are entering college, your career plan will include the subjects you need to study to enable you to get a job in a particular field.

If you have business experience, you may have already worked with different types of business plans. A career plan provides the same value as a business plan. You will identify who these things:

Who you are as a brand
Your career mission
An understanding of what you need to do to achieve your career goals.
Ways to present your plan to other people so that you will get the meetings you need for success.

Students and professionals who have who have developed and follow their own career plan have a greater likelihood of success, simply because they know which steps to take for success.

A CAREER PLAN GIVES YOU A SENSE OF PURPOSE.
Have you ever found yourself in a meeting, working on a project, or in any situation where the question came to mind, “What am I doing here?” or “Why am I doing this?”

Have you noticed that associated with those questions is an unpleasant feeling that you are wasting your time?

You have no sense of purpose.

Going to work every day with a sense of purpose is a lot more fun than going to work every day and wondering why you are doing what you are doing.

Also, it seems logical that going to work everyday with a sense of purpose increases your likelihood of being more successful.

You will take an interest in your work.
You will be focused on your work.
You will be more willing to invest energy and time in your work.

Having a career plan gives you a greater sense of purpose.

A CAREER PLAN CREATES A CHECK-OFF LIST OF WHAT YOU NEED.
Part of creating a career plan includes writing a check-off list. Through this check-off list, you will create focus and direction. Your intuition can emerge to see options that might somehow never have come to you.

You might consider including the following things:

Your education now
Your plan for your on-going education
The job you are in now
The jobs you want to do
People you want to help
People you will need to help you
Things you want to achieve
Places you want to go
People you want to meet
Products you want to create
The amount of money you want to make
Your physical goals and diet and exercise plan.

A CAREER PLAN IS A LIVING DOCUMENT.
As much as possible, allow yourself to be feel confident that you are on a quest to create a vision of your life the way that you would really want to live it.

As you create your first draft, allow yourself to write down whatever ideas come to mind. Your career plan is a living document that you will refer to and change as you learn and grow as a professional. Put aside the limitations of writing structure and just write. Write what you want to be and what you want to do. This material is not permanent. Allow your intuition to become a powerful tool that guides you from map view and street view and back to map view as your proceed. Give your intuition free reign to see solutions to life events you had only seen as obstacles.

Take breaks and relax as you go through the process of creating your first draft of your career plan. Allow yourself time to create this plan. As your plan emerges and you get stuck, begin to work on other projects and come back to creating your plan.

What you may find is that the process of creating the plan gives you many more ideas and tools you can develop and ways you can begin to reach out to people you want to help or who can help you.

A CAREER PLAN CREATES THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE
The psychological advantage is that you are making everything easier for your mind to perform for your success. Knowing the details of where you want to go and knowing the details of the things you plan to do, your mind will have greater spontaneity and confidence. The spontaneity and confidence will create greater clarity.

What you are doing is the same mental process that takes place in any performance practice. Through repetition prior to the actual time of performance, you can respond intuitively when the pressure in on and you must perform in front of other people. Athletes, musicians, actors, and other performers who give all of their focus during practice experience greater ease during actual performance.

Give yourself the opportunity to create a larger, happier, more successful view of your life than you have ever had.

As you take advantage of creating a career plan, you will have more mental freedom and feel less stress whether you are working in front of other people or working alone at your desk. You will have practiced, rehearsed, over and over how to get where you want to go, gathering the tools you need to get there, and how to meet the people who are important to your career.

In summary, you will have the following psychological benefits from your career plan.

Increased creativity and confidence
Clear direction
Less stress through the simplicity of a planned process
Great habits for success
The great feelings of a sense of purpose
Spontaneity in handling the inevitable turns and redirections
Creating a vision for success

Most importantly, you will have enabled your mind to be able to contribute for your success.

As school students, educators had laid out the plan for us to follow to complete certain studies to qualify us for a diploma.

Daily Sessions to a More Powerful You

Work breaks are important to your health and to your work performance.

If you are unemployed and in a career search, keeping yourself healthy while experiencing the added stress of looking for a job is critical to keeping up your self-confidence and maintaining a strong self-image.

Even if you workout before or after work and then work at a desk, you may find that your desk job can reduce the fitness gains from those workouts.

The Department of Labor provides a list of minimum paid rest periods by state for every four hours of work. Most states require companies to give employees a paid 10-minute break for each four hours of work.

If you are a desk worker, taking 10 minutes every four hours is probably less physical activity than you need to receive the physical benefits your body needs from sitting for several hours.

Here are some ideas that can help you refresh your mind, get a little exercise during the day, and stay within your company guidelines for the time you are allowed to take breaks:

When you are rearranging things on your desktop, stand up.
When you are talking on the phone, stand up.
When you are returning or retrieving things from your desktop to your desk drawers, stand up.
While you are working at your desk, tighten your stomach, leg, chest, shoulder, ankles, feet and neck. Roll your ankles. Arch your back. Stretch your arms.
As you pause from typing or when you are on the phone, roll your neck.
When typing, stand up, keep your back straight, and type standing or do a little squat and type squatting.

Some of these suggestions may seem to you as odd at first. Yet, if you think about it, cashiers work with keypads while standing. Retail buyers walk aisles with keypad ordering systems. Some companies provide motorized desks that workers raise and lower during the day. Typing while standing is not that unique of an idea.

For those paid breaks away from your desk, leave the screens at your desk. Give your mind a chance to rest completely. Take a walk. Join a co-worker, even if that meeting is a standing session outside the office doors.

What ideas do you use to help yourself become more effective and healthy at work?

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

Your Online Profile for Business and Career

Developing your online profile is as important to your career as developing as your reputation at work or developing your resume for your career change.

The information you post online may also be more in-depth and broader than the information you put in your resume. On LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, you will find that you are including information that you might not put on your resume. You might include some of the following information:

Recommendations
Endorsements
Pictures
Group Memberships
Companies you follow
Your clients
People who have viewed your profile (on LinkedIn)
Statements of your interests, likes, and perhaps dislikes
Aspects of your personality

This information provides search engines with keywords that can enable potential clients or hiring companies to find you.

To select the most powerful keywords, go to http://www.google.com/trends. This website ranks keywords words for search frequency.

15 Minutes A Day That Will Enrich Your Life

Remain a student for life. One of the most enriching parts of my life is continuing to study. Along with other things, I read textbooks or books on developing skills. I read magazines and online articles about new things that I am doing.

I am not crazy about sitting down and reading a five-hundred page textbook. What I do is that I read for 15 minutes or so a day. Over time, I have learned things and have a lot of fun.

When my wife scheduled us for a trip to France a few years ago, I bought a diplomatic series of French lessons with audio tapes and a book. I would listen to the types when I rode an exercise bike. I also began to watch French news on the Internet, “France2.” I would watch for perhaps 15 minutes a day.

In the process of watching the news in French, I learned something about learning. I could not understand most of what I heard on the French Internet news. I would just watch the French programs and take in what I saw and heard. The surprising piece from this experience is that I found that I knew how to discuss things that were not in the French lessons I was taking. Despite my lack of understanding of the Internet broadcasts, I was learning more French. When I spoke French, I discovered that I have words in my vocabulary that I did not know were there.

Study games. In the book “A Beautiful Mind,” the author Sylvia Nash writes about Nobel Laureate John Nash, who as a student at Princeton University developed a board game. Undergraduates at Princeton today still play the board game. Nash was an economist who studied economic and mathematical theory through what is known as game theory.

There is plenty written on game theory and poker. When poker became all the rage a few years ago, I took up poker as a hobby. I also bought copies of books on poker: Doyle Brunson’s “Super System,” Phil Gordon’s “Little Green Book,” Phil Hellmuth’s “Play Like the Pros.” Reading the books did not so much make me a better poker player as help me understand the intricacies of poker and made poker more fun for me to play and watch. I believe that great poker players are 75% intuitive with odds and human behavior and 25% lucky. I lack the intuition for poker, and I am just too sociable to be serious at a card table. However, I enjoy the game much more.

Continue to build your professional skills. About a year ago, I started rebuilding my company website. I became very ambitious. I lack the genius to be a great programmer. Yet I do love languages, and I learned that Internet browsers read languages.

My son gave me a copy of “HTML, XHTML, and CSS” (author Steven M. Schafer) and a copy of “WordPress All-in-One for Dummies” (authors Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Cory Miller, Kevin Palmer, Andrea Rennick, and Michael Torbert). I have since checked out other books from the library.

I have learned how to create content for web browsers. What I do not know when I am in the middle of a project, I can not easily find on Internet forums or from countless Internet tutorials.

Continuing to study makes my life more fun. If I want to write “Of Course” in French, I write “Bien sur.” If I want to write “Of Course” through a web browser, I write “Of course.”

I do not enjoy reading hundreds of textbook pages a day. Yet I do enjoy studying something that interests me. So the 15 minutes have begun to add up. Over time, I have learned more and had a lot of fun.

You are extraordinary! Remain a student for life!

Creative Ways to Manage Any Process

After going through a lengthy project that may take several days, I find that the project required so much attention and had such a long list of things to get done, that I get away from preparing a schedule for the day’s activities.

This morning was one of those days for me. What happens on a day without scheduled events is that I am not very productive. I check my email. I check my online network accounts for messages. I click around a couple of groups to see what might be going on to stimulate my thinking for new projects. By midday I have very little done and reach a point where I have nothing else to do for the day.

The best way to avoid this loss of productivity is to remember that even on the days on which the work seems to come at me much more quickly than I can manage it, I still need to create an agenda for the day. Busy days are better directed and slow days become more productive when I have a list of projects in front of me.

The agenda needs to have two aspects to it.

First there is the aspect of the things to get done.

Second is the aspect of the goal of each thing I am doing.

For example, I might have items like to the following.

Activity: Sort email into these folders: Delete, Read later, Inbox for high priority, Read.
Objective: Focus on opportunities that bring value to my clients and to me.
Activity: Call people who are on my calendar for business calls.
Objective: Discuss the goal for each call. For example, get advice for new project, follow-up on deadlines for submitting new material, and ask for the correct contact for a particular project.

There are several benefits to creating an agenda.

The process of creating the agenda stimulates my mind to become more creative
The process awakens my mind to more opportunities.
The process keeps me focused on what I need to do.
The process increases the likelihood that I will become more successful at achieving my goals.

So for me the outline for success is to have a schedule of activities for the day and to use that schedule. As I complete tasks, I check them as completed and make a record of what I have accomplished for future reference.

What methods do you use for successful management of your schedule?