9 Tips for Effective Communication in the Workplace

Workplace communication shouldn’t be this difficult.

Your team is mere days out from releasing the project you’ve all been agonizing over for weeks. There have been flurries of emails and messages, presentations, a legal review, and an afternoon of confusing discussions leading to charts drawn on whiteboards with markers that turned out not to be dry-erase. Oops.

Above all, there have been meetings—so many meetings. There was the quick daily kind where people said what they were working on, or more often sidetracked by. Then there was a punishingly long session involving dozens of slides about user metrics; by the end of that one you were quietly daydreaming about taking up kickboxing lessons.

Still, all those rambling discussions and endless email threads somehow failed to avert a looming fiasco. Now no one seems to be on the same page, and your deadline is ticking relentlessly closer. What you have here is an abject lesson about communication in the workplace—or lack thereof.

How effectively you and your colleagues communicate says a lot about how well work is going more generally. It’s hard to get things done efficiently when no one has a clear plan. People can flounder when they don’t see a good way to discuss fresh opportunities—let alone unforeseen challenges.

That’s why we’re here with a few tips to improve your communication skills in the workplace.

Select the right tool for the job

There are many ways to connect—and misconnect. Choose wisely.

Emails may be de rigueur, but they’re also easily buried. Video conferences add a humanizing touch if someone’s working remotely, but they can be unwieldy. Basic phone calls are sometimes underrated, but you’ll often want to schedule in advance, or at least start by asking whoever you’re calling if it’s an okay time to talk.

The advantage of real-time conversation is how much it can clarify in a short amount of time while saving both parties a huge amount of typing back and forth. Be judicious about lining up meetings with multiple parties; this can easily become a chore, so you have to expect a worthwhile return to justify the effort.

Make your meetings count

As with work, which Parkinson’s Law states will expand to fill as much time as is allotted for it, so too with meetings. Set a time limit and an agenda. Budget how long you’ll spend on each item before moving on. The idea here is to respect your participants’ time, so communicate transparently about this; doing so will help you avoid seeming overly brusque as you shepherd things along.

For one-on-ones, take it offline

Potential rabbit holes abound in any discussion—and some might be worth following up on, at least among a subset of participants. For instance, if your designer realizes a new template that’s getting the go-ahead will soon require updated text, then she and her trusty copywriter can discuss those details after the meeting—not while the dev crew looks on and tries not to yawn. A handy turn of phrase for situations like this: “Let’s take it offline.”

It’s okay to repeat yourself sometimes

If something matters, it’s usually worth repeating.

Sometimes when dealing with complex subjects or ongoing processes, it’s helpful to remind people of the basics. You don’t have to belabor it. Consider this quick example:

“All right, this conference call is to update key players on prototyping. We’re trying to manufacture a better dog bed by fall, ahead of holiday sales, so we have a lot of work to do in terms of optimizing drool resistance. On the call last week, Susan informed us the supplier anticipates an eight-week turnaround. That means we need to settle on dimensions this month. Let’s talk about next steps. Who’s first?”

This quick recap falls well short of a lecture while still accomplishing a lot:

• Establishes the focus of the call, so speakers know to keep things on track and take other subjects offline as they pop up
• Also gives a sense of what to expect to anyone who hasn’t tuned in before
• Reprises Susan’s important takeaway from the last call in case anyone missed it
• Lays out a key priority and upcoming deadline

That last part will bear repeating later, but in the meantime, if your preamble has saved someone an awkward question or confused email, it’s done its job. And if you’re worried about spending too much time retracing your footsteps, just ask if you should skip ahead; your colleagues might surprise you by saying no.

Try stating key points a few different ways

It can also help to devise new ways to spell out key ideas—using different words or possibly different channels of communication, like a follow-up email that crystallizes the main takeaways from a meeting and who’s in charge of key action items going forward.

Alex Blumberg, the radio journalist-turned-entrepreneur who founded Gimlet Media, told Tape that despite his many years as a professional communicator, it took awhile to recognize the significance of helping coworkers understand:

When people say the same thing, it has different resonance, comes from a different place or means different things to different people… A big part of my job now is saying the same thing a bunch of different ways just so people understand where it’s coming from. If you just say it once, there’s no guarantee that people heard it the way you said it.

In other words, if something is important enough to bear repeating, it’s likely also worth rephrasing.

Run it back

Especially with technical matters, restating key ideas can also help you make sure you properly understand something new. If there’s time, try asking the person explaining it if you can restate their point in your own words, and ask if you’re getting it right. If there’s an important detail you missed, this is a good opportunity to get help grasping it.

Mind your body language

Intentionally or not, how you comport your body communicates a lot. For instance, do you appear closed off with your arms folded, or actively engaged, say by talking with your hands? It’s worth considering, lest you send the wrong message with your posture or facial expression.

Maybe as a colleague concludes a presentation and looks around the room, you seem to glower—not because the presentation was bad, but because you’re lost in thought. In moments like this, it’s sometimes worthwhile to explain yourself: “That wasn’t bad at all, I just need a moment to process. Let’s circle back in a moment.”

Summarize the highlights

It’s not unheard of for people to meet for an hour, raise a series of worthwhile questions, ponder potential answers, resolve nothing, and then realize it’s time to leave for another meeting. This is where follow-up notes can help ensure whatever headway you might’ve been making doesn’t just vanish out the door.

If you can avoid sending lengthy emails to long strings of recipients, it’s probably for the better. But if you must, you might also include a tl;dr (“too long; didn’t read”) that briefly encapsulates the highlights. Put it at the top so that guy in logistics who only seems to skim will at least lay eyes on the essentials.

Be kind

A quick word of thanks or a well-timed smile can go a long way toward helping your officemates feel appreciated and understood.

If that makes people want to talk with you more, well, isn’t that what better workplace communication is all about?

All the Coffee Words

At your local coffee shop, do you ever see words that you don’t understand? For instance, what is java? Why is a cup of coffee called a cup of joe? Ordering a cup of coffee can feel like speaking another language! No worries, here are the meanings behind all the coffee words.

Synonyms of Coffee

Let’s start with the words that just refer to a simple cup of coffee. The first and most puzzling is joe. No one really knows how that got started, but some think that joe may derive from java. Java, besides referring to coffee, is also an island in Indonesia where coffee is grown. Decaf is decaffeinated coffee. An espresso is a dark roast coffee brewed with hot water and pressure.

Types of Coffee Drinks

Do you add something to your coffee? Doing so might result in a name change! Let’s start with milk. If you only put a small to moderate amount of steamed milk in your espresso, you are drinking a macchiato. A cappuccino has a lot of frothy steamed milk. If the proportion of hot milk to coffee is two to one, it’s cafe au lait. If the proportion is three to one, it’s a cafe latte. Add a little boiling water instead of milk and it’s a cafe americano. The addition of chocolate makes the drink a mocha. You can even serve coffee with ice cubes, but that one is easy—iced coffee. It usually includes cream and sugar.

Coffee Sizes

Rather than small, medium, and large, some coffee shops use their own units of measurement. For example, at one popular chain the smallest drinks are called short and tall. Rather than being the largest, grande is overshadowed by the venti and trenta, which contain as much as 31 ounces of liquid.

With all the different coffee drinks, no wonder there’s a special name for the talented ones who serve it—baristas. They speak the language. Now, what kind of coffee will you order next?

Figurative Language: 5 Tools to Spice Up Your Writing

A cardinal axiom of good writing, “show, don’t tell” reminds authors that language is infinitely more vivid and poignant when it appeals to the senses. Writing that does this has an amnesic effect on readers, ensconcing them so deeply in the story that they forget they’re reading a story at all. Perhaps the most apt tool to cast this spell on readers is figurative language, which employs various devices that imply meaning rather than plainly stating it. Here are five figurative devices that will breathe new life into your writing by compelling the reader to look beyond the obvious.

The Double Epithet

An epithet is an adjective or phrase that expresses attributes of a person or thing, such as “Alexander the Great.” Considered a device of poetic diction, epithets abound in famous poetry, especially Homer’s. For example, he coined phrases like “the rosy-fingered dawn” and “the wine-dark sea.” Epithets have even more figurative force in pairs, known as double epithets. Shakespeare was especially fond of this tool, penning classics like “mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms,” “beslubbering swag-bellied ratsbane,” and “roguish tickle-brained fustilarian.”

Anaphora

Used as both a rhetorical and poetic device, anaphora refers to parallelism created by successive lines or phrases beginning with the same words. Poetically, the recurring sounds produce a driving rhythm that can intensify the language’s emotionality. Rhetorically, anaphora lends emphasis to concepts. Anaphora appears frequently in the work of Charles Dickens (e.g., “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”) and also figures prominently in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (King repeats the phrase “I have a dream” eight times in the closing paragraphs of the address).

Alliteration

This literary device repeats consonant sounds in a sentence or verse, typically, but not always, at the beginning of a word. Alliteration can give writing character and add an element of whimsy. Strategically, alliterative devices draw the reader’s attention to a particular passage, set a mood and rhythm, and can suggest certain connotations. For instance, a recurring “S” sound connotes a serpent-like quality, suggesting treachery and peril. Poe’s line “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” from The Raven uses alliteration, as does Beowulf‘s “Hot-hearted Beowulf was bent upon battle.”

Onomatopoeia

Appealing to the aural senses, onomatopoeia uses words imitative of sounds, such as quack, boom, whoosh, whir, hiss, crunch, crack, and swish. Paradoxically, onomatopoeia can add both frivolity and reality to writing, as it quirkily yet accurately mimics common sounds. The Alka Seltzer slogan “pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is” uses this device, as does Poe’s line from the poem The Bells “How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy air of night!”

Hyperbole

When authors intentionally overstate for effect, they employ hyperbole. These exaggerations can be ludicrous or funny and help the author make a salient point. An excerpt from Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen rel=”nofollow”” skit illustrates this device perfectly as used for comedic effect. In describing how poor he was, one of the characters says, “I had to get up in the morning at 10 o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work 29 hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing ‘Hallelujah’.”

If variety is the spice of life, figurative language is the cayenne pepper of prose, figuratively speaking. So what are your most clever or creative uses of figurative language?

How to Turn Your New Year’s Resolutions Into Habits

So you’ve decided to write more. That’s your goal, your resolution.

You’re there; the keyboard is there. Maybe in your head you’re repeating “you can do it, you can do it,” getting pumped for the outpouring of productivity, the astronomical wordcount that will no doubt ensue at any moment now.

Yep, at any second, we’re going to kick into high gear and—Hang on, let’s put on some coffee first. And while that’s warming up, we might as well start a load of laundry. Oops, we’ll get back to the keyboard in one second, and we’ll really rip into this writing thing as soon as—Actually, I just got some email, I should check this…

Getting into the discipline of writing isn’t easy. Even people who do it for a living sometimes dread it, and often procrastinate. But if writing is what calls to you, we’ve put together some thoughts on how to cement it as a new habit.

Read a lot

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others; read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

Stephen King, the author of On Writing as well as dozens of novels, urges writers to constantly have a book on hand. (He’s also far from the only wordsmith to lay into the distraction of television. The late David Foster Wallace counselled writers not to mistake watching shows for observing actual humans in the wild: “The dots are coming out of our furniture, all we’re spying on is our own furniture,” Wallace wrote.)

In the smartphone era, doing away with all manner of distraction in order to lug around a three-pound book may sound like unwieldy, curmudgeonly advice. The key here is knowing it’s easier to replace an existing habit with a new one than to erase an old habit altogether.

For instance, you might wonder when you’re supposed to have the time to read more, while also hemorrhaging precious hours over the course of each week perusing mundane social media. But if you want to take King’s advice, your phone doesn’t have to be an enemy; thanks to a variety of apps, it can be a library, both for reading and for listening to audiobooks. So rather than looking at your old classmates’ depressing vacation photos, you can open a book on your phone and begin enriching yourself as a reader.

And reading, King continues, can inform how you write, even if what you’re reading this week happens to be dreck:

I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

In other words, while you may want to write brilliantly, you’re under no obligation to choose strictly brilliant books to read.

Write a lot

If you were to take up running for the first time (as Haruki Murakami did when he first became a novelist), you probably wouldn’t expect to finish a marathon your first day, or even in your first month.

The work of writing is similar. It’s easy to forget, when you’re reading neatly assembled words on a page or a screen, that a human sat somewhere and labored to organize each thought. Writer Harlan Ellison used to remind people of this fact by demonstrating it in public; he would sit in bookstore windows and mash out page after page. “By doing it in public, I show people it’s a job,” he said, “like being a plumber or an electrician.”

Some people set out a goal of drafting their entire book in one month, but it’s a tall ask. King’s goal for himself is about two thousand words daily, including holidays; he suggests neophytes start by aiming for a thousand daily, six days a week.

Specifically, he recommends you find a room with a door on it, close that door, and stay there until you hit your goal. But in an era when people publish novels composed entirely via mobile phone and articles drafted using speech recognition while walking around New York, you’re not necessarily confined to King’s strict regimen of solitude and dad-rock. (The dude loves AC/DC.)

Indeed, no matter how you write or who you are, “writing is hard for every last one of us” as author Cheryl Strayed noted in her seminal pep talk on the subject, continuing: “Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do.

You’ve got this

If this all sounds daunting, take heart; journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has called the very task of writing “an act of physical courage.”

Much of writing can be a battle with an inner editor—a voice reading each word as you write it, declaring “no, that’s not good enough. Rework this. Strike all of that. Do it better.” Managing to shut this voice up is no small feat, but doing so is crucial, explains Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, among others.

Calling perfectionism “the voice of the oppressor,” she argues that perfect can be the enemy of the good, or perhaps the hey-at-least-it’s-finally-done first draft, continuing:

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.

Lamott also warns that while writing is essential, “publication is not all that it is cracked up to be,” suggesting it’s perhaps better to see your new writing goal as its own reward than as a career path. On this point, she is echoed by King:

If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best—always, always, always—when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer.

As you cement your writing goals into habits, don’t forget to have fun. We believe in your victory.

How to Adapt Your CV for an American Company

Many people dream of living and working in the USA, but no one would claim it’s easy. To secure a work visa, you’ll need a job offer before you leave – which means perfecting your CV is more important than ever. Don’t simply roll out the CV you’ve been using at home; there are a few key differences you’ll need to know first. Before you hit send, check through this list of tips to make sure American employers can easily see what a great candidate you are.

1 Your CV is no longer a CV!

While languages as diverse as Arabic, Spanish and British English use the term (short for the Latin curriculum vitae) American English prefers the term résumé. It’s important not to neglect this detail as the term CV is used in America, but only in academia.

2 Lose the photo

In many countries it’s normal to include a photo of yourself, and it’s tempting to try to get the employer to picture you in the office, looking dynamic and ready to work. But the USA has strict laws concerning discrimination, so employers can’t be seen to be making decisions based on any aspect of your appearance. You should also remove any details about your marital status, ethnicity, date or place of birth, parents’ names or religion. All you need in terms of personal information is your name, contact details and where to find you on LinkedIn.

3 Keep it short

The name change signals a change of attitude. This is a summary of your skills and achievements, rather than a detailed account of your working life. On average, employers spend only six seconds looking at your résumé! Aim for a single page, or two at the very most. Cut out irrelevant hobbies or unrelated positions you held years ago. After your contact details, recruiters will be looking for:

• Summary statement – a few short, strong statements that sum up why you’re the perfect candidate for this job
• Professional experience – start with the most recent position and work backwards
• Skills – this could include relevant computer programs you can use or languages you speak
• Education – unless you are a very recent or current student, keep this down to a line or two and put it toward the end of the résumé, not at the beginning

If English is your second language, you may be tempted to prove your proficiency by including your TOEFL score. Don’t! Your fluency should speak for itself. But the fact that you are bilingual is a big bonus – list it under skills.

4 Third or first person?

Should you write “Maria has exceptional organizational skills,” or “I have exceptional organizational skills?” This question raises some surprisingly strong feelings. Not so long ago, the advice was to use the third person, and some employers still feel this avoids the impression that you’re just stating your own opinion of yourself. On the other hand, you are stating your opinion of yourself, and as a result many employers hate third person résumés, finding them weird and artificial. Our advice: where a pronoun is unavoidable, use “I,” but in so-called “résumese,” it’s acceptable to avoid pronouns altogether and even to drop the occasional verb. For example: “A manager with exceptional organizational skills. Successfully increased staff retention by 50%.”

Whatever you do, don’t mix “I” with “he/she”!

5 Use action verbs

American culture isn’t big on modesty. Where some cultures would see boastfulness, Americans see confidence and straightforwardness. This doesn’t mean you should make grandiose claims of personal perfection, but it does mean that when explaining your employment history, you should focus on the successes you achieved, not just your duties and responsibilities. You can approach this by avoiding the passive voice and by replacing verbs like “worked on,” “handled” and “was responsible for” with bolder alternatives like “accomplished,” “created,” “increased,” “transformed” or “led,” as well as by giving specific examples of your results.

For example, “handled fundraising” could become “raised $105,000 in new donations in 2017.” Don’t worry about showing off – if you think back, you’ll probably find more relevant achievements than you expect!

7 Avoid clichés

Don’t claim to be “passionate” about your field – is anyone really passionate about, say, data management? And even if your work truly is your passion, the word is so overused that it no longer communicates anything. Instead, tell a story that demonstrates your depth of commitment in your cover letter, or include a bullet point that showcases the results your enthusiasm has helped you achieve. Don’t claim to be a “good team player” or “hard worker” and don’t boast of your “communication skills.” These are vague virtues that employers will tend to assume everyone should have! Give examples of times you’ve taken on extra responsibility, or times you’ve collaborated with others to accomplish something tangible.

8 Don’t forget American vocabulary!

Make sure to use American terms throughout. Even if it feels strange to change your job titles, use “attorney” instead of “solicitor,” “realtor” rather than “estate agent.” Write all dates in the American format: month/day/year. Finally, switch your spell-check to “US English” and do a last sweep to be sure you’re describing your skills as “analyzing” data, not “analysing” it and writing “programs” not “programmes.” And of course, you’ll want to proofread multiple times to be sure that your spelling and grammar is perfect.

9 Nail the cover letter

In some countries a cover letter (or these days, a covering email) is optional, but an American employer won’t even consider an application without a letter – which needs to be individually tailored to every job you apply for. If at all possible, find out the name of the person who will be receiving the letter and address it to them, “Dear Mr./Ms./Mrs. [xxx].” Even if you really can’t find a specific name, don’t lead with “Dear Sir” – female recruiters will not appreciate it. “Dear Hiring Manager” is an acceptable alternative. Like your résumé, your cover letter should be short – no more than one page. It’s the first thing that employers read, which means it’s your best chance to grab the recruiter’s attention: make it clear why you are interested in this particular company, and why they should be interested in you.

Once again, don’t be shy – Americans appreciate self-confidence and will expect you to be proud of your achievements.

Kaplan International English is part of Kaplan Inc., a global education and career services company. With 40 language schools across 6 English-speaking countries, Kaplan helps 50,000 students from 150 countries each year go further with English. Our courses include Business English and preparation for exams such as TOEFL® and GMAT®.

This Is Why You Should Check Your Email in the Morning

Do not check your email! Plenty of people with fancy credentials will tell you to avoid your email at all costs in the morning. Time management consultant Julie Morgenstern wrote a whole book about it. She told The Huffington Post that if you give in to the temptation, “you will never recover.” Personal development writer Sid Savara gives seven reasons not to check it. For starters, the requests in your email aren’t on your agenda of “things to do” yet. If you add them to your plate, you will be distracted from the important things already on your to-do list. Do you want to lose the bliss that accompanies ignorance? On the other hand, just as many experts will tell you to check your email at the beginning of the day. Here’s what they have to say.

Why you should check email

Get it out of the way

The biggest reason to check your email in the morning is simply to get it out of the way. Lifehacker reports the personal experience of Harvard Business Review contributor Dorie Clark: “Pushing email correspondence to the end of the day, I found that I consistently avoided answering certain messages because they required hard choices that my brain found taxing. I realized that if I finally wanted to vanquish those messages straggling at the bottom of my inbox, what I needed most wasn’t simply time to respond; it was the willpower and discernment to make good judgments and respond accordingly.” She recommends setting aside twenty-minute periods throughout the day to handle email correspondence.

Train others to respect your time

Has anyone ever called you or sent you a message asking if you got their email that they sent five minutes ago? In today’s world of technology, people want things fast. But isn’t patience a virtue? When you don’t reply instantly, you might irritate others at first. However, when they receive a thoughtful reply, they might learn to appreciate your diligence. If your custom is to reply to emails in the morning, you can respond within twenty-four hours. That’s a reasonable time frame that gives you time to answer properly. Eventually, your frequent contacts will become familiar with your routine. They will see that you are too busy to be at their beck and call, but you will get back to them in due time. For real emergencies, they can call you on the telephone.

Give yourself time to cope

If you read your emails early, you have time to react. If you wait too late for an urgent email, you might miss an opportunity or not have enough time to meet a deadline. A morning review of emails prevents you from holding up others. If someone needs your reply to progress, you can help out your team productivity by doing your part as soon as possible.

You can avoid “email pressure”

According to an article in The Guardian, London researchers from Future Work Centre reported that workers feel pressured from constant streams of demanding emails. Employees who receive emails on their mobile devices via apps are even more stressed. In Germany, the problem became so concerning that the minister of employment began entertaining “anti-stress” legislation to prohibit companies from contacting employees outside of business hours in non-emergency situations. Though checking email at the beginning and end of the day had the strongest correlation with email stress, the report suggested turning off automatic notifications of new messages. If you check your account in the morning, handle the most important messages right away, and then close the app, you might find that you stay on top of your emails without feeling overwhelmed. Interestingly, personality also influenced how pressured people felt. What a psychologist and a science writer found out about the effects of willpower may surprise you.

Willpower is finite

In the book Willpower, Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney uphold willpower as one of the greatest human feats. According to Tierney, “You only have a finite amount [of willpower] as you go through the day, so you should be careful to conserve it and try to save it for the emergencies.” How does this apply to emails? It’s easy to put off answering them if the responses require research or a long reply. Delay too long, and you seem rude. Answering the tricky ones requires willpower and you have the most of it in the morning, before you have depleted it dealing with other challenges. Perhaps you won’t have weighty replies to write every day, but when you do, the morning is a great time to address them. Tierney also says that willpower is comparable to resistance training. The more you exercise willpower, the stronger your self-control will become. Once you train yourself to handle key communications first thing in the morning, you will have the discipline to avoid spending mental energy on the time-wasters.

How to do it right

Writer Laura Chin tells us how to check emails without zapping our mental energy. The process starts before you even power up your laptop. She quotes NeuroLeadership Institute director David Rock: “If you can’t recall what your goals are, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to scan the environment for things relevant to your goals.” First, define your objectives. When you scan your email later, you will be able to zero in on important messages and make a decision how to handle each one.

Next, open your inbox. Remember these two words—discernment and willpower. Channel your top priorities as you scroll through your new emails. Use your judgment to decide which messages are most important. Open them and respond immediately or flag them as high priority. Next, use your willpower to close your browser. Anything less than critical can wait until later in the day.

Do you feel that sorting critical from unimportant drains too much of your time? Try an email organization service, such as Unroll.me, which groups low priority messages together so that you can concentrate on the important stuff. Outlook has recently implemented a similar service. It’s called focused inbox. The system responds and adapts as it observes which contacts you interact with the most. It also filters forwards, newsletters, and bulk emails into a separate tab that you can read in your leisure time. Besides automatically deleting spam, you can set “rules” to keep only the latest copy of overly frequent newsletters.

You will stress yourself out. You will get distracted from your daily objectives. You will waste too much valuable time. These are some reasons people may tell you that you should never check your email before lunchtime. However, many experts have found that clearing away important emails in the first part of the day will free up your brain for other matters. People will learn that you are busy, but you will answer within a reasonable amount of time. And you will build up your willpower as you answer only the key messages. What’s the bottom line? No one can tell you which philosophy is best because you must take into account your personality and circumstances. What time works best for your job? What method makes you feel the least stress? When do you work most productively? No one will knock your choice if you are capable and competent in your job.

Why Is the Oxford Comma a Heated Debate in 2017?

If you stare awhile at the string of characters that a sentence comprises, the squiggles lose all meaning. That humans somehow manage to agree on the use of these symbols well enough to communicate at all can seem miraculous.

But what about when we don’t quite agree—when it seems a writer has added a superfluous, bafflingly out-of-place comma, perhaps, or inexplicably used the wrong pronoun? Maybe they’re simply mistaken. Or maybe they’re in the vanguard of a futuristic linguistic trend that, decades or centuries hence, will be widely embraced and regarded as correct.

Our language is forever evolving, and 2017 was no exception. Two key authorities on proper usage—the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style—both made modernizing tweaks in their latest updates.

Examined closely, these offer glimpses into the past and future: “Often people think of language shifting over centuries,” says Grammarly copy editor Brittney Ross, “but some of these happened pretty quickly.”

We’ll give a rundown of a few of the recent changes that felt consequential, and then delve into one particularly contentious stylistic faultline we’re still watching—the Oxford comma.

Both style guides are through with capitalizing “internet” and “web.”

Associated Press editors made this move last year, and the Chicago Manual has now followed suit. Not to make anyone feel old, but if you remember the sound of a dial-up modem, you’ve witnessed the arc of these terms trending from exotic to mundane. Same goes for this one:

It’s now email, not e-mail.

Chicago Style lagged a few years after the AP made this shift, but it’s now unanimous—no hyphen required. Similarly:

AP Style now has an entry for esports.

The e is not a typo; we’re talking about competitive multiplayer video games. One could argue that 2017, the year of Starcraft: Remastered, approximates a 20-year anniversary for esports, which have now become commonplace—and so lucrative that popular streamers on Twitch have their own agents.

AP editors also added an entry for autonomous vehicles.

It will likely be years before you get a chance to ride in a self-driving car, but in the meantime, journalists can’t stop thinking about them. (Guilty.) Just don’t call them driverless unless there truly isn’t a human onboard who can take the wheel.

They can now be singular—sometimes.

AP and Chicago Style editors both cracked this door open in 2017, but neither yet seems ready to charge fully through it, prompting the Columbia Journalism Review to declare “it’s the middle of the end for the insistence that ‘they’ can be only a plural pronoun.”

The style guides allow for a singular they when referring to someone who doesn’t identify as he or she, but they also note you can often just write your way around this by reworking the sentence. Here are highlights from the new AP entry:

They, them, their — In most cases, a plural pronoun should agree in number with the antecedent: The children love the books their uncle gave them. They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy. However, rewording usually is possible and always is preferable…

In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun.

Whether this shift heralds the widespread adoption of what’s known as the “epicene they,” we’ll have to wait a few more editions and see.

Whither the Oxford comma?

No discussion of warring (okay, not really) stylebooks would be complete without considering the Oxford (or serial) comma. For the uninitiated, that’s the last comma in a list of three or more things, as in this example:

“My goals for 2018 are to learn how to use commas like a champion, to run a half-marathon, and to get good at poaching eggs.”

Whether that last comma is necessary is hotly debated. It featured in a 2008 lyric by the band Vampire Weekend that might be politely paraphrased as “Who gives a hoot about the Oxford comma?” And this year a single Oxford comma was even the subject of a court fight with millions of dollars at stake.

Chicago style recommends its use in almost all instances, while AP style leans somewhat against it. The AP’s position is squishy, though, as it recently noted in a series of tweets that began “We don’t ban Oxford commas!” Rather, they say you should use it when it adds clarity and ditch it when it’s nonessential.

As AP Stylebook lead editor Paula Froke told a roomful of colleagues this spring, “The stylebook doesn’t ban the use of a serial comma. Whether you put it in at all times is a different debate.” That’s hardly a hard-and-fast declaration, but the Oxford comma is divisive, as anyone who’s served as a copy editor at a student newspaper can attest. Brittney, Grammarly’s resident style maven, puts it this way:

“Oxford commas are like the Ugg boots of the punctuation world. People either love them or hate them or don’t know what they are.”

Brittney notes that Grammarly is pro-Oxford comma, in part because many long-timers (“the OG Grammarly users”) have voiced fondness for it. “It’s really carried over into our blog, social media, emails,” even in settings where AP style might be more typical: “We’ve kept the Oxford comma just to keep things consistent.”

And consistency, alongside clarity, she says, should be more important than pitting one stylistic tribe’s abstract symbols against another.

“When it comes to AP vs. Chicago style, I think a lot of people forget the importance of the word style. The important thing to remember is when the style isn’t working for you, you should do what works.”