We’re sharing from this article verbatim. It is concise, actionable and central to our personal lives. Erica Dhawan says reading carefully is the new listening and writing clearly is the new empathy.
So many of our exchanges today happen in written (or typed) form such as email, text and IM. This means that listening in its traditional sense has been replaced by reading text on a screen. Lacking cues like eye contact, tone of voice, or body language to clarify what another person means makes digital communication challenging.
In lieu of traditional body language, having the skills to read and write carefully is essential to organizations who want to make sure their teams are on the same page and excel in our virtual world.
Source: Harvard Business Review, February 19, 2021. Link.
Proofreading is both a habit and a skill: making it a point of pride to send clean, unambiguous copy will help people take what you write more seriously.