Casey Mank and Jason Mudd discuss best practices for internal communications.

Guest:

Our episode guest is Casey Mank, co-founder of Bold Type, a woman-owned communications skills training firm that focuses on workplace writing skills. She's led writing workshops for organizations including Kellogg’s, Sephora, and Mastercard.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. Why you are not a great writer yet
2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) & what it means
3. The importance of keeping everything you do forward-friendly
4. Why you should answer emails in a timely manner
5. How to decide what emails should be conversations 

Quotables

• “I'm always emphasizing that they need to understand at least the difference between a goal and an objective, and a strategy and a tactic.” — @JasonMudd9
• “Writing is really social and you need other people to look at your work, and you need feedback from real humans, not just you going over your draft alone again and again. So yeah, you're not a great writer alone. You need other people to react to your draft with you and give you that perspective.” — @bold_type
• “I would love it if teams within organizations would actually just take a few minutes to sit down and set out what their own best practices are around emails for emailing each other and their clients.” — @bold_type
• “So (BLUF) bottom line up front, it just means you come in and you immediately say what is the main high-level takeaway from this communication? And then you can go back and say, and here's the background and here's the details, and here's how we got here.” — @bold_type
• “Especially when I see somebody sending an email that's just all over the place, I'm like, tell me what you're gonna tell me. Tell me, and then tell me what you told me again.” — @JasonMudd99
• “Any email you send, there's a very permanent electronic record of it. And I want you to imagine that it can be on the front page of the New York Times.” — @bold_type

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About Casey Mank

Our episode guest is Casey Mank, co-founder of Bold Type, a woman-owned communications skills training firm that focuses on workplace writing skills. She's led writing workshops for organizations including Kellogg's, Sephora, and Mastercard. Mank has a background as an English teacher, teaching in different programs and schools around Georgetown University. She’s previously been at the business school and currently teaches in the school of nursing at Georgetown’s medical campus. Mank got into teaching professional teams how to do their workplace writing tasks and likes to stay on the line between academia and workplace writing.

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