Speaker | Author | Communication Professor
The Protestant Reformer John Calvin used the term “mutual communication” to refer to mutual service rather than selfish careerism. “It is not enough when a man can say, ‘Oh, I labor, I have my craft,’ or ‘I have such a trade.’ That is not enough. But we must see whether it is good and profitable for the common good, and whether his neighbors may fare the better of it.”
Another way to put it is that we are called to use the gift of communication to serve one another.
I have written a book primarily for recent college graduates on how to write great résumés and cover letters: How to Write Powerful College Student Résumés and Cover Letters: Secrets That Get Job Interviews Like Magic. Read reviews at Amazon.
I have long worked closely with college students and graduates. I know how concerned they are about “looking good” on their résumés. I’ve witnessed first hand the difficulty of getting interviews let alone meaningful full-time employment. I yearn for them to find satisfying work.
Beyond the poor job market, there is another, often-overlooked reason why college students and graduates are so anxious when it comes to writing résumés. They are inheriting a cultural climate that emphasizes image-making over substance. Why else would a student add something to a résumé primarily because it will “look good”—even if the entry doesn’t reflect any significant work or life experience on the part of the writer? Students today feel the burden of having to prove their value to a potential employer. They understandably try to project a positive image of themselves.
This is not all bad. Résumés should be an opportunity for the writer to persuade by emphasizing personal strengths. I would even hope that college students learn to communicate effectively as part of their formal education. Sure, students should be truthful in what they say in résumés, cover letters, and interviews. But truth can be expressed more or less persuasively. When it comes to résumés, truth is necessary but insufficient. Persuasively expressed truth is essential.
The problem today is that students are not as fully truthful as they could be for their own benefit in the marketplace. The “truth” is that current and former college students are experienced persons. Yes, their experience is primarily life experience, not academic or work experience. But a student is a person, and a person is more than a bundle of job-specific skills and academic accomplishments. Students are human beings who have learned primarily by experience, and hopefully by reflection on such life experience. Such learning can and should enhance the persuasiveness of a résumé.
As I point out in the book, employers, too, are looking at the whole person, not just at an applicant’s job-specific skills. For instance, they know that the traits of the people we work with are just as important as the immediate professional skills that our colleagues possess. We appreciate colleagues who bring life-acquired, positive virtues to their work—virtues like patience, gratitude, and kindness. We dislike laboring with manipulators and deceivers who care more about themselves and their own careers than anything or anyone else.
The best résumé writers—the truly effective résumés writers—address what I call the “Big Three”: skills, knowledge, and traits. And they do so not by worrying excessively about “what looks good” on a résumé but by aiming to represent their whole selves in all three categories. The result is a résumé that is a picture of the personal potential of a possible employee as a human being. This is why even activities such as travel, non-academic cross-cultural experience, hobbies, and volunteering can be so important to include on résumés and cover letters. Such entries round out the skills, knowledge, and traits of the writer.
I jumped into the already-loaded résumé-book market because none of the other books take this kind of holistic perspective. There are some fine résumé-writing books for a general audience of experienced workers, but not specifically for college students and recent graduates who lack much paid professional experience. Yet most people do have impressive life experience that reflects the kinds of skills, knowledge, and traits that can transferred to all kinds of careers.
To be true to ourselves and others we all need to consider what we’ve learned from life, not just what we’ve learned on the job. In the end, such self-reflection can lead us toward the sort of examined life the ancient Greeks considered essential. Writing a résumé or a cover letter is an opportunity for getting to know ourselves better, and representing ourselves to others more fully. It’s also a recipe for success that is deeper than image.
Best wishes on your life journey.
— Dr. Q
Michael Lotti interviewed me for this fine article about the need to apply age-old ethics to the new social contexts created by digital communications technologies. You can find out more online about Mr. Lotti at the publisher’s (Effect Magazine, LarsonAllen) website. Kudos to LarsonAllen for addressing ethics on behalf of society.
by Michael Lotti
The information age has given us more than cell phones and emails. It has also dumped a bunch of new ethical dilemmas on us. A few thinkers eagerly look into an ever-more-electronic future as they ponder the rapid development of information technology. For them, the question is not about the right or wrong use of the Internet or a Facebook account, but how these things are paving the way for the next evolutionary step of the human species.
Luciano Floridi, a philosopher at the University of Hertfordshire in England who specializes in information theory, thinks that developments in information technology are ushering in an age where humans will develop “a new ecological approach to the whole of reality,” which will include the recognition that information systems have rights.
Arthur Saniotis, an anthropologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, looks forward to the day when there will be information technologies that “optimize human biology” and deliver “friendships with imaginative entities,” along with the ability to download a brain onto a hard drive.
If there’s an ethical imperative for such thinkers, it seems to be this: keep developing the technology so that the human species can continue to improve.
Besides being wildly speculative, such views make it seem as if the everyday ethical dilemmas of the information age are merely annoying speed bumps on the evolutionary highway.
For many, running into new ethical problems may be as common as answering their email messages. However, while the ethical dilemmas of the information age are very real, they pose no substantially new challenges for the people who face them.
Information technology has changed just about everything in our lives—the way we shop, educate, follow politics, and even carry on romances. We face a whole new landscape that has been radically altered by cell phones, satellites, and the Internet. But while we have new ethical problems, we don’t have new ethics. The categories we use to identify, evaluate, and solve moral dilemmas haven’t changed.
Why shouldn’t you take a call on your cell phone in the middle of an important business meeting? Because that would be unfairly taking away valuable time from your employer and co-workers. Why should businesses take significant measures to protect the electronically stored information of their customers? Because it would be a violation of trust not to do so. Why shouldn’t you text people in the middle of a family dinner or business lunch? Because that’s impolite. What’s troubling about pretending to be someone else in an online chatroom? That’s a form of lying.
Lying, impoliteness, trust, and fairness, along with concepts such as justice, self control, respect, generosity, loyalty, and many others, are part of the human fabric. Even for Plato and Aristotle and other long-dead thinkers, these terms had no discernible origin.
So when we need to answer a new ethical question, we don’t really need to invent new categories, because the familiar terms apply.
Big changes—especially big technological changes—usually outpace ethical reflection, but basic ethical sensibilities gradually catch up. The information revolution is not a revolution (or evolution) in creativity or consciousness or awareness, even if it has changed our lives an awful lot. It’s a bunch of new tools that, like the factories, telegraphs, and steam engines of the industrial revolution, can be used justly or unjustly, to spread truth or lies, or to find much-needed information or gratify the worst appetites.
But even if Saniotis’s scenarios of “optimized human biology” are farfetched, can’t information technology actually change a person’s mind or “consciousness” for the worse? And can you tackle such a problem with familiar ethical terminology?
Quentin J. Schultze, the author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart (Eerdmans, 2002), is not against the innovations of the information age, but thinks we “should be just as concerned about the kinds of persons we are becoming as we are with being able to send messages quickly. In fact, our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.”
Consider the following experience a friend shared with me. He noticed that his 15-year-old daughter’s social habits changed significantly about six months after she got a cell phone and a Facebook account. She didn’t gossip, lie, cheat, or do anything that would be called unethical with her new tools. She texted people constantly and had lots of less-than-a-minute conversations on her phone, but complained about not having any close friends. As my friend put it, “She was alone in a crowded room.” Schultze would say, information technology, despite giving her dozens of new ways to communicate, actually served to amplify her normal sense of teen isolation. It hadn’t done anything to bridge the gap between communicating and connecting.
“… our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.” —Quentin J. Schultze
Marshall McLuhan, a professor from the University of Toronto who pioneered the field of communication studies in the 1960s and ’70s, articulated the problem this way: a medium of communication does not just deliver a message, it is the message. It shapes the person who uses it, and not always for the better. Television news is the classic example. On the surface, it communicates information about events, politics, weather, and sports. At a deeper level, it communicates a way of looking at the world—namely, that it is a bunch of unconnected events, political sound bites, weather radar, and sports scores that can be easily digested in 22 minutes, with 8 minutes of commercials designed to mold a consumer’s mind and motivate a customer. At first glance, it’s hard to say that tweets, text messages, and emails, along with the ever-present advertising on the Web, won’t alter mental habits in a similar way.
Schultze, for example, says that increased social isolation and attention disorders are predictable byproducts of the use of modern information technologies. Ron Greene, an associate professor of communications at the University of Minnesota, adds another worry: “Modern information technology intensifies fragmentation of community,” he says. “It produces an echo chamber effect as folks increasingly only communicate with those with like-minded prejudices.” Greene also thinks the easy access to information is leading students to think they are educated simply because they have accumulated a lot of data.
So can the old ethical tools possibly address these new problems? Or are these new problems at all?
For the past six decades, parents have limited their children’s time in front of the television. Why? Because they instinctively knew that kids who watch a lot of television don’t easily develop long-term concentration skills, and they, being responsible parents, wanted to do what was best for their children. And before the age of television, parents restricted time in front of the radio. And before the age of radio, books and movies were screened. Even Plato, way back in 380 BC, was critical of the stories, music, and plays that entranced so many in his day. In other words, people of every age—especially parents—have felt an ethical obligation to protect and guide children, and that meant managing the media of the day.
Information technology can disrupt or damage things that we value, like academic integrity and a workplace without unnecessary distractions, so we try to figure out how to productively combine it with those things instead of abandoning it. In other words, we’re taking a very old ethical concern—and applying it to a new situation.
And for what it’s worth, people are gradually figuring it all out. For every person checking into an Internet addiction center, there are millions who use the Web to find valuable information, send pictures to grandparents, manage finances, and connect with business contacts. Max More, an internationally acclaimed futurist who has written extensively about ethics in the information age, likens our time to Europe in the decade after the invention of the printing press. “I’m sure there were people worrying that with books so easily available, everyone would stop having conversations,” says More. “But people obviously adjusted.”
Maybe it’s too simple to say that people are asking the questions that they have always asked as they navigate the ethical waters of the information age. Maybe it’s too easy to say that many things have changed—the boundaries between work and home life, the ways our private information can be misused, the sense of always needing to be plugged in. But the distinction between right and wrong has not changed.
If it’s not terribly complicated, why is there so much obvious misuse of information technology? How are we to make sense of humans, with their innate ethical sense and their notably unethical behavior? Plato writes that ethical concern about anything is rooted in two basic assumptions, so basic they can be hard to notice. The first is the conviction that, even if we don’t know all the details, there is a better and a worse way to live, a right and a wrong, actions that are good and actions that are evil. The second is the conviction that our lives ought to be shaped by what we find to be good, right, and beneficial to ourselves and our community.
Aristotle points out that these basic convictions are not automatically or continually held by people. He doubted they could arise in people who had been poorly raised and asserted that young people are too driven by passions to benefit from discussions about ethics. Likewise, Plato puts foes in his essays who shrug off ethical concepts like “justice” and “honesty” as inapplicable or even meaningless in the “real world.” Plato and Aristotle say, in other words, that people must choose to be ethical amidst the ease of being unreflective. They have to care about being good to even recognize an ethical dilemma, and lots of people don’t care (or only care in fits and spurts). So we have—as Plato and Aristotle had—a society with lots of good, bad, and thoughtless behavior thrown together.
If you do care about being good, though, the news from Plato and Aristotle is positive. Your concern for ethical behavior will certainly make you more prone to act well, and by acting well, you will, according to Aristotle in particular, “lead the life that is by nature pleasant.” You may not have all the answers to the ethical dilemmas of the information age, but you do have all the tools you need to figure them out.
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By Quentin J. Schultze
I have written over a dozen nonfiction books and am working on a few more. I also lead workshops on writing nonfiction books for publication. Here are a few of the tips that I cover in workshops.
#1 Engage Your Readers as Listeners
Read your writing out loud to “readers.” See how they respond. Good nonfiction engages readers as listeners. Moreover, it’s easier to tell if people are engaged with your prose by looking at and listening to their reactions to an oral reading than it is trying to gauge their immediate responses to silent reading. Friends almost always will tell you that your writing is great, but how do they really feel about it? When you read out loud, avoid sounding preachy or academic. Don’t try to impress listeners. Just read in your natural but lively voice. Soon you’ll discover what actually engages readers and what doesn’t. You’ll become a better writer as well as a more adept oral interpreter of your own work. After all, most nonfiction book readers “hear” the writer when they read silently—just as they hear fictional characters’ dialogue. I learned the importance of engaging readers as listeners by reading short sections of my work to my college students. Their faces never lie.
#2 Title Your Chapter Drafts in Parallel Form
Perhaps each of your chapter titles should begin with a verb or a noun. Maybe each chapter title should be one word or a short phrase. In any case, be consistent in order to maintain the same voice and perspective across all chapters. For instance, two of the chapter titles in my public speaking book are “Addressing Challenges” and “Crafting Artfully.” I wanted to encourage the reader to imagine herself or himself “doing” the subject of each chapter. A chapter titled “Challenges” or “Art” would not fit that cross-chapter purpose. Parallel titles will keep you focused and organized. Without them you’re more likely to confuse yourself and your readers. Note how I titled each of the tips on this page.
#3 Discuss Your Writing with Writers (and Authors)
Authors need one another. Writing is personal, but learning about writing is communal. Every author depends on the work of earlier writers. This is true for style and content. We all need feedback from other writers as well as from readers. Discussing our ideas and manuscripts with other writers helps us to discover what works and what doesn’t—and why. Join a local writers group (e.g., through a bookstore), read one another’s drafts, and offer kind but honest feedback. If possible, invite some published (but humble) authors into the group. Eventually, sitting at your keyboard or staring at a notebook will not seem so lonely, intimidating, and baffling.
#4 Address a Proven Topic in a Fresh Way
Publishers lose money on most books. They know that very few books become bestsellers. But even if publishers can’t predict big winners they can try to avoid big losers. How? By reducing their risk, especially by rejecting both overly innovative manuscripts and manuscripts that address unproven topics. Publishers prefer a modestly unique approach to a market-proven topic. The one major exception is extremely timely topics.
#5 Thematize Your Work
What’s your book’s theme? State it in one complete sentence to keep yourself on track. Do this for memoir, too. Unless you’re a well-known author, your memoir is not likely to be published. Why should readers care about your life? To get published, you need more than your personal story. You need thematic significance. Again, your best chance of getting published is by developing a novel approach to a a timeless topic such as parenting, love, health, faith, work, success, failure, and friendship. The modestly unique theme of my public speaking book is that the purpose of all good speaking is serving the audience—not serving the speaker.
Thanks for reading. I hope these suggestions serve you well.
Read tips 6-10.
By Quentin J. Schultze
I have written over a dozen nonfiction books and am working on a few more. I also lead workshops on writing nonfiction books for publication. Earlier I posted tips 1-5. Here are five more. I hope you find them helpful.
#6 Serve a Particular Audience
Who is your reader? Imagine your audience even before you write the first chapter. Picture readers in your mind as you write. Consider what they are thinking as you write specifically for them. The best prose is written by someone in particular for others in particular. (Contrast that with the uninteresting prose in most academic textbooks, which are written by no one in particular for everyone in general; textbooks are increasingly the product of marketers, not writers.) After all, you’re not writing just for yourself. If you are, why write a book? Just keep a journal. You’ll be much happier, without the stress of trying to get your manuscript published. Most of my writing is essentially journal material that will never be published. I write in order to clarify and express my own thoughts to myself and to serve my audiences at public-speaking events. When I write for publication, however, I imagine the readers. You can journal to express yourself. Write books in order to serve a particular audience.
#7 Use Humor Carefully
“You had to be there.” That’s our excuse when our half-baked attempts at humor fall flat. Humor is one of the most difficult things to write well. Satire is probably the most difficult of all. It’s easy to arrogantly offend rather than winsomely illuminate. Never assume that what’s funny to you will be comical to others. Always try out your stories to see if others truly find them humorous.
#8 Read Proven Writers
We tend to read what we enjoy and to write like the authors that we read. Make sure you’re reading the kind of quality prose that you would like to write. I devour many contemporary books, but I savor classical nonfiction books that have stood the test of time; I read and re-read them. The latter help me to think and imagine like a proven writer; they flex my literary muscles. They feed by literary spirit. They inspire me to write wisely and well. I also need to make sure that I’m reading “up” so I don’t write “down” to readers. It’s so much easier to tickle readers’ ears than to touch their hearts and open their minds.
#9 Clarify Your Real Purpose
Why are you writing? There are many fine reasons—including to inform, persuade, and delight readers. Perhaps the many worthwhile purposes actually boil down to one: to serve others. That’s why I get a bit concerned when a writer makes statements like these: “I just want to express my opinion.” “I’ve got to tell my story.” Writing is a type of service that requires a lot of effort to do well. Many people feel called to write a book for publication. But who’s the caller? What’s the caller’s message? We don’t always hear well. We fool ourselves. So listen again. Question whether or not you are merely pleasing yourself or you are really serving others.
#10 Write with the End in Mind
One of the biggest problems especially for new writers is that they don’t know what they’re writing until after they’ve written it—and even then they’re often not so sure. They write in order to determine what to say. That’s not all bad. The process of writing always requires research and exploration, retrospection and introspection. But you need to know in advance of drafting the actual manuscript what it is that you are aiming to say. Otherwise you’ll write in circles, revising to the point of exhaustion, like a cat maniacally chasing its tail until it eventually has to give up (and then the cat pretends like nothing happened). I made this mistake once and ended up dumping my entire book manuscript in the trash and starting over from scratch. As you conduct your research, make notes, and create possible manuscript outlines, be sure to discern your conclusion. Then begin writing the manuscript. Next, revise your manuscript to make sure that you’ve said what you set out to say. Finally, revise the manuscript again, especially for style, so you say it well. Then every draft will become a less-frustrating opportunity to clarify what you have already said but could have said more lucidly, convincingly, or artfully.
Thanks for reading. I hope these suggestions serve you well. You might want to read tips 1-5 if you found these helpful.
We can communicate more easily with speech than writing. Our in-person speech carries all kinds of special signals. The tone of our voice alone is powerful.
But writing requires a lot of care to communicate well. The reader has little to go other than the silent words. This is why email is so problematic.
When I write book chapters I ask dozens of people to read them and give me candid feedback. The responses are sobering.