Welcome Visitors from the Say What You Mean Convention

Please feel free to browse the CJ Press catalog. Our current featured eBook is See, I Told Me So!: Homeschool Veterans Declare You Can Stop Worrying and our featured eWorkshop is Cherry Pie: Recipe for a Successful Christian Homeschool.

CJ Press specializes in books on homeschooling and Christian living. We also offer  reprints of antique and vintage books, lovingly reproduced from the originals.

It’s About Communication

By Tammy Marshall Cardwell

What do writing, publishing, blogging, magazine editing, presenting workshops, church ministry, and retail sales all have in common? Well, aside from the fact that I’m involved in all of them, communication.

I refer to myself as “She of the Many Hats” because I’ve seldom been able to limit myself to doing only one thing. I’ve been involved in retail sales, off and on, since I was eleven or twelve when my parents opened a business. I started writing for magazines in 1995, accepted a position as one of the editors of the Eclectic Homeschool Online a few years later, saw my first book published in 1999, began working one day a week as our church music ministry’s secretary a few years after that... I also have my own website and blog as well as a publishing company that prints ebooks and audio workshops on homeschooling and Christian living. I stay busy and like to think that I usually serve successfully in all areas; I certainly try.

I know that my most recent foray back into retail sales has made my employers happy; I’ve been rewarded nicely as a result. One key to my success is that I understand the importance of the relationship between sales associate and prospective customer. My job is to be that person’s friend for just a few minutes, to help them determine what they need and show them how to get it. This requires communication: truly listening to the customer, letting them know that you appreciate them and genuinely want to assist them, ensuring that you really do understand what they want, and then helping them get it. The customer sees you as a good sales associate if you do all of this without being obnoxious. The store owner sees you as a good sales associate if your customer leaves happy, preferably after buying something. You fail if you can’t communicate properly with your customer.

My other regular job is as our church’s music ministry secretary. This involves all of the tasks you would usually expect where a secretarial position is concerned, but it is also very much about maintaining relationships within the ministry, and relationship is all about communication. I learned early on that communicating properly with sixty or so other people from varying cultures and backgrounds can be exceptionally challenging. I’ve been at this several years now and in those early years there was more than one occasion on which I had to go apologize to someone I’d inadvertently offended as a result of my mouth’s inability to properly express what my heart or head was thinking. I do better now, only having to apologize on rare occasions, but it’s because I’ve actively worked at making sure that what I say and what the other person hears are the same thing.

Workshop presentation and other forms of public speaking are also all about communication; your audience will walk away completely unsatisfied if you fail to communicate your thoughts clearly and in a manner to which they can relate. In the traditional homeschool conference setting, communication involves looking out on a room full of strangers and connecting with them. It involves eye contact, body language that is in agreement with your words, and using the right voice (For instance, you should never speak in such a way that your audience thinks you’re bored or talking down to them.). When presenting a workshop, I strive to use familiar language whenever possible and am always watching to ensure that my audience comprehends what I’m trying to impart to them, aware that I may need to elaborate on certain topics. Communication grows even more complicated when giving a workshop online because you lose the chance to make eye contact with your audience. You may get immediate feedback in the form of text chat, if you’re in the type of conference room that allows it, but even so the burden of communicating your thoughts becomes more challenging because you have lost the face-to-face aspect of communication.

And then there’s my blog: From a Cluttered Desk. Around 1,000 people read my blog every week, so I know I’m doing something right. In it, I communicate my own thoughts on a variety of topics, share things I learn as I walk by the way, and keep friends abreast of what’s going on in my life. Success in this type of communication requires solid writing skills, of course. And this brings me to my greatest passion where communication is concerned – the written word.

The written word, because the reader interacts with it privately, one-on-one, can change hearts and educate in a unique and powerful way. But it can only do this if the words properly convey the author’s thoughts, particularly since you have now lost every other facet of normal communication, specifically facial expression, body language, and vocal shifts. I know this and consider it carefully as I write blog posts, articles, books, etc. I know it especially because I deal with this very thing every month as a magazine editor and, on a non-professional level, as the member of several discussion lists.

Professionally, while I’m editing a review, I have to understand what the author wants to say and make sure he or she says it well. If a sentence or passage is unclear, it is my responsibility to adjust the word choice, grammar, and style until the selection correctly communicates the author’s thoughts. I hate to say it, because I work with a fabulous group of writers, but there have been a few times through the years when an author has done such a poor job of presenting his or her thoughts that I could only hazard a guess as to their original intent; on those days I’ve wished for mind-reading skills.

But you don’t have to be a professional editor to see the need for proper written communication. I encounter this reality even more on discussion lists. How many times have fights erupted over someone’s words and, in the end, that someone came back to explain, “But you don’t understand. That’s not what I was saying at all!” Many times, it is the readers who misread, but it seems to me that many more times it is the authors who fail to properly record their thoughts and, therefore, open doors they never dreamed of opening. There is one classic example that illustrates this more clearly than any other does. These two sentences are quite similar, but don’t even remotely communicate the same thing.

“A woman, without her man, is nothing.”
“A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

No matter what you do in life, no matter what hat you are wearing in any given moment, communication is a necessity. I challenge you to build your own communication skills and, if you are a parent, to help your children build theirs as well. Such an investment will only pay off in the end!

Copyright © 2008 Tammy Marshall Cardwell