It’s been a rollercoaster few weeks, and we’re not through it yet. Interesting to see how my clients are reacting. At the start some were cancelling sessions, especially international ones. Now, more and more are realising the need to keep developing and challenging their people, especially while they’re isolated at home.
Ten days ago I’d done only one webinar in my life. I’ve now delivered six full seminars (1-2 hours) and many shorter coaching slots by Zoom, WebEx, BlueJeans, Lync, Skype, MS Teams, Loop-up and others! What a baptism of fire! I’m also training people every day on how to use Zoom (including some of my competitors). We need to pool our resources at times like these.
Some positive thoughts on the coronavirus crisis
I write this sitting in my home office where I’ve been all week. On the first morning I was full of anxiety because I’d had nothing but cancellations of training sessions, first abroad and then also in the UK. But it’s amazing what can come out of adversity.
On Monday I signed up to Zoom and began thinking about remote training.
On Tuesday I delivered my first training session by Zoom, pushed to do it by the client. It was interactive and lively, with twelve delegates, and the feedback was great!
On Wednesday a good client offered to partner with me to develop some e-learning drafting training. This has given me the momentum to get going with something I’ve wanted to do for ages.
Today I’ve had Zoom calls with eight different clients and contacts – it’s just nice to see a friendly face when you’re otherwise working alone. Oh, and I’ve done an hour’s one-to-one coaching with someone I was already working with.
Tomorrow I have three back-to-back coaching sessions with lawyers from a Portuguese law firm. I’ve already trained them face to face, so it will be easy.
I’m wondering how I ever had time to travel all over the world to deliver live training! But there’s room for both in the world – I don’t think the remote training will ever disappear.
I’m now working on offering some public webinars – more on this soon. If you’d like to talk to me about remote training or coaching for your people, I’d love to hear from you!
A trio of grammar-related events
Three things happened recently:
– I received a highly appropriate birthday card from my sister
: great example of the “grocer’s apostrophe”.
– I read a new (to me) a book called “Grammar snobs are great big meanies” by June Casagrande. Such a great title, and a really good read. I learnt plenty about grammar in the US.
– I worked one to one with a lawyer this week to brush up his grammar. It’s amazing how many highly intelligent and accomplished professionals lack confidence in their grammar and punctuation. A whole generation of us missed out on proper grammar teaching at school unless we studied another language. But it’s never too late!
Tautology at the gym!
The running machine is where I catch up on what’s hot and what’s not in the music world. I’m afraid the grammar geek in me couldn’t get over one lyric this morning. Great new song by Ramz – “Barking”. But his line “7 a.m. in the morning”… When else could 7 a.m. be? He could so easily have changed it to “7 o’clock in the morning”…
Improving poor legal drafting
I promised to tell you the techniques used to improve that awful passage from the GDPR. My six principles of a user-friendly drafting style came into their own:
- Prefer the active voice: I’ve kept just one passive because I felt it needed to be there to convey the legal meaning.
- Keep sentences under 40 words with an average sentence length of under 20 words: When you use clauses and sub-clauses, you can count each sub-clause as a separate sentence, making the new average sentence length under 10 words.
- Choose simple words if possible: I’ve got rid of “pseudonymisation” for example. I am, however, stuck with words that mean something under data protection law, for example “process” and “state of the art”.
- Don’t use three words if one would do: “In order to” becomes “to” and I’ve replaced “take account of” with “consider”. “At the time of” becomes “When”.
- Avoid jargon (including legal jargon): I’ve changed “shall” into “must”.
- Don’t turn perfectly good verbs into nouns: “The determination of” has changed to “deciding”.
How to improve poor drafting
I promised to redraft Article 25 of the General Data Protection Regulation (see my last post). Here’s my best effort so far. Unfortunately Word Press doesn’t let me indent, so it’s not as easy to read as it would be in real life:
1. When deciding how to process, and when processing, data, the controller must take appropriate technical and organisational measures such as using pseudonyms (the Measures).
2. Measures must be designed to:
(a) implement data protection principles (such as data minimisation) effectively; and
(b) integrate into the processing all safeguards necessary to:
(i) comply with the Regulation; and
(ii) protect the rights of data subjects.
3. In taking Measures, the controller must consider:
(a) the state of the art;
(b) the cost of complying with the Measures;
(c) the nature and scope of the data;
(d) the context and purpose for processing the data; and
(e) the likelihood or severity of the risks that processing the data might pose to rights and freedoms of individuals.
I’d welcome comments, or suggestions to improve the drafting! In my next post I’ll explain the techniques I used.
