A fine line exists between confident and arrogant writing. Confident writing creates urgency and assures readers you believe in your ideas. Arrogant writing diverts attention from your ideas onto yourself.
Follow these tips to ensure your writing sounds confident, yet gracious.
How can I avoid sounding arrogant?
If people say you sound arrogant, tone down your message and create a reasonable voice:
- Avoid praising yourself.
- Avoid absolute claims.
- Focus on facts.
- Provide what the receiver needs.
- Don’t tear others down.
Arrogant
Do you have that deliverable done yet? When I was in your position, I knocked those reports out in an hour—max. Timeliness leads to promotions. If you want to move up the ladder like me, you need to work faster. Feel free to pick my brain about ways to work more efficiently.
Reasonable
The report deadline is approaching, and timeliness is important. I’m here to help. At first, these reports can feel overwhelming, but a few templates and tricks can reduce the load. I’d be happy to share them with you. Let’s schedule a time to talk through the process.
How can I avoid sounding hesitant?
Create confidence by doing the following:
- Avoid an apologetic tone.
- Focus on facts.
- Avoid unnecessary qualifiers:
- I’m just checking in (why just?)
- I was wondering if
- It’s not a big deal, but
- In my opinion
- I feel like maybe
- Does that make sense?
- You might try
- Express main ideas as statements, not questions.
- Stand behind your statements and your work.
Hesitant
Forgive me for bothering you. Would you be willing to hear out the head of the Graphics Design Department at Northwestern College? She asked if we might possibly be interested in perhaps offering internship opportunities to strong candidates from the university’s program.
In my opinion an internship program would likely benefit our company.
- It would probably be great to have young people around.
- It might help us on college campuses.
- There is a pretty good chance more work would get done.
Confident
The head of the Graphics Design Department at Northwestern College asked if we are interested in offering internships to strong candidates from the university.
Starting an internship program would benefit our company in a number of ways:
- Create a pool of potential future employees
- Boost our visibility on college campuses
- Increase our productivity
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