I love communications – I love next gen talent.
Special note: I’m really happy to announce that I will be featuring Master of Professional Communication, Ryerson University student blog articles on my site, on a recurring basis.
I hope you enjoy the fresh and creative angles as much as I do. This week’s piece is written by Corinne Graham.
#nextgentalent – it’s all about them.
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A template can be a valuable asset when you’re communicating information.
It can be a useful tool when you find yourself preparing documents with the same formatting on a regular basis. A real time saver, that’s for sure.
The structured formatting will allow other authors to re-use it in the future, and any expectations for the document will already be clear. If used properly, a template can be an excellent source of continuity within an organization.
Future interns, such as myself, will definitely thank you for the time you have spent crafting them.
But in this moment of creative freedom, we’re going to say goodbye to templates for the time being. We have new ideas to explore.
As a graduate student, I’m often reminded that I should be beginning to think of myself as a “knowledge producer”, rather than a “knowledge consumer”. This statement struck me on two levels. First, I’ve been in school for most of my life, so surely by now I’ve “produced” new information, right? Well, not necessarily. Our school years are often spent contributing our own ideas (some of which are creative), but then tailoring them in order to fulfill a particular framework or requirement. Can’t the same be said for the ways in which we choose to communicate outside of academia? We either copy and paste our information into an existing template, or worse yet, we change the content because it doesn’t fit how the document is supposed to look.
Why should the content be the only thing that changes?
Although there will always be a place for templates, I think it’s important to remember the benefits of a more organic approach to communicating. Let’s reflect the culture of our organization. As it moves forward with new faces and ideas, so should our strategies for sharing information.
That’s one small step for communicators, one giant leap for the creative mind.
- Corinne Graham
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Get to know Corinne – follow her on Twitter! @CorinneGraham
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