As a manager you are constantly being asked to do things - by your boss, by one of your fellow managers, by head of another department, by one of your staff.

Your working life is a constant bombardment of requests coming from all quarters.

Your boss will ask you for a quick report on something or other in time for his upcoming meeting with directors or his visit to see overseas customers. The report is, of course, very urgent.

Or you will be asked to give a presentation about some aspect of your department’s work to colleagues elsewhere in company. It will be an important communication between departments and will result in good publicity for you, your team, and its work.

Naturally you will receive numerous invitations to attend meetings at which your presence is needed.

And undoubtedly your fellow managers will contact you to ask small favours such as giving their particular request higher priority than others, or diverting a resource to a different project to speed that up at expense of another. Needless to say, meeting your colleague’s request is ‘vital to company’.

By writing or speaking for ear, I mean that spoken words can have more power than written words. After all, when we have important messages, we prefer to deliver them verbally and personally, rather than by sending a written message.

Of course, it's not practical or possible to deliver every message verbally. But, if we can capture some of nuances of spoken word we can increase power of our messages. When we write for ear, our writing undergoes some subtle but important changes. Our words, sentences, and paragraphs change in several ways.

Consider number of pauses that occur when we speak. Most of us pause often, more often than when we write. To capture those pauses, use commas or one of other 'slowing' punctuation marks, such as colons and semicolons.

Writing for ear also means shorter sentences. And even fragments of sentences. As you can imagine, speech tends to greater spontaneity than written expression, which means shorter sentences and more fragments.

Many of same principles hold when we make formal speeches or presentations. Especially if we speak from prepared notes.

Whatever we say, when we speak publicly, has to go in through listeners' ears. And so, if you'll allow me to belabor obvious, we need to write speeches for listeners' ears, not our mouths.