Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: How to Spot a Liar & How to Write Anything Better

Episode Date: January 4, 2020

What’s your favorite sleep position? It turns out that one sleep position is better than the others for eliminating “brain waste” and preventing Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s and other brain problems. In this episode, you’ll discover the best way to sleep. https://www.sciencealert.com/sleeping-on-your-side-could-reduce-alzheimer-s-and-parkinson-s-risk-study-finds How do you spot a liar? It’s not just one or two things – you have to understand the process of determining whether someone is being deceptive. Listen as Maryann Karinch, co-author of the book How to Spot a Liar (https://amzn.to/2QDEMYZ), helps you become a better truth detector. With all the texts, and memos and emails and reports you write – you probably strive to make your writing effective - right? Laura Brown, author of How to Write Anything: A Complete Guide (https://amzn.to/2MH8c7B) – and an expert writer herself – offers some simple ways to punch up and improve your writing so that people understand you and your message is crystal clear. What’s in your garage? Some of the things you probably have in there are better off somewhere else, according to Home & Garden magazine. We’ll explore what things you should either get rid of or bring into the house. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, you'll discover what sleep position can help prevent Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other problems. Also, can you spot a liar? If there's that over-emphasis, that overreaction, I swear I didn't do it.

Another is, you know, repeating the question, you mean you want to know where I went last night? Those are really, really big, fat clues. Then, what's in your garage? There are things in there that should probably be stored somewhere else, and for some very good reasons. And some expert advice to help you be a better writer. Sometimes I'll ask a client who tells me, oh, I can't write,

why don't you explain it to your grandmother? And then it all comes spilling out. They tell me everything, and I say to them, that's your first draft. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. This is our weekend episode, our SYSK Choice episode, and I occasionally get emails from people asking what that means. What is an SYSK Choice episode? And what it is, is we go back into the archives

and find episodes that are no longer available because platforms like Apple Podcasts only allow you 300 episodes and we're over 360 episodes now. So those earlier episodes drop off and you can't hear them anymore. So we find the very best ones and we dust them off, we update them, we package them together and create a new episode with the very best of the previous episodes. And that's what SYSK Choice means. First up today, we're going to talk about your sleep position.

It turns out that it matters more than you realize. And there's evidence that sleeping in the lateral or side position, as compared to sleeping on your back or your stomach, may more effectively remove brain waste. or side position, as compared to sleeping on your back or your stomach, may more effectively remove brain waste. Ew! And prove to be an important practice to help reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurological diseases,

and this is according to researchers at Stony Brook University. Interestingly, sleeping on your side is the most common, and that is probably not coincidence. The researchers said that the lateral sleep position is already the most popular in human and most animals, even in the wild. And it appears that we have adapted the lateral sleep position to most efficiently clear our brains of this metabolic waste product that builds up while we're awake. If you don't sleep on your side now, you may want to try it. And that is something you should know.

Sometimes it's easy to tell when someone is lying to you, usually because that person isn't a very good liar. But what about a good liar? Could you spot a lie from a good liar? Well, you can certainly get better at detecting deception when you're talking with someone. Welcome, Marianne. And so this ability to spot a liar, is it art or is it science or is it both or what? Well, actually, it is a little bit of both. It's good to have a sense of the science of it because of people's reactions sometimes are involuntary. And we look for that. We look for those stress-related reactions to determine whether or not someone's lying. And so there is science in that. The art

is really arts of observation, arts of building rapport, of asking good questions. And so it's an equal combination of the two. But it's not a case of, oh, he scratched his eye, so he must be a liar. No, maybe his eye itches. You have to look for deviation from baseline, and that's the key thing. We look for what people do normally, and then we look for signs of stress, which are sometimes associated with lying. When people act a little differently, whether it's the way they answer a question

or the cadence of their voice or their word choice or their eye movement or some little glitchy behavior, if it's different from how they usually present themselves, that could be a sign. And then you probe after that. So is it all things like what they say, how they say it, how they stand, how they look? Is it all of those things? Or are you looking for something more specific or more importantly, maybe one of those things over the others?

That's a really, really good question. It's not really one over the other. What we do is baseline. Now, so yes, the short answer is that yes, there are some things that are, you know, real signals. One of them is as we baseline, we figure out how people's eyes are moving when they're remembering things and how they move when they're imagining things. So let's just do something quick here. What's the fifth word of the Star Spangled Banner? Now, you may have moved your eyes. Most people do. They move their eyes over to either the left side or the right side as if you're digging for an answer in the inside of your brain. And it just so happens your auditory cortex is right over your ears. So it's very common for you to move your eyes

in that direction. Let's say you look left to try to remember that word. And I ask you to describe, I don't know, your mother's kitchen. Your eyes might drift up left way back because your visual cortex is in the back of your head. That's where you look to remember something. Now, let's just say I ask you where you were last night and you don't want to tell me. And you make up something, you're going to probably be looking up to the right because you're going to look left. If left is your memory side, right is going to be your imagination side. I see that in you, and all of a sudden, I think, you know, maybe I should probe this a little more, and that's when I go in with the questions. And so it takes, it's like almost like a formula, almost. First, we figure out what's

normal, and then we watch how we deviate from normal. Right, exactly. Or let's say that it's not eye movement that's the tip-off. Let's say we're talking about something, and that something triggers a response. We call it an adapter. It could be a little grooming gesture, like maybe stroking your cuffs, for example. Maybe it appears that you're getting a wrinkle out, or that you're stroking your neck, or that you rub your fingers together, something like that. Those little gestures are adapters. That's a sign of stress. But are there things that objectively indicate that there may be some deception going on where you don't have to spend the time doing the baseline thing?

Because if somebody does that, well, you're on to something there. Well, actually, no. Baselining is very subtle. I can tell you many, many stories. I know we probably don't have time for that, of actually baselining somebody just in the course of a conversation like this. And it only takes 30 seconds, maybe a minute, to get some of those initial signs and signals so that you know what the person is like when there's a deviation present. So you can do this really quickly. A lot of times if I'm looking at politicians, say, in a presidential debate. You know, you can get the sense of when there's something else going on,

and you can get it pretty quickly. They're just ways that they look, the little glitchy behavior, changes in the way that, like the tone of voice, yelling all of a sudden or being super, super assertive about a particular point, and you think, whoa, that's kind of out of line. You don't have to know the person really, really well to know that, you know, if there's way too much emphasis on something, then there's probably something out of whack. Like OJ's absolutely, positively not guilty? You got it. You got it. I swear on my mother's grave, this is a great tax plan. Wait a minute.

That's a little bit too much for that particular statement. Right, right. The conversation today is with Marianne Kerinch, and Marianne is the co-author of the book, How to Spot a Liar. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Marianne, if I'm someone who's looking to try to find out if someone is telling the truth or not, and I'm a novice at this, I don't have the training,

are there some things that even a novice can look for, either by asking or gestures or whatever you look for, to get a good sense of whether someone's telling the truth or not? You can get a quick sense. We get a lot of tips in the book, you know, things to look for that will want, you know, that will encourage you to probe further. One of those things is definitely that eye movement. That's a really key piece of this, is getting to know where a person looks for memory and which direction the person looks for imagination or construct. That's a really hot tip. And I've used this with, well, I used it with somebody recently who wanted to hire me to do a book.

And that person was asserting his innocence in a criminal case. And I thought, I'm just going to spend a few minutes with him, see if I think he's a liar or a truth teller. And I was able to discern pretty quickly what was going on. Was he lying? He was lying about one thing, and it was an embarrassing, personal thing, nothing to do with a criminal case against him.

But I did detect the lie. And when I called him on it, he was profoundly reactive. Now, that wasn't anything to do with the case, but I was able to spot the lie. Turns out, I think he was telling the truth about being innocent, by the way. But do people always give away clues? Or, I mean, if you don't look up, if you maintain eye contact with someone when they ask you a question, if you don't look up, if you maintain eye contact with someone when they ask you a question, then you don't get that clue. Oh, you know what? That in itself makes me wonder, because that's a very strange thing for people to do, to just stare at you. It really isn't normal. I know that in this culture, we're told that maintaining eye contact is a really good thing,

but I think that's creepy, you know, if somebody just is staring at you. And so I would tend to probe anyway. I would look for the other clues, say the vocal clues, you know, if the person has a change in cadence or tone, all of a sudden uses a different word choice, or here's a hot tip. You ask them a question, and instead of answering the question, they'll rephrase it. So I say, where were you last night? Well, what do you mean, where was I last night? Or where were you last night?

You know, I had a really, really long drive after work. Well, in both of those cases, one case you're rephrasing the question, basically repeating it, and the other case you're starting to talk about something else. Those are the kinds of things that you look for if the person doesn't give you any body language clues. But how many clues do you need before you figure it out, before you can say, well, there's enough clues here, I don't need to probe any further, This person is lying or they're not. That's a good question. And you'd have to take it on a

case-by-case basis. There are things that are definitive. For example, if you suspect that somebody is embellishing, because we'll go to specific types of lies and the signals that this is, you know, you've just discovered them in a type of lie, so you can do it that way. And somebody's embellished. They were talking about their sterling football career in college. Well, if you can involve other people in that lie and say, well, I know you went to college with Joe here. Joe, what about this?

This must have been a great moment when he made that touchdown. As soon as you involve other people in the lie, then usually it's very, very hard to maintain that, and the liar will somehow backpedal. And when you see that backpedaling, then you go, okay, well, I caught him. There are lies of commission, lies of omission, and lies of transference, meaning you take somebody else's story. In each type of lie, there are ways, there are moments when you can say, yeah, okay, I gotcha. And that's a lot of what we teach in this book, is what is that moment, and how do you get there?

Are there ways to tell, do you ever go up to someone and after a few minutes go, this guy's not a liar? I mean, I don't need to probe any further, I can pretty much trust what he says. Or is everything they say accessible as to whether or not it's a lie? Do you ever just say, this guy's okay? Yeah, there are times when I say this guy's okay. In fact, probably more often than not. People really, unless they're trying to lie for entertainment, where they have something to protect, you know, this is love, hate, or greed. Unless you know that there's some kind of agenda

or suspect there's some kind of agenda like that, people generally don't lie. I mean, they just don't lie as a matter of, oh, I think I'll tell a lie now in the grocery store. That just doesn't happen. Most people realize that they might omit. That's a very, very common type of lie. But generally, the lies that we tell on a day-to-day basis are pretty harmless. They're just social lies. So, yeah, I think you

need to trust your gut. That's part of the art of it. Women tend to be better detectors of this than men, by the way. And when we tell those kind of social lies, do we usually not give clues because we kind of convinced ourselves, well, those are just little white lies, so I'm not going to look up to the wrong side. We just tell them and we sort of think we're telling the truth. Right. There's maybe a little bit of discomfort, but for the most part, if somebody asks you, how do I look?

Or, you know, how was my presentation or something like that? And you say, oh, it was good. You know, and it's a noncommittal, oh, it was good. It wasn't an over the top, wow, you really look great, or boy, that was magnificent. It's just, yeah, you were good. But it's a lie, but it's not a lie that's really going to upset us because we know that the lie actually is sort of for a greater good. Can you give me just, before we go, just a couple of other kind of quick things to look for, clues that indicate that something's afoot here?

Okay. A really quick clue is, is the person that you asked the question of actually answering the question? That's a very good clue. Is there, let's say, if there is a question asked and if there's a complete avoidance of it, there's a story that completely sidetracks from the question. That's a sign that something's up. If there's that overemphasis, that overreaction, I swear I didn't do it, that's another indication that you might want to probe further in.

It's a possible lie. Another is that, you know, repeating the question, you mean you want to know where I went last night? Those kinds of, those are really, really big, fat clues. And even though it's not definitive, there are some times when people will get overreactive because they can't believe you asked them a question and they really are trying to take the moral high ground. Still,

I would probe further. And so that's it. In answer to the question, how does the person respond? What about simple things like hand gestures or, you know, feet or, you know, how they hold them themselves? That really depends on the individual person. For example, I tend to gesture a lot. Even while I'm talking with you and we're not sitting in the same room, I'm gesturing as if you were right in front of me. I'm using my hands for punctuation of what I'm saying. Now, if all of a sudden I stop that, you ask me a question and I stop, wow, I'm under stress. And if I'm under stress, why?

Is it that I don't know how to respond to you? Is it that I'm about to tell you something that is offbeat? You know, what's the reason? So you look for those changes in the person. The deviations from baseline are really what, that's what's going to tell you a lot. Thanks, Marianne. That's advice pretty much everybody can use because we all talk to people who we suspect are lying or, you know, we'd like to think are telling the truth, but maybe they're not. So this is all helpful.

Marianne Karinch has been my guest. She is co-author of the book, How to Spot a Liar. There is a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show,

we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice.

Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Even if you don't consider yourself a writer, you're a writer. Emails, reports, texts, memos, letters. We all write a lot, so how well you communicate with the written word is really essential. Here to help make us better writers is Laura Brown, who knows a thing or two about good writing, and she's written a rather ambitiously titled book called How to Write Anything, A Complete Guide. So, hi, Laura. And so what is your definition of good writing? Purpose is clear, writing that responds to the reader's needs, and writing that's comprehensible, grammatically correct, at least within reason and with correct punctuation,

so that the reader can comprehend what's being said. And is it that people are coming out of school just lacking the skill, or are we lazy, or do we think it doesn't matter, or what? I think it's a little of each, actually. I think that, you know, there's a lot of discussion about how texting is affecting students' writing, and I hear a lot about that from my friends who teach, that they're seeing texting language seeping into student papers. Managers are talking about the way it seeps into emails at work. So I think that that's a big challenge,

people not understanding that even emails at work are a form of formal writing. So I think part of it is that we're in a hurry, part of it is that we're lazy, and part of it is that we just don't understand what's required. Okay, so let's get into some of the do's and don'ts of what people, I know when we're talking in big broad strokes here, it's hard to get real specific, but as best you can, you know, what do people need to start to think about before they even start typing or pick up a pen? I think no matter what you're writing, you need to spend at least a few seconds

thinking about what your purpose is. And I know that sounds self-evident, but I'll give you an example, a complaint letter or message. We're usually angry when we write a complaint, otherwise we wouldn't be bothering. But people often use these just as occasions to vent. Your complaints will be a lot more successful if you stop and think what you want. Are you asking for compensation? Are you

asking for a replacement? Are you asking for a refund? Your writing will be much more effective if you understand exactly what you're trying to achieve. The other thing I think you really need to think about is what does your reader expect? Writing is a kind of conversation. There are two people in the conversation. Are you just writing what you want to write or are you thinking about what your reader needs to hear? Are you making a request? If you're making a request, then you need to understand what your reader's position might be on that request so that you can construct a more persuasive message. When you're trying to persuade, when you're trying to be clear and get your point across,

what are some of the things perhaps that people do wrong that either gets their true intent lost, or what do you see that is like fingernails on a blackboard to you? There are a lot of complaints about emails that are very blunt. And email is a very fast form of communication. But I think courtesy goes a long way. So I think taking a few minutes to say please and thank you is well worthwhile. We also hear a lot about emails that are extremely long and unfocused, and they don't get read.

So if you can take a few minutes and figure out what is the core of what I want to say and cut out the chaff, then your communication will be more effective. I've heard it said that good writing is really good rewriting. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. And I've been working with clients for almost 30 years now, clients and students, and I have some people come to me and say, I just can't write. I can't write. I just can't write.

Well, I've never worked with anybody who literally can't write. I think the problem is often people write a first draft and they look at it and they think, well, that's no good. Well, it's just a first draft. Working with drafts is really, really key to good writing. Sometimes I'll ask a client who tells me, oh, I can't write, why don't you explain it to your grandmother? Why don't you just imagine somebody sitting there who's completely

sympathetic to you, isn't going to need a bunch of technical jargon, and just explain it to her. And if your grandmother doesn't work, then, you know, pick someone else who'd be completely sympathetic to you. And then it all comes spilling out. They tell me everything, and I say to them, that's your first draft. That's your first draft. Now you can go back and polish it. People put a lot of pressure on themselves to have it come out perfect the first time, and nobody's writing is perfect the first time. Yeah. Although I know that sometimes I think,

but this first draft is so bad, polishing it is, you know, kind of putting lipstick on a pig kind of thing that I really need to start over, and I don't know how bad is bad enough to start over, or is, you know what I mean? I do know what you mean, and I struggle with that too because I work with drafts,

and I often end up throwing out a lot of my first draft and feeling like, oh, well, that was wasted effort. But it really isn't. Revising a first draft can sometimes mean just throwing it out. But the act of having written that first draft helps you think through what you want to say. So it's not wasted effort at all. Revising isn't always just, you know, fixing the punctuation and changing the order of things. It could mean significant revision, but that doesn't mean you've wasted the effort with the first draft. How do you make, and maybe this is the million-dollar question,

how do you make your writing not just clear but interesting? That is the million-dollar question. I think working with drafts helps a lot. I think writing a draft, walking away from it, and then coming back to it with a fresh eye really can help you raise the interest value of your writing because you're seeing it as a reader might see it. And that's really, really the key.

You have to be able to look at your writing with a different eye. So writing drafts, working through drafts, and importantly, leaving some time between the drafts so that you can get some perspective on it is really, really helpful. I also tell people to read, and maybe this is a losing battle, but I think the more you read good writing, the better your writing will become because it gets into your head. The rhythms get into your head. The strategies of writing in an interesting way seep into your head the more you read. So I recommend whatever field you're in, find some good writing in it and read. Be led by example, I guess.

Absolutely. What is that one piece of advice you give people who are having trouble writing? What's that one thing you tell people that seems to have the most impact? I always tell my clients to stop trying to sound like writers. I have several clients who are very anxious about their writing. They get very tense when they start writing, and they'll write something that's very complex and full of big words, and I look at it and I don't know what it means. So I'll stop them and I ask them to explain, what does that mean?

And if they can put it in simple words, then we can revise so that their writing makes more sense. People put a lot of pressure on themselves to sound perfect the first time around. So my advice is really simplify it. Simplify it. Don't worry about using big words. Don't worry about sounding smart. If you have smart ideas, you'll sound smart.

You don't have to make the writing extremely complex. But we've all read books and articles by people who just have that flair. They're clever writers. They're interesting writers that aren't just writing basic pedestrian sentences. They're kind of artists with the language. Yes. And I think if you want to do that, that's a real study. I was an undergraduate at UCLA, and I took a writing class while I was there, not just writing composition, but writing style. And one of the things that the instructor had us do was to pick a newspaper article and then rewrite that article in the style of, I think she

gave us four famous writers. I think we had to write it in the style of Hemingway and then Charles Lamb, and I can't remember who else it was. They were writers who had very distinctive styles. That's a terrific exercise because it makes you very, very aware of different ways of using language, different ways of using syntax and word choice. So if you really want to develop your style, study other writers and actually imitating them is really helpful. Is there any kind of rule of the road for, you know, the order of information when you're trying to explain something or get a point across as to how to do it?

Yeah, absolutely. Especially with emails, it's very, very important to get the main point in the first two lines of your email. If you're making a request, state your request. State the purpose of why you're writing. This is a little bit different from the kinds of writing strategies that you might learn in school, inductive versus deductive.

Everybody's in a hurry. So even if you have a lot of content that needs to go into the email, put the meat of it right at the top. And then if you need to expand and give more information, you can do that later in the email. But don't bury your main point at the bottom

because most readers won't get there. Well, and we've all found that out. I mean, anytime I write an email and I ask somebody more than one question, I never get an answer to the other questions. It's usually just the first one that gets addressed, and that's the end of that. People just don't read it. No, people don't read it. Everybody's in a hurry.

That happens to me, too. And I have to correct myself, because I'm a hurry. That happens to me too. And I have to correct myself because I'm a writer. I like to write, so I tend to write long emails and I have to go back and say, no, wait a minute. Let me reorganize this and let me cut some of this stuff because, yeah, the shorter emails get much better results. Another thing you can do with that sort of problem is separate it into several emails.

For the most effective email, you should have just one point per email. If you need to ask several questions, use a bulleted list or a numbered list so that it's very easy for the eye to identify, oh, there's more than one thing going on here. That really helps instead of just paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of gobbledygook. Well, it's true. And I think it's helpful to think about emails as something that are looked at rather than read. I think it's certainly true of web copy, but also emails. People will look at a thing before they actually read it. It's certainly true of resumes. So if you make it easy to look at, then people are more likely to continue and read it.

And the elements of easy to look at are? White space, formatting like bullet points. And I'm not saying here that everything should be written in bullet points, because I'm not an advocate of that. But bullet points do make information more easily digestible. So some kind of section breaks, bullet points, numbers, lists, even short paragraphs in emails can help. Even if it's a long email, if you break it into a series of short paragraphs, it's much easier to scan than an email that's made of long, long paragraphs. What about the subject line?

Any advice there? The subject line should be very specific. If it's something that's urgent, you can say that it's urgent. If you say everything that's urgent, nobody's going to pay attention to you anymore because you'll be crying wolf. If it's something that requires a response, you can put that in the subject line.

Response requested or response needed, colon, and then the name of the subject line. The more specific the subject line, the better. Your reader should know what your email is just by looking at the subject line. And I see that in some organizations that somebody will say, I'm going to be out this afternoon, and then in parentheses they put EOM for end of message. So there's actually no content in the body of the email. The whole message is in the subject line, and that's kind of what you want to work towards,

at least at work. Yeah, well that's good advice, and thank you for sharing it with us today, Laura. Laura Brown is author of the book, How to Write Anything, A Complete Guide. And there's a link to her book stuff that you want to keep handy, but you don't necessarily want to keep it in the house or maybe don't have the room for it in the house. However, according to Home and Garden magazine, there are some things that are probably in your garage that probably should not be in your garage. Furniture, for example. Rodents love to make nests in dressers and in other furniture as well. It's just best to either get rid of the furniture or store it in the basement where rodents can't get to it.

Wine. The temperature fluctuations in your garage will ruin wine and do it fairly quickly. Electronics are probably not best kept in the garage. The extremes in heat and cold can wreak havoc with electronics. You really want a well-ventilated, low-humidity spot like the basement. Canned food. Again, the fluctuations in temperature, the hot and the cold,

will shorten the shelf life of canned food. Seasonal clothes, maybe you put some of your summer clothes or winter clothes and swap them out and you keep them in the garage when you're not using them. The problem is that bugs can eat those clothes, and even if you store it in a container in the garage, the fumes from your car can get in the fabric and cause it to smell, and it's tough to get that smell out. And finally, old paint. The color will go bad in the garage, and if you leave the cans on the cement floor, paint cans will rust, and then they leave a ring that's tough to get off. And that is something you should know. If you're not

a subscriber to Something You Should Know, you should be because we have some great episodes we're lining up for all of 2020. And by subscribing, you get the episodes delivered right to you so you never miss any. Just hit the subscribe button at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot. And someone is watching Ruth.

Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.