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NLP was developed in the mid-70s by John Grinder, a Professor at UC Santa Cruz and Richard Bandler, a graduate student. NLP, as most people use the term today, is a set of models of how communication impacts and is impacted by subjective experience. It's more a collection of tools than any overarching theory.

Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; and Milton Erickson, hypnotist.

The presence of NLP on the Internet and other electronic forums is growing. There is a general World Wide Web server devoted to NLP. Various training centers have their own Web pages. There is an Internet newsgroup, a Compuserve forum, and an America On-Line forum, all devoted to NLP.The participants are people of virtually every certification level in every school of NLP.

NLP forums are full of Practitioners and/or more advanced NLPers, demonstrating NLP on-line. They do NLP in newsgroups. They do it in e-mail. And often, they end up looking anywhere from silly to incompetent. Most people on the forums respond to the content of their messages, and never give feedback that the form of what they're doing is destroying their credibility.

Having just come off this week's third electronic exchange with an on-line NLPer who was stretching their wings via e-mail, I decided to write this. Now, instead of rewriting it to everyone who decides to NLP me on-line, I can simply refer them to this Web page .

People write e-mail and forum messages as if they were talking. But they aren't. Messages arrive distorted, out of order, edited, and most importantly: in text. Text doesn't communicate very much. And even NLP language patterns require attention to the accompanying nonverbal behavior to direct their meaning. But people forget this. Instead, they converse the way they would in a face-to-face conversation.

We bill ourselves as communication experts, yet NLPers of all skill levels seem to fall victim to a few common mistakes when writing on-line. Here are some hints about how you can come across well in text.

Know how to write. If you're going to communicate via writing, you need to know how to do it. Use complete sentences, proper grammar, appropriate punctuation, and proper capitalization. In person, you can use voice tone and inflection to convey meaning. In text, those are the only "non-verbal" cues available. Use them.

Take the time to revise your writing. Many people think they're "posting" to a newsgroup. Instead, think of publishing a message. Because that's what you're doing. Your writing is a public presentation of you, and electronic media is every bit as permanent as printed media. In fact, on-line writing may be even more widely read. The NLP and DHE General Information server has been read by more people than it takes to qualify for the New York Times best seller's list. And I wrote it in about half an hour.

Write for the Cyber-Surfer: brief chunks that don't depend on order. People don't read on-line conversations from start to finish. Message arrive at different sites in a different order. Newsgroup readers may skip to other articles for reference. Many people browse at work, and only have time for a few paragraphs here and there. So they read whatever happens to come up on the screen. Express your ideas in small, digestable chunks, and they can be read and pondered as people "surf" the text.

Keep messages to a screen or two at the most. The longer a message is, the more likely people are to put off reading it until they have time. Often, that time never comes. Longer messages are also hard to respond to. Three thousand lines of text discussing twelve interlinked topics can be so daunting that no one takes the time to respond. If you want to put in the effort to write huge volumes of prose, spend some of that effort editing it. Your communication will reach more people, and you'll be much happier with the responses!

Avoid hypnotic language. As you notice your tendency ... to use linguistic tricks ... diminishing in relation to the careful consdieration you give ... your self-awareness ... lets you know, really know, that hypnotic language is a comforting, life-affirming way to begin to drift... into that wonderful future ... which grows ever larger and brighter ... with yourself able to do great, amazing new things ... as you drift down into thoughts of how you can understand the ways in which ...

What response did the above paragraph elicit from you? It will elicit some response from anyone who reads it. I'm willing to bet that it has never elicited the response the writer intended.

Good hypnotic language elicits and leads people through mental states. It directs their attention. It sequences their attention gradually, farther and farther from where they started. And hypnotic language depends on feedback: voice tone and tempo change based on the listener's moment-to-moment responses (e.g. we may pace our tempo to their breathing). It's those auditory submodalities that carry much of the impact.

You have no control over auditory submodalities in text. Period. Some people read with a mental voice that may use a hypnotic cadence and tone. They will follow a written induction, right up until it starts to work. At that point, their attention drifts inward and they never get to the rest of the message.

Other people speed-read, taking in whole paragraphs at once. For them, there may be no voice tone, and the sequential flow of the induction is lost. There are also the proof-readers, who get a physical twang at every misspelled word (like "consdieration" above) or agrammatic sentence. They often skip hypnotic passages entirely, because it's just too jarring to read. (I'm afraid I fall into this last category, which is what prompted this entire article!)

Diagnose people's deep underlying problems only when you have supporting nonverbal information. Good NLP diagnosis involves many nonverbal cues. A well-trained practitioner will pay close attention to unconscious inflections, body language, breathing, eye movements, and incongruities (among other things) in face-to-face communication. Written communication is different; none of that is present. Even written language patterns are suspect: some people write very differently than they speak, and a thrice-edited-in-four-sittings message may no longer reflect their underlying thinking. Rather than providing the missing pieces from your own imagination, wait until you have sensory-based evidence to support your ideas about what's going on inside someone else's head.

Intervene only in person. You can't observe someone's responses via e-mail. So you can't notice whether you've successfully gotten a response from someone. You can't match the nonverbal responses to the verbal responses. You can't calibrate body langugae. You can't set anchors. You can't tell if someone is falling into a trauma. You can't reach over and interrupt a dysfunctional behavior pattern. You can't affect the reader's state. Effective, responsible, ethical NLP interventions require you to be there to make sure you're having the effect you intend when you intervene. Never attempt a substantive intervention, except in person.

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