Thursday, April 30, 2009

The Exclamation Mark’s Excited Return

This week I cheat—I direct your attention to a nice little article about the emotional impact of punctuation. The author, Stuart Jeffries, doesn’t bill it as such, but that’s what he’s really getting at. He’s talking about the recent ubiquity of the exclamation mark, which he notes has been prompted vaguely but I think definitely by email communications. Jeffries weighs in on the debate as to whether it’s a sign of excitability or friendliness and explores his own feelings about the mark.

My thoughts on the exclamation mark are that:

• it shouldn’t be banned the way purists have commanded it be in the past
• it shouldn’t be overused in business communications
• it’s nice to see in emails sometimes—it can impart a friendly tone
• when it’s not used well (e.g., to camouflage insincerity or even petty negativity) it’s REALLY annoying (just like ALL CAPS are)—smiley faces are like this, too
• if it’s sprinkled all through your writing, you can come off as silly or insubstantial

But overall, I like the comeback of the exclamation mark (in small doses), and I agree with Jeffries that it really was “the funless and fastidious” who were keeping it trodden underfoot. That said, one will do: it’s a powerful mark, and there’s no need to triple the action unless you’re purposefully being goofy with good friends.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Turner-Riggs Changes (But Stays the Same)

As of June 1, 2009, Turner-Riggs headquarters will be based in Ottawa, Ontario. We’re moving to be closer to family—our one-year-old has been demanding to see his grandparents more than a couple of times a year—and for the short, balmy winters we know await us.

We’ll post full mailing/phone details soon, but please know that we’re always available via our current web/email contact information, and that our clients and networks will continue to be all over Canada and the world. That’s how we like it.

Vancouver and BC in general, we will miss you dearly, but we’ll be back and forth lots so stay beautiful.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The Dastardly Debate About Possessives Ending in S

If Us Magazine is doing it, you can bet a lot of other people are, too. Us has decided to end the possessive case of words like Paris (as in Hilton) with an s’ rather than an s’s. For example:

Paris’ $250 million pool party for her newest dog ...

They’re using the style convention where when a word ends in a sibilant (a consonant that sounds like a hiss, like Paris), it’s fair game to end with the more visually attractive s’.

Paris’ does look better than Paris’s. But I’m in the camp where you always add the final s after the apostrophe. I like how Paris’ looks, but I don’t like how it sounds in my head.

Both styles are correct. What’s incorrect is to be inconsistent. Choose one style and stick to it.

p.s. When the word in question is plural—e.g., the players’ wives—just add an apostrophe. But you knew that.

p.s. When you get all hot and bothered about the issue as I so often do (just think of our company name, Turner-Riggs) try to reframe the sentence. Instead of “Turner-Riggs’ company mascot was fired soon after the unfortunate event,” I’d write “Turner-Riggs fired their company mascot soon after the unfortunate event.” And avoid the passive voice in the process!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Weekly Geek

Finally, a regular column for blogspace, an outlet for our geek. Okay, my geek ... I haven’t asked Craig about it, so maybe it’ll be just me writing. In that case, expect to hear a lot about words and grammar. I love learning about words and grammar, and I need to share what I learn with anyone who will listen. Or just anyone. Whether or not they listen.

So let’s get started!

Topic #1: Commas (Between Adjectives)

Oh, don’t pretend you’re bored by commas ... that you don’t want to know more. Commas are tricky little devils that beg for understanding—otherwise they can run rampant through your writing. They can turn you into a comma bomber, like someone I know in this office. And it isn’t me.

There is much to know about commas, but for now I’m going to limit myself to an invaluable little lesson I learned from the brilliant Frances Peck about how to figure out whether you need a comma between adjectives. If you are anything like me, you’d look at a sentence like this one (purposefully unpunctuated) and get a little anxious:

They are selling their blue pine table their damaged oak dresser their beloved shag carpet and their thick luxurious throw.

Would you put a comma between “blue” and “pine”? Between “damaged” and “oak”? Between “beloved” and “shag”? Between “thick” and “luxurious”?

I might have, pre-Frances. And I would have been 75% wrong.

The correct punctuation** for the sentence is:

They are selling their blue pine table, their damaged oak dresser, their beloved shag carpet, and their thick, luxurious throw.

Here are the tricks that helped me figure it out:

1. Can you insert an “and” between the adjectives? If you can’t (e.g., you wouldn’t say “the blue and pine table”), you shouldn’t use a comma. In other words, the comma substitutes for “and,” as in “the thick, luxurious throw.”
2. Can you rearrange the adjectives? If you can’t, you shouldn’t use a comma (e.g., you wouldn’t say “the pine blue table”).

To end in full geek glory, let me just add that beneath these tricks, there is a proper point of grammar: the decision about whether to use a comma between adjectives has to do with what kind of adjective you’re dealing with: coordinate or cumulative. In the sentence we used above, “thick” and “luxurious” function as coordinate adjectives (they all separately modify the same noun) while the others work in a cumulative way (they build and lean on each other).

That’s it for today. Don’t worry, Weekly Geek will be back. Soon. Like in a week.

**Assuming you’re using a serial comma, which is another topic (and a contentious one at that!). If you choose to use serial commas, as I do, you put a comma before the last item in a list.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Goodbye Edison

It’s been a long time coming. When we first published the Turner-Riggs website, we gave Thomas Edison’s quote, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it” a place of honour on our homepage since we thought it complemented our main text. Shortly after, Craig’s uncle and business colleague Wayne MacPhail let us in on Edison’s yen for electrocuting animals, and we knew the quote had to go.

That was over a year ago.

Since then, we’ve been a little busy with business and baby. But we’re pleased to announce that we’ve replaced Edison’s quote with one from Balzac: “As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move ... coffee is your ally.” We find it both true and funny, but we don’t know much about Balzac except that he’s credited with several other pithy remarks that make us slightly nervous. Among them:

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
A husband who submits to his wife’s yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman’s influence ought to be entirely concealed.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Hmmm. But these can possibly be explained by the times he wrote in. If anyone knows of any compelling reason why Balzac should be banned from the Turner-Riggs homepage, speak now or forever hold your peace. Wayne?

Update: Farewell, Balzac. Your quote took up too much space on our page, and it sorta diffused our main message about what it is we do. But we do agree that life with coffee is infinitely better than life without.

Write Your Design

When you’re considering a new or refreshed website, it can be tempting to think about design first. It’s natural: we want to appear attractive to our audiences, and generally we have very definite ideas of what this looks like. So often website design takes up a lot of energy, time, and resources at the beginning, and sometimes it leaves little left over for other elements of the website. Like copy.

Don’t get us wrong ... we love great design and see it as a major source of competitive advantage. But copy is king on the web. Copy is content, and content is what everyone is looking for. We are looking for relevant information we need now presented in a logical way that respects that we have no time.

What are the implications of this?

Don’t

• Don’t get fixated on design at the expense of content.
• Don’t leave content to the last minute.
• Don’t think flashy design will make up for sloppy or lackluster content.
• Don’t think copy you write on paper translates seamlessly to a website: different mediums need different approaches.

Do

• Do see design and content as inextricably, happily linked.
• Do see design as having a priority: to support content effectively.
• Do work on content preferably before or at least at the same time as design. At the recent Mesh 2009 conference, 37signals’ Ryan Singer put it this way: “Interface design is 90% copywriting ... good writing is good design.”
• Do place your copy strategically according to the way users navigate text on sites.

To this last point, eyetracking studies provide important clues as to how to match copy and design to users’ behaviours. The study Eyetrack III (conducted by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media, and Eyetools Inc.) “observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.”

Some of the most significant findings from Eyetrack III for web designers and anyone with a website are:

• Users’ eyes are attracted to text, not graphics “both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.”
• Users look first at the upper portion of a webpage—left first, then right—and give less attention to the lower portions of a page. So make sure you reference your most important messages up top, probably through headlines and subheads.
• Large type promotes scanning, while smaller type promotes more focused reading. Both are important behaviours, so it’s up to you to decide which text you’d like readers to scan (e.g., to decide what they’d like to read further) and which you’d like them to zero in on.
• Users tend to look only at the first few words of headlines. Make sure those first few words are good and catchy.
• Navigation bars placed at the top of a page performed better than navigation placed elsewhere.
• Short paragraphs perform much better than longer ones in terms of users’ focusing on them.
• Ads placed on the top-left, bigger ads, and ads placed close to editorial have the greatest chance of making an impression.
• Big images, especially those with people’s faces in them, attract the most attention.

Findings like these underline the importance of marrying copywriting and design for websites. In fact, separating the two given this sort of information seems counterproductive. This is well illustrated by a passage from 37signals’ book Getting Real (p. 110):

Do you label a button Submit or Save or Update or New or Create? That’s copywriting. Do you write three sentences or five? Do you explain with general examples or with details? Do you label content New or Updated or Recently Updated or Modified? Is it There are new messages: 5 or There are 5 new messages or is it 5 or five or messages or posts? All of this matters.

For more on writing good website copy, see our post “Writing Web Copy that Gets Read.”