Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Lynda Partner’s Writing Workout

Craig sent me a gem of a post by Lynda Partner on the OneDegree website: Cut the Blah Blah Blah—When Less is the New More. The post advocates stripping writing until only the most necessary, powerful words remain, allowing meaning and core messages to shine through to readers. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1868, writer Mark Twain said

“Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

In an age where attention spans are shrinking, and 140 character sound bites are all you are allowed on marketing vehicles like Twitter, it is once again time for writing less to become a valued marketing skill.

I couldn’t agree more. In The Power of Slow and Spare, I wrote:

When you’re excited about something your business is doing—a new initiative or product, for example—it’s tempting to want to include in your press release every one of the 34 reasons it’s so great. And explain each reason in depth. And quote all the people who were involved in the idea. And give background. And context. And related information.

But guess what?

Most people will abandon your press release unless you relinquish your dream of including everything you’d ideally like to say. Our society is time-starved as well as compelled to cram as many sources of information in as possible—we are news grazers, not gourmands.

What I love about Partner’s post is that she includes ten tips to apply to the way you describe your own business that will help you distill your message to its absolute core. Here’s Tip #7:

Count how many times you used your product or company name or the word “we.” If it’s more than once in every 500 words, ask yourself if you are writing about you or for your reader. For every statement you write, answer the question “what does this mean for my reader?”

I’m going to sit with those ten tips tomorrow and chew them over. I want to see where the exercise gets me. If nothing else it will be exercise, and exercise is the only way to become a better writer. 

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Launching a Whitepaper

We’ve been working with Launchfire, a leading interactive promotions agency, on a new series of whitepapers, and the first one was just released. The topic this time around is how to motivate consumers with interactive promotions. The premise is that the advertiser-consumer value exchange that has fueled the advertising business for the last 50 years (i.e., 22 minutes of television show wrapped around eight minutes of advertising) needs to be adapted and applied to the Internet.

Interactive promotions—advergames, contests, and other viral promotions—activate this value exchange in a dramatic way. Because of this, spending on interactive promotions is expected to overshadow online search and display advertising by 2012.

The whitepaper presents findings from a new consumer survey and draws on Launchfire’s 10 years of experience in delivering interactive promotions for leading brands. The paper is available for $0.00 on the Launchfire website, and is well worth a read if we do say so ourselves.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Writing to Get Read: Paul Collier

How refreshing! In his Globe and Mail column last Saturday, “How to fix the world? Make aid work for the ‘bottom billion,’” Doug Saunders quotes Paul Collier, professor and author of The Bottom Billion, as saying:

I think that economists have a responsibility to write in such a way as to be read by ordinary people and by political leaders. So I wrote a book that’s very readable.

It sounds so logical, so ... “duh!” But it’s actually a bold and confident move for someone who is normally an academic (Collier is an Oxford professor). For anyone, for that matter. If you want to be read, make your writing readable.

His book’s title alone—The Bottom Billion—is serving Collier very well. The title neatly and plainly sums up Collier’s argument: that foreign aid needs to target not the poor, but the poorest of the poor—numbering one billion people, overwhelmingly in Africa—to reverse a tide of social, political, and economic catastrophe that will reverberate across the whole world unless checked.

Collier could have called his book Alleviating Extreme Poverty: An Argument for Targeted Geographic Reallocation of Aid—or some such jargony mouthful, but he refrained. He went for a simple, memorable, concrete title: The Bottom Billion.

As a result of this and strong, plain-language writing, “the bottom billion” is becoming a catchphrase. As Saunders reports, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Kimoon declared 2008 “the year of the bottom billion.” Collier is arguing his case—and promoting his book—across the world, and he has just won the $60,000 Lionel Gelber Award for non-fiction writing. Would Alleviating Extreme Poverty: An Argument for Targeted Geographic Reallocation of Aid have fared so well? It’s highly doubtful.

The Bottom Billion lesson is one that so many companies and organizations could profit from. It can be difficult to trade in the comfort—yes, the comfort—of industry jargon, since it masquerades as refined or “in-the-know” vocabulary. But “masquerades” is the key term: rest on the laurels of jargon, and you won’t be making meaning at all—you won’t be saying anything.

And guess what? People won’t be interested. They won’t be able to be, because there’s nothing to hang onto.

Summoning up the courage to eschew jargon—even when all your competitors use it—and wrestle to say what you mean, in plain language, is a worthwhile challenge. Just ask Paul Collier.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Power of Slow and Spare

Ten years ago in grad school, I had to make an oral presentation to about thirty people. A daunting prospect for me under ordinary circumstances, the endeavor became much more difficult when about fifteen minutes before the presentation, I developed some bizarre reaction to a cough medicine I had taken. I grew shaky and very spacey, but the show had to go on—it was a group thing, and an end-of-the-year-marks-depend-on-this thing.

The minutes I spent up there by the podium were torturous. I laboured to get each of my planned statements out—it felt like I was pushing them though molasses. As a result, I spoke very slowly and emphatically, with lots of pauses (I was summoning up the strength—and attention span—to get to my next line). The elaborate ideas I had meant to articulate got truncated to far shorter, simpler bits.

People clapped when I was done, but I attributed this to a kind reaction to my obvious struggle. I skulked back to my team and got ready to apologize profusely.

There was no need.

According to everyone, I had delivered my most memorable, effective presentation of the year.

Haste Makes Waste

I recalled this odd event when I read Jane Taber’s “Turtle Talk Wins the Race” in the Globe and Mail last weekend (February 23. 2007). Taber delves into the reasons behind Barack Obama’s masterful oratory, calling on several speech experts to help her out. In a nutshell: Obama speaks slowly and makes use of well-timed pauses: “... he chooses his words carefully and deliberately, allowing his audience to savour every syllable, conjunction, vowel and pause.”

Taber’s speech experts advise their clients to slow down and utter no more than 110 to 120 words a minute (as opposed to the 140 to 160 words per minute typically raced through by politicians such as Stephen Harper and Jack Layton). They note that a slow pace lends “gravitas to the message almost regardless to what the message is” and by contrast, that a fast pace “loses people” and almost signals that “you don’t want us to listen closely.”

More Core, Less Bore

Good writing is in many ways like good speaking, and many of the points Taber raises can be applied to writing effective communications. One of the things we try to do with clients when helping them with press releases or communications campaigns is to focus on the core of their message, and strip out the rest.

When you’re excited about something your business is doing—a new initiative or product, for example—it’s tempting to want to include in your press release every one of the 34 reasons it’s so great. And explain each reason in depth. And quote all the people who were involved in the idea. And give background. And context. And related information.

But guess what?

Most people will abandon your press release unless you relinquish your dream of including everything you’d ideally like to say. Our society is time-starved as well as compelled to cram as many sources of information in as possible—we are news grazers, not gourmands.

Once you swallow this, the next part can be fun. It involves isolating your core idea, then coming up the best words in the world to do it justice. Instead of skipping lightly through A to Z, you embrace one letter and make it sing. Chances are, your audience is going to hear—and remember—that simple song much more clearly than the 34 items you originally wanted to cover.

It may feel strange at first—much as my grad school speech felt almost catatonic—but reducing clutter in communications is a golden rule.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Lessons from Orwell: Don’t Gum Up the Works When You Write

There are relatively few works of art, and/or genius, which stand the test of time. George Orwell’s 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, is one such gem. If you haven’t read it, treat yourself; it is a classic example of how a good writer can take any subject and make it interesting. It is also packed with brilliant advice for how to write compellingly.

Orwell wrote the essay because he thought the English language had declined into “slovenliness.” He urged his readers to take corrective action—to fight back against puffy and meaningless phrases and constructions.

For this post, I’ve extracted a few bits from the essay I found the most helpful. At the end of the post, you’ll also find a downloadable PDF containing a list of substitutions for sluggish phrases that’s handy to have kicking around when you edit your writing (or someone else’s).

Identifying the Villains

Orwell was particularly offended by the following enemies of good writing:

• Staleness of imagery and lack of precision: What Orwell called a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence.”
• Dying metaphors: Metaphors that have “lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”
• Verbs turned into phrases: Such as “render inoperative,” “make contact with,” “give grounds for,” “serve the purpose of.”
• A tendency away from concreteness: Orwell was referring here to a fear of just saying what we mean to say and instead dressing a sentence up in fatuous and pretentious language.

A Summary of the Offenses

In this passage from the essay, Orwell summarizes his objections:

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think ....

[But people who write this way show] that they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying.

How to Escape the Trap

Orwell included a helpful little list of questions for the writer interested in communicating meaningfully to ask himself:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
5. Could I have put it more shortly?
6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Cutting Out the Ugly

To see how Orwell’s list of questions can help make a sentence clearer, consider the following:

Before: “It should be noted that the we are not in a position to take into account the employee’s special circumstances for this application.”
After: “We cannot, in this case, consider the employee’s special circumstances.”

Before: “For the purpose of putting into effect the changes, we will hire a contractor in the very near future.”
After: “To implement the changes, we will soon hire a contractor.”

Practice Makes Perfect

Even Orwell admitted that descending into lazy writing is all too easy to do. Today, as in 1946, we are surrounded by overstuffed, pretentious writing that passes for the norm. Norms tend to seep into everything, despite our best intentions.

So don’t despair if you look at your writing and see a few villains rearing their insidious heads. Go back over your piece if there’s still time, and weed out as many as possible. If it’s too late or otherwise impossible to do this, just try to think “Orwell” the next time you sit down to write.

Here’s that list I mentioned: SimplerWays_TR.pdf

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Writing Web Copy that Gets Read

When you’re creating content for the web, your job is to make it easy for visitors to your site to (1) want to read your stuff, and (2) read your stuff.

In other words, content should be both interesting and well presented (i.e., geared to the unique way people absorb textual information on web pages).

Writing Interesting Content

Writing interesting content makes it easy for visitors to want to read your stuff. Interesting content is:

• In plain language, with no pretentious words or marketese
• Relevant to your target audiences (i.e., think about their interests as much as your own)
• Written with flair and personality, using strong, active structure and verbs (see “Knockout verbs” at blogthecat.ca)
• Typo free and grammatically correct

Presenting Content to Best Effect

Every time I write web copy, I remember three percentages I got from Jakob Nielsen:

1. 79% of users scan the page instead of reading word for word
2. Reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper
3. Web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent

The implications of these percentages are huge. To make it easy for visitors to read your stuff:

• Use short sentences
• Break text into short paragraphs—many more than you would use when writing for print
• Rely frequently on bulleted and numbered lists
• Make sure your text comes across in short line lengths (like newspaper columns)—anything longer than three inches is too long
• Scatter subheads liberally throughout each page or entry
• Bold particularly important words or phrases (but don’t overdo it)

I could go on and on, but I won’t. I’m writing for the web, after all.