Breaking the rules, talking to yourself and killing your darlings
“How do you write so clearly?” somebody asked me recently.
Clearly, me? Do I?
Well, yes, I suppose I do, but it’s not because I’ve got some secret that nobody else has access to. I didn’t climb a mountain and meet a copywriting sadhu.
I just follow some simple rules. Or, in some cases, break them.
1. Read it out loud
If there’s one tip you should remember of the five, this is it.
Often, when we write, the words remain lifeless on the page – and we wonder why.
Wonder no more.
Scriptwriters know all about this. Words, phrases, entire passages that they thought were flowing, sonorous and effective, suddenly fall apart when spoken out loud by actors.
What worked on the page simply doesn’t work when spoken.
Now it’s not that people all read out loud when they read. Or even silently, moving their lips – what linguists call ‘subvocalisation’.
But a lot of people hear voices in their head (nice ones, I mean).
So read it out loud. I promise you, you’ll be surprised. As soon as you start doing it, you’ll see what doesn’t make sense.
As a Telegraph journalist might have done when he wrote the following phrase a couple of months ago:
Mr Clegg will leave his own conference early to deputise for Mr Cameron, whose wife Samantha is due to give birth next month, at a United Nations meeting in New York.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I read that, I immediately had visions of of Sam Cam with her feet in stirrups in front of the UN General Assembly.
See what I mean? Read it aloud, and you’ll avoid problems of delivery.
2. Break it up
Most people skim, and pick up the sense of the copy. So make it easy for them.
Break up your text with headings, bullets, bold and underline. Summarise the main points in boxes. Repeat your message. Repeat your call to action.
Include.
Enough.
White.
Space.
…so that copy can ‘breathe’ and not overwhelm the reader.
Break up ideas into paragraphs. Break up the paragraphs into sentences, and vary the length of the sentences. Some short. Some much longer, just for variety, and so that it all flows better.
Writing has a rhythm. So learn to dance with it.
3. Break the rules
How many times have you heard that a sentence can’t finish with a preposition?
You know what? Yes, it can.
Would you say products in which we specialise or products we specialise in?
Now you know that the first version is probably more correct. And you’re right – it is.
But it sounds stilted, formal and pedantic. Are you any of those things? Do you think your target market would respond to somebody who was ?
Of course not.
So be yourself, and write how you talk. And if that means breaking ‘rules’ (never begin a sentence with and, never use contractions, don’t use informal words or slang, don’t split an infinitive) then go ahead.
Break. And watch the magic.
4. Kill your darlings
This is a phrase from classic writing guide The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
Your darlings are those phrases you’ve laboured over lovingly. You’ve crafted them, tweaked them, reworked them, polished them. You’ve watched them grow and develop, and are justifiably proud of them.
You’ve obeyed rule number 1 (read them aloud) and you’re still pleased with them.
Just a little too pleased, in fact. Every time you read them, you smile to yourself. And that’s an early warning sign.
It could be a clever pun. Or a particularly long, obscure or high-flown word. Maybe it’s humorous alliteration or words that mirror each other. Perhaps it’s a clever-clever tagline, or a Latin-inspired name that hides its meaning to all but the most over-educated.
Kill it. Before it kills your business.
Simple language works best. Because it’s simple, direct, and doesn’t get in the way – like the best newsreaders, whose sober dress sense doesn’t detract from what they’re saying.
5. Plan, write. In that order.
Copy is not like a letter. You don’t sit down at a blank sheet of paper and pour your heart out as you would to your granny or your dear old Aunt Joan who’s sent you a fiver for your birthday.
Copy should be structured, focused and concise. It should have a clear aim, and tell a simple story.
And throwing words on the page won’t achieve that.
So plan first. You can use MindMaps or bullet points, or just scribbles on a piece of scrap paper.
If you don’t know how to begin, then start at the end. Why are you writing this? You want somebody to buy? To make an appointment? To call? To set up a demo?
Fine. That’s the end. Now work backwards. What’s the thing that will clinch that decision? Good. That’s your killer argument.
Now work back to the detail – not too much, but enough to build to the killer argument.
Now back a step to the intro paragraph. Now back a step to the headline.
And you’re done.
Plan it forward. Plan it backwards. But whatever you do, plan it.
Then write. It’s the only way it works.
Find out more:
Words of wisdom. Pleased with what you’ve written? Too pleased? Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style will help you kill those darlings.
I could have taken umbrage, but I didn’t. What she was really getting at is that her mind functions very differently to mine. Her spelling is often patchy, but she has a wonderful sense of colour and shape. She’s hopeless with foreign languages, but has a keen ear for English accents.
Her comment came after I’d mentioned that for me, days had colours. Monday is green, Tuesday is blue, Wednesday is orange, and so on.
Before you get worried, I don’t taste numbers or smell words or feel images. I just do the day/colour thing. That’s all.
I know what you’re thinking (maybe)
I thought about that episode again just recently when I watched Temple Grandin’s talk called The world needs all kinds of minds at TED 2010.
Grandin herself thinks in pictures, and says it took her a long time before she realised that others perceived the world in a very different way.
She identifies three groups, and gives examples of what professions they’re best suited to:
Visual thinkers, who make good graphic designers, photographers and creators.
Pattern thinkers, who often go on to become programmers and mathematicians.
Verbal thinkers, who want to know everything about everything, and make good journalists or actors.
Minds, audiences, messages
So how does all of this relate to your sales and marketing messages? The mailshots you send, the websites you put up, the brochures you write?
Well, it means that you need to really think about your audience.
And often, we don’t. We assume they’re visual, when actually they’re verbal. Or that they see patterns, when in fact, they see the whole picture. Or that they’re details people, like we are – but really, they’re not.
So what can you do to get around it? Well why not:
Use pictures and words. Combine strong graphics that send out a clear, positive message, backed up by enough detail to satisfy the curious.
Summarise and give detail. If you use headings and bullets, skimmers can skim. And details-focused people can read the bits in between.
Offer them a choice.Looking for technical details? Step this way, sir. Want a marketing overview? Second on the left, madam. If you structure your copy so people can branch off, you’ll keep all the minds happy.
And always remember, that what you think is obvious may not be that obvious. As sure as night follows day.
And as sure as Saturday is red (but then, you knew that, didn’t you?).
It’s been a while since I let pictures take the place of words, so here we go again with Copycam.
It’s my occasional series on copy that’s caught my eye and addled my brain, captured with my trusty Nokia (still in my Top 40, by the way).
First up is this, which I saw at Marks & Spencer:
Found the mistake? Or should I say mistakes?
First the glaring one: the apostrophe.
It’s such a tiny little thing, but it causes endless confusion. The general rule is that it’s before the s if the word is singular, but after the s if it’s plural. So that gives us:
The boy’s coat.
The boys’ coats.
So far so good. The trouble arises when that boy grows up to become a man and is looking for something to wear in the evening.
Irregular plurals are treated just like the singular. So you get:
The man’s coat.
The men’s coats.
So hats off (evening hats, of course) to M&S for effort. They got the general rule right, but in this specific instance, it’s wrong. And what’s more, wrong in 600 stores up and down the land. Oops.
Still, at least they tried. Unlike Sainsbury’s, who opted for the maxim if in doubt, leave it out. This time, we’re talking 500 stores throughout the UK.
It’s only an apostrophe, you might say. Does it really matter?
Well yes and no.
The meaning is clear, but the mistake still niggles. Small things suggest bigger things: if organisations don’t care about apostrophes, what else flies under their radar?
It may not even be a conscious thought, but it affects people’s perceptions. And somebody somewhere will notice (especially here in Cambridge, where every other person you bump into has a PhD.)
It’s an image thing. It’s a brand thing. It’s an attention-to-detail thing.
And it’s something that’s worth getting right.
Speaking of which, what else is wrong with the M&S example? Well first, eveningwear isn’t one word – it’s two. Whoever wrote it was thrown off-track by menswear, which (a) is one word and (b) doesn’t have an apostrophe.
And the last thing that’s wrong isn’t related to grammar, spelling or punctuation. It’s the small print, which reads:
* Applies to products with mens’ eveningwear stickers only. Excludes cufflinks. Savings are applied to total price when items are purchased individually. Items in this promotion cannot be refunded or exchanged individually. All items must be refunded or exchanged together in order for a refund or exchange to be processed although you may be entitled to a refund on individual items in accordance with your legal rights.
Come again? Here’s what I got from this mumbo jumbo:
You have to buy these items individually to qualify.
But if you do, you can’t refund/exchange them.
Even if you don’t qualify for a refund/exchange, you probably do under law.
Oh dear. I feel a little bit grubby after reading that. I think I’ll head for the gents (note: no apostrophe) to freshen up.
Don’t quote me on that
If apostrophes bamboozle us, then quotation marks (also known as inverted commas) are double trouble. And recently, they’ve been proliferating.
Again, the rule is simple. Quotation marks go around something that somebody actually said. It’s a quote (the clue’s in the name).
Here’s an example:
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
And another:
“I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Easy, isn’t it?
And yet quotation marks are everywhere these days, often with entirely unintended consequences.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this in the window of a shop in Cambridge:
Really? Who said that?
The answer, of course, is nobody. The quotation marks are being used for emphasis – which is not what they’re intended for. For emphasis, we have bold, underline, italic or a combination of all three. Plus CAPITALS, colours and fonts.
There’s no shortage of choice. Go ahead – knock yourself out. But save quotation marks for quotes.
It could have been worse.
Quotation marks are often used with sniper-like precision to home in on one particular word or phrase, which immediately makes you think of the opposite.
“Now open!”
So it’s not really open? It’s a joke? The door sticks? It’s not open when you think it is? It’s open but the entrance is elsewhere?
The possibilities are endless, but all undermine the intended meaning. And this insincere, does-it/doesn’t-it quote is everywhere nowadays. Somebody’s even set up a website called The Blog of Unnecessary Quotes.
Or to give it its proper title, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotes. Hilarious examples include:
We value “you” as our special patient
“Deal” of the week
“Wet” paint
“Special” Mongolian beef $5.95
Check it out, and you’ll never, ever use quotation marks again without asking yourself whether you really need them. I “promise”.
The wheel of fortune
To add insult to injury, the bicycle shop was closed.
It was 3pm on a Thursday afternoon, but the lights were off and the door locked. I checked the opening hours, and they were indeed supposed to be open. But instead, they were “open” (i.e. closed).
Outside, several prospective customers peered into the gloom, saw the sign, and looked puzzled.
So here we are. 2009. A bright, shiny new year to play with. Kick the tyres, walk around, get on in.
Let’s take it for a ride.
And on the way, we can chat about New Year’s resolutions. Oh you haven’t made any?
Well how about this? Tell it like it is. Write like you talk. Say what you mean. And mean what you say.
In a year that’s likely to see credit crunched even harder, more businesses going to the wall, and belts tightened even tighter, telling it like it is might give you the edge over the competition.
It’s not that hard. Really.
Froth to go
Doublespeak is everywhere. And even the coolest, funkiest, hippest companies are not exempt.
A while back, I talked about Starbucks wasting 23m litres of water every day. And their response was as insubstantial as their cappuccinos:
“We recognise the opportunity exists to reduce our total water usage. Starbucks’ challenge is to balance water conservation with the need for customer safety.”
Well they’ve done it again. The story was simple: in 2009, they said, their sales would fall.
Add an extra shot of gobbledygook to that, and some sugar-free spin, and you’ve got:
“Any resulting decreases in customer traffic or average value per transaction will negatively impact the company’s financial performance as reduced revenues result in sales de-leveraging which creates downward pressure on margins.”
So let’s précis that. Sales. Will. Fall.
Never mind the quality – feel the width
Why do we do it? And yes, at times, we all do it – hide behind grand-sounding phrases, and double-decker words.
The credit crunch is a perfect example. ‘Collateralised debt’ is simply debt that nobody understands or can track back to the source. ‘Highly leveraged’ means in debt – lots of it. And ‘highly geared’ doesn’t mean you have a BlackBerry and an iPhone.
It just means that you’re in debt. Lots of it.
Often, we use doublespeak to hide mistakes. In June 2000, the Millennium Bridge opened in London. The futuristic metal footbridge linked Tate Modern, on the south side, with St Paul’s, on the north.
Within hours, it was closed. It wobbled – badly.
Eight years later, a study carried out by Bristol University showed that the problem was caused by:
“the presence of lateral bridge motion without changing the pedestrian walking frequency and applying the same foot placement strategy to maintain balance”.
Translation: it wobbled.
The designers got it wrong. They made a mistake – but they’re passing it off on the pedestrians whose ‘foot placement strategy’ was at fault. Well that’s all right, then.
Doublespeak makes a bad problem worse. You get something wrong, then you try to talk your way out of it. And your customer, your friend, your wife, your husband, the person whose car you’ve just pranged – all of them will think less of you because of it.
Next time you make a mistake, try this approach:
I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I’ll try better next time.
(It works, really. I should know.)
Plain talking – and that means plain writing, too – sends an immediate signal to the person you’re talking to: you can trust me.
I’ve just been reading a blog post by one of my favourite bloggers.
He’s witty, intelligent and often makes me laugh out loud. His writes things I can’t find anywhere else (the Holy Grail of blogs) which is why he’s always on my must-read list.
And one of the things I really like is that his spelling is impeccable. Or at least, it used to be. Because his latest post contains a glaring error.
Homo sapien.
It brought me to a juddering halt. In my mind’s ear, I could hear Mr Watson drumming his thin, bony fingers on the blackboard.
“Sapien, Mr Walsh?” he’d intone. “Sapien? Be so kind as to tell the class what part of speech that is.”
Just thinking about it sends a chill down my spine.
And more so because sapien isn’t any part of speech. It’s just a common-or-garden mistake. I can see how he got there, though. If homo sapiens means ‘men’, then you just knock off the ‘s’ to mean ‘man’, right?
If only life were that simple.
This blogger used the Latin term because he wanted to appear just a touch cleverer, more educated and…more superior?
It didn’t work.
[Note for Latin lovers - or even lovers of Latin: homo sapiens is singular; the plural, never used, would be homines sapientes. Thanks, Mr Watson.]
2. Make fun of people (unless it’s yourself)
Oh dear. Hell’s Pizza has done it again.
I’ve written about the New Zealand pizza chain before. They like a walk on the wild side when it comes to marketing.
They’re the ones that created a pizza called ‘Lust’ that shipped with a free condom. And they ran an advert with Hitler with his arm outstretched with the line ‘It is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell’. (Jewish groups were outraged and the ad was withdrawn.)
Well last week, they crossed the line again.
This time, it was a Halloween promotion that had three dancing skeletons: Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to climb Everest), the actor Heath Ledger, and the Queen Mother.
Hillary’s family said it was “in very poor taste.” (The campaign, not the pizza, you understand.) It too has been withdrawn.
Rachael Allison, Hell’s Pizza marketing director said the company was known for its controversial advertising, and that a lot of people loved it. She went on to say:
“Interpretation of this is always up to individuals and we are always mindful of that and always keep an eye on our tone of voice and try to keep on top of that.”
A little too much sauce, I think.
3. Assume that technology works
Your website’s got an e-commerce function so you never have to talk to people. It just runs itself, right?
Wrong.
I recently (re)discovered this when I tried to buy a USB pen drive. I dropped it into the basket, then clicked ‘Next’ to enter my details. Then ‘Next’ to go to the payment screen. I filled in my card details, and hovered over the ‘Pay’ button.
And that’s when the little seed of doubt sprouted into a green shoot and pushed through the soil.
Had I ordered the 2GB or the 4GB drive? I was pretty sure it was the 4GB one. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t go back, forward, or anywhere else. I couldn’t view the basket. It was ‘Pay’ or nothing else.
So I opened another browser, brought up the website again, found the contact number, phoned them up, got them to pull up the (pending) order and check that it was 4GB. It was, so I clicked ‘Pay’.
Not an example of technology at its best.
It’s also important to remember that technology is logical – ruthlessly logical. The sort of ruthless logic that caused AOL and Google to blacklist the northern English town of Scunthorpe as an obscene term (think about it).
The sort of logic that meant Google Alerts I set up a few months ago never reached me. Why? Because they were blocked by the Google’s Gmail spam filter.
The bottom line is this: technology is only as clever as the people who design it (not to mention the people who use it).
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