So where does bad copy come from? Sometimes it’s bad writing. Sometimes it’s a bad brief.

Quite a lot of the time, it’s bad attitude. If whoever is reviewing or signing off the copy is thinking solely about what’s great about the product and/or has very rigid views about how things should or should not be written, the effect on clarity can be severe. And somewhere between the first and the final draft, the copy gets beaten up. It’s a bit like the tree swing diagram, which can be adapted for just about any creative discipline from advertising to software engineering.

Because we can’t draw,  we thought we would have a go at doing a written illustration of what happens to make good business writing go bad. It’s a fictional, highly simplified but not entirely unrealistic example of what we could impolitely call the ‘bullshitification’ process.

Here’s the first draft, which the copywriter thinks pretty much nails it:

CustomerLocate clean

And here are the comments, from an internal executive who we’ll call ‘John Doe’. As you’ll see, John has strong views about the first draft. Too much about benefits, not enough about the product. And a flip tone of voice that just doesn’t convey the gravity of the company’s serious products.

CustomerLocate commented

And the finished article, delivered to a delighted John Doe by a weeping copywriter.

CustomerLocate final

Next time come you across some impenetrable marketing copy, an overlong and self-congratulatory press release or website that makes you wonder why you visited it, chances are it could be because ultimately, the customer is always right.

So first things first. We’d like to thank you for continuing to read our occasional email updates – and for supporting us with your writing commissions over the past decade.

In this post, we’re celebrating our great age and sharing with you our journey from pedants to pragmatists. And we’re offering our popular Words that Work training sessions again.

So please read on. And do get in touch if you’d like to discuss writing with us.

Contents

10 years of Plain Text
From pedants to pragmatists
Words That Work

When Paul Waddington and Paul Nero left the corporate world behind in 2001, we were determined to help organizations eliminate gobbledegook. As you’ll read in the story of our journey from pedants to pragmatists, below, we now realise that aim was somewhat ambitious. Perhaps even wrongheaded. But we had broader goals too. We wanted to lift the burden of written communications from executives, so they could concentrate on their day jobs. We wanted to bring clarity to previously opaque copy. And we wanted to make the process of producing written communications an enjoyable one for our clients. In short, we wanted to be nice people to deal with. Ten years on, those aims haven’t changed.

Since then, we’ve had the pleasure of working with some wonderful people in some fantastic organizations. We’ve built strong relationships with our clients, many of whom have taken us with them when they’ve moved jobs. That always gives us a little buzz.

We’ve also enjoyed developing the copywriting careers of some fine business writers. Some have moved on to other jobs, in advertising agencies or client organizations. Some remain with us to this day. To those people too, we say thank you. Excellent copywriters are not easy to come by. We’re honoured that you choose to work with Plain Text.

So to everyone who has played a part in the Plain Text story over the past decade, our thanks and appreciation. Here’s to the next ten years.

How things change. When Plain Text opened its doors to business in 2001, we must admit we were sometimes pedantic. Pedantry gave us pleasure. A badge we wore with pride. We were honoured to be upholders of the Queen’s English and we hated business speak.

Then along came the book Eats Shoots and Leaves, in which author Lynn Truss wrote about the grocer’s apostrophe; the grocers’ apostrophes, or the apostrophes of grocers, depending on plurality and ownership. Reading it, we realised that while there are plenty of enthusiastic pedants out there, our clients, largely, weren’t among them.

What they cared most about, we came to understand, is whether or not writing makes an impact. Not whether there are a few split infinitives, a bit of jargon, or Capitalization The Copywriters Don’t Like. If it reads well, is ‘on brand’ and fires up your audience, it’s doing its job.

So please forgive us if we’ve ever tried to translate your company’s way of speaking. We realised sharpish that our job is not to change copy to some grammatical ideal, but to make it sell: an idea, a product, a point of view.

And after all, language isn’t fixed — a fact we noted evades the Queens English Society. We don’t want to be the Canutes holding back its development. We’re delighted that ‘innit’ is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Nor is there a single, correct, ‘plain’ way of speaking, as we opined when the Plain English Society did its annual naming and shaming exercise last year. If writing resonates with its audience, that’s fine. Sometimes – sorry, pedants – ‘management-speak’ is fine: it’s what managers want to read.

Satirist Craig Brown wrote beautifully about the Society of Pedants and the problematic issue of what they should (or more accurately “it should”) be called. Ten years on, it still makes us smile.

As copy pragmatists, we understand that people don’t want to be lectured about the correct use of apostrophes, how to spot a gerund or whether to capitalise a bullet point. So our Words That Work writing training sessions are fun as well as informative. In less than 90 minutes, we’ll arrange for the Incredible Hulk, deceased romantic author Barbara Cartland and the Pope to appear in your offices in quick succession.

When you book a Words That Work session, you’ll gain a fresh perspective on ‘How writing can help you and your business to get what you want’.

It’s free for Plain Text clients and contacts. And it’s suitable for anyone who writes anything that needs to have an impact: emails, presentations, tweets, blogs, web pages, thought leadership.

If you’re interested, we can handle between 4 and 20 people per session. To book, get in touch via our contacts page.

Ts and Cs – First come, first served, subject to availability; we will only charge travel expenses for seminars held outside Great Britain.

“I was taught at school that it’s not good grammar.” “My boss says it’s wrong.” “It’s too informal.” Stuff like that. So several times each year, we dial up our emotional intelligence settings to 11 and explain that it’s not really wrong, it helps make copy nice and punchy… but of course style is very personal and we can of course leave it out if that’s what you would prefer.

But we’ve been trading for ten years now. We’ve had enough. This is where we drop the emotional intelligence and get mediaeval on the question. (Which is quite appropriate as people have been starting sentences with And for centuries).

Here is our cut-and-paste response, which will henceforth be delivered without preamble to anyone who asks ever again.

Starting sentences with And But and So is just fine. Full stop. Period.

But don’t just take our word for it. How about the word of God? It’s good enough for Him. More sentences in the Bible begin with ‘And’ than any other word. And of course the King James edition begins with the sentence: “And in the beginning…”

Other towering figures have no problem starting sentences with conjunctions either. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (edited by Sir Ernest Gowers) says:

“That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with and is a faintly lingering SUPERSTITION. The OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them.”

Fowler’s applies the same rule to ‘but’.

In his popular writer’s handbook Troublesome Words, author Bill Bryson concurs, saying:

“The belief that and should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that’s all there is to it.”

But why do it? So you can make copy active and lively. Advertisers have been at it for years. Check out these 1950s advertisements touting the wonders of gas appliances.

It’s all very well for cheesy old gas advertisements, I hear you say, but surely it has no place in proper businesslike writing? Several large and very proper corporations, together with some very proper business publications, would beg to disagree.

Economist articles are full of sentence-leading ‘Ands’ and ‘Buts’. There are several in this randomly selected Charlemagne piece.

A quick ferret around FT.com will soon turn one up (its paywall makes direct linking irrelevant for the unregistered).

Two minutes minutes fossicking around on the website of blue-chip consultancy PwC (disclosure: not a Plain Text client – yet) will quickly reveal a few too.

And there are many more. Everyone’s doing it.

So in sum: if it’s the style you don’t like, then by all means shove ‘And’ But’ and ‘So’ somewhere else in a sentence. But don’t worry that it’s the wrong thing to do. God, Sir Ernest Gowers, Bill Bryson and some of the smartest publications and corporations in the world are all totally cool about it.

As in years past, hapless organisations are made to stand in the naughty corner for their terrible crimes against language. This year it’s the Foreign & Commonwealth office’s turn to wear the dunce’s cap, with this somewhat verbose job ad copy:

“Maintenance and development of the UK narrative around FCO and its value proposition, using insights from research and evaluation as well as knowledge of the evolving FCO strategy to inform resonant messaging.”

Showing instant remorse in the face of its public beasting, the FCO admitted that what it really meant was:

“Work out better ways of telling people what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office does.”

Thing is, do we all really want to live in a world that’s as plain as this? ‘Plain’, to me, means clear to its audience. Sure, there are times when universal clarity of meaning is the primary concern. Public notices or instruction manuals for nuclear warheads, for example.

There’s a risk, though, that by boiling everything down to the plainest common denominator, we make language dull.

This all may sound a bit rich coming from the co-founder of ‘Plain’ Text. But we’ve evolved a bit from our original ‘all jargon is bad’ standpoint. We accept that language is dynamic and some of its rules are there to be broken. Most importantly, in our business of commercial writing, we know that different readers respond to different styles. What’s barely comprehensible to one person may be music to the ears of another, as I’m reminded when reading high-octane erudition in the London Review of Books .

Anyone in the communications business would know exactly what the FCO wanted with its job ad (although personally I’d have added a comma after ’strategy’). Does it really matter that the Plain English campaign has a problem with it? Would the FCO attract better candidates with its ‘Janet and John’ version?

It’s just boring to reduce language to its simplest possible form. Being interesting is a better way to stand out. And that means tailoring your words to your audience, not to everybody.

It’s a near 2,000-page all-copy ad by ad guru David Ogilvy selling the skills of his agency and I’d wager that all the wisdom still applies. As a writer it’s good to hear affirmation that people read long copy (”the more you tell, the more you sell”) and although one of Copyranter’s commenters disagrees I think that’s still the case today.

The ad is also a great example of thought leadership – letting your wisdom and insight drive business rather than battering people over the head with sales messages.

Not sure what Ogilvy would think of one his agency’s recent copy-heavy efforts, though, a full-page press ad that’s part of the ‘new logistics’ campaign for UPS. I took a pic of its closing paras at the time, a little dumbfounded by the verbosity.

Was I missing something or is it a little too abstract?

It was timely, then, to hear today from one of our clients Ian Wolter, CEO of HB Human Capital, one of Dragon’s Den star James Caan’s investments. He emailed to say that he’d just spoken to a successful London company owner who, on the strength of the HBHC proposition, had called to see whether Ian wanted to buy his business. Ian had been very pleased with our copy – but hadn’t expected his website to deliver such direct results.

Part of this story is about the power of a good brief. Ian gave such a powerful, single-minded and impassioned account of HBHC that it would have been almost impossible not to reflect it in words. But it’s good to know that a strong story delivered on a simple website in under 250 words can create what could be the first of many lucrative contacts.

“Apple has discovered something that other companies have long forgotten, if they ever knew: language can also be beautiful and easy to use. Words can be fun to read. They can look elegant. They can make you laugh.”

Is this the beginning of a bright new dawn for business writing, in which everyone follows Apple to the broad sunlit uplands of clarity? Hardly, suggests Kellaway, going on to compare Apple’s bright words with Microsoft’s stodgy copy:

“It is one of the great mysteries of capitalism that there is no invisible hand that joins good language and good profits. If anything, the hand pushes the two apart”

It’s a fair observation. Plenty of successful firms write drivel. But would they be more successful if they didn’t? Take the first para of Microsoft’s press release announcing the Windows Phone 7:

“The goal for Microsoft’s latest smartphone is an ambitious one: to deliver a phone that truly integrates the things people really want to do, puts those things right in front of them, and either lets them get finished quickly or immerses them in the experience they were seeking.”

Huh? A gadget that lets me get finished with the things I really want to do right in front of me? C’mon guys, you’re up against the BlackBerry and the iPhone here! Get clarity!

Good copy may not correlate directly with profitability. But it surely has an impact on the way people feel about a company or a brand. As the queues of crazed fans at every new launch attest, people love Apple. Would people love Microsoft a little bit more – or even a little bit – if it spoke a language they could relate to?

Whilst we’re a copywriting agency, our clients don’t always want just the words. Sometimes they need us to help deliver them in the most compelling and appropriate way possible: and not everyone has easy access to reliable design, print or audio-visual capability. So this time we feature two projects in which we worked with our partners to produce short films; and a glossy report.

Read on – and please get in touch if you’d like to discuss writing with us. And of course feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might find it of interest.

Contents
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• Condensing a conference: Merryck & Co
• Making a compelling argument in double-quick time: Wherry Housing Association
• Introducing Brave
• And presenting the new-look Plain Text website

Condensing a conference: Merryck & Co
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How do you best capture the many thousands of often important words exchanged in a two-day conference? CEO-mentoring organisation Merryck & Co invited Plain Text to do just this at its Business Leaders’ Forum at Bagshot in May.

Together with our AV partner SAV Media, we worked with the speakers to summarise their themes in a series of short films called ‘The five-minute mentor’. These give delegates and Merryck clients a lively and interesting reminder of the main points made at the conference – more effective than pages of PowerPoint handouts! We’ll post links to the pieces when they are published.

Making a compelling argument in double-quick time: Wherry Housing Association
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Sometimes you only have a short window of time in which to make your point. For Wherry Housing Association, an upcoming conference provided the perfect platform to promote a radical new way of financing the ‘greening up’ of social housing. Having just been instrumental in transforming an old, fuel-guzzling house into a state-of-the art ecohome, Wherry had a great case study that would help to make its argument. The challenge was to create a report that told the story in just the right way: enough detail to prove the case, but delivered in a way that would resonate with a broad audience.

Referred to Plain Text by our client the Energy Saving Trust, Wherry knew we understood the environmental issues and arguments involved. Marshalling a great deal of technical background information and working with our contact Mark Jones and design partner Brave (see below), we delivered an accessible, attractive 16-page printed report on deadline. The result, Mark assures us, was “very well received at the conference and generated a great deal of interest”.

Take a look at the report, ‘Greening the Box‘.

Introducing Brave
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For the Wherry project we worked with our design partner Brave, a new branding and design agency whose fast, accurate and diligent work ensured our client had their printed report well in time for their conference.

So if you need the finished, artfully designed article instead of just the copywriting, or need a second opinion or a quote on design, please get in touch.

Browse Brave’s portfolio to see more examples of their work.

And presenting the new-look Plain Text website
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And finally – we’ve recently dragged the Plain Text website into the 21st century. From your point of view, the main difference is that we blog, occasionally, with language- and copywriting-related stuff that piques our interest. You can subscribe via RSS (bottom right of the page) if you wish. We don’t tweet yet, but it’s on the todo list, perhaps.

Contact Plain Text
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If you have questions or would like to discuss a writing project, please get in touch.

And this time we’re offering free copies of Paul Waddington’s book ‘Shades of Green’ to anyone who can correctly answer two tricky green questions.

Read on – and please get in touch if you’d like to discuss writing with us. And of course feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might find it of interest.

Contents:
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* Transforming a Hay Group website
* A 100-word email challenge from the Energy Saving Trust
* What Plain Text does in its spare time #2: Exeter FM
* Answer a tricky green question and win a book

Transforming a Hay Group website
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Hay Group’s ‘transforming learning’ website is the place where this global management consulting firm sells its training tools and programs direct to businesses. The writing challenge was to create compelling, benefit-led copy that matched a refreshed site design – and fitted the firm’s new brand voice. We helped Hay Group to develop templates for different types of pages and then re-wrote the words.

In commenting on the project, Hay Group product design consultant Sam Guise also illustrates one of the reasons why outsourcing writing is sometimes necessary. “In an ideal world, every company would do its own writing. But writing is always part of a bigger project – and you have to deliver the whole project, not just the words. Working with Plain Text took the pressure off. They ‘got’ what we were about really quickly and gave us a voice we were comfortable with. And they produced all the content we needed elegantly, on budget and on time. Plain Text were easy to work with, relaxed about changes, happy to give advice and always reliable.”

Take a look at the new website.

A 100-word email challenge from the Energy Saving Trust
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We love writing longer, more involved pieces, like the white paper featured in our last email update. But we like a brevity challenge too. So a recent email from the Energy Saving Trust’s transport division was just the ticket: promote and prove the benefits of ’smart driving’ to local authorities in 100 words. We were proud to have the final email – which packs costs, savings, benefits, proof points, a headline, two subheads and a call to action into precisely 106 words – called ‘brilliant’ by our client. Read the smarter driving email.

What Plain Text does in its spare time #2: Exeter FM
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Plain Text’s Paul Nero doesn’t just write – he hones his skills with broadcasting too, every weekend on radio station Exeter FM. Paul presents the Sunday breakfast show, a mix of music, news and conversation that includes the station’s main incisive interview of the week.

Paul has been broadcasting since the age of 15 – and in the intervening decades, he’s nearly got the hang of it. His guests have included stars of major theatre production, cabinet ministers and influential businesspeople, as well as ordinary people who have something to say. Add to Paul’s listening figures by tuning in online on Sundays from 7.00 to 11.00 a.m. — or check out his attractive station photos.

Answer a tricky green question and win a book
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Paul Waddington’s third book ‘Shades of Green‘  is an A-Z guide which gives an informal ‘green rating’ to the things we do — from air travel to wine — presenting options from ‘deep green’ to ‘not even a little bit green’. While backpacking might clearly be the greenest holiday and taking a private jet to a desert golf resort unarguably the least green, some of the ’shades’ are not always what you might think. We’ve got a few copies to give away to the first correct answers to these two questions:

1) Which is more eco-friendly – a) washing up by hand b) using a dishwasher?
2) What uses more energy a) organic chicken b) intensively farmed chicken?

Email your answers via our contacts page.

Contact Plain Text
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If you have questions or would like to discuss a writing project, please get in touch.