* Editorial
* White papers! Huh! What are they good for?
* Another gratuitous cycling reference
* Language miscellany

Editorial
———

It’s been a while since the last Plain Text Gazette — over a year, in fact. Does this make us the most relaxed email newsletter on the web? We hope so. Amongst the babble of blogs, podcasts, RSS headlines and spam, we’d like to think that this newsletter’s Zen infrequency remains part of its charm. It’s not just about easing the pressure on your groaning inboxes, though: we’ve been busy too, doing Plain Text stuff and writing books. Paul Waddington’s most recent, ’21st-Century Smallholder: How to get back to the land without leaving home’ came out in May this year. If you want to know stuff like whether you’ll be arrested for keeping pigs in your back garden, take a look.

In this issue we discuss less serious topics. We take a look at corporate white papers, mainly in response to our own profound unwillingness to read any of them. There’s a gratuitous cycling reference (which is about writing, not bicycles, for those indifferent to this pursuit) and then we include a miscellany of writing-related stuff that has amused or horrified us on the web of late.

Enjoy this issue.

The Editors

White papers! Huh! What are they good for?
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Absolutely nothing, say it again… It’s always nice to remember Edwin Starr, whose hit War! is being abused here (and who once flagged down my car in west London and gave me his phone number, but that’s another story). Although Edwin’s life was cut short, at least he is unlikely to have had to spend any of reading a corporate white paper. (Or whitepaper, depending on your preference). Now it might be harsh to suggest that these documents are a complete waste of time. Some of you may even have just finished lovingly buffing a meisterwerk none of whose many thousand words are superfluous and which enlightens, entertains and enriches the reader and–of course, because this is the purpose of all things in business–ultimately contributes to shareholder value.

But if you have, I suspect you’re in the minority. Few corporate white papers do any of the above. I have three problems with them.

1) Dishonesty. Many white papers are not white papers. If it’s just going to tell you that ShinyNeoTek’s * Command Resource Architecture Planning Solution TM is cool, and that you should buy it (sorry, ‘partner with the vendor’) straight away, then it’s a brochure. But almost certainly without the nice pictures and snappier copy that would otherwise have made it almost readable.

2) Cruelly subverted expectations. A ‘white paper’ was originally a statement to parliament of government policy; and commercial documents so named thus carry a certain residual gravitas. Until you read them. What you hoped might have been a trenchant exposition of, say, European energy policy in relation to low-carbon technologies turns out to be no more revealing than something you could have thrown together yourself with a few spare hours, a broadband connection and a confident writing style.

3) Tedium. Just because it’s 3,000 words long doesn’t mean it has to be boring. In fact it needs to be really, really interesting in order to keep the reader riveted for the 10+ minutes it’ll take them to wade through it. All the usual business writing rules apply to white papers too.

None of this is to suggest that businesses should never write white papers. They just need to make sure the documents are honest, informative and interesting.

Here are some of the questions that Plain Text bears in mind when the task of writing a white paper looms:

* Does the subject need a white paper? Is it sufficiently complex, multi-faceted and interesting to merit exposition in a lengthy document?
* Will the paper say something new? Or are you simply rehashing common industry knowledge?
* Will it be useful? Will it make your reader go ‘Aha!’? Or ‘Uh?’, followed by ‘Zzzzzzz’
* Will it be interesting? Is it going to tell a story?
* What will it do for your company? Will it help you to sell stuff? Boost your reputation? Get you in the press?

Positive answers to these can make a white paper worth reading. But I still think they need a different name. I just can’t think of one in London’s current 32c heat. Just ‘paper’? Too academic. Or maybe ‘think piece’? Too ghastly. Any ideas gratefully received.

* It’s a dangerous business thinking up company names. Whilst writing this newsletter I thought ‘Ubiquitech’ would be a good made-up name. Imagine my surprise in finding not only that it existed, but that it sells–wait for it–‘Tomorrow’s Solutions Today’.

Another gratuitous cycling reference
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

I make no apology for returning to a personal favourite subject, after eulogising retro cycling brands at various points in Gazette 11. It’s just that these people seem particularly skilled in the art of using language to make their customers slaver. Take Rapha, purveyor of ludicrously expensive retro cycling clothing. They supplement a tasteful website with stories that polish the mystical aura of heroic suffering that surrounds road cycling. All of which cleverly leads hapless victims like me to think cool thoughts about their brand. An illustration, if one were needed, that good writing sells, particularly when you know what makes your audience tick.

Language miscellany
- – - – - – - – - -

In the aeon since the last Plain Text Gazette, we’ve been gathering the odd bit of stuff loosely relating to business writing that has popped up on the web. You may have seen some or all of these, so there’s some handy summaries to save you the trouble of visiting if they’re not of interest.

PowerPoint suicide note — it was surely only a matter of time before someone did this delightful if rather macabre satire, so hats off to The Onion. We’re a bit disappointed that Ron neglected to include an agenda slide, essential to any successful presentation in our view. Guess he wasn’t thinking straight.

Constructed languages — if you’re a language nerd with a lot of time to waste, or just someone who always likes to be amazed at the amount of time others have to waste, this directory of constructed languages reveals fearsome depths of nerdery. That there are primers on two different variants of Elvish shouldn’t surprise, but it somehow does.

London Underground anagram map — which despite having been removed from parts of the web by humourless lawyers, still seems to be here. Worth the detour, as they say in the Michelin guide.

Council mis-spelling — proof, if any were needed, of the British national decline in literacy which is making professional writers so essential to modern life.

And finally, it is disappointing to learn that the football (soccer) club representing two Welsh towns has changed its name to ‘The New Saints’ after having spent eight years as the first team to be named after its sponsor. The (former) sponsor’s name? Plain Text couldn’t have made it up: Total Network Solutions:

That’s it for this issue. As always, your comments, suggestions and rants are welcome.

Plain Text

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Contents
——–

* Editorial
* Blogs and business writing
* Powerpoint: why?
* Words we hate: and another one

Editorial
———

It seems that our rant about straplines in the last Plain Text Gazette has had little effect. In the recent UK general election the two main parties had a battle of the straplines (or slogans, as I guess they should be called in politics) in which the only winner was irony. One assumes the ruling Labour Party chose “Forward not back” because any further moves to the right would be impossible; and to the left, unconscionable. And given the ghoulish mien and hardline stance of its leader, the Conservatives’ “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” made many people think “God, I hope not — I could get five years, minimum!”

Thinking nicer thoughts, late last year the British Council polled 40,000 people in 12 countries to ask them what were the most beautiful words in the English language. Allegedly, the top five of a ridiculously twee list were: mother, passion, smile, love and eternity. Nice concepts, but a credible list of beautiful words? Naaah. I reckon the whole process must have been subverted by a virus written by a Chris de Burgh fan. You don’t need a spurious survey to show that the English language abounds in beauty: any off-the-top-of-the-head list can do that. For example: cowslip, fleam, synecdoche, bollo*ks, malarky, scythe. If only we could get more words like those into corporate brochures.

In this issue we’re going to hold forth about Powerpoint (again), this time from a slightly different angle. We’ve done the ‘how’ of Powerpoint; specifically, how to escape from Powerpoint hell. But we’ve never done the ‘why’. Powerpoint: why? Read on. And finally, two centuries after they first appeared and five months after their discovery by the president-elect of the American Library Association , we’d like to offer some thoughts on blogs.

But before we do that, just a quick note to anyone interested that we have updated our ultra-minimal website to reflect the starkly beautiful brochures we’ve just produced. If you’d like one of these, by the way, please drop us a line.

Enjoy this issue.

The Editors

Blogs and business writing
————————–

At nine million and counting, there’s a lot of blogs about. And I bet there have been as many words published discussing their significance (Lucrative online business model? New publishing paradigm? The Death/Rebirth of Journalism?) as have emerged from blogs themselves. For sheer grumpiness, though, it’s hard to beat the by now famous rant of American Library Association president-elect Michael Gorman. Goaded by attacks from bloggers for his not entirely unreasonable critique of Google, he wrote: “A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.”
Written as it was in February 2005, this tickled me, as I’m sure it did the many people for whom weblogs are crucial discussion fora, fast-growing businesses, required reading, etc. etc. It typifies the reaction of a professional community to something that ‘democratises’ their skill. Just as the web was attacked in its early days for swamping people with unstructured information, much early huffing and puffing about blogs focused on the terrible consequences of publishing’s being made available to anyone.

As anyone in the blogosphere knows, such fears were entirely unfounded. Thanks to the savage Darwinism of the web, the bad stuff gets rapidly sidelined or ignored; and technologies like RSS mean readers can be highly selective. Bad blogs just sit there in cyberspace, unread.

And there’s the issue for businesses seeking to capitalise on the weblog phenomenon. The regular homily from the CEO, for example, will quickly end up in cyber-Siberia unless it’s interesting, controversial, funny; or preferably all three. But what’s the chance of that in most modern companies? As the Financial Times’s Lucy Kellaway commented on corporate blogs earlier this year: “If they are merely another conduit for sanitised corporate information, or exercises in executive vanity, they will go the way of the corporate mags, the voicemails and the company spam.”

Blogs, on the whole, have been great for writing in general. The intense public scrutiny to which they are subject forces up the quality of their content and acts as a superb bullsh*t detector. But to make them work in a business context, companies need to live dangerously and let their people let rip. Who’s going to rise to that challenge?

Powerpoint: why?
————————–

It’s nearly five years now since I left the corporate world. One of the many enduring pleasures of life outside the cube farm is the fact that watching Powerpoint presentations is at worst an annual, rather than a daily or weekly ordeal. This, I think, gives me and fellow escapee colleagues at Plain Text a healthy perspective on this most unproductive of business communication phenomena. Despite firm exhortations to our clients that Powerpoint presentations should only be used in very specific circumstances (the projection of diagrams or photographs, for example), we are still asked to edit and sometimes even write the wretched things.

Why does this make us so upset? Because once you’ve spent a few years ridding your system of the poison of Powerpoint, renewed contact with it makes you realise what an appalling communications device it is. And it makes you want to scream WHY??? at the otherwise reasonable people who shelter behind its nested bullet points. Sure, sometimes there are sensible answers to the ‘why’ of Powerpoint: “I’m an architect/a systems engineer/a designer/someone whose pitch needs pictures.” But a lot of the time, the answer to the ‘why’ of Powerpoint is: fear.

Fear that if there isn’t a big handout full of smart slides of bullet points and bar-charts, the management will be disappointed. Fear that without the slides, the speaker won’t know what to say. And fear that somehow, without a constantly shifting visual display to look at, the audience will feel short-changed. If you encounter anyone feeling this fear, or feel it yourself, just ask this simple question: think back to the most memorable presentation you ever sat through. What do you remember? The slides, or what the speaker said? Succumb to the fear that breeds a need for Powerpoint and your audience is less likely to remember you. Invest some time in preparing a great talk, though, and it’s your talk they’ll talk about. Not everyone has the natural ability of, say, Bill Clinton (whose hot ‘n’ heavy speech to a British political conference prompted a senior delegate to head outside afterwards for a cigarette, commenting: “I always like a smoke after being made love to”). Still, it should be within everyone’s power to talk about a subject with passion: and that’s worth more than any number of bullet points or flow charts.

So if there isn’t a sensible answer to the ‘why’ of Powerpoint, invest the time in crafting words rather than wrestling with slides.

Words we hate: another one
————————–

Stakeholder, n, meaning: ’someone with an interest or concern in a business or enterprise’

We had a pop at ’stakeholder’ a couple of Gazettes ago, but didn’t really give it a hard enough time. It’s spread like a pernicious weed; yet we managed perfectly well without it a few years ago. Yes, yes, we admit it’s useful in business, in that it serves to describe all those who have a ’stake’ in a particular project. But there’s an implicit dishonesty in the word: calling people stakeholders seems to imply that all of their interests have equal status, whereas in reality they rarely do. It’s a word designed to make people feel important to a project when they probably aren’t. Limit its use to the description of people holding stock in a company; or those looking to finish off a vampire.
That’s it for this issue. As always, your comments, suggestions and rants are welcome.

—————————-oOo—————————-

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* The corporate strapline must die
* Words we hate: another one

Editorial
———

Welcome to the many new subscribers who have joined up following our citations on Metafilter and Signal vs. Noise. And thank you to those who cited us. I was particularly taken this rather arch comment: “Wow. A whole screen of text, every six months? I can’t imagine how they keep it going.” You’re right. It’s tough. But you wouldn’t want us to email you 10 words a day instead now, would you? We like to think that in a world of overflowing inboxes, the Plain Text Gazette’s infrequency is part of its charm. Do let us know if you think otherwise, and want more: we’d have to staff up, of course, but it would be a pleasure. Otherwise, we’ll stay infrequent. Perhaps we should team up with the Long Now foundation, who among other things are building a 10,000-year clock. Now there’s someone who’d be in the market for an occasional newsletter.

On to this aeon’s issue. We have a lengthy rant about corporate straplines which, predictably, we’re not terribly keen on. But we do have some practical suggestions amidst the ’sturm und drang’ of our righteous irritation with them.

And then another unloved corporate word gets it in the neck. Conscious that the Plain Text Gazette might err a little to the negative from time to time, we’d like to add more sites to our links page that show really good writing in practice. We’ll be scouring blogs and websites to create an eclectic listing. As a starter, I offer you California’s Rivendell Bicycles, whose delightful, opinionated site will leave even the non-cyclists amongst you desperate to get your hands on their beautiful retro creations. All suggestions from readers will, of course, be gratefully received.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

The corporate strapline must die
———————————

Most company straplines should be dispensed with. Harsh? Yes, but have you ever been in a strapline-related meeting? It is during such sessions that companies look the furthest up their own fundaments; and the results are rarely edifying. Day-long workshops followed by endless rounds of managerial approval often result in lines like: ‘Delivering excellence today’. What does that tell anyone, apart from the fact that the company is run by management consultants? Then there’s the ultra-abstract strapline, such as Vodafone’s ‘How are you?’ to which I *always* want to answer “None of your flipping business.” I know it would be desperately tedious for them to say: “Mobile communications”, but why say anything at all unless you say something effective? Perhaps it is a good test of a company strapline — as it is of a mission statement — to see whether the opposite can be easily stated. McDonalds’ UK line “I’m lovin’ it” would immediately crumble under this test: I, for one, am definitely not lovin’ it. Not since I learnt about the modern food industry, anyway.

A sure sign that the corporate strapline is in the descendant is that businesses that would never before have bothered with such nonsense are now using them. A personal favourite is a northern English transport company’s “Taking people to places”, which, particularly when emblazoned on the side of a coach, is taking the bleedin’ obvious to new and entirely unnecessary heights. Similarly, it seems a little ‘de trop’ of a local taxi firm to bill itself as “The human logistics experts”. It’s a vehicle. It says ‘taxi’ on it. Which part of that howlingly obvious semiotic proposition does the marketing manager think the punters might not understand? Then, of course, there’s the pretentious strapline, now shed by many large businesses but still affecting the small: witness the north London glazing company billing itself as providing “Total fenestration solutions.” And there’s the ambiguous: the City of London police were recently spotted at a roadside speedtrap using this marvellous line: “Engaging criminality.” Call me awkward, but I read it as a suggestion that they had some really rather attractive felonies to talk about. What’s wrong with “Stopping people speeding”, for goodness’ sake?

This rant would doubtless raise a kindly, avuncular smile from branding professionals, would might then go on to explain in detail the art, science, and importance of corporate straplines. And there are some lines that manage (in my view) to work well without actually telling you what the company does. Nike’s “Just do it”, for example had a relevant, motivational oomph that did much to power their brand (although one wonders how it was interepreted by their factory workers). Honda’s “The power of dreams” has a certain resonance, although it sits somewhat awkwardly in an ad for a bland people-carrier.

But do we really need these lines? And if we must have them, what makes a good ‘un? Here’s the Plain Text view — unscientific, unreasonable, and opinionated — in handy, bullet-point form.

1. Don’t use one if you don’t need one. The UK Post Office (see also point 5. below) surely does something so widely understood that it needs no further explanation. It may well be that our country will soon ‘benefit’ from a deregulated market for postal services, but is the incumbent really helped to fight newcomers by the line “With us, it’s personal”? Ugh. I don’t think so.

2. If you must have one, at least make it useful. It’s interesting to see KPMG, who have probably been responsible for a fair bit of corporate psychobabble (and the world’s favourite corporate anthem) in their time, going for this nuts-and-bolts description: “Audit. Tax. Advisory.” It ain’t going to set the world on fire, but at least you know what they do. Or the splendid Brooks saddlemakers, whose lovely site shows how the Victorians would have approached web design. (Or at least it did until they started mucking about with animations). The simple line used on their packaging: “Saddles, bags, etc.” gets straight to the point.

3. If it has to be abstract, make sure it works. OK, so an ultra-obvious strapline may sometimes be a little dull. But get carried away too far into the worlds of abstraction and pretention and it’s even worse: stuff like “Delivering tomorrow today” (I dreamt it up but yes, it is almost someone’s strapline — I hope they don’t read the Gazette) doesn’t really say anything at all. Good examples are HP, who, by using ‘Invent’ everywhere, give a strong impression that this is what they do; or Sun’s ‘The network is the computer’, which, although perhaps too abstract for some, serves as a perpetual dig at Microsoft, and a statement of Sun’s position on technology.

4. Strictly limit the approval process for corporate straplines. Benign dictatorship is the only way to stop every division trying to get an explicit mention on the strapline: “NewVisia: Innovative solutions for enterprise consulting, outsourcing, change management, organisational effectiveness and human capital development.” Even people who stayed awake while reading this line are still unlikely to remember any of it.

5. And finally: refrain from using the words ‘delivering’ and ’solutions’. So very, very, 1990s. Let the UK Post Office’s “Delivering value” — lambasted in these pages before for avoiding the undeniably useful fact that they deliver letters and packages — be the last major appearance of one of these overused words in a strapline.

Words we hate: another one
————————–

Enterprise, n, meaning: ‘a business concern’

I know, I know. It’s useful. It’s there to mean ‘company’ or ‘business’ when we’re talking about the whole thing, when we’re implying that there’s a lot of it, when it probably includes lots of people and departments and almost inevitably crosses many international borders. So ‘enterprise-class’ software is what you buy if you’re a big swinging company. And you doubtless pay ‘enterprise-scale’ bills for it, too. ‘Enterprise’ jars because it fails the ‘write as you speak’ test. Who actually says ‘enterprise’, ever? “Do you like working for this enterprise, John?” “Yes, Mary, as enterprises go, it’s pretty good: possibly the best enterprise in the sector”. Maybe people just like their companies to sound like a famous starship. In our entirely unreasonable view, the term should be avoided at all costs. How about ‘thing’, as in ‘cosa nostra’ (our thing)? Now *that* would sound cool in a technology discussion. “We want a system that works right across our thing.” “All the way across the thing?” “Yes, the whole thing.”

That’s it for this issue. As always, your comments, suggestions and rants are welcome.

Paul & Paul

—————————-oOo—————————-

© Plain Text Ltd 2004 all rights reserved

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* Bad language in the public domain
* Phrases we’re not terribly keen on

Editorial
———

It’s been a while since the last Gazette, and we’d been ruminating quietly about what to put into the 10th edition until I heard the UK secretary of state for health on the radio the other week. “What we are talking about here is a fully engaged scenario.” said Dr Reid, to conclude a radio interview in which he attempted to describe the government’s approach to improving public health, specifically towards tackling obesity. You could almost hear the famously jargon-phobic presenter John Humphrys spluttering into his tea.

What on earth is a ‘fully engaged scenario’? Perhaps it is an analogy related to human birth, describing a policy that is on the point of entering this world. Quick web research reveals that it in fact describes the strategy of involving the populace in improving public health by avoiding getting ill in the first place.

To me — and doubtless to many other jaded citizens — such a term could better be described with a celebrated quote of former UK government communications director Alastair Campbell: “bollocks on stilts”.

Don’t worry: the Plain Text Gazette isn’t getting political. What this ghastly jargon has done, though, is to remind us that meaningless management-speak is not the sole preserve of the private sector. Government and the public sector seem to have caught the bug in a big way. So in this edition, we’re going examine random samples of public sector communications and see what could possibly be done. We’re also moving on from the harsh, simplistic ‘words we hate’ feature to the more complex and subtle ‘phrases we’re not terribly keen on’.

And an apology masquerading as a shameless plug: this Gazette has been so long coming because two of Plain Text’s writers have been writing books when they haven’t been writing for businesses. Paul Waddington’s book Seasonal Food is published by Eden Project Books/Transworld on September 1 this year; and Paul Nero’s Blagging it is out on October 14 through Michael O’Mara. If you like the jargon-free Plain Text style (and you’re interested in food or getting something for nothing) then hopefully you’ll like these books.

A final note on paper publications: we still have beautifully produced printed copies of the ‘A-Z of Plain Text’, free to Gazette subscribers: if you’ve signed up recently, decided that now is the time finally to ask for one, or asked for one and not received it, just email enquiries@plain-text.co.uk with your details (which we won’t retain unless you want us to) and we’ll send one out forthwith.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

Bad language in the public domain
———————————

The public sector has long provided rich seams of tortured language. Trade union leaders in the 1970s were mercilessly mocked by middle-class comedians for their use of overcomplicated words and sentences, a legacy, perhaps, of organisational bureaucracy and hierarchy.

John Reid’s ‘fully engaged scenario’ is merely the latest in a long line of famous obfuscatory phrases from the public sector and government. People are still puzzling over its predecessor ‘neo-endogenous growth theory’, employed by UK chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown to ‘explain’ his finance policy. The US military invented a new verb ‘to attrit’ as an alternative to ‘kill’ to describe action in the first Gulf War: for obvious reasons, military public communications are a minefield of allusion.

But some of the most startling examples of bad language in the public domain can be found in public sector recruitment advertising. ‘Change agents’? (see below) They’re on every page. It is here that a confluence of two malign linguistic influences has created a torrent of verbiage. The first is the culture of management consultancy, whose institutional fondness for obfuscation has been taken up with enthusiasm by local authorities and others who now engage such services. The second is the language of politically correct academia, whose pressing need to avoid giving offence often results in their saying little that can be genuinely understood.

Open the job ad pages of the UK’s Guardian newspaper on a Wednesday and almost any advertisement will greet you with phrases like this: “Your role will be to act as a key point of contact for stakeholders and to develop an effective communication and local management network”. Or this: “Your role will be to lead the strategic development of new engagement services….advocating the use of participatory approaches..” It is possible to read some of these ads without becoming any the wiser at all about what the job would entail. Is this style of writing perhaps a secret code, only understood by the finest candidates?

It’s unfair to charge the whole sector with offences against clear and compelling language. There are many examples of powerful, creative writing in job ads and elsewhere. But even though it may not be exposed in the same way as the business sector to the cleansing fire of competition, the public sector surely has much to gain from better attention to language. So here’s a (slightly whimsical) checklist from Plain Text to get things going.

Seven habits of effective public sector communicators:
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

• Tell the management consultancies to go away and not come back until they can talk to you in enlightening sentences, without the help of Powerpoint
• Ban Powerpoint, completely. You won’t miss it.
• Imagine that a grumpy, sceptical grandmother is your target audience at all times
• Don’t assume that the private sector always sets a good example in written communication
• Threaten your internal customers with random ‘fog index’ tests on material they submit; reject stuff that fails to pass muster
• Scythe down syllables and sentence length, unless the material is aimed at post-structuralist academics or economists
• Never say ’stakeholder’, ever again. Ever.

Phrases we’re not terribly keen on
———————————-

Change agent

Sometimes a phrase jars so violently with one’s sense of reality that it leaps at you from the page, powered by its own awfulness and incongruity. ‘Change agent’ did this to me when I first encountered it. Perhaps it would have been less shocking in the context of an article about obtaining smaller denomination currency; or about people who help you to try on new clothes. But no: being a ‘change agent’ is in fact a key desirable characteristic in applicants to senior — and not-so-senior — posts in all sorts of public- and private-sector jobs.

Leaving aside the question of whether perpetual change is a prerequisite for business success and happy employees, the term ‘change agent’ itself deserves closer inspection. Where does it come from? Are traditional job titles failing to tempt candidates in an overheated job market? (Which prompted ads like ‘Evangelist wanted’ during the dotcom boom). Do the hottest business people see themselves that way? “Good to meet you. What do you do?” “I’m a change agent.” “How interesting. Oooh — can you break a fifty for me?”

There’s a job advertised whose actual title is ‘Senior Change Agent’. There are, inevitably, seven characteristics of effective change leaders. On what is an otherwise well written website, the UK Department of Health’s Change Agent Team announces that it will help you “work to implement the National Service Framework for Older People”. I can imagine what my mother would have to say about that. And there are courses to help you be a change agent (although Surrey University has just cancelled its ‘Change Agent Skills and Strategies’ course, perhaps to illustrate that even the world of change is not immune to change).

Put a nice hot flame under the many definitions of ‘change agent’ and even the most flowery and evangelical reduce down to ‘doer’: someone who makes stuff happen. I suspect most people would rather see themselves that way than adopt a daft title that should be put back in the chemistry lab where it belongs.

That’s it for this issue. As always, your comments, suggestions and rants are welcome.

Paul & Paul

—————————-oOo—————————-

© Plain Text Ltd 2004 all rights reserved

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* why oh Why Oh why can’t we get Capitalisation Right?
* Words We Hate: the list that could just go on for ever

Editorial
———

Welcome to the pre-festive season Plain Text Gazette. This time, we have *good news* for subscribers whose daily routine involves a forlorn search of their in-tray for the printed ‘A-Z of Plain Text’ we once promised to send you. At long last, it is printed. One free copy is reserved for each Gazette subscriber, so if you would like a rather attractive 36-page guide to best practice in business writing, please email us at enquiries@plain-text.co.uk with your name and address and we’ll send it out forthwith.

In this issue, we’re going to rant about capitalisation. It may not bother you, but it sure as hell bothers us. We’ll tell you why. And then we’ve got some more hated words to pillory.

Before either of these things, though, we thought the ‘Fog Index’ (which we’ve only just discovered) was worth a mention. Many Gazette subscribers are likely to be aware of this calculation, devised by Robert Gunning, author of ‘The Technique of Clear Writing’.

The Fog Index assesses how easy copy is to understand, using wordcount, the number of sentences, and the percentage of long words. We won’t detail the formula here, because we hate numbers and typing ‘fog index’ into Google will lead you to many sites on the subject. The view on these sites seems to be that a score of anything above 14 is ‘difficult’. So broadsheet newspapers come in at around 14; Time magazine scores 12; and the Reader’s Digest (a prestigious Plain Text client) hits 8. One website says: “If you have a Fog Index of more than 12, you run a serious risk of not being understood — or even read”.

We’re pleased to announce that a couple of samples of our own website copy came in at around 10, which seems about right for copy that is intended to be readily comprehensible without ‘talking down’ to business readers.

But oh what fun we had applying the Fog Index to some other business copy! A random press release from a major technology company hit 18, not far off the awesome 22.5 achieved by our own fake press release from ‘Prolix’.

Most entertaining of all, the UK government communication service’s description of itself also scores an incomprehensible 18.

Time for a ‘Fog Index Hall of Fame’ on our website?

Enjoy this issue, and don’t forget to ask for your free copy of the ‘A-Z’.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

why oh Why Oh why can’t we get Capitalisation Right?
—————————————————-

If I had a penny for every inappropriate capital letter I’ve edited, I’d be writing this newsletter from the tastefully appointed cabin of my 60-foot yacht. Admittedly, not everyone cares about capitals as much as writers do. We find all that pressing of the ’shift’ key tiring. But there are many occasions when the misuse of capitals makes text look silly.

The Economist Style Guide suggests that “the general rule is to dignify with capital letters organisations and institutions, but not people”. But it also quotes Emerson, reminding us that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.

So there’s no hard-and-fast rule book for capitalisation; but we have strong views on a few areas where a bit of consistency isn’t at all foolish.

1. The Extremely Arresting Powerpoint Slide Title

‘How Our New Services Can Help You!’ If you spoke like this, you’d sound like a Dalek. So *why* does initial letter capitalisation crop up so much in promotional materials and presentations? I guess it’s to do with trying to make words stand out. The Plain Text solution is predictable and simple: if the title isn’t interesting enough, capital letters won’t save it.

2. Very Important People and Departments

‘Sales Manager John Smith and Marketing Director Jane Doe gave a presentation to the Board’. Even the pope gets lower case in correct usage. What did the sales manager do to deserve his caps? And why the big ‘B’ on ‘board’? In both cases, the capital letters are for the glorification of individuals and are unnecessary.

3. Markets and concepts

‘The market for Personal Information Managers (PIMs) has grown rapidly amongst Investment Banking professionals’. By all means use the TLA (once it’s been explained) to describe this deadly ten-syllable market. But there’s no need in this sentence to capitalise the market itself; nor the concept of investment banking. Otherwise the text risks becoming an indecipherable forest of different-sized letters. Which leads us neatly to…

4. Daft ComPany and ProDuct NameS

‘ProDuct’. Geddit? We’re a lobbying group for drains! Right. Just like PowerPoint is something that helps you to point powerfully. We’re in the realm of personal preference here, because it is clear that random capitalisation is a good way to make your company or product more prominent. From DreamWorks to QinetiQ, weirdly capitalised names stand out on the page. All Plain Text would ask is: *please* find another way to do it. Those random capitals make us poor writers wince.

Words We Hate: the list that could just go on for ever
——————————————————
Vision, n (and shockingly v); meaning: ‘a pleasing imaginative
- – - – plan for, or anticipation of, future events’.

The phrase ‘Our vision’ is inevitably followed by a seemingly random combination of ‘usual suspect’ positive words and phrases: ‘empower’, ‘achieve’, ‘best-in-class’. I could go on. But is a ‘vision’ really necessary? And how does it really differ from a ‘mission’? (We’ll deal with that word one day). Corporate visions should be honest. If Plain Text had one, it would be: “We’d like a world where all businesses write well. But not in our lifetimes, please. We have bills to pay.”

Workflow, n; meaning: dunno.
- – - -

And that’s the problem with ‘workflow’. It *probably* means ‘an interconnected series of professional activities largely facilitated by technology’; and as such, is pretty good shorthand. ‘Workflow’ has two big problems, though: its definition is somewhat nebulous and difficult to grasp; and not everyone seems to agree precisely what it means. A word as slippery and, let’s face it, as ghastly as this should be avoided.

Architect, v; meaning: ‘to design software’.
- – - – -

I have friends who are architects. But do they ‘architect’ their buildings? Of course not. So why does the software industry need it as a verb? I suspect that the hairy-chested yet intellectual world of technology feels that ‘design’ is just a little bit too namby-pamby and ‘build’ a little too blue-collar. We say that you can ‘architect’ something about as much as you can ‘dentist’ or ‘lawyer’ something. Time to think of another word. How about ‘Make’?

That’s about it for this issue. Before we forget, though: check out Whatbrandareyou.com (a publicity wheeze for a UK ad agency) whose spoof company name generator has generated amusement, website hits and column inches in equal measure.

Paul & Paul

—————————-oOo—————————-

© Plain Text Ltd 2003 all rights reserved

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* We don’t like ‘em skimpy: the need for sensible briefs
* Words We Hate: the list continues

Editorial
———

Welcome to the back-to-school Plain Text Gazette. Despite the summer recess, there have been busy goings-on in business writing. June saw the release of Deloitte Consulting’s “Bullfighter”, a software package designed to ‘fight the bull’ in business writing. We were suspicious. A management consultancy at war with bullsh*t? Surely this would mean destroying their own business model?

Having taken a good look at the related website, we couldn’t resist posting this to the Guardian newspaper’s weblog:

“Witty it may be, but Bullfighter is done in the best traditions of management consultancy:

* It presents a well-worn theme as novelty
* It makes a vice out of something that its industry once presented as a virtue
* It only runs on Microsoft apps
* It doesn’t (despite protestations) represent what the firm does itself: check out this sentence from the DC website:

‘Moving from Build-to-Stock (a “push” model) to Build-to-Order (a “pull” model) can powerfully transform Order-to-Delivery processes, unlocking unrealized business along the value chain. Effecting this shift is best accomplished through a series of discrete steps that enhance capabilities and flexibility along both the demand and supply chains.’

Looks to me like they need to leverage improved comprehensibility on an enterprise scale.”

Or to put it differently, if you’re going to pull PR stunts like this, make sure you rewrite your entire website first.

Postscript: it may not be entirely surprising to learn that Deloitte is no longer associated with Bullfighter, which lives on here

Later in the summer — and on the ‘white hat’ side of the business writing debate — a Gazette subscriber pointed out that Edward Tufte, author of the acclaimed ‘Visual Display of Quantitative Information’ had weighed into the corporate writing debate with his ‘Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.’ Not a snappy title, but it’s an important pamphlet, illuminating the numerous reasons why slide presentations are a terrible way to communicate. Amongst many examples, Tufte reminds us that a small paper handout can carry the equivalent of 250 slides’ worth of information.

The paper is on sale at Tufte’s website and there’s a related opinion piece in Wired magazine. Alternatively, you could take a look at this brief and amusingly self-referential summary of it.

Before we forget, there’s been a minor tweak to the Plain Text website. Conscious that there are nuggets of writing advice buried in both the Gazette and our A-Z of Plain Text (as well as elsewhere on the web), we’ve brought these together under business writing ‘themes’ on a new writing resources page. Gazette subscribers may have read much of this stuff already. But if you or your colleagues need a page of resources to help with specific business writing issues, this is the one.

Anyway, on with this issue. The main thing that’s bothering us this time is briefs. Not the wearable kind, fortunately, but the information that writers need in order to produce the best result. We’ll take a look at what makes a good brief. Then we’ll take a brief pop at some more words we hate.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

We don’t like ‘em skimpy: the need for sensible briefs
——————————————————

Despite our superior intelligence, the phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’ applies as much to business writers as it does to the computers for whom it was invented. Brief us inadequately and you won’t necessarily get rubbish; but you certainly won’t get what you want.

In our experience on both the client and agency side, the best briefs come from clients who know exactly what they want. And the very process of putting a brief together — for writing, PR, advertising or any aspect of the marketing mix — can be a good way of discovering any gaps in your strategy.

But what are the elements of a good brief, and how should a brief be delivered? Here’s the Plain Text view.

Five questions that make a sensible brief
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

1. What do you want and when do you want it?

Is it a website, a flyer, a brochure, or all three? If it’s a dreaded Powerpoint presentation, does it need notes? Should these be fully scripted or bulleted? Do you have wordcount limits? Style considerations? Mandatory things to include? When do you want the copy (*not* the finished object) by?

2. What’s the story?

Why are you doing this? Is it a new product? A keynote address? The updating of a website? What’s the background? The context?

3. Who’s it for?

Who’s the target audience? What are they like? What do they think?

4. What are your objectives?

What do you want this communication to do? What’s the *main message* you want to get over?

5. What supporting information do you have?

How are you going to pass on the information needed to complete the job? Detailed documents? Existing brochures? Or is it all in someone’s head?

If you can answer these five main questions, then you’re ready to brief a writer.

But before you do, think about how you’d like to deliver the brief. Not everyone likes writing all this stuff down. Ask many managerial types to fill in a scary-looking template and it will rapidly find its way to the bottom of their to-do list, or be delegated to someone who has to fill it in based on guesswork.

So give the client the option of briefing over the phone or face-to-face. This means the writer has the hard work of writing it up (so there’s a permanent, agreed record), but it takes much less of the client’s time and can play to everyone’s strengths.

Whichever way you do it, good briefing is worth the time and effort it takes.

Words We Hate: the list continues
———————————

Webinar, n, meaning: ‘a web-based seminar’
- – - -

It’s just ugly, isn’t it? And lazy, unnecessary and generally vile. You can imagine the intensity of the brainstorm surrounding its conception:

“Hmmm…we need to make the idea of sitting in front of a PC listening to a live Powerpoint presentation seem interesting. Let’s give it a name. Brad?” “Um, how about ‘web-based seminar’?” “Nah, too long.” “What about ‘web seminar’?” “Too boring.” “OK, how about ‘webinar’?” “Hmmm…maybe..” “Hey, what about ‘war’?” “No, too short and doesn’t look good on the page. Let’s stick with webinar…”

Leverage, v, meaning: ‘to exploit’
- – - -

We had no problem acceding to a subscriber’s request to include this one. Chambers dictionary does not contain a definition for ‘leverage’ used as a verb, except in the strict financial sense of the word. Enter the lovely phrase ‘leverage core competency’ into Google, though, and you’ll hit a rich seam of the ‘corporatese’ against which we constantly rail. What is really irksome about this word is not its laziness, but its euphemism. ‘Leverage’, in its business-speak context, really means ‘exploit’. Which itself means, benignly, ‘to turn or adapt to use’ or ‘to make gain out of’. So why don’t businesses say what they mean?

That’s all for September. Let us know what’s bugging you in the world of business writing and maybe we’ll wave the sword of satire at it next time.

Paul & Paul

—————————-oOo—————————-

© Plain Text Ltd 2003 all rights reserved

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* Order, order! The importance of structure in business writing
* Words We Hate: the list begins

Editorial
———

Welcome to the springtime Plain Text Gazette. In the spirit of the season’s theme of new growth and new beginnings, the Gazette will henceforth be taking a new tack. We’ve exhausted the ‘When Communication Doesn’t’ series, having briefly written about six different types of written business communication: press releases, presentations, case studies, brochures, web writing and letters and emails. .

From this issue on, we’ll take a look at different themes in business writing, starting with some observations on the importance of structure. We also indulge in some much-needed catharsis (’a purging of the effects of a pent-up emotion and repressed thoughts’, according to Chambers) as we let rip in a reasoned, yet spirited way, at words we hate.

Before we kick off, though, it’s been encouraging to note that the issue of good writing in business seems to be getting more attention. In an interesting piece subtitled ‘Firms must ditch jargon and do some plain speaking’, Simon Caulkin of the UK’s Observer newspaper makes a connection between the death of old-style, ‘broadcast’ marketing and the need for companies to pay more attention to language. He points out a contradiction that we continually cite: “(organisations) spend billions on advertising and brand building. Yet so often their words destroy the carefully constructed image.”

Keep it plain,

The Editors

Order, order! The importance of structure in business writing
————————————————————-

Is it just me, or is the weather forecast always boring? I’m a cyclist and motorcyclist, occasional gardener and a practitioner of outdoor pursuits. The weather forecast is therefore of great importance and should hold my attention like a gripping thriller. Yet no matter how animated and eccentric the presenter, or how apocalyptic the projected weather conditions, I almost always drift off half way through. What’s going on?

I think the weather forecast bores me (and many others) because it ignores the primary concern of its audience. We want to know one simple thing: what’s the weather going to be like where we are now, or where we’re going? The weather people, however, don’t seem to want to tell us this. They’re focused, understandably, on meteorology, which in the British Isles is a mightily complex and unpredictable thing. They want to tell us about anticyclones and Atlantic lows; they want to share the bigger picture with us. So every forecast is organised differently. Sometimes it starts with the weather in the west; sometimes with the situation in the south.

The upshot is that we get bored waiting to guess when our local area might be mentioned, go out without an umbrella, and get soaked.

But what’s this got to do with structure? Or business writing, for that matter?

Some of the most effective communications have a recognisable, familiar structure. Think of a newspaper, with its carefully designed layout; a good web page, built so you can find your way around easily; or even a well-delivered presentation, with a beginning, middle and end. With all of these, you always know where you are. With a traditional weather forecast, however, you don’t.

Here’s the Plain Text answer. Get the ‘big picture’ stuff out of the way first with a quick overview of all that technical meteorological stuff. This will keep the weather geeks happy and can be ignored by everyone else. Then, having chopped the country up into a small number of regions, tell the weather story, region by region, in the same order, every day. That way, we’ll all know when to listen and when to tune out.

A radical solution? No, we stole it from some other weather people. The UK shipping forecast has been done this way for years, illustrating that even when information is a matter of life and death, structure is crucial.

The lesson for business writing is simple. If you’re communicating regularly with an audience, and you want them to listen, a little bit of structure goes a long way.

Words We Hate: the list begins
——————————

Performant, adj, (normally of IT ’solutions’), meaning: ‘it works’
- – - – - -

Is it fair to hate ‘performant’? After all, it’s been used in French since 1968, largely to denote a computer system with high performance, which is pretty much its intended usage and meaning in English.

Its proponents — and there seem to be a few in the technology world — would probably defend it as an example of a justifiable neologism, saying that there is no single word that does the same job. They might say that such linguistic development is a necessary accompaniment to the development of things that need to be described.

We don’t care. You can’t just go around slapping on suffixes and brazenly expect the world to say ‘Of course!’. Especially when the world also contains large numbers of people who will say ‘Noooooo!’. Where will it end? Deliverant? Valuising? Serviceative?

Performant is wrong for that reason and many more. It implies something special when all really says is: ‘it works’. It looks silly. But most of all, it implies a secret knowledge on behalf of its user that the humble reader is left to divine: in other words, it’s jargon. Use it in meetings (when your writing agency is not present), but keep it out of print.

Solution, n (and sometimes v), meaning: ‘the answer to a problem’
- – - – -

We know, we know. It’s a soft target. But we can’t not hate it. The dreaded ’s’ word plagued the business world well before the technology boom, when it was introduced in order to justify things being more mysterious and/or expensive. Here’s where it fits in the hierarchy of things companies do:

Product = a thing produced

Service = a product received and paid for on a regular basis, accompanied by some customer support

Solution = a service that has been sprinkled with magic consultancy dust

The problem, of course, is that everything is a solution now. From the postal company’s ‘Delivering Solutions’ — you know it’s a play on words but you want scream “You’re delivering letters, for @*!% sake!!” — to the inspiring ‘Solutions for Palletized Distribution’, we’ve reached solution saturation point.

Once a word means too many things, it’s time to move on.

And with that, we’ll close this issue. As always, keep your comments and suggestions coming and please pass the Plain Text Gazette on to friends and colleagues.

Paul & Paul

—————————-oOo—————————-

© Plain Text Ltd 2003 all rights reserved

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* When communication doesn’t #6: You’ve got mail!
* Shifting sense: a miscellany of words with changed meanings

Editorial
———

Welcome to the first Plain Text Gazette of 2003. It’s shaping up to be an interesting year for language. Recent corporate scandals and the unmasking of the ’spin’ culture endemic in many governments have boosted the search for plain, unvarnished truth. The web has played an admirable role, with satirical sites and weblogs cocking a snook at the ‘official story’. But I read recently that a US soft drinks brand is recruiting young ‘key influence (web)loggers’ to promote a new milk drink in their online diaries. Can you imagine the result: “And, like, at least there was some Lux-o-Lait in the fridge. Kewl!”

Which illustrates that however unvarnished the language and the medium, it eventually gets subverted. And the consumer’s job of trying to extract fact from hype becomes ever more difficult.

This kind of stuff makes Plain Text come over all (small c) conservative. What’s wrong with having a good product, that people want to buy, promoting it honestly and in clear language; and waiting for the word to spread? Call me naive, but it works for us.

There’s a glimmer of hope, though. A recent column by the FT’s Lucy Kellaway surely sounded the death knell for corporate psychobabble. Her irreverent critique of Accenture’s annual report, which was awash with ‘delivering’, ‘leveraging’ and ’solutions’, perhaps showed that the consultants had been reading the Plain Text Gazette on case studies for all the wrong reasons.

Talking of our website, we’ve made one minor update this time: adding a client list. Take a look and see what company you would keep as a Plain Text client.

And finally, a brief apology to all of you who are still waiting for a printed copy of the ‘A-Z of Plain Text’. It is a fact of small (writing) business life that we spend much more time on other people’s marketing collateral than our own. We still plan to print it soon and thank you for your patience.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

When communication doesn’t #6: You’ve got mail!
———————————————–

Unless someone comes up with a type of written business communication that they’d like us to cover, this will be the last in our ‘when communication doesn’t’ series. To recap, thus far we’ve covered: press releases, presentations, case studies, brochures and writing for the web.

This time, it’s the turn of the humble promotional letter or email, about which we have a few basic things to say in the A-Z of Plain Text.

One would have thought the standard of writing in direct marketing would have been honed to glittering perfection by decades of research into consumer psychology and campaign effectiveness. But what do we get through our letterboxes?

“New! Free stuff coming your way soon!

Dear Mr Waddington

Would you like some new, free stuff? Of course you would. Have we got a deal for you!!”

OK, so this kind of ghastly consumer DM is a soft target. And experts would doubtless tell me that, sadly, the words ‘new’ and ‘free’ in six-foot high letters of fire always work and always will. They would tell me to look at the creative work on most low-cost airline ads if I was in any doubt about it.

The point being made here, though, is that people are massively sceptical of any unsolicited mail, whether in paper or email form. If you want people to read what you send, you need to follow a few very simple rules. Here are three:

1. Talk your prospect’s language
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

This is just a variation on the oldest theme in communications: knowing your audience. I received an email this week asking if Plain Text would like to get involved in “inducing the media bodies to take part in something that is intangible and to vision it in a tangible format.” Anyone who had taken the trouble to visit our website would know that that sort of cobblers is a one-way ticket to the trash folder. (Using ‘vision’ as a verb should, in our view, attract a custodial sentence).

And if you’re planning to use either emails or letters to send a proposition to a broad audience with different attitudes and expectations, don’t. Letters and emails are personal, direct media, through which people expect personalised communication. Buy some advertising space instead.

2. Say something interesting
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Sounds blindingly obvious. But how many letters and emails just launch into the usual exposition of whatever the offer is:

“Dear Prospect,

Need some writing doing? Plain Text can write your brochures, websites and speeches and we also do writing training too.

Give us a call.

Er, that’s it.

Yours sincerely,

Paul”

The best letters and emails *offer* something (relevant, of course) in return for a few minutes of the jaded reader’s time:

“Dear Prospect,

The top 100 UK companies spent GBP 3bn creating information in 2002. None of them had a specific budget for editing it.* Is it any wonder that people don’t always want to read what companies write?”

Plain Text blah blah….”

At least this way you’ve earned the ‘permission’ to invade the in-tray.

3. Explain how you can help
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Again, this is nothing new or mysterious. But if you’ve gone to the trouble of finding something interesting and targeted to tell the prospect, you need to go to the extra trouble of telling them exactly how your offering can help. Either with proof, examples, or a strong argument. In an ideal world, the ‘blah blah’ above would be replaced with something like:

“Plain Text has boosted its customers’ intranet usage by up to 70%** by making content more compelling for readers. If you’d like to find out more…..”

So that’s it for letters. Let us know if there’s any business communications we have missed in the last few Gazettes and we’ll give them the Plain Text treatment.

Shifting sense: a miscellany of words with changed meanings
———————————————————–

And finally — the constant evolution of language over time is a source of both joy and pain to language enthusiasts and scholars. Slang is often a great driver of this. Some words are so subverted that their original meaning is lost. Others return to their original meaning, or retain several meanings. Here are a few that we’ve identified to date, in various stages of evolution. For overseas readers, we should point out that this list also highlights how linguistic evolution is a localised phenomenon: maybe some of these terms haven’t changed as far, as fast, or at all, where you live.

Bonk
- – -
Before: the noise made when one cartoon character hits another
New meaning: the act of lovemaking
Now: rapidly losing currency in the face of coarser competition

Asylum
- – - -
Before: an institution for the mentally ill
Now: political refuge

Trolleyed
- – - – -
Before: Perhaps denoting rapid corridor-based hospital transit
Now: drunk

n.b. We should also add more entries from the lexicon of British intoxication, which is a positive ferment of changed words: wasted, smashed, faced, trashed, ratted, mashed. We could go on…

Wicked
- – - -
Before: evil in principle
New meaning: very good
Now: probably very uncool, but Plain Text wouldn’t know because we’re too old

Pants
- – -
Before: trousers or undergarments
New meaning: disappointing
Now: definitely uncool, because non-youth TV presenters use it

Wedge
- – -
Before: a piece of wood or metal, thick at one end and thin at the other
1980s meaning: money
Now: a piece of wood or metal, thick at one end and thin at the other

That’s it for this issue. As always, keep your comments and suggestions coming and please pass the Plain Text Gazette on to friends and colleagues.

Paul & Paul

—————————-oOo—————————-

© Plain Text Ltd 2003 all rights reserved

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* Introducing the A-Z of Plain Text
* When communication doesn’t #5: caught in the Web

Editorial
———

Welcome to the last Plain Text Gazette of 2002.

It’s been a high-profile time for no-nonsense writing here in the UK, with the annual ‘Plain English’ awards exposing the worst of corporate and legal gobbledegook for public edification. We were particularly amused by a revelation in the NTK newsletter that one of the award-winners for bad writing — a corporate mission statement — was in fact created by a ‘corporate mumbo jumbo’ generator in the Dreamweaver software package. It’s encouraging to know that machines are beating us in the incomprehensibility stakes: there’s hope for real writers yet.

With this clash of person and machine in mind, the fifth in our series of ‘when communication doesn’t’ articles will look at the vexed subject of writing for the web. And for Gazetteers who signed up following Plain Text’s recent ‘Effective Writing Online’ seminar in London, don’t worry: there will be something different here.

Before this article, though, we’re going to introduce ‘The A-Z of Plain Text’, a new resource on our website for business writers. And we have a special offer for Gazette subscribers.

Have a fine festive season.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

Introducing the A-Z of Plain Text
———————————

In a shameless ploy to make the Plain Text website ‘worth the detour’, we’ve added an alphabetical guide that further fleshes out our thinking on writing. With one entry for each letter of the alphabet, it’s a small resource that we hope will serve as anything from an amusing diversion to a useful reference, depending on who’s reading it. To give you a flavour, Paul Nero’s entry for clichés begins: ‘Pulling out all the stops is a cliché. Use only when referring to organists.’

Anyway, we hope you find it useful. If you haven’t already found it on the site, it’s here.

The other reason for producing the A-Z was to provide you with something in print to remember us by. If you’d like a print copy of the A-Z, which will be out shortly as a stylish A5 booklet, it’s free to all Gazette subscribers. Please email with your name and address and we’ll send one out to you.

When communication doesn’t #5: caught in the Web
————————————————

One of our favourite ways of illustrating the value of good writing on websites is to talk about intranets, thus:

“You’ve spent 2 years and GBP 2 million to create the ultimate content management system. Your staff have reached the nirvana of ‘total relevance’ where they have precisely the right amount of information they need. But because it’s so boring and badly written, they don’t read it. The board wants to see a return on their massive investment reflected in usage statistics. You have but a tiny bit of budget remaining. What should you spend it on?”

We all know the answer, and it’s not software. Gartner estimates that USD 30bn will be spent on information management systems in 2002. The same survey reports 90% of companies still feeling overwhelmed with information. A little editorial expenditure could go a long way.

But if you can’t convince management to call in Plain Text or other editorial heavyweights to take a scythe to the content haystack, here’s some tips for getting more out of online content, in our favourite ‘how to get it wrong/right’ style.

1. How to frighten off users in four easy steps
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

* Always use a ‘Flash’ introduction of at least 750k

Nothing impresses readers more than an introductory animation. Especially when it is something like a lengthy mission statement slowly disappearing, ‘Star Wars’-like, into the background to the strains of an inspirational corporate anthem.

* Make readers guess what the page is about

Web users like surprises. So don’t tell them what your company does. Keep them guessing with an elaborate series of pages explaining your ‘Vision’, ‘Mission’ and ‘Values’. If they want to find out that you are, in fact, a tractor manufacturer, then they can jolly well go and search Google.

* Let rip with literary language

People love to curl up on the sofa with a PC. So give them writing that takes time to read. Long, literary flourishes are what they want to read on web pages, with lots of scrolling before they reach your conclusion.

* Just let everyone do their thing: the web is a self-organising system!

Editorial control? Style Guides? Sounds, like, Orwellian, man. If we just, like, empower everyone to contribute their stuff, then we’ll unleash this amaaaazing creativity.

2. How to get ‘em back again
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

In the interest of not repeating ourselves, we have a short list of ‘writing for the web’ guidelines covering the importance of brevity, ’scannability’, accuracy, linking and the ‘inverted pyramid’, all of which are well-documented best practice for web writing.

We’d like to add two more points to this list that don’t, in our view, get enough airtime:

* Know your audience

Who’s it for? is the first question that should be asked of any piece of business writing. On the internet and intranets it’s crucial, because the readership can be so wide. If the audience is hardcore geeks, for example, then jargon is fine. If it’s the whole company, or a demographically diverse audience, then the highest standards of writing are needed.

* Impose editorial control and style guides

The web is self-organising, for sure. Readers gravitate quickly away from badly written, inaccurate sites and towards the good ones. For example, the vicious Darwinism of the weblog world keeps the top blog-writers sharp. Within companies, and on corporate sites, editorial and stylistic control is essential to make sure that content stays on track. No amount of software will ever be able to do this.

That’s it for this issue. As always, keep your comments and suggestions coming and please pass the Plain Text Gazette on to friends and colleagues.

Paul & Paul

—————————-oOo—————————-

© Plain Text Ltd 2002 all rights reserved

Contents
——–

* Editorial
* When communication doesn’t #4: The Brochure of Doom
* Utilising unnecessary quantities of terms: redundant words

Editorial
———

In the last issue we took a look at ‘Case Study Carnage’ to see what happens when a useful business story gets ambushed by lawyers and nervous managers.

As we continue our tour through the world of business writing, this time we’re applying the sword of Plain Text to the dreaded brochure, in our customary ‘how to get it wrong/right’ style.

And Jargon Watch strays from its remit a little to look at one of our favourite obsessions: redundant words. So in the spirit of brevity, Editorial now gives way to our first feature.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

When communication doesn’t #4: The Brochure of Doom
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There seems to be an inverse relationship between the usefulness of a type of business communication and management’s enthusiasm for it. So we see case studies and newsletters (very useful, in our opinion) received rather coolly: “Hmmm…it’s a lot of work..all that talking to the customer..and we have to do more than one of them? Forget it” Whilst press releases and brochures (which can be much less useful) are inevitably popular: “Great, our v1.0.1.2 upgrade will be in the news!” or “The customers love to have something glossy.”

Just as we still read newspapers even though all the content is online, it’s a fact that customers like to have a physical ‘takeaway’, even if the product is entirely digital and supported by a superbly-designed website.

But hands up anyone who carefully reads the contents of the groaning bag of brochures that we drag back from the average trade show? I didn’t think so. Brochures are a necessary evil. But they can be good, too. Here are some guidelines on how to produce (or avoid producing) the Brochure of Doom.

1. Writing the Brochure of Doom: a step-by-step guide,
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There are many, many ways to mess up a brochure. So this list is by no means definitive. But we hope it covers the main points.

* Write a lengthy essay explaining the background situation

No-one’s going to know what you’re talking about unless you explain the background to your product first. So start your brochure with a detailed exposition of the industry, covering everything from historical trends to current issues. By the time they’ve finished, your customers will be wiser and ready to understand where your product fits.

* Gather an exhaustive list of the product’s most exciting features

OK, so they’re up to speed on the business. Hit ‘em hard with the bells and whistles. They all want to know — to the nanosecond — exactly what the response time of your SpeedFlo (TM) Logistics Extender is. And don’t forget to tell them in detail about the other 23 enhancements…

* Use ‘aspirational’ language

A brochure is the one place where it’s OK to let rip and use some seriously flowery language. This kind of stuff: “You demand perfection. We deliver excellence. Together we can forge a partnership for the future.”

* Make sure you include as much information as possible

Brochures are also *the* place to put absolutely everything. Fill as many pages as you can with all the background information your customers will need. They’ll be able to read it at their leisure, just like a magazine.

* Include expensive shots of attractive business people looking at laptops

Nobody will take your product seriously unless they think it’s aimed at them. So make sure they see themselves — sleek, besuited and serious — reflected in the pages of your brochure.

2. Not writing the Brochure of Doom: a step-by-step guide
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Getting a brochure right takes a lot less effort than getting it wrong. Here are some pointers to writing a good brochure easily.

* Ask yourself some serious questions

Never let anyone start from the “We need a brochure!” position, because not everyone does need a brochure. Ask questions like: What do we want to say about our product/company? To whom do we want to say it? What do they know? What do we want them to do once they’ve read it? Answer these questions and chances are you’ll produce materials that have an impact with your audience.

* Explain what your product/service means to your customers

This sounds blindingly obvious but is so frequently ignored we feel moved to mention it. Companies continually confuse features (e.g. flat screen) with benefits (e.g. means you use less space and power). If your brochure doesn’t explain what you can truly do for customers, then it’s not doing its job.

* Be brief and to the point

Brochures get ‘flicked through’. So dense, 1000-word essays in 10-point text won’t get read. Equally, flowery sales language is likely to be ignored. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should resort to just bullet point lists and huge headlines. Use straightforward, attractive language that gets to the point. And keep it brief.

* Use your website as the foundation

Websites are easy and cheap to update. Brochures aren’t. So if you can, use the text on your website as the ‘master copy’ for your brochure and send updates to print when you need them.

* Include relevant, attractive graphics

Although we word-heads at Plain Text don’t practice what we preach here, graphics are useful, but only when they are relevant, or when they genuinely enhance a brochure. But don’t use them to fill space, or because someone insists they must be included.

Redundant words
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Here’s an easy, underused tip for improving your copy by taking a red pen (or the electronic equivalent — the delete key) to as many words as you can.

Write as you speak to help copy flow, by all means. But if you do, erase unnecessary words, which slow readers rather than help them.

The trouble with some words is that they are, basically, overused if not entirely irrelevant. To all intents and purposes, they are more or less redundant. The end result of their continued use is that your writing becomes somewhat bloated. Look out for them on a daily basis.

Sorry — that last paragraph should have read:

Some words are not necessary, even redundant. Use them and your copy becomes bloated. Look for them daily.

Easy.

That’s it for this issue. As always, keep your comments and suggestions coming and please pass the Plain Text Gazette on to friends and colleagues.

Paul & Paul

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