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.

But what also sets Monday Note apart is its formatting. Perhaps here at Plain Text we just don’t read enough blogs, but I don’t recall seeing others that use this one’s simple technique of starting paragraphs, and major points in the story, with a sentence or a few words in bold.

It’s simple, but using bold this way really works. Having it at the start of the para makes it somehow more convincing, more credible than if it were a subhead. And Gassée and Filloux make sure that whatever’s in bold is also properly interesting, usually a short, attention-grabbing sentence. It draws the eye down the page and through the argument.

Maybe it’s the weight of what they write that makes it work. But these bold beginnings, together with some choppy paragraphs and a smattering of images, make their long, involved posts a joy to read.

Contrast this with ‘traditionally’ formatted pieces (or my personal pet peeve, the multi-web page mega-article) where no matter skillful the writer, it still seems harder to appreciate their words online than in print.

Let’s hope they haven’t been pesky and copyrighted the technique. Because it really works – and could maybe help businesses to cheer up some of their ‘thought leadership’.

.WTF – prints out something completely random, possibly startling and probably very rude, that bears no resemblance to the document you wanted

.OMG – regardless of what you asked for it prints out the front cover of Heat magazine

.L8R – prints out at an unspecified and highly inconvenient time in the future

.IMO – changes the text of any balanced, unbiased document into an opinionated rant

Seems the WWF could have unwittingly spurred a resurgence in print…

The Times is confident it has the upper hand, claiming to be the ‘biggest source’ whilst the Telegraph, via a correspondent rejoicing in the name of Harry Wallop, credits itself with 251 additions including underdog, ageist and triathlon.

What happened to ‘lexiconate’, though? It was there in the Telegraph’s print edition (”You read it here first: words the Telegraph lexiconated”) but mercifully absent from the online story.

Perhaps the editors thought there was more potential for ridicule on the web.

It’s a question that’s bugging the Monday Note’s Frederic Filloux as he pays his ‘Microsoft tax’ this year. His beef, though, is not about basic functionality, but bells and whistles. What Filloux wants is high-tech autocorrect that helps compensate for plummeting writing standards.

As a writing professional I don’t much care for autocorrect. All I’m after is word processing that works reliably. Something that doesn’t crash inexplicably at a critical point in a large edit, randomly introduce comedy rogue formatting or make it excruciatingly difficult to place an image exactly where you might want it on the page.

I would run willingly into the arms of any firm that could deliver a bombproof, intuitive and joyful WP package, handing over my credit card details as I did so. Surely in an increasingly app-driven world there’s a market for this?

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?

Coming in for particular attention was ‘innit’, which in UK English has become shorthand amongst certain groups for not just ‘isn’t it’ but ‘aren’t we’, ‘didn’t he’, ‘haven’t we’, ’shall I’ and such. For example “I’ll come to see you one day, innit.” Or “He looks good, innit.”

For sure, these constructions would not land you that job in a top fund management firm.  “Yeh man, that yield curve was sick, innit!”

But as Thompson goes on to acknowledge, people are perfectly capable of maintaining different dialects for different occasions, as I am reminded when overhearing my children adopting the local speech patterns of hereabouts with their pals.

‘Innit’ is just another fine example of linguistic evolution – a genuinely useful word. Let’s celebrate it – in its proper place of course. Innit.

* DVXL (TM) ready
* Full 2.0 feature suite
* Cross-platform compatibility
* Cloud computing ‘out of the box’
* Deep, rich, wide content-mining options
* Plug-and-play widget performance analysis
* Multiply scalable format distribution extensions
* Optimized, extensible interface handling parameters
* And more.

You had me well before the eighth bullet point. I just don’t want any more. And these scream-inducingly unnecessary final words also of course beg the question: “and more” what? Bananas? Trilobites? Cuddly toys? It’s as if the writer planned to use ‘etc.’ but decided at the last minute to be a little more formal.

Apply the “and more” test to real life and it’s clear what a waste of words it is:

“I love you. I need you. I want you. And more.”
“And more what?”
“I dunno, just… more stuff, y’know?”

“Hey kids, we’re going to the seaside tomorrow. And more.”
“Hurray! And more what, daddy?”
“Just more, OK? Now go to your room.”

In copywriting as in life, “and more” is just two words too much.