Ostensibly for simplicity and ease of use online, the move by Waterstone’s is clearly a piece of excellent PR too, such is the national harrumph it has provoked. Steam is already pouring forth from ears around the country, via Mail and Telegraph pieces and no doubt throughout the Twitterverse. (Somehow the Telegraph manages to use this as an excuse to winkle in a pic of Cheryl Cole but hey, that’s serious broadsheet journalism for you).

But in the comments threads there’s a sense of national ‘meh’ too. It’s well known that the apostrophe confuses people. Not because people are getting more stupid, but because the apostrophe is confusing, especially around plurals (the famous grocer’s apostrophe) and the possessive ‘its’ vs. ‘it is’ (It’s a great day for this company. Its results show a marked…).

It’s arguably incorrect to knock the the ’s’ off Waterstones even if Mr W doesn’t own it any more. But remember that this didn’t bother Reuters, who realised decades ago that to name itself Reuter’s, after its 19th-century founder Paul Julius Reuter, would look ugly and awkward. If a linguistic convention is good enough for one of the world’s greatest news agencies, it should be just fine for a high-street bookstore.

Reuters, like Waterstones, knew that the change made things simpler and more elegant, without altering any meanings. Resisting it is more a matter of conservatism and taste than a question of grammar. I’m not suggesting that no-one should care about apostrophes any more – but we should worry about one’s that really have potential to muddle our meaning’s.

As a company that works almost exclusively in the world of business-to-business, it’s a question that has been preying in our minds. Is there real commercial value in furiously tweeting, Facebooking and Linking In, or is this all a passing fad that we’ll remember with a wry collective smile?

The attitudes Plain Text sees vary widely. Some companies we work with run virtually no social media activity. They see no relevance for their customers. Others have a social free-for-all, with Twitter feeds and LinkedIn discussions springing up in different departments and different parts of the world. Yet others have a highly regulated approach, with social media activity rigorously controlled to keep it ‘on message’.

It’s very similar to the early days of the Web. Remember when companies questioned whether they really needed a website, or wondered whether e-commerce would ever take off? And it’s reflected in studies that show that while some companies are investing in social media, few are measuring their results and fewer still (11%) have formal policies for social media. Or this study, which suggests small businesses are aware of the potential benefits of social media but not acting on them.

Just like in the mid 1990s, though, a lot of early adopters are embracing the new technology. In fact some of our clients would be shocked we’re even asking the question that headlines this article. For them, the value of social media is beyond question.

From broadcasting to sharing

In essence, social media breaks down the walls between companies, suppliers and customers. All of a sudden – just as with networks of friends on Facebook – you can see a very great deal of what everyone else is doing and thinking. And, of course, you can share your own activity too. It’s a big shift from the ‘broadcast’ model of email and the web. A constant ‘everyone to everyone’ network of shared information now augments ‘one-to-one’ or ‘one-to-many’ communication.

B2C companies have been taking advantage of this for a while. Who’d have thought, for example, that a conservative airline brand would be mining Twitter to pinpoint and resolve customer service issues?

In B2B, there are endless applications for social media. Here’s just a selection:

Improving search engine results. The Google algorithm gets cleverer all the time and you have to work hard to get noticed. At the moment it ranks shared content higher in organic searches. So a well written and shared blog post will bring your website up the search engine listings.

Tapping opinion and sentiment. A whole ecosystem of applications – like Radian6 and Metrica – has appeared to help companies make sense of the firehose of tweets and posts – and use them for a huge range of applications from marketing and PR to customer service and product development.

Due diligence. Hiring people? Checking out prospects? Now their CVs, thoughts, opinions, etc. are there for all to see.

Innovation. Could the wheel have been invented by email? Or even by Wiki? Collaboration and serendipity drive invention. Social platforms make it easier – now you can even outsource your own.

And, of course, brand building, opinion forming and communication. Even CEOs are getting social media savvy now. Some of them have even banned email.

So with even seriously technophobic customers playing with LinkedIn, peeking at Twitter and almost certainly lurking on Facebook somewhere, the audience is out there for B2B companies thinking about whether social media is likely to be worth it as a communications channel.

Social: here to stay in B2B

We will almost certainly tire of minute-by-minute Facebook updates and crazily over-prolific tweeters. But it seems unlikely that we’ll look back on today’s social media explosion with a knowing smile and go back to our email inboxes and bookmarked websites. Why? Because social media is better than what we had before. It gives businesses what they want: more insights and more opportunities.

Plain Text has teamed up with Honey Digital to help our clients make sense of social media. From an initial audit we can help you with blogging and content, social media channels and monitoring – and ensure your social media strategy fits together for both your staff and your clients. Contact us to learn more.

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.

Spotted on Brough station. From the art direction, to the typography to the words themselves, this could be textbook example of how not to do it.

Savour in particular the second paragraph of body copy, which conjures up an image of station staff yelling, gobbing and using foul language to control yobbish behaviour.

Surely ads can't get worse than this

“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.

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…

This struck a chord with me, as someone who worshipped at the altar of Derrida and fellow post-structuralists in my final year at university, only to realise in later life that much of their obfuscation was far from meaningful. It’s hard to disagree with Cohen’s position when you tackle the worst examples of the genre, as in the Bad Writing Contest to which he links. I believe it was Derrida who suggested that meaning constantly evades the reader: it certainly hides itself pretty well in paragraphs like this:

A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a différance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determination, etc., such that in designating consciousness as an effect or a determination, one continues – for strategic reasons that can be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated – to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-limiting.

And this is at the more comprehensible end of the genre. Incidentally that paragraph scores 42.9 on the Fog Index, one of Plain Text’s favourite readability measures. That’s so far off the scale it defies belief. (Decently readable business copy scores 12-18).

Surely a defining moment for this movement came when cheeky physics professor Alain Sokal had Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published in the journal Social Text. While the journal interpreted it as a welcome rapprochement from the science community to its way of thinking, it was in fact a load of utter nonsense. A clever hoax designed to hoist the post-structuralists et al with their own petard.

Whether or not academic psychobabble has a direct link to the Conservative government’s plans to cut arts and humanities funding will no doubt be a matter of ferocious – and doubtless occasionally impenetrable – debate.

But perhaps it’s a terrible lesson to us all that you can only write so much nonsense before the bullshit bites back.

Am I missing something – or doesn’t that make three teenage youths?

Perhaps the word ‘youth’ now refer exclusively to males in the Telegraph’s world.

And youths or teenagers, would suffice, surely?