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

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

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

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

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

Take a look at the new website.

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

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

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

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

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

Email your answers via our contacts page.

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

* 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.

According to reports following Mr Blair’s evidence, “To Kofi” means “to encourage the [then] United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan with easy promises.” Simple.

Whilst its origins lie with the Ghanaian-born diplomat, its application – within the coterie of Downing Street aides, is reported to be broad. Anyone who needed to be influenced was Kofied. From whole nations, the French or the Scots, for instance, to members of the government or opposition, to individuals in consistencies. Never since “You’ve been Tangoed” has a snappy verb possessed so much latent aggression. So have you been Kofied?

This surely calls for a spoof video.  Anyone?

OK, so we once thought otherwise (that post actually dates back to 2002) and had fun at its expense. But it’s time to take a fresh look. Particularly because the annual procession of flimsy PR campaigns built on lazy digs at the latest business phrase (see here, and  here for examples) is getting really dull.

And also because it’s a bit like the Dawkinsian view of religion, with its unavoidable subtext that all practitioners are stupid. Yes, there are some daft people in corporate life — but no more so than anywhere else.

Why should we now embrace office jargon? Because it’s nothing more than useful shorthand, ensuring that things are quickly communicated and understood. Take ‘reach out’, as in ‘I’ll reach out to Jim about this’. *God* I hate that phrase. However it means a lot more than just ‘contact’; and a little bit more than ‘get in touch with’. It’s actually quite handy, if you can bear to use it – and in a largeish organisation, once everyone’s accepted it, it no longer grates. Only when such terms escape into the outside world do they cause alarm.

Check out this list of business-speak terms, found in an idle Google search. The ‘translations’ clearly show that many of the dreaded buzzphrases are pretty efficient at conveying meaning. Whilst I’m no fan of ‘low-hanging fruit’, it’s surely preferable to ‘the bits that can be done quickly and easily but still have an effect.’

Are we jumping the shark? Net net, I’d say we’re just going forward.

The university says that such an analysis can be used to predict reading ability and that children who text a lot have high levels of phonological awareness, a skill that refers to the ability to detect, isolate and manipulate patterns of speech.

All well and good. All very interesting – although asking a child to read a book could perhaps test the same skills. The really admirable thing about the publication of this research today, and the resulting press coverage, is that Coventry University seems to do the story, or a variation on it, every year. Check out this Register story, Texting: Good for Kids, from last year, or this Guardian piece from 2006. Congratulations to Coventry’s PR team.

Notwithstanding that he wants children to speak Cornish, their teacher has a beautiful way with English. Rhisiart Tal-e-bot, who is from Wales, says: “Traditionally the language was seen as for academics or people with beards and the community of bards.”

The children, beardless and bardless, are the future of the Cornish language. Now that a creche is underway, some parents hope that children will become bilingual. With the UK falling behind in languages, perhaps that is a good thing  - although Mandarin is arguably of more use.

Mind your Ps and Qs

Cornish comes from the ‘P’ Celtic family (the British version), rather than the Q family (Gaelic). So words like Penn in Cornish become Ceann in Gaelic. In an odd computation, the Times tells us that Cornish shares about two thirds of its vocabulary with Welsh “and even more with Breton”, which presumably means that many Welsh and Breton words are one and the same.

Find out more about the Cornish language.

That’s no reason to dismiss Scots as a force north of the border, where 85 per cent claim to speak the language, mainly with family or when socialising. That’s sufficient for the culture minister, Fiona Hyslop, to declare Scots a living language. Derrick McClure, a linguist at Aberdeen University, says Scots should be taught in schools to prevent it dying out. That seems unlikely if 85 per cent of the population really do speak it regularly. Even most English people have three words of Scots in their vocabulary. Auld Lang Syne. Long long ago.

(* a disappointment)

If it seems odd today that the church should get rid of church, the later Jacobean church thought so too. The King James Bible compilers re-established the word in their Bible, taking the opportunity at the same time to replace love. They preferred charity, perhaps fearing loss of revenue.

The British Library reissued the 1526 Bible as part of its millennium project, so you can now easily get hold of some authentic sixteenth century English.

The true test is whether a newly ‘verbified’ noun makes a contribution to the language; that is, improving communication in a way that’s acceptable to everyone. Assuming software architects do something different to, say, developers or designers, the perhaps that particular verbification is justified. Being ‘platformed’ or invited to ‘deplane’ don’t quite seem to pass the test at the moment.

And although ‘to impact’ is now well and truly established, especially in relation to financial performance and the like, it doesn’t pass the test either. Does it really mean anything more than ‘affect’? Perhaps it’s popular because we just like a little more drama in our language.

It reminds me of directions printed in the Bradford South billiards’handbook in the mid-1970s. “Alight Busby’s” advised the booklet. The famous city department store, by this time closed, burnt down shortly after publication