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

Editorial
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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
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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?
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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
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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.

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Contents
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* Editorial
* When communication doesn’t #2: Powerpoint Hell
* More business-speak

Editorial
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In the last issue we used press releases from the fictional company Prolix to look at the perils of technology jargon, and show how its massive overuse can completely obscure a company’s message. If you think Prolix’s release is over the top, by the way, a casual trawl of IT company press rooms on the internet will swiftly prove that the real world holds many worse horrors.

Press releases are a soft target, though. Often produced for some wrong-headed motive, written by a committee and edited by the dreaded legal department, it’s no surprise they end up as monuments to how not to communicate.

Playing with press releases got us thinking about how *every* attempt to communicate in business can have a detrimental effect if the writing is poor.

So having dealt with press releases last time, we’ll look at different types of written business communication in each issue, and show how they can be used to obscure your message completely, or illuminate it delightfully.

This month it’s business presentations that come under the uncomfortable glare of the Plain Text spotlight.

We’d also welcome your contributions to our growing compendium of business jargon. In this issue we also have a special feature on ‘nouns as verbs’, an unfortunate trend.

Keep it plain,

The Editors

When communication doesn’t #2: Powerpoint Hell
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Think back to all the business presentations you have ever sat through and your feelings about them. Fond memories of great times? Or indignation about the good things you could have done with all those wasted hours?

The tyranny of PC-based slide presentations has visited great cruelty on the business community. By making it dead easy and cheap to display vast amounts of complex material on big screens, software firms thought they were taking us a step further toward a communications nirvana where everyone understands everything.

The opposite has happened. Whole departments become preoccupied with the loving preparation of Byzantine presentations whose (usually small) audiences spend most of their time dozing or texting each other like bored schoolkids.

There have been various attempts to change this. Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy famously ordered the removal of Powerpoint from his networks to free up terabytes of storage (and of course to snipe at Microsoft), whilst others have claimed that sequential slide presentations stunt our ability to communicate.

Such cries for help are seldom heeded, though, and attending presentations is still rarely a reason for celebration. In its small way, Plain Text wants to help you out of Powerpoint Hell with some thoughts on how to screw it up and how to get it right.

1. How to screw it up
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* Write a script

It’s much easier to read from a script. You don’t have to worry about forgetting stuff and your audience will hear all of your ideas and arguments in full.

* Just launch straight into it

No-one wants to hear a lengthy introduction or tedious anecdote. They want to hear about your vision of global integrated strategy. So tell them about it. Go on, get on with it!

* Use multiple, complex bullet points

Got a lot to say? Hell, get as much of it onto the slide as you can. Preferably without graphics because people never understand them.

* Use jargon and long words

The people to whom you are presenting are all experts in their field. Don’t patronise them with plain language. Show them how much industry-speak you really know!

* Ignore narrative and just go for a series of random ideas

Your audience is intelligent. They don’t need leading by the hand through your argument. Let them work it out for themselves. They’ll be fine.

* Make some spelling mistakes

Just in case anyone is flagging, you can’t beat a good typo to get your audience’s attention back on track.

* Use all those fancy multimedia options

There’s nothing like a bullet point flying onto the screen to the tinny sound of screeching tyres to boost credibility.

* Don’t bother wrapping up

You’ve told them everything you wanted to so they must have got the message. Job done! Why waste time going back over the same ground?

2. How to get it right
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* Never read from a script

OK, so we’re straying into speaker training territory here. But it’s writing related, so that’s OK. If you read from a script, it sounds like you are, and people get bored. The only person who gets away with it (just) is Angus Deayton on BBC1’s ‘Have I got news for you’. By all means write a script, but then summarise it in bullet points and read from that. Your audience wants to hear you, not a prepared statement.

* Always use an agenda, and update it throughout your presentation

You may think your audience’s enthusiasm for you to keep going is because they can’t wait to hear the next idea. Not if you haven’t used an agenda, it isn’t. They are just desperate to know where they are in the presentation. It’s the oldest presentation maxim: ‘tell them what you’re going to tell them…etc.’ but it is so useful, and ignored so frequently, that we still feel motivated to bang on about it.

* Know your stuff, and your message

Remember those presentations where people just read the bullet points? It’s normally because they don’t know the subject. If you do, and you’re confident of the message you want to get over, then you’re already on a winning streak.

* Tell a story

Stories are what people want to hear. If your presentation has a beginning, middle, and an end, they’ll be happier even if the message you’re tasked with getting over is not the world’s most exciting.

* Think minimal

It is said that one single idea is the most you can expect an audience to come away from your presentation with. So why keep putting up lists of twenty? If you must present many different concepts, try and relate them back to your overall message.

* Be accurate

The people in the audience who are likely to be most obsessive about accuracy are also the people who love to bring mistakes and slip-ups to a much wider audience: journalists. Proof-reading is as necessary in a presentation as it is on any other written communication.

* Forget the fancy stuff

Plain Text’s favourite presentations are the ones where someone paces the stage, fizzing with enthusiasm, generally telling a great story and backing it up with the odd crude-but-effective slide. Unless you have a guaranteed stadium-quality sound system, pin-sharp projection and totally reliable technology throughout, presentation gimmickry is at best a risk and at worst a disaster.

* Always summarise and conclude

If you’ve followed all of the above instructions and failed to wrap everything up, then your time has been wasted. Great conclusions save the audience the trouble of trying to draw their own once you have left the stage. They draw a line under the presentation and cement your message.

More business-speak
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The unfortunate trend of using ‘nouns as verbs’ is an attempt by poor business communicators to try to ram concepts into our heads.

So insidious is this trend that some of the terms have made it into common parlance, if not all into the dictionary. See for yourself whether this is something to which we should object violently or acquiesce. Plain Text says fight it where you can!

The well-established, but nonetheless irritating to writers:

To chair (a meeting)
To trial (usually software)
To target (customers, criminals)
To fund (anything)

The slightly less well-established and more jarring:

To author (software, typically)
To transition (an organisation, probably)
To impact (the bottom line)
To network (at cocktail parties)

The downright appalling:

To architect (software again)
To fast-track (it *is* bad enough as a noun, thank you)
To solution (yes, really)

That’s enough for this edition. Please email bs@plain-text.co.uk with any ideas, comments, or contributions on jargon.

We’ll be back in the New Year with episode 3 of ‘when communication doesn’t', as well as some more jargon.

Enjoy the festive season.

Paul & Paul

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