Let’s rein in reign!
Have you noticed how often you see these two words confused?
Here’s a sentence from Dan Brown’s best-selling The Da Vinci Code: “Chartrand rushed forward, trying to reign in the camerlengo.”
From a sports-page headline: “Walsh might seize reigns as president.” That’s former 49ers coach Bill Walsh, rumored to become president of the 49ers.
From the National Catholic Reporter in a story about Deal Hudson, publisher of Crisis magazine: “While Hudson was taking over the reigns at Crisis, Cara Poppas consulted an attorney.”
In scholar John Merrill’s wonderful book, Existential Journalism, in which he describes the existential journalism professor: “He will insist on personalism, not impersonalism; he will encourage diversity in his students, not conformity; he will try to give free reign to creativity, not imitation.”
And in a column in the Columbia Missourian in which Merrill is condemning the “No child left behind” program, he writes: “What we need is an emphasis on ‘No child held back,’ or ‘Give free reigns to the gifted child.’”
I think we should not only rein in “reign,” but we should also rein in “rein.” It’s used so often and so needlessly. Besides, I wonder how many people really understand its roots. Once when a graduate student of mine used “reign” in place of “rein,” he asked me what in the world a rein was.
As a former farm boy whose father still had a team of horses, I think I can describe reins without looking the word up in the dictionary. I can still see those long strips of leather that dad held in his hands to get the horses moving or to get them to turn right or left (“gee” – right, and “haw” – left, he used to shout) and to get them to stop. If the horses were going too fast, he would pull on the reins that went right to the harness over their heads and to the bits in their mouths. He would tighten the reins. If he wanted them to trot, he would loosen the reins (give them free rein?). And if he wanted them to stop, he would pull hard and rein them in.
Granted, the word has also come to mean “a restraining influence, a curb or a check.” But again, it’s so overused, and it’s so often replaced incorrectly with “reigns.”
At least think twice before you use “rein” or “reins” again!
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Trick #1: What am I trying to do? It’s Communications 101: what’s the purpose of all this? Am I trying to educate someone on a topic? Am I looking to get their agreement? Am I trying to get them to take action (and what would that be, by the way)? Am I looking to get more information from them?
You’d be surprised by the number of people who don’t consider why they’re speaking or writing before they start. Don’t be one of them. If you know what you want, you’ve exponentially increased the chances you’ll actually get it.
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Trick #2: Who am I trying to reach? Let’s face it: your family and friends will cut you a lot more slack on your latest love than anyone else. But not your boss, when you’re trying to convince her that you have a great idea for a new project. But not your client, when you’re trying to convince him to spend more money with you when he’s already feeling budget constrained. But not the reporter on the phone, when you’re trying to convince him that this is a great story his readers can hardly wait to know more about.
So when you’re spending that extra few seconds deciding what you want to accomplish before the communication, take a few more to think about the people on the other end of it. Here’s your checklist.
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Why would they want to hear from you?
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When would they want to hear from you?
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How would they want to hear from you?
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What’s in it for them?
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What objections could they raise to your idea—and how could you address these up front so they don’t get the chance to use them to end the communication?
And the all-important—and often overlooked—What do I do if they actually agree with me and want to move forward? That’s another downside of passion: sometimes we’re so busy waxing eloquent about our subject that we don’t know when to stop! Then we can run the risk of talking people out of something they initially agreed to.
Or would you rather just email me?
A couple of readers have asked me about making “email” a verb. I’m a little surprised they didn’t ask about taking out the hyphen in email.
Well, as I wrote in my piece about verbyfying nouns, some of our strongest verbs were once nouns. Linguists like to trace when nouns first became used as verbs, and I suppose some words were used as nouns and verbs almost from the beginning.
Take the word “work,” for example. I have no idea. Was it first a noun or a verb?
It certainly didn’t take long for “email” to be used as a verb. At least the form of the word remained the same, and we did not “ize” it. Wouldn’t it be awful if we “emailized” people?
All I know is, one day I made a momentous decision. I decided on the same day that I would never again put a hyphen in “email” and that I would lower-case (notice that verb!) “internet.”
So, OK, “email” me. But for heaven’s sake, don’t “copy” me!
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Trick #1: Laugh. The article I wrote was about a diabetes management program. My laugh was that it went out thin and came back overweight—the opposite of what the company intended for the program I was writing about. My greatest chuckle came from reading a 63-word sentence, with the end repeating words from the beginning—because it was so long that even the re-writer forgot where it started.
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Trick #2: Don’t look for imagined slights. Don’t begin with thinking, “People don’t like my ideas (or me) and took them out,” or “They don’t think I covered everything adequately so had to add something.” People make changes for all kinds of reasons—and many have nothing to do with you. It could be someone had a bad day and is taking it out on your copy. It could be that someone hates a particular turn of phrase and will remove it whenever it appears. It could be that one reviewer doesn’t like another, so feels compelled to alter that person’s suggestions. You can only guess, so don’t begin by feeling inadequate.
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Trick #3: Ask for amplification. If someone makes a change you don’t understand—or don’t agree with—ask about it. Most people are happy to explain their suggestions. This situation presents two opportunities for you: 1) to learn something you might not otherwise know (ask me about the subjunctive tense …), and 2) to show you cared enough about what a commenter said to inquire further. Who knows: by discussing something, you might even convince the person that your approach is better.
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Trick #4: Ask “Does the change make the copy better?” Did it take too long to say something, and now it’s more concise? Did I need to include a longer explanation so the ultimate audience for this piece has a better sense of what is meant? Did I get sloppy and use incorrect grammar and punctuation, which someone has corrected to my shame? Remember, you want to have the final piece meet your goal: to persuade, to educate, to whatever. If someone’s comment moves you closer to your goal, that person has actually helped you.
I won’t lie to you. The verb “to lie,” meaning “to recline,” is not the easiest verb in the English language. For that matter, neither is the verb “to lie” meaning “to tell a falsehood.” I sometimes see the present participle of both verbs spelled “lieing.”
Now either you were horrified by the title of this piece and thought Ranly has finally lost it completely, or you have come to accept the misuse of the verb. Is it really so bad? Doesn’t the language change? Shouldn’t we just accept that few people will use the verb correctly?
For more than three decades I have been trying to teach writing and editing, and even though I sometimes doubt that I can teach writing other than to encourage good writing when I see it (“Hey, that’s good. Do some more of that!”), I have thought that I could teach editing. And all I have tried to teach is what some call Standard American Written English.
People speak colorfully and certainly in ways that we would not find acceptable in accepted print publications. I was listening to a local talk show the other day, and an officer of a bank, I think he was the president, was discussing how quickly the new bank had been completed. “If you had drove past here just two weeks ago, you would have saw a lot of work still to do.” Now that’s just great. He may be a helluva banker, but should he speak in public?
Standard American Written English. I’ve been stewing about this “lie” verb for some time now, and then this past week I started reading a packet of articles sent to me by an absolutely outstanding young writer by the name of Justin Heckert. Justin was hired right out of undergraduate J-school here at Mizzou by ESPN The Magazine. Well, he just couldn’t stand it there because they wouldn’t really let him write. So he went to a magazine that would, an outstanding city magazine, Atlanta.
Now I’m reading this wonderful personal story of his, and I come upon this sentence: “The first day of tests I had to lay flat on my back while the doctors drew a sufficient amount of blood to test.” My student wrote that! (His mother is an English teacher.) And the editors, good editors, did not change it. Damn. Well, maybe the battle’s over.
But then I read another piece by Justin, and I came upon this sentence: “… Skip (Caray, the Atlanta Braves announcer) had just been sitting there, at the table, transfixed by all that lay outside the window….” Damn again. They do know the verb! The least they can do is be consistent!
The hospital scene reminds me of a story about a former professor here that is so good it just might be true. He was a fanatic about “lie, lay, lain,” and being around doctors and nurses who regularly told him to “lay back” nearly drove him out of his mind. Well, the story I tell is that he was literally on his deathbed when a nurse told him to “lay back.” He bolted straight up and shouted at the top of his voice, “Lie back!” and he lay back and died.
Another story that’s almost true that I love to tell my students is about my dog, Rosie, who will just look at you if you tell her to “lay down,” but she will recline immediately if you tell her to “lie down.”
My granddaughter was 4 when I asked her what she did with the TV remote. She told me, “I lied it over there.” Seemingly she had heard me lecture enough about the use of “lie” not to ever use the word “lay” in any of its forms. But how do you tell a 4-year-old that “to lie” is intransitive; it cannot have an object. You meant, sweetheart, to say that you “laid” it over there because that’s the past tense of “to lay,” a transitive verb that requires an object. You see transitive verbs do things to things. Intransitive verbs cannot do things to things. You cannot “lie” something.
But neither is the remote “laying” over there. It’s not doing anything to anything. It’s just “lying” there. Is that really so difficult?
If you are a reader who always uses these verbs correctly, I salute you. If you want more explanation, read on.
The past tense of “to lie,” meaning “to recline,” is “lay.” The past participle (we use past participles along with the helping verb “to have” to form the present perfect, past perfect and future perfect tenses) is “lain.” So here’s how it works:
“At midnight I thought I would lie down. I lay there an hour before I turned off the TV. I had lain there another hour before I finally fell asleep. I don’t know how long my puppy was lying beside me.”
Now the past tense of “to lay,” meaning “to place down,” is “laid.” The past participle is also “laid.”
“I always lay the remote next to me on the bed. I’d swear I laid it there last night, but I couldn’t find it. I thought I remembered laying it there. Perhaps I had laid it on the stand by my bed.”
Remember. After I “lay” something down, it’s just “lying” there. It’s not doing anything to anything.
Is the battle worth fighting? Shall we let sleeping dogs lay — or lie?
I love outlines. Most of my writing starts with an outline, which becomes the functional framework for all my content creation.
Headline
- I like having a simple keyword in the headline. It makes it easy to attract the eye of folks scanning my website, their RSS feed, or their social streams.
- Here are a few of the sample mini-frameworks I use
- Keyword: [A facet of defining this keyword]
- Some version of numbered list
- Otherwise short and descriptive with at least one keyword
Opening Line
- No more than 2 sentences
- Usually a quip, but always a luring statement.
- I often think about what would make you click if seen in the space of a Google SERP, a Tweet, or a RSS reader
Opening Paragraph
- Ask a question,
- Make a statement, or
- Challenge an assumption
Convince Me Please
- I rarely exceed three paragraphs in this mid-section
- I use sub-headlines or numbered sub-headings
- I generally use one of three frameworks:
- 3 numbered sub-headings + respective paragraph
- 3 headlines + respective paragraph
- 1 list introducing paragraph + bulleted list + 1 expounding paragraph on the list
If this is indeed the year of reading more and writing better, we’ve been right on course with David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, and various invaluable advice from other great writers. Now comes John Steinbeck — Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel laureate, love guru — with six tips on writing, culled from his altogether excellent interview it the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review.
- Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
- Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
- Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
Read full article via brainpickings.org
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Trick #1: Build a super structure. Organize your thoughts before you write. If you’re not certain where you’re going, get your ideas down and then review them for the most logical progression. For example, if your intent is to persuade, put your strongest argument first—if you put it last, readers might not get that far and your best thinking will be missed. (See the fourth rule to write by: Begin with the End in Sight Theory: http://www.communitelligence.com/blps/article.cfm?weblog=78&page=727.)
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Trick #2: If a word doesn’t add—subtract it. Be merciless until there’s nothing left to tighten. Start with clichés. Never again write “enclosed please find” instead of “here is,” or “due to the fact that” instead of “because,” or “at this time” instead of “now.” Also know that if a sentence is 30 words, it’s too long, and there must be something you can cut. The average length in business writing is 10 to 12 words. Change that to eight to 10 if the material is complex, or when you’re writing emails.
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Trick #3: Practice word choice variety. Don’t begin several sentences in a row—or consecutive paragraphs—with the same word (especially “I”). Read each paragraph to ensure you aren’t repeating a word or phrase too often. But use that thesaurus sparingly: don’t signal readers that you’re searching very hard for another word to use. Also vary your transitions. My personal failing is to frequently use “so,” which means I look for that. Repetition—unless it’s effectively used for emphasis (“government of the people, by the people and for the people”)—is boring and makes readers zone out.
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Trick #4: Use the active voice. It’s the difference between “I will do it” versus “It will be done by me.” The first is much stronger—and shorter. The only reasons to take the passive approach are if you don’t know who did something, or don’t wish to identify that person.
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Trick #5: Watch for consistency. Keep an eye on changes in tense, such as sliding between past and present. Choose one and stick with it—unless you’re actually discussing different time frames. Do the same thing with capitalization: it’s either “Company” or “company” in the middle of a sentence. (I default to the latter because the former can look like legalese or bespeak a firm’s ego.) And watch that your subheads use the same approach: all bold, or underlined or the same color.
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Trick #6: Keep writing reference materials—or buddies—handy. If grammar, punctuation and usage are not your strong suits, know where to get help. Spell check is a good start but doesn’t catch everything. So have those books by your desk where you can easily use them—because if they’re down the hall, you’re more likely to guess, and perhaps wrongly. (You noticed I used “so” didn’t you?) Or know where to go online to get your questions answered. Or find that grammar maven who always seems to know the obscure rules. (That would be me.)
Thy landing page shalt have but one goal, and the number of the goals shall be one. Not two, not zero, but one.
If thy landing page hath zero goals, it is a “branding” page, and such vanities shall bear no fruit.
If thy landing page hath more than one goal, thou shalt confuse thy visitor, who shall leave thy site in disgust and anger.
Thy copy shalt not be divided amongst more than one goal, for such shall surely drive thy visitor to lamentation and thy copywriter to madness.
Ask any journalist and they can tell you about the 5 Ws and an H. Any solid news story covers those six basic ingredients. The same is true for communicating with others.
Want to ensure you don’t forget a critical detail in your communications? Think 5 Ws and an H to ensure you’re not missing an important detail, sharing the all-important context, and making it relevant for your audience.
What
What’s the decision? What does it mean? What should I know? What’s in it for me?
Why
Why is it the right decision? Why now? Why is it important?
Where
Where is this decision coming from? Where/what locations will it affect? Where can I get more information?
When
When is this happening?
Be Brief
One of the worst mistakes email copywriters make is trying to shove the entire story into the email message. Think about when you open a marketing email in your inbox. Do you read every single word in there? Probably not. It’s more likely that you scan for important points so you can glean the overall message, and decide whether you want to take any action. So if you’re sending email with hundreds of words of copy, you’re making it much more difficult for recipients to decide whether they want to click through … because they can’t quickly sift through all of the information in your email!
Instead, find a way to summarize what the reader will get in a compelling way, and let them click through to a page on your website for more information. Take a look at how this HubSpot customer and Certified Partner Precision Athletics drafted a brief email that encouraged readers to click through for more information:
There are a few lines of copy used to set up the purpose of the email and, of course, thank the recipient for utilizing their free training session. But after that, Precision Athletics gets to the point of the email — delivering success stories from those who have completed the training program to motivate the email recipient.
Keeping your message on-point is the key to writing brief email copy. What’s the point you’re trying to make with your email? If you know the action your email is supposed to drive — recipient buys a grill the size of a Foosball table, recipient remembers to buy their Bruce Springsteen tickets, recipient gets motivated to work out — you’ll have a much easier time drafting succinct email copy that remains focused on that one end goal. And if writing succinct email copy isn’t enough of a motivator for you to narrow down your goals, remember that having just one primary call-to-action in your email marketing results in better click-through rates than emails with competing calls-to-action!
Use Actionable Language in Your CTA
That’s right, emails have calls-to-action, too! Well, the good ones do. First and foremost, your email call-to-action should be extremely easy to identify. Remember, people scan their emails, and if there’s one thing you want your recipient to pick up on, it’s your call-to-action. If you’re sending an HTML email, you may decide to include a button like this AmazonLocal email did below.
140 characters, the limit of a Twitter post, fill up fast. Hamlet’s soliloquy screeches to a halt right around “outrageous fortune.”
Want more examples of the Twitterization of literature, opera and even recipes? Check out this NPR piece.
Are you a deluded writer? Stop! Before you answer that question, let me tell you about Brian Wansink and the bottomless bowl of tomato soup.
Wansink is a scientist who holds the John S. Dyson Endowed Chair at Cornell University where he is Director of the Food and Brand Lab. He’s also the author of the 2006 book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More.
In one of his most famous studies, he rigged up “bottomless” bowls of tomato soup. (Researchers kept the bowls filled by hidden tubes that imperceptibly kept adding more soup while the subjects ate). Wansink then compared the eating habits of people faced with a normal bowl, versus those given a “bottomless” bowl. The results were astonishing.
People who had a normal bowl ate, on average, nine ounces of soup. But people who ate from the rigged bowls averaged 15 ounces — 73 percent more! And most amazingly, the subjects at the self-filling bowls did not rate themselves as any more full than the subjects at the normal bowls.
All of which goes to show, we are terrible judges of ourselves.
This principle applies to our writing, too. Are our carefully thought-out words lucid, moving, and compelling? Or are they boring, self-indulgent, and banal? Who knows? The problem is, we’re not very skilled at analyzing ourselves.
6. Passive voice is always wrong. Wrong! Passive voice is when you don’t name the person who’s responsible for the action. An example is the sentence “Mistakes were made,” because it doesn’t say who made the mistakes. If you don’t know who is responsible for an action, passive voice can be the best choice. (See episode 46 for more details.)
5. “I.e.” and “e.g.” mean the same thing. Wrong! “E.g.” means “for example,” and “i.e.” means roughly “in other words.” You use “e.g.” to provide a list of incomplete examples, and you use “i.e.” to provide a complete clarifying list or statement. (See episode 53 for more details.)
4. You use “a” before words that start with consonants and “an” before words that start with vowels. Wrong! You use “a” before words that start with consonant sounds and “an” before words that start with vowel sounds. So, you’d write that someone has an MBA instead of a MBA, because even though “MBA” starts with “m,” which is a consonant, it starts with the sound of the vowel “e”–MBA. (See episode 47 for more details.)
3. It’s incorrect to answer the question “How are you?” with the statement “I’m good.” Wrong! “Am” is a linking verb and linking verbs should be modified by adjectives such as “good.” Because “well” can also act as an adjective, it’s also fine to answer “I’m well,” but some grammarians believe “I’m well” should be used to talk about your health and not your general disposition. (See episode 51 for more details.)
2. You shouldn’t split infinitives. Wrong! Nearly all grammarians want to boldly tell you it’s OK to split infinitives. An infinitive is a two-word form of a verb. An example is “to tell.” In a split infinitive, another word separates the two parts of the verb. “To boldly tell” is a split infinitive because “boldly” separates “to” from “tell.” (See episode 9 for more details.)
1. You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. Wrong! You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition when the sentence would mean the same thing if you left off the preposition. That means “Where are you at?” is wrong because “Where are you?” means the same thing. But there are many sentences where the final preposition is part of a phrasal verb or is necessary to keep from making stuffy, stilted sentences: “I’m going to throw up,” “Let’s kiss and make up,” and “What are you waiting for” are just a few examples. (See episode 69 for more details.)
You can find more information about each of these myths in the Grammar Girl archives.
Here’s a universal principle that frames the experience of writing for the web: “Form ever follows function.” Those words were first written by Louis Sullivan early in the 20th Century. What does designing a department store or any large public building have to do with writing for the web? And what could an architect who lived so long ago have to say to us about writing web content? Or designing web sites? Everything.
Just as no building architect today would design a building without taking into account how people are going to use it, likewise, no web site architect should ever consider designing a web site without thinking about how visitors are going to use it.
We talk about usability—a word that would have seemed strange to Mr. Sullivan—but aren’t we talking about the form of the web site reflecting the way people use it? And when it comes to writing content, aren’t we likewise trying to make the content as readily available, as comprehensible and effortless to read as possible? I think so. That thought frames everything I know about writing for the web.
So, based on “Form ever follows function,” and the way people use web sites today, let me suggest three thoughts as a guide to web writing: chunk, light, tuna.
Chunk. People don’t read on the web, they scan. Break your story into bite-sized chunks. Make your writing compact and succinct. A few short paragraphs on one page and you’re done. Bullets and subheads improve readability. Keep it simple.
Light. Keep the writing light. Avoid self-serious or ponderous prose. Focus on benefits. Tell how a product or service improves peoples’ lives or adds value. Tackle serious subjects and be real, but do it in a highly readable way.
One example from a white paper I wrote: “Digital asset management systems can generate a healthy ROI, yet few do. Why? Three important reasons: Planning. Planning. Planning.”
Keep it light, but avoid humor which can easily backfire on the web.
Tuna. This is not a reference to a losing Cowboy coach. By tuna, I mean give people substance. Tell people what they want to know: What you’re going to do for them. Give them benefits. Tell how they’re going to feel after they’ve used your service or product. Most importantly, prove it with testimonials from real customers•statements that carry emotional impact.
Write “chunk light tuna,” and you’ll be writing the way people use the web today.If Louis Sullivan were alive, I bet he would agree.
The most important words on your web site are not the ones you wrote. Here’s my thinking on this and tell me if you don’t agree: The most important reason people do business with an organization after looking at their web site has to do with trust. They believe the organization is presenting itself truthfully. And, of course, they want what the organization is offering. As you may know, the whole issue of trusted relationships on the web is very current, being discussed by security and work collaboration experts. How do you create trust on the web? There are many ways, but in my opinion, the most effective way to create trust is to include customer/client testimonials throughout the web site. They don’t have to be lengthy—just a few sentences will do. Many organizations will have a page devoted to client testimonials. That’s good, but what I’m suggesting is that you sprinkle those testimonials throughout the web site. The welcome page can have rotating testimonials. Every page thereafter should have at least one testimonial towards the bottom of the page. The point is this: You can’t go on any page of that web site without reading at least one testimonial—people who paid you a compliment and are willing to let you use their name on your web site. They’re going to bat for you. And that communicates trust. So think about it: The most important words on your web site are not the ones you wrote. They are the words your clients or customers wrote about you. Do you agree?
Web writing is all about emotional impact. We’ve already said web writing is a direct selling environment. (WWUP #1) To attract and retain readers, we must get to the point quickly. But the point we get to cannot be intellectual. It must be emotional. When I use the word emotional, I don’t mean the writing should be cheesy or sentimental. I mean it should be emotionally authentic. It should build trust, not violate it.
For example, consider this web copy: “When you buy from Company XYZ, you receive personalized service.” That is obviously an empty promise—dead and wooden. It doesn’t build trust. What if we approached it from the point of view of the customer: “Our service representatives have fans. One customer calls her rep, ‘Mr. Trustworthy’ because he always shows up when she calls. Once, he returned her call while he was getting ready to attend his son’s wedding. Mr. Trustworthy returned her call and made sure her problem was handled.’” Do you see the difference? In just a few words we create emotional impact by relating a success story.
So, how do you create emotional impact? Particularize. Tell a story about satisfied customers. Get real about how you create delighted customers. Deliver that impact.
What if you’re a new business and you don’t have any success stories you can call on? What if you company business process isn’t there yet, generating quality success stories.
Just use business language instead of abstracted, intellectual sales talk.
An example: “Smaller grocery chains are being inadequately serviced by large food marketing organizations. Company XYZ solves that problem.”
Improved: “As far as the large food marketing organizations are concerned, your grocery chain is not even on their radar screen.”
You could argue using “radar screen” is a cliché. Perhaps you don’t like it. My larger point is to suggest you should use language that delivers the emotional impact without beating around the bush. That kind of language creates trust, keeps people reading your web site and ultimately contributes to making a sale.
One of my writing coaching clients sent me a link to a blog post about exclamation points. I was fond of striking them from her text as I edited her website content. And it does seem that they pop up with more frequency these days. (Insert your own comment here about how social media destroys all, if you’re not too busy yelling at the neighbor kids to get off your lawn.)
The essential questions in the Authentic Organizations blog post were this: are exclamation points unprofessional, do they corrode the credibility of women and did the writer really care or not? You can read it here.
I don’t have a problem with exclamation points in general. They serve a purpose and give writers the ability to use their authentic voice when writing, which I always advocate for myself and all the writers I work with.
However, I do have an issue with exclamation points used in bulk (and I believe that ending three out of four sentences that way as the blogger did is the very definition of “bulk.”) Whether you are a man or woman, use that many exclamation points and you make your writing start to sound breathless and vaguely like an infomercial. Act now! Limited time offer! Operators are waiting! The blanket that has sleeves!
So go ahead and use an exclamation point now and then. Moderation is the key here, just as it annoyingly is in all good things. Just don’t use multiples. There is no excuse for ending any sentence with !!!! unless you are a fourteen-year-old girl trying to convey just how cute that boy in your homeroom is and you agree to dotting all your I’s with hearts.
Barbara Govednik launched 423 Communication in 2001 to helps its clients tell their stories through freelance writing services, coaching and editing services, and employee communication consulting and implementation. Read Barbara’s Being Well Said Blog.
Corporate communicators would do well to read and heed this advice from a Jan. 11, 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Best Beginning: Clarity:
“Meek or bold, a good beginning achieves clarity. A sensible line threads through the prose; things follow one another with literal logic or with the logic of feeling. Clarity isn’t an exciting virtue, but it’s a virtue always, and especially at the beginning of a piece of prose. Some writers seem to resist clarity, even to write confusingly on purpose. Not many would admit to this.
One who did was the wonderful-though-not-to-be-imitated Gertrude Stein: “My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear.” Oddly, it’s one of the clearest sentences she ever wrote.
For many other writers, clarity simply falls victim to a desire to achieve other things, to dazzle with style or to bombard with information. It’s one thing for the reader to take pleasure in the writer’s achievements, another when the writer’s own pleasure is apparent. Skill, talent, inventiveness, all can become overbearing and intrusive. The image that calls attention to itself is often the image you can do without.The writer works in service of story and idea and always in service of the reader. Sometimes the writer who overloads an opening passage is simply afraid of boring the reader. A respectable anxiety, but nothing is more boring than confusion.
You can’t tell it all at once. A lot of the art of beginnings is deciding what to withhold until later, or never to say at all. Take one thing at a time. Prepare your readers, tell everything they need to know in order to read on, and tell no more.
Journalists are instructed not to “bury the lead”—instructed, that is, to make sure they tell the most important facts of the story first. This translates poorly to longer forms of writing. The heart of the story is usually a place to arrive at, not a place to begin. Of course the reader needs a reason to continue, but the best reason is simply confidence that the writer is going some place interesting.”
—Adapted from Messrs. Kidder and Todd’s “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.”
Let’s talk links. That’s right, web links. Because most of the links we see on intranets and employee portals just stink. That’s right, stink.
Recent client usability testing efforts resulted in some classic examples of how not to do it.
- Avoid using software package titles as links: One client uses “Rosetta Stone” as the link to the language learning modules they offer employees. Problem is, most employees don’t know what Rosetta Stone is. They’d like to find the language learning options, but when asked to, can’t.
- Don’t separate what goes together. Notice how employees group and label a topic. For example, one group of employees is inclined to put compensation stuff together with benefits stuff. They can group the compensation stuff together, but they don’t know how to label it and they don’t really think of it as its own separate group. When put with “benefits” it all makes sense to them. So, the link becomes “Benefits & Compensation.”
- Don’t use acronyms for navigation. When faced with a bunch of HR navigation such as FMLA, L&D and SPD, most employees just ignored them and hit the search. Heavy use of search means your navigation is failing you.
- Don’t use terms that aren’t easily understood in every country. One term may not mean the same thing to employees in different countries. Some terms are far more recognizable to employees in the U.S. than in other parts of the world.
Obviously, links also must be prioritized and well organized. Here is some recent insight from Jakob Nielsen on the use of mega drop-down menus. We think this is a really cool approach for dealing with a lot of descriptive navigation.
But, it still has to be descriptive. Even a great mega drop-down menu won’t work if the link language is vague, unfamiliar and laden with acronyms.
Stacy Wilson, ABC, is president of Eloquor Consulting, Inc., in Lakewood, Colorado
Here are five suggestions to help you build your writing habit. (And, for even more help, here are seven ideas on how to seven ideas on how to ensure writing inspiration strikes.)
- Practice writing every day. Writing has to become like brushing your teeth. Develop the habit by doing it at the same time every day, ideally first thing in the morning. It’s like paying yourself first since you’re putting your creative goals front and center and leaving the rest of your day for work and other obligations. Further, if you start writing before you interact with people and media, it’s easier to connect with your inner self.
- Build writing muscle skills. Forcing words out onto a piece of paper or a computer screen can be painful when you first start. It’s the same as if you woke up one morning and decided to run a marathon and just showed up at the starting line. Chances are that you wouldn’t get very far. Practice by writing morning pages, as suggested by a number of creative coaches, namely Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way and Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones. Sit down and spill out whatever comes to mind as fast as you can. This writing isn’t for anyone else’s eyes. It’s to develop your writing skills and getting in touch with that inner part of your being. (BTW, this exercise is useful if you’re going through a difficult period in your life since it gives you an outlet for your thoughts and emotions.) This is uncensored writing. You should write faster than you can think about what’s going onto the page. If you start focusing on the right word to use or decide I don’t like the way I phrased that, you’re on the wrong track.
- Prepare to write. To maximize your writing effectiveness, gather ideas and other elements of your writing. It’s much easier to crank out a good column if you start with an outline or a set of ideas. Find what works for you. Maybe it’s just a title or it could be a full outline. Whatever your focus, find a way to gather germs of ideas wherever you are, whether it’s on your smartphone or in an old fashioned notebook.