Rule #1: don’t throw stones! Two great examples of Stibbe-fallibility this week.

First, I ran a seminar about writing in business. Lots of cool people came and we had a great discussion. One of the points I stressed was that you had to proofread everything really carefully. Within two hours of the seminar finishing, I had an email from one of the attendees politely pointing out a typo on my website.

Second, I’m writing an article for an IT security magazine. To cut a very long story short I made a complete bozo out of myself by not realising that these two PR people I was talking to were in fact the same person. D’oh! No wonder PRs think journalists are a bunch of semi-housetrained monkeys.

If either of these situations were reversed and happened to me, I’d blog them. So it’s only fair that I indict myself when it’s richly deserved.

I remember the old Woody Allen gag where he describes an alien invasion of Earth in which the Martians beat humanity by the simple expedient of being ten minutes early for everything. The moral: you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be better (and put your hands up when you’re wrong).

Writers are peculiar creatures with special care and feeding requirements. Being a writer myself and working with writers at my company, Articulate Marketing, I thought it would be useful to post the advice I wrote for the company website here. I hope this will help people get the best work from the writers they deal with.
Selection

• Look for writers with a track record of work in a similar format or subject but don’t get hung up if they haven’t done exactly the same thing elsewhere. A good writer should be able to research new topics effectively.
• Meet the writer (not just the account manager) and make sure there’s a good ‘chemistry.’ Do they talk your language? Understand your requirements? Give constructive input about ways they might carry out your brief?
• Look for a chameleon-like ability to write in different styles. A good writer should be able to follow a corporate style guide and adapt their work to the audience and client.
• Ask for references.
• Check that your writer has professional indemnity insurance.

Briefing

• A briefing document should explain who the work is for (the target audience), what its objectives are (why is it being written), what style guidelines and language will be used (for instance American English or British English), the length in words, what the deadline is, a high level outline of the contents and any supplementary contact information or additional resources the writer may need.
• You can reasonably expect a good writer to help with this process, even draft a briefing document for you based on your instructions.

Management

• Like most people, writers like to get positive feedback. If they’ve done a good job, tell them.
• When it comes to fact-checking, you should expect a writer to keep meticulous notes and voice recordings of any interviews they carry out.
• Similarly, they should be able to provide independent sources for any facts and statistics that they use in their work.
• Like anyone in business, writers will try to schedule their work. Last minute requests and short deadlines are okay (sometimes) but you are more likely to get a good job if you allow a reasonable deadline.
• Writers tend to think in terms of deadlines, drafts and word counts and chunk up their time in units of interviews, research, writing and editing. Understanding a little about how they work will help you understand what progress they are making

Editing and rewriting

• You may find writers reluctant to release work until it has reached a final draft form. At Articulate, work goes through a fact-checking and proof-reading stage before being released to clients.
• You should expect to receive work that is spelled correctly, grammatical and that makes sense. It should, naturally, meet the brief.
• It’s normal for the client to review the work from their company’s perspective to check, for example, that trademarks are properly written out or that job titles are correct. Minor tweaks like this are normal, especially when you start working with a new writer.
• In our experience, most major rework arises from a faulty brief or one that changes during the assignment.
• That said, you shouldn’t have to deal with a writer’s ego. If the work doesn’t do what you expected, explain why not and request changes. The more specific you are the more likely you are to get a satisfactory result.
• In our view, unpardonable sins include: missing a deadline, starting work without an agreed brief, clichés and making the same mistake twice.

The UK’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS to its friends) recently issued a DVD about ‘level busts’. This is when a pilot inadvertantly flies higher or lower than than her assigned altitude. The problem, which is very common, raises safety concerns. As an instrument-rated pilot myself, I would like to avoid level busts if I can.

A typical scenario described on the video is this: a controller clears a plane to 11,000 feet (”Fastair 345 climb flight level one one zero”). The pilot read back the instruction but dialed 10,000 feet into the autopilot and nearly hit another aircraft at that level.

It looks like an easy mistake to make but there are a number of things that contribute to the error including pilot workload (flying the plane, reading charts etc.), pilot expectations (he was probably expecting 10,000 feet) and habit (getting a clearance and setting the autopilot are frequent repetitive tasks that most pilots do correctly 99.99% of the time).

What is interesting for Bad Language in this whole analysis is the use of a very strictly defined vocabulary and templates for communication on the radio. For example, when a controller wants you to climb to flight level 100, he will instruct you to “climb flight level one hundred” but for any other level he will spell out the numbers, e.g. flight level two four zero.

A similar discipline exists in radio use in the army. Radio operators will use the phrase “say again” rather than “repeat” if they didn’t understand a transmission. Why? Because “repeat” is the word used when you want the artillery to fire another load of shells at the same place they fired at last time. Which may not be exactly what you wanted.

voiding misunderstandings. But even when lives depend on it, you cannot guarantee that everyone will understand what you say all the time. I think this is a powerful lesson in the ineffability of language and the importance of saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

Here’s The Sex Pistols. They’re back in the news today. Having been inducted into the Rock and Roll “Hall of Fame” they sent a ‘thanks but no thanks‘ letter which is a mixture of self-promotion and biting sarcasm. Here is an extract:

We’re not your monkeys, we’re not coming. You’re not paying attention.

The BBC goes on to examine the Pistols’ reaction to the $2,500 a seat induction dinner:

The note further criticised the Hall of Fame for offering “fame at $25,000 if we paid for a table or $15,000 to squeak up in the gallery”.

It further claimed that the money “goes to a non-profit organisation, selling us a load of old famous”.

I liked the way that the BBC reported all this with a straight face. Their online news article ended with this no-frills kicker:

A shortlist of nominees is sent to an international body of about 700 voting “rock experts”.

It is this kind of blandness that the Sex Pistols so brilliantly exploit. It’s Bill Grundy all over again. If you’re going to do PR stunts, do them in style. Or in torn jeans and spiky hair. Either way, blandness is pretty vacant.

The first step to changing something is to measure it. In my view, readability has two components. The first is the ‘hygiene’ factors that make a piece of writing easy or hard to read. Lots of things can make something hard to read (and put people to sleep!). For example:

• Over-punctuation. Too many %$&. Too many Capital Letters.
• The passive voice is used too much.
• Unnecessary acronyms and abbreviations.
• Long sentences.
• Using long words when short ones are better.
• Spelling and grammatical mistakes. Typos.
• Technical things like mishandling quotations.

I think these things make it hard to read something because they increase the work that your brain has to do to make sense of the text. There is also an accessbility aspect to all this because some people find reading harder than others. A gristly piece of text will exclude more readers than a more digestible item.

The second component is more positive. It comprises the techniques used to make writing memorable, credible and compelling. They teach whole courses on this at journalism school but among the things that work in business writing are:

• Avoiding anything that switches off readers: unsubstantiated claims, jargon, hype.
• Using strong verbs, good analogies, pithy quotations.
• Eliminating cliches and waffly throat-clearing.
• Credible data from the real world.
• Citing believable authorities and people like the reader in evidence.
• Well-written introductions, titles and subheads
• Making the first and last sentence of each paragraph strong.

The form and structure vary according to media. Newspaper articles favour the ‘inverted pyramid’ with conclusion first and facts later. Writing for the web is another specialism.

The list goes on and, in essence, getting the hygiene factors and the positive factors right are the job of a professional writer (ahem, like those at Articulate Marketing).

So how do you measure good writing. The hygiene factors that lose readers if you get them wrong are easier to measure. There are statistical tools that will analyse text including Flesch Grade Level, Flesch Reading Ease and FOG. The Online readability assessment will let you test a piece of text against several of these simultaeously. Microsoft Word has a tool that will give similar results. You can get a readability plug-in for WordPress (my blogging tool of choice).

As to the second set of positive factors, I don’t know of any statistical ways to measure this. It is a professional skill like being a lawyer or architect and reputation, recommendation and track record are the main ways of assessing a writer (and by implication their writing). I plan to get some research done later this year on this aspect.

P.S. This post may look familiar. I posted it a while ago but somehow managed to delete it. So here it is again with new pictures and better formatting.

Yesterday, I ran my first Articulate Seminar. It was tremendous fun and I found that talking about writing with people from different industries illuminated old problems in new ways for me. Andrew Yeomans came along from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and afterwards he sent me his delightful deconstruction of press release hype:

“This amazing, prestigious and sophisticated product is a quantum leap forward and performance is a greater order of magnitude, and will decimate the competition. The enormity of this tremendous advance indicates our commitment to servicing our customers in a forensically sound manner.”

Various dictionaries give:

• amazing 1. Causing distraction, consternation, confusion, dismay; stupefying, terrifying, dreadful.
• prestigious 1. Practising juggling or legerdemain; of the nature of or characterized by juggling or magic; cheating, deluding, deceitful; deceptive, illusory.
• sophisticated 1. Mixed with some foreign substance; adulterated; not pure or genuine. 2. a. Altered from, deprived of, primitive simplicity or naturalness. Of a literary text: altered in the course of being copied or printed. 3. a. Falsified in a greater or less degree; not plain, honest, or straightforward.
• quantum 5. Physics. A minimum amount of a physical quantity which can exist and by multiples of which changes in the quantity occur.
• magnitude 3. A class in a system of classification determined by size. a. Each of the classes into which the fixed stars have been arranged according to their degree of brilliancy. Now regarded as a number on a continuous scale representing the negative logarithm of the brightness, such that a decrease of five magnitudes represents a hundred-fold increase in brightness and a decrease of one magnitude an increase of 2·512 times.
• decimate 4. transf. a. To kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of.
• enormity (-nôrmt) n., pl. e·nor·mi·ties. 1. The quality of passing all moral bounds; excessive wickedness or outrageousness. 2. A monstrous offense or evil; an outrage.
• tremendous \Tre*men”dous\, a. [L. tremendus that is to be trembled at, fearful, fr. tremere to tremble.] Fitted to excite fear or terror; such as may astonish or terrify by its magnitude, force, or violence; terrible; dreadful; as, a tremendous wind; a tremendous shower; a tremendous shock or fall.
• advance \Ad*vance”\, v. t. 7. To furnish, as money or other value, before it becomes due, or in aid of an enterprise; to supply beforehand
• commitment \Com*mit”ment\, n. 4. A doing, or perpetration, in a bad sense, as of a crime or blunder; commission.
• service \Serv”ice\, n. 11. Copulation with a female; the act of mating by male animals
• forensic Relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation.
• sound a. Meaningless noise. b. Thorough; complete: a sound flogging.

So the translation is:

“This confusing, dreadful, deceitful, illusory, adulterated, dishonest product is the smallest possible small step forward and provides less than half the performance, and will kill very few of our competitors. The monstrous evil of our releasing this dreadful product before it it ready demonstrates our crimes in screwing over our clients, see you in court where we will speak complete nonsense.”

Three days ago I wrote that Amazon had missed several of their own delivery dates for my Xbox 360. Stung by the criticism their customer care department has swung into action … and cancelled my order completely.

No explanation was offered and my sources at Microsoft were mystified. I couldn’t find a telephone number on the Amazon site to call for a comment and when I wrote to them about the repeated delays I got a form email back with no contact details.

This is the gist of the email:

This item has now been cancelled from your order and we can confirm that you have not been charged for it.

Please accept our apologies for any disappointment or inconvenience caused.

There is no information on this email that tells me how to return the games and accessories I bought when I thought they were going to actually deliver the wretched thing.

It’s called a 360 because that is how many days you have to wait for it to arrive.

Bad writing is expensive. It can have direct operational costs: In 1983, Coleco lost $35 million in just a few months when customers returned thousands of new Coleco Adam home computers because they couldn’t understand the manual.

But mostly bad writing is a leaky bucket. Money just drips out in lost opportunities. I think people know this intuitively. When I talk to them, most people admit that they’re not happy with their website or that they’d like more compelling product literature or case studies. This is how we make a living at Articulate Marketing, so I know there is some demand out there!

To understand the cost of bad writing, I think we have to go back to why we write anything in the first place. In business we’re not really bothered about artistic expression or entertainment. What we want is to persuade and inform people.

Writing fails if the reader doesn’t understand it, doesn’t believe it or doesn’t remember it or act on it. Consequently, comprehension, credibility and retention are the requirements of business writing.

To help calculate the cost of bad writing, imagine you had a tool that could tell you how successful a piece of writing was at meeting these requirements. The opposite of a bullshit detector. (A good shit detector, perhaps?) It would tell you how readable it was. Think of readability as the ‘clickthrough’ rate for writing.

Companies spend lots of money chasing circulation: the number of hits on a website, the number of press releases sent out, the number of brochures printed. Little or no thought is given to readability.

But if your readability detector told you that a brochure was just 50% readable, you would know that half your production costs for making that brochure had been wasted. Also you would know that half the sales you hoped for as a result of the brochure had disappeared in a puff of incomprehension and indifference.

This is why even modest improvements in readability can generate a massive and disproportionate return. This is how some schlub of a writer can spoil a whole campaign in an afternoon.

Patrick Smith writes a fantastic column on Salon.com called Ask the Pilot. He’s a commercial airline pilot and he answers people’s questions about the technical aspects of aviation and discusses the weird airline world from the inside out. His latest column, Getting the Silent Treatment from Airlines, is fascinating. This is the gist of the story (in case you get lost in Salon’s baroque login procedure like I did):

It’s ironic that while travel by plane remains profoundly safe, the airlines themselves are the subject of widespread and growing distrust. The mass media does them no favors by distorting and overhyping minor events, but the industry has, for many years, been guilty of aiding and abetting people’s fears through a combination of tight-lipped reticence and the use of ludicrous simplifications.

I’m a pilot, although I don’t fly anything bigger than a Cirrus SR-22. But this resonates with me. I often take nervous flyers as passengers and spend the time to explain what I’m doing to them.

From a business perspective, this article touches on the importance of two things:

• The customer experience which is made up of a thousand small interactions from the airline website to the check-in desk. And not so small: “extremely loud bangs and, occasionally, tongues of flame” resulting from a compressor stall. I recently wrote an article for Director magazine about this and I’ll post extracts once it appears in May.
• Clear, honest communications, for example an announcement from the cockpit in plain language explaining what has happened and reassuring everyone that they are safe - that compressor stalls are spectacular but very rarely dangerous, for example. When one passenger wrote to the airline asking for an explanation of what had happened they got a $100 voucher but no explanation. Another missed opportunity.

With so much competition, building a trust relationship with customers can be a genuine competitive advantage. For example, at the moment Amazon are royally pissing me off because they can’t give me a straight story about when I might get my Xbox 360. I ordered it at the beginning of November and they keep changing the due date. It is now 30th March. I mind the delay but I mind misleading, incorrect information more.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that short words are best. Now we have proof. The March 2006 issue of The Atlantic Monthly cited a piece of research that shows that besides clouding the meaning, the use of long words actually makes the reader think the author is stupid. The title of the research illustrates the problem eloquently:

“Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”

I love it when scientists have a sense of humour. Good for you Daniel M. Oppenheimer.

When I wrote about readability in an earlier post, I listed some formulas that could be used to test how readable a piece of text is. All of them take account of word length.

What Oppenheimer did was to get seventy-one Stanford undergraduates to evaluate different writing samples. He created a “highly complex” version of each original text by replacing each noun, verb and adjective in it with the longest synomym. This is the kind of writing by thesaurus that many business people and techies employ when they want to sound knowledgeable and important or because they think writing like they speak will make them sound lightweight.

Thanks to Oppenheimer, we know that the opposite is, in fact, true. He says “one thing is certain, write as simply and plainly as possible and it’s more likely you’ll be thought of as intelligent.”