My wife, Aileen, is a theatre practitioner - she writes, acts and directs - and in that world all feedback has to be given, in the words of Alan Bennett, with lashings of love and praise. For writers, it’s a bit less luvvy but clients who give good feedback get better results. I have written before about how to work with writers and here are my tips for giving feedback:

1. One person owns the feedback. Sometimes clients will need to gather feedback from different people - legal, product managers, technology experts etc. - but only one person should filter, prioritise and give this feedback to the writer.
2. Les absents ont toujours tort. This means ‘absentees are always wrong’. Give stakeholders a deadline for feedback and if they miss it, they don’t get to add their feedback. It’s your job to manage your feedback process. The most efficient way of updating the document is to do all the changes in one go. Drip-feeding changes is counter-productive.
3. Work out what feedback is for. Classic failure modes include: product managers rewriting a piece of text so that it reads like a technical spec or reintroducing all the impenetrable jargon that I have struggled to clarify. The brief should have clarified who is the audience and what language is appropriate for them. It’s fine to say ‘this bit of the text won’t work for an teenage audience / an IT audience / a general readership because…’ It’s also fine to spot factual errors or typos. In fact, this is the point.
4. Use redlined documents as a last resort. My experience is that if you give someone a Word document and ask them for feedback, they will send back a redlined document in which they have rearranged the running order, changed the words, added a lot of copy (over and above the word budget) and reverted to their own jargon. This is a huge mistake - they didn’t hire me to write something they would have written. What’s missing from this process is the chance for me to explain why I have written what I have written and the chance for them to explain to me what their priorities are and what I have misunderstood. The best way to do this is to have a conversation. The best feedback I get is over the phone.
5. Feedback time isn’t writing time. Sometimes people ask me to come up with new copy while I’m talking to them. Like most writers, I guess, I need to sit quietly and try different things and let the muse guide me. When giving feedback, you may have to accept that you won’t get revised copy in real time.
6. Share style guides and brand guides. If you have them, I can use them. It’s my job to get trademarks and brand names right. But you need to tell me what they are. For some jobs, I’ve even bought and downloaded corporate fonts and recreated elaborate document templates so that my writing ‘looks’ right. A good writer should take this stuff seriously.
7. Be specific. I love clients who can tell me WHY a bit of text isn’t working. Examples of good feedback: ‘it would be great to have an example here,’ ‘I didn’t really follow the argument in this paragraph. Can you simplify it?,’ ‘This misses the point. This is the message we need to get across…’ Also clarification of the audience and what they can and can’t understand often helps refine the work.
8. Explain what works too. Tell writers what you like, what worked and why. This is important. But not for ego and vanity. It’s part of the learning process. It helps them figure out the changes that they need to fix stuff that isn’t working.
9. See feedback as part of the relationship. Nearly all my work is repeat work for existing clients. Naturally, the more I do for someone, the more I understand their products, their priorities and their style. Good feedback reinforces this and helps me become more efficient at delivering the right copy. My objective, of course, is to deliver copy that needs no editing or feedback. The more work I do with someone the easier this becomes.
10. Listen to the writer’s feedback. A good writer is a professional, like a lawyer or an accountant. They have experience from other projects that may be relevant to yours. Sometimes, I find myself counselling a client against a particular request because I know - from my own experience - that it will be counter-productive. A good example is that some clients feel that their text needs all the latest industry buzzwords to make it credible. Sometimes (rarely) this is true. My experience is that jargon-free business English is much more credible and compelling. This is a fight that I have quite often.

Cartoon Copyright (c) The New Yorker, via CartoonBank.com.

Technorati Tags: Writing, writer, editing, feedback, collaboration, management

• The half-life of an online posting. Turns out to be 36 hours.
• Al Alcorn on the early history of Atari and Apple. Thanks to Robert Scoble for this.
• Every to-do list programe ever written. Or at least it feels like that. I use Outlook plus various PocketPCs and Smartphones for my to-do list.
• How to give better presentations. Darren Strange’s useful and detailed list.

I didn’t think it could happen, but today a PR found a new way to wind me up.  I put out a request on a wire service on Monday for input to an article I was writing for a major UK magazine.  I was very clear that a) I only wanted to be contacted by email and b) my deadline was 11am Wednesday.

So today, two days after my deadline, I get a call on Skype from a PR wanting to pitch something for the article.   Which bit of ‘email only’ didn’t he understand?  Did he think I was lying about my deadline?  Argghhhh!

He was the worst example but he wasn’t unique.  23 of the 89 PR companies that responded by email did so after my deadline.  What is the point of that?  23 companies are going to get billed for work that was irrelevent and unnecessary before it even began.

Picked this up on Slashdot: Paul McNamara expresses the irritation felt by journalists everywhere when PR firms send out indiscriminate press releases:

This isn’t exactly brain surgery, yet the fellow at a PR agency called Rocket Science managed to violate Rule #1 while attempting to drum up publicity for Singlefin, which provides e-mail, IM and Web filtering services to the likes of Juno and NetZero.

Rather than direct the request to the appropriate individual or individuals here — oh, say our spam and security beat writers — the Rocket Science rep lit up the inboxes of 11 different Network World staffers, not to mention at least three individuals who no longer work here.

For more examples of PR madness, from my blog see:

• The top ten lies of PR companies
• Bad PR meet bad hack
• Journalist Anti-FAQ
• Unintended press release disclosures
• The worst press release ever
• Another dumb press release
• Ban the word ‘leverage’

Technorati Tags: PR, spam, junk mail, bad writing

I mentioned Bullfighter a few weeks ago in a ‘pick of the web‘ post. I’ve now had a chance to use it properly on a 6,500 technical white paper and I can review it properly.

It works with Microsoft Word 2003. Once installed (it’s a free download), it appears as a small toolbar. There are two main tools:

1. Bullfighter. This works like a regular spelling and grammar checker but it warns if you use certain cliches or business bull words. You can add your own pet hate words to the list.
2. Bull index. This brings up a window showing: a bull index (a score generated by the number of bull words used in the text), the average sentence length and the average word length and a Flesch readability score. All these different elements are combined into a single ‘Bull Composite Index’ for the document.

Getting a Flesch readability score at the click of a button is very useful. Word’s grammar checker will do it but you have to click through the wholel document first. The Bull detector is helpful. I picked up a couple of poor word choices that way.

Overall, I recommend Bullfighter. It’s useful. It might be educational for bad writers (it was developed originally by a firm of management consultants).

*

Bullfighter did highlight one problem with readability statistics. This isn’t a fault of Bullfighter specifically but of all these kinds of tools. Across a very large document, it’s very hard to generate even small improvements in Flesch or other readability stats. I spent four hours reviewing and editing my 6,500 word document and managed to budge the average sentence length by 0.2 words per sentence.

What I would love is a tool that ran through the document and heat mapped or highlighted sentences that were too long, dangerous long words and so on. It would allow me to focus my editing on the bits of the document that needed the most work. There are lots of tools to help me WRITE but very few tools that help me EDIT. It’s a curious oversight. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be very grateful.

Technorati Tags: Word, writing, editing, Bullfighter, Flesch, readability

Stephen Bungay is a management consultant, academic and author of two remarkable books about the Second World War: The Most Dangerous Enemy and Alamein. I met him recently and enjoyed the opportunity of asking him a few questions.

You’ve described The Most Dangerous Enemy as an ironic epic – can you elaborate?

Non-fiction is fundamentally the same as fiction except that your plot is not your own. The Battle of Britain is part of Britain’s national mythos and I wanted to explore (but not debunk) it. It has huge odds, mighty contests and great heroes. I deliberately modelled the structure of the book on Homer’s Iliad as a way of ordering the mass of data I had accumulated. For example, my chapter on ‘the reason why’ mirrors the argument between the Greeks and Trojans. In Book 2 of the Iliad, Homer reviews the forces. I do that in chapters 3-6 - I need more space than Homer because modern forces are more complex. My Achilles is Park. It’s ironic because many of the received wisdoms about the Battle of Britain turn out to be wrong but that makes the truth more inspiring than the myth we’ve inherited.

How do you make it come to life?

In the prologue and postscript, I link the whole story of the battle into my own personal story, as a child reading the canonical history of the battle and, as an adult, watching a fly past for the 50th Anniversary of the Battle outside Buckingham Palace.

My priorities are 1) clarity, 2) accuracy and 3) memorability. I spend a lot of time trying to find the exact phrase.

For example, I use understatement: “Twenty seven British fighters plunged into the formation of 475, ‘undaunted by odds’ once again.” In fact, they claimed 14 enemy aircraft for the loss of one of their own. It turns out that if you had height and surprise it was a tactical advantage to be outnumbered in a dogfight. It gave you a target rich environment.

Allusion and reference also works. For example, hinting at Henry V and, of course, Churchill when I describe them as “the intrepid ‘few’,” one of the leitmotifs of the story.

The last sentence in the book deliberately ties into another quotation used by Elgar to bring out the full emotion of the point I am making: “Perhaps you too, especially if you are not British, should not completely forget about the Battle of Britain. For this, if anything of ours, is worth your memory.”

Tell me about writing the book.

It started off as the book ‘I was going to write when I retired’ but I decided to make a start during a six month career break in late 1996 and early 1997. When I was writing it, I worked harder than I have ever worked - 16 to 18 hours a day. I went back to my job and it wasn’t until I left The Boston Consulting Group in 1999 that I could take three months off to complete it.

I would type until 10pm, print off that day’s copy and go to bed. The composition was more like a download – an extended intellectual orgasm. I didn’t interrupt myself, even to correct typos. I would wake up at 4am the next morning and read over what I had written. I would put a red ring around repeated words, lost threads, missing pronouns, broken rhythms, overlong sentences. Then I used to correct. Always correct to clarify.

How did you research the book?

I wanted to get into the German decision-making process. I read pretty much everything that is available, including Milch’s inspection report from the end of August and Osterkamp’s biography, which is very hard to get hold of. No-one else seems to have bothered with a lot of this stuff. Also, I grew up in Kent, underneath the battlefield!

You chose a different structure for Alamein. How did that come about?

The book is structured around a series of answers to questions I had. For example: ‘why fight in the western desert? (where no army had ever fought before),’ ‘what determined success?’ and so on.

What was the hardest thing to write?

I spent the best part of half a day on the end of Chapter 4 of Alamein.

“The desert offered baking heat and chilly nights, but it did not offer weeks of rain, steaming jungle or months of snow and ice. It offered flies and dysentery, not mosquitoes and malaria, desert sores not trenchfoot or frostbite. There was less sniping and mortaring than in other theatres. The landscape was open, so death did not constantly lurk round the next hedge or behind the next tree. Quarter was usually given, and prisoners were not massacred. In a global conflict unprecedented in its comprehensive awfulness, the desert was the nice bit of the war.”

The last sentence had to underscore the contrast with the rest of the world without diminishing the ghastliness of war so I balanced polysyllabic latin-derived words with short Anglo-Saxon words and a stronger rhythm. I also pair words: global vs. bit, awfulness vs. nice to enhance the contrast.

How did you get past writer’s block?

I don’t really suffer from it but sometimes I have to go for away from writing for a bit. Do some reading, go for a walk, go shopping. Also, when I’m puzzling out a problem, I’m a great believer in a good night’s sleep. My mind has usually sorted it out by morning.

How does your consulting experience influence your writing?

The consulting helps a lot with TV work. I tend to think in bullet points. I’m using tostarting with a conclusion and then giving reasons, either inductive or deductive.

It also makes me wary of the inappropriate metaphor. Was Alamein ‘the turning of the tide’? Not really. A tide goes in and out. Turning the tide isn’t much good if it will return again. After Alamein the tide stopped ebbing and flowing. A better metaphor is that Rommel builds a dam and Montgomery crumbles it. There’s still a water metaphor but it is more accurate.

Technorati Tags: Stephen Bungay, writing, writer, interview, Battle of Britain, history

Mostly I use my Bose noise-cancelling headphones without listening to music at all (see my earlier post, how to concentrate on writing). Sometimes, however, music is essential to my work. I listen to different kinds of music depending on how I’m doing: wake up, get started, keep going, calm down, concentrate etc. Here is a list of my top ten but what works for you?

• Jazz mix tape: what Alistair Cooke described as the aristocracy of American Music: Earl Hines, Count Basie, Duke Ellington. Also Bennie Goodman (Sing, Sing, Sing, With a Swing especially).
• Flamenco guitar: Angel Romero, Paco Lucia etc. This is lovely to listen to. Lighter than classical music and more energising.
• Foreign lyrics: I generally try to avoid music with lyrics that hook my attention. I love Joni Mitchell, for example, but if I listen to California I stop working and start listening. So, I prefer MC Solaar (French rap), Madredeus (Portugese Fados), Seu Jorge’s covers of Bowie songs from The Life Aquatic (good songs, poor film), Caetano Veloso etc.
• Wu-Tang Clan: it comes as a big surprise to people (me, especially) that I like rap music so much. Oddly, some of it, the Wu in particular, are good background for certain kinds of writing. Perhaps the beats synchronise the heart and typing. I don’t know. It works for me when I need more energy. In particular: Enter the Wu-Tang and RZA’s soundtrack for Ghost Dog.
• Brian Eno: Apollo Atmosphere and Soundtracks are very good. Haunting. Remind me of the Apollo documentary. I have pictures of the two Apollo astronauts I have met - Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Duke - by my desk. I find anything space-related inspirational.
• Cocteau Twins: Takes me back to my school days when I used to listen to it while I was doing my homework.
• Classical: Bach is good writing music. My favourites: Six suites for solo cello performed by Yo-Yo Ma and The English Suites performed by Murray Perahia. But I don’t listen to a lot of classic musical.
• Modern classical: More to my taste is Philip Glass* (Mishima, in particular is good for pumping the blood), Michael Nyman (Alexander Balanescu’s solos on Zoo Caprices are astonishing) etc. Incidentally, Glass wrote that he trained himself to compose every morning, whether he felt like it or not.

* I quite like this Philip Glass gag I found on the internet:

- Knock Knock.
- Who’s there?
- Knock Knock.
- Who’s there?
- Knock Knock.
- Who’s there?
- Knock Knock.
- Who’s there?
— Philip Glass.

• Human Space Invaders. Students reenact the classic game in stop motion video. Made me laugh.
• The (Un)happy Planet Map. Map of the world showing which countries are happiest. Hurray for Vanatu. No surprises at the bottom end of the list.
• Ten tactics for driving traffic. Detailed suggestions for building traffic to websites. Top ten lists work very well on Bad Language but sometimes I wish the other posts would get the same traffic spikes.
• Airtoons. Hilarious parodies of airline safety cards.

Technorati is now reporting 48m blogs worldwide. But who writes them? Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki can’t be doing all of it. According to a report in Slate, Pew Internet & American Life Project carried out a telephone survey of bloggers and published the results yesterday.

There is long tail of blogs and they’re not like the top 100 blogs many of us read so avidly. In fact most of them are about cats. (I made that bit up but it could be true.)

Here are some interesting observations from the Slate article:

About half of all American bloggers are men, says Pew. About half are under the age of 30. About half use a pseudonym. About half say creative self-expression or documenting personal experiences is a major reason for blogging. About half think their audience is folks they already know.

It’s interesting to note that whereas 90% of bloggers read blogs, only 39% of the internet audience read blogs, equating to 57m Americans.

The article closes with a predictable, if well-written, ‘get a life’ kicker.

Will the next Pew snapshot find bloggers engaging the outside world in greater numbers instead of cataloging their own? Will teenagers give up navel-gazing when they graduate from MySpace to the greater Web? If all these people really want from the Web is a hobby and to talk to their friends and family, they’d be better off taking pottery lessons and purchasing more cell-phone minutes.

I suspect that people want more from blogging than this. I suspect that many of the long tail bloggers have been bitten by the same thing that bit me when I sold my business: the joy of writing and the pleasure of being read.

Allister Frost works at Microsoft and wrote some friendly things about me and my work. This cheered me up immensely and the cartoon made me laugh.