I wrote before about the top ten lies of PR companies and Guy Kawasaki has done a couple of excellent pieces about VC lies and entrepreneur lies.  In the same spirit, here are the top ten lies of writers:

1. It’ll be done by the weekend.
2. It’s the next thing on my to do list.
3. I’ve never missed a deadline (actually this is true for me but only if you allow me the deadlines that I rescheduled and a couple that I got wrong by a day or so in my to-do list).
4. No problem.  It’s easy.
5. I’m happy to do the rewrite.
6. Of course, it’s off the record. (See my previous post on this subject.)
7. Your brief is fine.
8. It’ll take two days (when it might take one or ten!).  Not so much a problem for me as I tend to charge by the word rather than time allegedly spent on the project.
9. My workload’s pretty light at the moment - I’ve got plenty of time.
10. Yes, I can easily incorporate your PR company / marketing manager / product manager’s “improvements” into the text.

Check out my company’s guide to working with writers.

Sarah Bee is my proofreader - my secret weapon against grammatical errors and typos. I asked her a few questions:

How did you get into proofreading and editing?

I started out from university writing for various music mags, and took it upon myself to check the proofs of one of the smaller ones every month having spotted a few errors in previous issues. I soon realised it was my mission to rid the world of errors. After a while I set up my own website offering editing services, and have tweezed typos out of all sorts of documents, from charity reports to novels about the fall of the Roman Empire.

What skills do you need?

There’s a definite knack to skimming a page and seeing the things that aren’t right - � they need to leap out at you, waving big signs saying ‘THIS AIN’T RIGHT’. Some of them are really embedded, not obvious at all, so you need to be able to smell that whiff of something being misplaced. You also need a light touch - with editing less is often more - and it helps if you’re terribly pedantic.

What’s the best way for people to proof read their own work - any tips of the trade?

It’s easy to get distracted by the meaning of sentences when you’re trying to identify their basic components, so it can help to read from the bottom of a page upwards, right to left, so you’re forced to focus on the nuts and bolts. But it is better to get a fresh pair of eyes on anything important if you can - it’s really difficult not to get bogged down in making stylistic alterations rather than technical ones when it’s your own stuff. I can’t really proofread my own stuff to my satisfaction.

What are the most common mistakes?

‘They’re/their/there’ is a constant source of confusion, as well as ‘where/were’ and ‘you’re/your’. Similarly I see a lot of mix-ups of ‘pair/pear’, ‘discreet/discrete’ and ‘loath/loathe’ (which I loathe). No one seems to know where to put apostrophes any more.

Also, a new one I’m seeing everywhere - full stops seem to be escaping from self-contained parentheses at an alarming rate. If parentheses appear at the end of a sentence then the full stop goes outside (like this). (But if the whole sentence is contained in brackets, the full stop stays in.) However, people seem to think the full stops deserve their freedom. I shall be campaigning to keep them imprisoned.

Do you have any top tips for writers?

Just take care, be deliberate as you go. It may not seem that important to get the boring technical stuff in order when you’ve got important points to make or gorgeous metaphors to build, but the smallest slip can undermine a whole sentence. I’m constantly amazed at how one letter or comma out of place can nudge a sentence right off its tracks. I think you just have to maintain a background awareness of that, to keep your writing strong and focused.

What are the worst mistakes you’ve found? C’mon, spill the beans!

I see mistakes everywhere, and while I get a sort of buzz from spotting them like some sort of perverse birdwatcher, I can also get in quite a mood. I saw a permanent council sign the other day saying ‘PEDESTRAIN AREA’, and the word ‘capitvate’ in a sponsor ident before the break in a TV drama. Those were quite inexcusable typos. As for the copy I actually get to edit, I’m afraid some malapropisms do make me laugh - recently I had ‘he marched at the head of a colon of soldiers’. I also had a ‘bile-up’ as opposed to a ‘pile-up’ - quite a handy neologism, though, for an enormous heap of things you feel bilious about.

I’m often shocked at the quality of press releases - errors in those immediately devalue whatever it is that’s being brought to your attention. Someone referred to ‘the perverbial herd of sheep’ or something in a recent one I saw - again, nice neologism for x-rated sayings.

One of my all-time favourites was on channel4.com, on a Dispatches microsite - a link said ‘If you have an opinion about this programme, why share your views on the Dispatches forum’. I had to write in and tell them -they never thanked me, though.

Technorati Tags: proofreading, writing, tips, mistakes

I seem to spend most of my day entering passwords; for Windows, for websites, sometimes just to open documents and ZIP files.

My wife has a great tip for passwords. She uses them as reminders. For example, “eatsomefruit” or “drinkmorewater” or “gooutrunning.” Not only are these passwords easy to remember and longer than the average password so somewhat more secure, they are also useful.

(PS Get Safe Online has good advice on choosing strong passwords.)

Technorati Tags: passwords, reminders, GTD

“Two peoples divided by a common language.” George Bernard Shaw said this about the British and the Americans, but the same can be said of anoraks and suits.

I have been on both sides of the fence: first, as a computer games programmer and then as CEO of a development company; finally as a journalist writing about technology for magazines like Director and Wired.

Now I sit right on the fence as writer-in-chief at Articulate Marketing, a company dedicated to helping technology companies get their message across to business people. This mission is also the subject of this blog.

IT people need to speak to the rest of the world. Emails, reports, budget requests, proposals, pitches, websites, manuals, FAQs, etc. etc. Get it right and your clients will love you. Get it wrong and you will mystify customers and end-users alike.

Let me try to approach the problem from an engineering perspective. What are the failure modes when technical people start writing?

• Too much ‘how’ and not enough ‘why’. I regularly see reports written by IT people that spend pages on the technical details of a particular solution but cover the benefits to the buyer in a short paragraph. It’s like a laptop review that tells you what the case is made of but doesn’t tell you if the machine is good value for money.
• Too much detail. Completeness and accuracy are virtues that good software engineering instils. But sometimes 100 well-chosen words will make the point better than 2,000 words covering every detail. It’s a question of prioritisation – you have no right to your readers’ time.
• Jargon and acronyms. It’s easy to scatter industry standard buzzwords and shorthand, assuming that every reader will know what they mean. Making assumptions about what readers know is dangerous.
• Wanting to sound big and clever. Research shows that using short words make writers seem more intelligent, but many people think they have to use long words and complicated sentences to appear smart. Too much IT copy looks like the winner of an obfuscated code competition translated into English.

I want to take an engineering approach to solving the problems too.

• Top down design. The Pyramid Principle (Barbara Minto) brilliantly describes how to persuade people through writing. Writing to Deadline (Don Murray) talks about how to construct an article and tell a story. Both books are short and sweet.
• Get the syntax right. Check out the Economist Style Guide and The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) to learn how to write good, clean prose. These are like the Mythical Man Month – required reading.
• Requirements analysis. What is your document trying to achieve? Who is it for? What are the constraints? A good specification is the foundation of all good writing.
• Pick the right language for the job. Don’t think you have to write like a PhD thesis in order to seem authoritative. If you write what you know as if you were explaining it to an intelligent friend over coffee, you won’t go far wrong. Use everyday English words and short sentences.
• User testing. I recommend three kinds of testing: read the article aloud to yourself. Does it sound like you? Is it natural? Does it make sense? Ask a non-technical friend or colleague to read it and check that they picked up on the main points you wanted to convey. Finally, try to find someone who can proofread it properly- it’s very hard to proofread your own work.
• Optimisation. Most prose can benefit from liposuction. Generally cutting the word count by 10 percent will improve any text. If you’re writing for the web, aim for a 50 percent cut because people read slower online. Tools like Bullfighter and Microsoft word’s grammar checker provide readability metrics to guide you.
• Best practice: Look at how newspapers and magazines convey information. They use short paragraphs, strong headlines, sidebars and boxed out quotations. They also write pithy opening sentences and strong final paragraphs. Do the same. And remember: paragraphs don’t crash and a syntax error in a sentence is embarrassing but not a bug.

Technorati Tags: Writing, technical, readability, grammar, communication

Everyone can write. But not everyone can write well.

We all learn to write at school but then society makes a distinction between ‘writers’ and ‘the rest of us.’ A writer sits in a garret and writes the great American novel. The rest of us write memos. It’s a false division.

Because everyone can write, people underestimate its importance and overestimate their own ability. Because they think that writers are creative weirdos they rarely think about hiring a specialist when they have something important to say.

I’m not talking about advertising copywriting. This is an artform at its best – business haikus. I’m talking about brochures, websites, case studies, press releases, reports, letters and the humdrum daily word torrent.

What comes out of most companies is bad. In my experience there are seven types of bad writing:

1. Thinks too much of itself. The UK satirical magazine, Private Eye runs a regular column lampooning the abuse of the word ‘solution.’ For example, Dow Corning’s “Innovative solutions for wound management,” which means “bandages.” This kind of word inflation devalues meaning and arouses the scepticism of readers.
2. Is too clever by half. For some reason, people are afraid to write how they speak. They want to sound big, grown-up and clever. So they use big words and long sentences. For example, I was presented with this beauty at a school board meeting once: “the Governing Body are agreeing this budget as the financial mechanism to support the education priorities of the school as identified in the School Development Plan and will adhere to the best value principles in spending its school funding allocation.” It meant, “We approve the budget.”
3. Gets hyped up. Press releases often include frankenquotes. These are made-up quotations that bear no resemblance to normal speech. For example: “Nortel has established a legacy in innovation and will continue to push the envelope…” Try saying that in a pub to your friends. See if they still listen to you afterwards. Or trust you.
4. Tells lies. In the UK, journalists score low in public trust. Somewhere near politicians and spin doctors. However, good journalists are obsessive about research, accuracy, good reporting, details and, yes, truth. What works for newspaper stories also works for business communication.
5. Ignores the reader. As a writer, the greatest skill is to think about what the reader needs to hear, not what you need to say. It takes an imaginative leap. For example, Google says “Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada, yada.” Microsoft says “This software is licensed under the agreement below.” Which one is more likely to be read?
6. Needs to go on a diet. Most writing can be improved by liposuction. Consider the Gettysburg Address. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This is especially true when writing for the web, when you need to cut the word count by about 50 percent.
7. Has no direction. My favourite tutor at Oxford told me that I had to take my essays and drive them like Ayrton Senna (a famous racing driver). Good writing has a strong purpose. Bad writing has either no direction or has too many.

Technorati Tags: Writing, problems, frankenquotes

According to a story in The Register this morning, BAE Systems, the UK’s largest arms manufacturer, wants to go green. On the agenda:

• Lead-free bullets, so as not to “harm the environment and pose a risk to people”
• Reduced emission jet engines
• Quieter warheads to produce less noise pollution
• Grenades that produce less smoke

I’m a closet armementophile. I go to airshows and defence exhibitions and I write about this stuff sometimes. However, military folk and arms manufacturers tend to be fairly realistic about what they do. You may not approve but at the sharp end nobody pretends that bullets don’t kill. Until now.

I feel like the satirist who quit when Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger got the Nobel peace prize. Unfair competition. Really, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Technorati Tags: irony, BAE Systems, bullets

When I take passengers flying, I usually show them where the parachute handle is and how to operate it. If that doesn’t scare the willies out of them, I give them the ditch-in-the-sea briefing. Failing that, I say ‘there are toilets at either end of the flight’ and that really gets them.

(Actually, my pre-flight briefing is online at my personal website.)

The Economist recently had a very entertaining and honest article about airline in-flight briefings. I recommend it.

Technorati Tags: Flying, safety, airlines, Economist, Cirrus, briefings

Dude, Where’s my Car? This happens to me a lot. I park somewhere and then totally forget where. One time, many years ago, my car was stolen and I didn’t realise for several days because I just assumed I’d parked it somewhere really out of the way.

Anyhow, I have found a great solution: my cell phone camera. I always have my phone (an Orange C600) with me and I just take a quick snap of where my car is - something that will remind me, like a streetname or a familiar landmark. Next time I’m looking for the car, all I have to do is look in the gallery and the most recent picture will show me where it is. I can also email the picture to my PC for extra reminderage.

Technorati Tags: car, parking, memory, absent-minded professor

Lee wrote an impassioned letter to MCV, the computer games trade magazine in the UK, asking PRs and journalists to just get along better. Since I am interested in games, PR and writing I decided to ask him a few questions. Here are his interesting, surprising and insightful answers.

1) What was the biggest surprise when you switched from hostage to terrorist (or is it the other way round? J)

Both terms can be applied to the press as well as PRs. I firmly believe any antagonism is less about the role and much more to do with the individual personalities involved. To pigeonhole two sets of people who work so closely together as “incompatible” only serves to reinforce the sense of Them and Us, of bully and victim, of master and slave. This realization was, in fact, the surprise; that I could still be an effective PR person while retaining my own identity and individual style.

2) Now you’re on the PR side of the fence, what irritating PR activities now make sense to you? What changed?

It’s always worth remembering that PR execs don’t work in a vacuum. Organising even the simplest interview or presentation event can involve multiple suppliers, client contacts, journalists, developers, all amounting to variables galore. Any and all of these can and often do go awry, causing headaches for the PR and “irritation” for press.

For instance, if a videogame developer isn’t available when he said he would be, an event naturally has to be postponed or rescheduled and the press inevitably put out. I will always recommend that alternatives are found but you have to be realistic.

The idea of a generic “off the shelf” PR solution, tied up in a bow and ready to be made available to any and all who wants it, benefits very few people due to the lack of personalization, specificity and relevance to individual media.

3) Do you ever have to explain to your colleagues what it’s like out there in editorial land? How do you do it?

Many members of Bastion’s team come from an editorial background, both mainstream and specialist. Those who do not have been working in PR and marketing for many years. They know how editorial works because it’s our business, as a company, to know. If a PR doesn’t understand the basic editorial processes of magazines, websites, daily newspapers, TV and beyond, then they are failing, in my opinion.

4) Is it ever right to follow up an email or press release with a phone call?

Not only is it right, in the games industry at least, it is absolutely essential. All too often there is a sense of emails disappearing into a digital void once sent. The follow up call is expected by press and clients alike. As an agency we need to demonstrate forward planning and knowledge of when coverage is hitting. The follow up call is a great way of doing this and it also gives us the chance to get to know individual press on a personal level. The games industry is relatively small and mostly friendly. The follow up call helps cement bonds between Bastion and journalists.

5) What’s the best way for a journalist to build a good relationship with a PR?

It works in different ways for different personalities. I’ve seen the most unlikely bonds form between press and PRs because of a common interest in Arsenal, or ice hockey, or parenting. There’s no one correct way, in the same way that there is no guaranteed formula for making friends outside of the working environment. It’s about chemistry, but even if that chemistry isn’t there you can still have a successful working relationship as long as both parties respect each other as best they can.

6) What are the three most annoying things journalists believe about PRs?

That we’re all dolly birds or wide boys enjoying free lunches, while being transported from client dinners to launch parties in account cabs. If that’s true then how come my keyboard has more crumbs than my nan’s biscuit tin from working through lunch breaks?

7) I’m interesting in writing, especially lousy press releases etc. I believe that PRs start out writing well but get corrupted by their clients’ interference. Is this true in your experience? How do you retain your integrity as a communicator when a client has unreasonable expectations or interferes too much?

Well , a more uncharitable person would point out the irony of the typo in the first line of this particular question = )

My biggest personal bugbear is TMs and ©’s and ®’s dotted throughout product press releases. They can make even the wittiest, cleverest release look dry and corporate. I’d like to see them outlawed for good, from a writerly point of view at least.

Is games PR different from other PR?

Not having worked in different sectors, this is tricky to answer with any authority. Reading some of the tales on your blog it seems that your experience of PR has been somewhat different from mine, when I was a journalist. I also have a friend who is a music journo who says that PRs bend over backwards to assist her in any way they can.

9) What is a typical day for you? Where does the pressure come from? The deadlines?

It’s a bit cliché but there really is no such thing as a typical day. I could be on a photo shoot, organising a press event or tour, or simply spending a day on the phone selling in stories. It’s massively varied and that’s why I enjoy the role.

10) You end by asking ‘why can’t we be friends?’ Do you think the PR-Journo relationship is inherently antagonistic or is there common ground?

I think this relates back to my first answer. Yes, of course there will always be pressure and stress – it’s business and it isn’t always easy – but I firmly believe that the way in which PRs and press react to that stress is what makes the difference between a good working relationship and poor one. Manners, honesty (yes, a PR used the “H” word!) and respect have worked much better for me than shouting and threatening ever could.

Technorati Tags: Bastion, PR, computer games, MCV

I use Basecamp, a project management extranet from 37 Signals.  It’s good and useful (although I could think of a few things that would improve it).  However, it doesn’t support Internet Explorer 7 RC1.  This means I can’t use it on two of my computers and at least one client can no longer access it.

Their response, as displayed on the login page:

SYSTEM NOTICE: Internet Explorer 7 is not supported yet

We’ve been getting email from folks using Internet Explorer 7 saying certain parts of Basecamp aren’t working anymore. At this time we do not support IE 7 or any other web browser in Beta. Once IE 7 is officially released we will make the necessary changes to support this browser. Until then please use IE 6, Firefox, or Safari. Thank you.

I’m not sure if this is very helpful or reassuring.