Whether or not to capitalise the word ‘internet’ provokes occasional debate. I used to capitalise and then Wired announced that they were not going to do so, I changed too. I figured they knew. However, I still see it capitalised in mainstream magazines and some clients insist on capitalising it.

For capitalising Internet

• It’s a kind of place and places are proper nouns that get capitalised.
• Lots of other people do it.
• There are lots of internets (networks of networks) but only one Internet.
• According to Wikipedia (not a wholly reliable source) The New  York Times, Associated Press, Communications of the ACM and Time capitalise.

Against capitalising internet

• Capital letters are speed bumps for the eyes when reading. Like unnecessary punctuation, they should be eliminated where possible. (Some clients like to capitalise all Nouns and especially Multi-Word Nouns. Maybe they are German.)
• As Wired says “That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.”
• According to Wikipedia, The Economist, The Financial Times and The Times do not capitalise.

My instinct is that the trend is towards the lower case. Certainly, that’s my preference. Welcome to the internet.

Kudos to BBC Four. Their medieval season got off to a great start with Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press. But I particularly love the medieval/psychadelic trail for the series with Jimi Hendrix’s classic played on historical instruments. You can watch all the programmes online.

It’s been a good week for techno-medievalists with Melvyn Bragg covering the Norman conquest in In Our Time.

I studied all this stuff when I was at college and it’s really satisfying to see well-made TV shows that deal with complex historical stories rather than the endless archeology programs they run on the mainstream channels.  BBC Four may have an audience of one person - me - but I love it.

It’s inspired me. If the weather’s good, I’m flying off to York tomorrow to look at the Minster and the Shambles and do a bit of time travelling.

“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs,” said Kenneth Clark at the end of his classic TV series Civilisation.

I was struck by this when I watched the series years ago and it rattles around in my brain quite often.

In countries, companies and, yes, individual lives the importance of confidence, of morale is critical to success but often overlooked.

Just today, I came across William Slim’s book Defeat into Victory on my bookshelf. He stands alongside Montgomery as one of the outstanding British generals of World War II. But since he was self-effacing by nature and fought the ‘forgotten war’ in the Far East, he had less fame than Monty. He deserved more.

It fell open at a well-marked page which I think captures the point better than I ever could. He is writing about a time in the war when the British were on the back foot in Burma and things, generally, were very bleak.

Morale is a state of mind. It is that intangible force which will move a whole group of men to give their last ounce to achieve something, without counting the cost to themselves; that makes them feel they are part of something greater than themselves. … I remember sitting in my office and tabulating these foundations of morale something like this:

1. Spritual

(a) There must be a great and noble object.

(b) Its achievement must be vital.

(c) The method of achievement must be active, aggressive.

(d) The man must feel that what he is and what he does matters directly towards the attainment of the object.

2. Intellectual

(a) He must be convinced that the object can be attained; that it is not out of reach

(b) He must see, too, that the organization to which he belongs and which is striving to attain the object is an efficient one.

(c) He must have confidence in his leaders and know that whatever dangers and hardships he is called upon to suffer, his life will not be lightly flung away.

3. Material

(a) The man must feel that he will get a fair deal from his commanders and from the army generally.

(b) He must, as far as humanly posssible, be given the best weapons and equipment for his task.

(c) His living and working conditions must be made as good as they can be.

Substitute ‘company’ for ‘army’ and ‘career’ for ‘life’ and change ‘he’ to ‘he or she’ and I think you have a pretty good recipe for creating an extraordinary company.

Introducing Google’s latest feature: Gmail Custom Time.

Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

Wait, I’m just checking my inbox and there’s an email from Future-Matthew in it.  It says, "Look at your calendar.  What day is it?"

I was asked to join the advisory board of the UK’s Business Superbrands project. The book just came out and it included this article, which I wrote for them about the use of writing as a branding tool. Regular blog readers will recognise several themes but I enjoyed writing this article for them because it weaves everything together nicely.

Companies lavish great sums on ads, branding and websites. But they give less thought to the everyday writing they create. I’m not talking about copywriting in adverts. That’s poetry. I’m talking about prose. The humdrum stuff of daily business life: press releases, contracts, marketing collateral, website content and the rest.

I believe that writing is a fundamental part of a brand. Finding a corporate voice and using it consistently adds weight and distinctiveness to a brand. Companies that neglect their writing risk short-changing their brand.

Google is a role model. It is no coincidence that it has a very consistent style and that its writing echoes the brand. Google’s home page is nothing but words, after all. Most people concentrate on the button “Google Search.” Those two words define what Google does but the other button, “I’m Feeling Lucky,” is more subtle. It reassures me that I’ll find what I’m looking for. It tells me “I” am in charge. It radiates optimism. These few words tell me a lot about the Google brand.

Google’s word-branding goes deeper than its home page – it permeates everything they do. Its terms and conditions also talk straight to the reader (“Thank you for trying out Google Desktop! Google Desktop is made available to you by Google Inc….”). It tells you what’s important (When you enable advanced features it said “Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada yada”).

Reinforcing the brand

Good writing, like Google’s, enhances a brand in different ways. It can reinforce the reader’s idea of what the brand stands for. For example, Virgin Atlantic shares the Virgin brand’s cheeky irreverence. Tired by a long flight? “Pretend you’re already there,” says Virgin Atlantic. Bored by safety announcements? Watch a cartoon instead.

On a more practical level, good writing can increase sales. Amazon’s login screen has a big friendly button which says “Sign in using our secure server”. This reassures me that Amazon will keep my details safe. Similarly, on the penultimate page of the checkout process it says “you can review this order before it’s final” right under the “Continue” button. Amazon has analysed where and why people stop buying and they’ve added these cues to get more people through the process.

Breaking faith

In contrast to Amazon, Virgin and Google’s success, most corporate-speak is bland, undifferentiated and hard to read. Meaning is obscured by jargon, waffle, hype, verbiage, legalese and conventionality.

The cost of bad writing far outweighs the value created by good writing. A typical example is the heavily-promoted ‘free’ online trial that opens with a daunting click-through contract. Another common problem is website copy that just doesn’t answer your questions. Yet another is the pious press release that takes 200 words to clear its throat and get started. My pet peeve is application forms that might as well be written in Medieval Latin. In fact, once you start looking for bad business writing, it’s easy to spot.

It is possible to track the impact of clear product descriptions on sales, well-written manuals on support calls and snappy website copy on traffic. On the other hand, it is very difficult to add up the costs that come from poor marketing collateral, obscure press releases or badly-worded letters.

The cost of bad writing is two-fold. First, you lose the money you spent delivering the words to the reader. Expensive website? Waste of money. 50,000 brochures? Recycling fodder. Second, you lose the hoped-for result. Have you ever read a brochure that bored or confused you? Did you buy the product afterwards?

Once you get past the glossy ads and shiny exterior, most companies sound like a headmaster, bank manager or lawyer. Is this how you want your company to sound to its customers and employees? In a wider sense, a company breaks faith with a reader any time a company’s words don’t match its brand. It’s like a witness squirming under cross-examination. The truth will out.

What is good writing?

Good grammar, punctuation and spelling are necessary but not sufficient. Business writing is about hooking and persuading the reader. The best way to engage a reader is to use stories because human beings are wired for them. We look for believable details, natural speech and a flow from beginning to end. Journalism has evolved ways of creating credible, persuasive and readable stories and books like Donald Murray’s Writing to Deadline have a lot to teach the business world. But journalism stops short of persuasion and that is the objective of a business writer. The ‘call to action’ often comes at the end of a piece but good business copy has a logical thread running through it that persuades the reader as it goes.

Writing for the web

We’re all internet entrepreneurs now. The internet has done what technology always does. It has gone from being gee-whizz to ho-hum, from avant-garde to comme il faut. Business writing – so important in this new medium – has not caught up with the change. The BBC has got it right, though. They know that people don’t read web pages the same way they look at newspapers or books and they write accordingly. Their website uses short paragraphs, short sentences, scannable text (clearly labelled links and headlines), hype-free language (in the journalistic tradition) and crisp micro-content (“Falklands return. How going back 25 years later helps heal veterans’ scars”).

One of the problems with less switched-on websites is the low priority given to web copy during development. A 2006 survey of digital agencies found that over half of them blamed delays on content problems but only 10 per cent said that content was a priority. They thought that design, development and search engine optimisation were much, much more important. To me, this is like building a missile but forgetting the payload. The gap is filled by ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder copy. If you see this on a development website, consider it a warning sign.

We’re all writers now

Thanks to email, blogs and social networks like Facebook, we’re all business writers now. Microsoft positively encourages its employees to blog. Its thousands of employee-bloggers put a human face on their business. But most companies prefer to muzzle employees rather than develop their writing skills and embed a corporate tone of voice across the business. As these new media burst into life, we have a chance to embrace every written word as a tool that can make a brand strong, fresh and different. Otherwise it’s just the usual yada yada.