Bad Language » How to write

How women use the internet

Laura Connell — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:28:22 +0000

This is a guest post from Articulate intern, Laura Connell

When women write, they write about relationships so it makes sense that women want to feel a connection with the material they read online.

Connecting emotionally

A survey commissioned by Yahoo and Starcom Mediavest Group (PDF) found that 96 percent of women say that they frequently feel positive emotions while online. If your marketing doesn’t elicit a positive emotional reaction, then you’re missing an opportunity.

Women don’t consume media in a vacuum

Women actively use the internet as they perform other tasks and as they view other media. Marketers can exploit this by ensuring that online marketing enhances your TV or print marketing – after all, your female audience is already viewing them side-by-side.

“Female-friendly” websites are a myth

The online content most popular with women includes news, weather, finance and games – items not found in most popular “women’s magazines”. Even though you are more likely to find horoscopes than football in Grazia magazine, more women visit sports sites than astrology sites when online.

“Surching”

Women are constantly “surching,” a hybrid of surfing and searching that focuses on a number of their favourite sites.

Women even “surch” when they go online to find something specific or are looking for an answer a question. The message to marketers is simple: it takes more than just search marketing or a great website to reach “the Surcher”. The key is smart, widely distributed internet advertising and a consistent presence in the places that your female audience visits.

How to tell if your boss is lying

Matthew Stibbe — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:27:28 +0000

There’s a great article in this week’s Economist about how to detect lies in conference calls. Here are some clues:

References to general knowledge (“as you know…”)
Overstatement (“fantastic” not “good”)
Avoid the word ‘I’, using the third person instead
Fewer hesitations
Use of swear words (remember Jeff Skilling? I do – I saw Enron a couple of weeks ago in London.)

(The original research paper: Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls (PDF) is also worth reading.)

These ‘tells’ are also attributes of a lot of bad marketing copy. So, if you want to increase the truthiness of your copy, the lessons are clear: be specific, don’t treat the reader as an idiot, be modestly understated and use the first person. And don’t swear.

Quantifiers are from Mars, Pronouns are from Venus

Laura Connell — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:23:00 +0000

This is another great guest post from my intern, Laura Connell.

According to The Gender Genie, a free online tool that analyses your writing for feminine and masculine keywords, a man has written seven of my eleven Bad Language posts – this post is especially manly.

The Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by a team of Israeli scientists who study the effects of gender of linguistic expression. To investigate how gender influences writing Argamon, Koppel, Fine and Shimoni studied 604 documents including non-fiction and fiction writing from both men and women in a wide range of genres- 25 million words were analysed in total.

The research confirms popular perceptions about gender differences in writing:

Male writing style

More determiners (a, the, that, these) and quantifiers (one, two, more, some)
Male writers use more factual references, such as place, time and numbers

Female writing style

More pronouns (he, she, herself, myself, we, our)
Female writers choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do

I’m a lady!

Moshe Koppel, one of the authors of the project, concluded that women are comfortable thinking about people and relationships, whereas men prefer thinking about things.

I suspect that my maths background has trained me to write about things as opposed to relationships, which is why my posts contain more determiners than pronouns.

When writing about people, Eye tracking and what it means for writers, I write like a woman. When writing about things and ideas, Gender Genie concludes that I am a man – the same is true for female writers at the Guardian newspaper.

I won’t be making a conscious effort to make my writing more ladylike, after all it’s just my inner maths geek that writes like a man.

Intentional literary gender bending

Left brain vs. right brain for writers

Laura Connell — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:42:07 +0000

Research has identified two types of people, those whose left-brain is dominant and those were the right-brain dominates. The dominant left-brain is ‘content’ oriented, while someone with right-brain dominance will be ‘process’ oriented.

Left brain dominance:

Logical
Sequential
Rational
Analytical
Objective
Looks at parts

Right brain dominance:

Random
Intuitive
Holistic
Synthesising
Subjective
Looks at wholes

Muse on the right, the critic on the left

The right side of your brain is responsible for intuition and creative thinking and the left is responsible for that annoying inner critic. Shutting off your left-brain entirely would leave you unable to write —the left-brain produces language – but quieting your internal editor is the only way to get into the zone.

Writing flow

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” as another way of referring to “creative dissociation”. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as that perfect balance between challenge and ability.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, “You can’t make flow happen. All you can do is learn to remove obstacles in its way.”

Alice Flaherty argues that creativity is due to a balance of your left and right brain. To make “flow” happen you don’t need to get out of your left-brain and into your right, but boost your creativity, concentrate on writing and shush your inner critic.

20 killer words and 13 words that kill

Laura Connell — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:03:00 +0000

People make buying decisions based on rational and emotional motivations. When structuring your writing you need to identify how you can appeal to both.

In “Confessions of an Advertising Man” David Ogilvy listed the 20 most persuasive words in advertising:

suddenly
now
announcing
introducing
improvement
amazing
sensational
remarkable
revolutionary
startling
miracle
magic
offer
quick
easy
wanted
challenge
compare
bargain
hurry

Persuasive words strike the fine balance between being rational and emotive whereas powerless words lack purpose and undermine the credibility of your writing.

Words to avoid

But
Try
Don’t
Should
Need to
Have to
Could
Maybe
Perhaps
Might
Possibly
Potentially
Think

Eye tracking and what it means for writers

Laura Connell — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:13:29 +0000

People look all over the place when they first land on a page. Eye tracking studies have shown people tend to look at websites in an ‘F’ pattern, but it’s not quite that simple.

People don’t read what they look at– they scan for keywords

People skip almost anything if they can avoid it. They focus on the areas they feel will be most useful to them – usually the navigation across the top and down the left hand side.

Tunnel vision

When people land on a site, they are arriving with a specific task in mind – they won’t look at all the other things your site has to offer. Readers also avoid content that looks like an advert – such as site banners.

Obvious answers: Readers will give up and look elsewhere if the answer they are looking for is not immediately obvious.
People are happy to click IF your site flows: You will drive visitors away if they have to click through levels where they must stop and think where to go next.
Users scroll without even realising it: The key is to ensure people are aware that more page content is below the fold. Avoid points on the page where the content cuts off.

10 Tips to encourage reading

Clear sub-headings
Start each page/paragraph with the conclusion
One idea per paragraph
Ruthlessly cut down the word count
Minimise instruction text
Highlight keywords
Use lists/bullet points where possible
Use images instead of words
Ensure your site banners are mostly text
Check that your site flows

Craptastic newspeak

Laura Connell — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:11:00 +0000

Portmanteau: a word formed by blending sounds from two or more words and combining their meanings. All the cool kids are doing it now but that doesn’t mean it’s good, right?

Hijacking perfectly good words

Take ‘neutraceuticals’ for example. It combines two perfectly good words into one dismal one.

Nutrient: a chemical that an organism needs to live and grow.
Pharmaceutical: chemical substances intended for use in medical diagnosis, cure, treatment, or prevention of disease.
Neutraceutical: supplements that are “not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease”, but designed to promote ‘wellness’.

So nutraceuticals are in fact, neither nutri nor ceutical.

More frenemies

Bromance: brother, romance – a platonic friendship between two men
Frenemy: friend, enemy – an enemy disguised as a friend or to a friend who is also a rival
Staycation: stay, vacation – a holiday spent at home
Twi-hards : Twilight, Die-hard – used to describe fans of the Twilight series
Refudiate: repudiate and refute, coined by Sarah Palin
Octodamus: octopus, Nostradamus- used to describe Paul the psychic octopus
Insania: insanity, mania – coined by Peter Andre
Scandal-gate: (any scandal, Watergate)
Gleek: Glee,geek – fans of the TV show Glee
Bridezilla: bride, Godzilla- a demanding bride-to-be
Brangelina: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie
Mockumentary: mock, documentary
Guesstimate: guess, estimate
Scrooge: screw, gouge – coined by Charles Dickens
Squiggle: squirm, wiggle
Chortle: chuckle, snort – coined by Lewis Carroll
Portmanteau: from the French porte (carry),manteau (coat) – hence a coat hook
Lipsmackinthirstquenchinacetastinmotivatingoodbuzzin-cooltalkinhighwalkinfastlivinevergivincoolfizzin Pepsi’s used this 100-letter portmanteau in their 1973 TV and film advertising

One headline to rule them all

Laura Connell — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:33:00 +0000

Sometimes a headline needs to be serious: ‘Iran accuses journalist of spying’ and sometimes it needs to be fun: ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster. But in every case it needs to be good.

BBC News’ headlines are the best in the world according to web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen’s guidelines state that web headlines must be:

Short
Rich in information scent, clearly summarising the target article
Front-loaded with the most important keywords
Understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results);
Predictable, so users know whether they’ll like the full article before they click

The BBC’s examples of ‘Italy buries first quake victims’ and ‘Iran accuses journalist of spying’ both pass the Web-usability test with flying colours.

Web headlines for web readers

The BBC’s has an advantage over newspaper rooted sites when it comes to crafting web-usable headlines.

Clever headlines that attract readers on the newsstands are not always search-engine friendly as they rarely contain keywords and proper nouns.

The first Google result for the classic Sun headline ‘Zip me up before you go-go’ is an article in the Independent about the return of the jump-suit – nothing to do with George Michael’s arrest for lewd behaviour.

‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ on the other hand fares rather well when put to the Google test.

Having your pun and Googling it

In February both the BBC and The Sun chose SEO friendly headlines when writing about China’s condemnation of Barack Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama.

The BBC went for ‘China anger at Dalai Lama-Obama meeting’.

The Sun opted for ‘Obama Lama ding dong’, proving that you don’t have to sacrifice a (bad) pun for your search-engine ranking.

Reader challenge

The challenge to Bad Language readers is to find:

Brilliant headlines that pass the SEO test
Headlines, such as ‘Missing baby found in Sandwich’, that remembered their keywords but forgot to proofread.

Add your nominations with a comment on this post.

Word bloat and privacy policies

Matthew Stibbe — Tue, 18 May 2010 08:39:23 +0000

How many words do you need to say ‘we will protect your privacy’? Five if that is your real intention. However, if you want to make money, you need a lot more, as these graphics from the NY Times show. (Hat tip: Steve Clayton.)

New Age terrorists develop homeopathic bomb

Matthew Stibbe — Mon, 03 May 2010 06:25:00 +0000

This made me giggle. Hat tip Bruce Schneier. From a writing perspective, satire can be a great way of making you see the structures that sit below writing conventions. In this case, the authors send up most reporting on terrorism:

Abuse of technical-sounding catchphrases: “weapons of mass dilution.”
Selective quotation from experts: in this case Hans Blix and Frank Gardner.
Unfounded fear-mongering: ‘Homeopathic weapons represent a major threat to world peace,’ said President Barack Obama, ‘they might not cause any actual damage but the placebo effect could be quite devastating.’
Security theatre (designed to reassure) rather than actual security (designed to protect): “new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane.”
Credulity masked by a mistaken attempt at journalistic neutrality: “now we have weapons-grade homeopathy and we demand to be taken seriously”

I’m against terrorism. But I’m also against hyped-up reporting. I think this NewsBiscuit article out-Onions The Onion, which is no trivial thing.