The difference between write and wrong

I receive a fair few résumés in any given week, and more so lately as I'm recruiting for a couple of roles.

Last week was no different, but one résumé in particular stood out from the rest of the bunch, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The front page led with 4 sentences, the first of which contained no less than 44 words and 2 errors – including misspelling the name of a previous agency.

From there, things didn't get any better.

80 words later, and I'd counted another 8 errors. Apostrophes turning up in the wrong places (or not at all), random capitalisation, the odd appearance of an ampersand or two, and commas missing in action or simply dropped into the middle of nowhere.

All I can say is that if you're still struggling with the difference between "who's" and "whose" after 25 years in the communications industry – and as a self-professed writer – then all is not well.

But what also struck me was the complexity of the language for something like a résumé, a piece of communication that ought to be simple, approachable and immediate. I've written here about the fact that using long words does not make you appear smarter (in fact, quite the opposite), and I was also reminded of the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

This is a test that – as the name suggests – measures how easy it is to read a passage of text, and provides a score on a scale of 0–100. Reader's Digest aims for a score of 65 or more, whereas the Harvard Law Review tends to hover around the 30-mark. So far, this post gets a score of 60.

The 4 sentences on the front page of the résumé achieved a Flesch-Kincaid score of just 16. A pretty ordinary effort when you also consider the number of grammatical errors, and a stark reminder of the power of language, for better or for worse.

I sincerely hope that the author of the résumé finds a role, but I can't say for certain that it will be in communications.

So good they wrote it twice – or was that three times?

Just last Friday, a good friend pointed me in the direction of what can only be described as a thrilling piece of copywriting.

The quality of the writing and craftsmanship is jaw-dropping. No word of a lie.

And here it is.

But a quick scroll through the comments on YouTube tells another story, one of perceived mistrust and deception. So much so that Penguin published their own blog post to defuse the story and acknowledge their inspiration, even going so far as to include links to two particular videos where this same approach has been used in the past, here and here.

Who knows the true story in terms of how events unfolded? Whether Penguin were transparent from the start or even knew that the video had been posted, or if it was those ever-watchful, web 2.0 vigilantes who caught them out with their own brand of cyber sleuth.

Whatever the case, you can be absolutely sure of one thing.

Jason LaMotte, the chap who wrote the script for the video, is a great writer.

And most certainly a far greater writer than the vapid vultures whose comments have so quickly picked to bits what is otherwise an inspired piece of language and communication.

Right or wrong, inspiration or imitation, I know whose words I'd rather read.

Can I have a small word?

I've been meaning to write this post for months. In fact, ever since I first read about it last August. And once again, I have The Writer to thank, a specialist writing agency in London.

Here's what they had to say.

Long words make you sound thick. Fact.

We’re always banging on in workshops about picking simple words whenever you can. Occasionally, though, someone will pipe up, ‘But I like using long words. They make me look clever, don’t they?’ No, they don’t. And you don’t just have to take our word for it. It’s been scientifically proven – by psychologist Daniel M Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, no less.

A couple of years ago Oppenheimer designed several experiments to test how people reacted to various styles of writing – some straightforward, some complicated. He was particularly interested in trying to find out which writers sounded the cleverest.

And guess what? The writers of clear and simple words were judged as smart, whereas those who used needlessly long words came across as less intelligent and less confident.

His conclusion is emphatic: ‘Write clearly and simply if you can, and you’ll be more likely to be thought of as intelligent.’

If you fancy reading the study yourself, it’s here. It’s rather splendidly called Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.

A brilliant insight, if you ask me. And I'd expect nothing less than that from The Writer, who seem to take as much time over the long words as they do the fine details.

To show exactly what I mean, here's the email signature from their newsletter (double-click on it to see a larger version).

So many people struggle to describe what makes their business or brand different, but here it is, laid out for all to read in something as basic as an email signature.

No multi-million dollar advertising campaign, exhaustive packaging redesign, or public relations crusade required.

Just a few small words say it all.

Hello, is there anybody there?

A little over a fortnight ago, I had a very curious phone call.

It was the Managing Director of a packaging agency calling for a quick hello and my email address so he could invite me for a coffee. Nothing too unusual about that, although I did feel a little uncomfortable as I've never really met this person for more than 60 seconds or so – and even that was more than 5 years ago.

Nonetheless, I quickly drew up a list of possible reasons for why he'd want to meet.

1. He wants to hire me.

2. He wants me to hire him.

3. He wants to see how much competitive information he can get out of me about our own agency's plans.

4. He's read my blog and wants me to ghostwrite his autobiography.

But the sad thing is that we'll never know, because he never did send me that email invite afterall.

It's never as easy as Abc

Last week, I was watching a documentary about the history of music. Inevitably, Nirvana were featured at one point in the story, much of it rehashed reports on the lead-up to Kurt Cobain's tragic death.

But one thing I had never heard before – that was mentioned only incidentally – was the fact that the band always jammed for the first half-hour of any rehearsal, only then setting their minds to specific songs or half-written tunes.

Likewise, designers will take weeks to work their way through dozens of concepts and half-baked ideas before settling on the one that cracks the brief.

And how many times do you hear of artists painting over their work, only for these hidden canvases to be discovered years later and revealed as forgotten masterpieces?

I realise that none of this sounds like a big deal. But believe me, it is.

Because when the amateur writer starts to write, they often expect great things from the moment the pen hits the page. And I mean, great things.

As writers, we can tend to put undue pressure on ourselves to create epic stories worthy of equally epic praise with every stroke of the pen or tap on the keyboard. However, if you take even the most fleeting glance at any other creative pursuit, there is always the basic belief that success does not come straightaway.

What's more, the pressure is doubled by the fact that everyone can read and write. From an early age, we're taught how to recognise and create the letterforms required to communicate through the written word. That said – and as you'll have read in this previous post – we don't spend nearly as much time promoting the creative arts as we do our technical skills.

And so it is that the examples I gave at the start of this post show the way for any aspiring amateur writer.

Firstly, a musician might jam or improvise. So why shouldn't we do the same as writers?

Then there's the act of rehearsing. Things don't always flow straight onto the page, and it takes time and practice to get the words to read and feel right.

And finally, writing is first and foremost about writing. And writing. And writing. Which is different to re-writing. And nothing at all like editing. Three different activities with three different mindsets that ought to be kept entirely separate.

Ultimately, the distinction between the technique and the art of writing is an important one.

We can all do the one, but we should never take the other for granted.

The post and the poem

This week, a friend of mine tipped me off about a conversation happening here about whether technology is killing the way we communicate.

I posted a comment, and it started me thinking about how everything is now about tweets and updates and txts – basically anything short and sweet that is easy to absorb and doesn't make you think too hard. And while I can appreciate that, I would also like to think that there's still a place in the world for writing that is longer and a little more challenging and creative.

With that in mind, here's something you don't see much these days. A poem.

This one 's by Ted Hughes.

Written in 1957, it's called The Thought-Fox, and it deals with the idea of creativity and the writing process itself. And I hope you enjoy it.

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock's loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Write on!

In my last post, I seemed to let my words chase after all sorts of different literary distractions - from Kenneth Slessor to Vice magazine. The result of having so much to squeeze in that I think I managed to avoid answering the central question - specifically, why I write.

So I thought it only fair that I post this follow-up.

The real answer lies in something called Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a psychometric test that explores your dominant personality and behavioural traits as a means of helping you understand how you perceive the world around you and, consequently, how you make decisions.

Generally speaking, I rail against anything that tries to pigeonhole me, but I must admit that I became an instant convert as soon as I heard my perscribed personality type (ENFP, for those who are curious) defined in layman's terms - I'm the sort of person "who knows what they think as soon as they hear themselves say it".

Nothing could be more true or accurate.

Through writing, I allocate the time in my day to work out what I think and how I feel about a whole range of things. It structures my ideas and forces me to organise my thoughts and feelings into some sort of point of view. And it acts as a depositary where I can store some of my reactions and responses to the world around me (the fact that I relate them to branding is merely incidental). I wouldn't call my writing in this blog "significant" by any stretch of even my hyperactive imagination, but I do despise the idea of thoughtlessness (literally speaking, stupidity, among other things), especially when I witness it in myself.

In other words - and apologies to any Descartes devotees and/or anyone scarred by learning Latin at school - scribo ergo cogito ergo sum.

Why I write

Earlier this week, I read an article in The Australian about how today's teenagers use an average vocabulary of only 800 words each day, preferring instead to use the abbreviated language of text messaging and hip-hop. I've never counted, but from reading the article, it would seem that 800 is not very high – in fact, it appears that "800 words will not get you a job". What's more, "yeah", "no" and "but" all feature in a top 20 that accounts for about one third of the words they use.

All of which I find a little sad. Especially when I think about how much I love words.

Here's a quick 50 from Australian poet Kenneth Slessor:

I looked out my window in the dark

At waves with diamond quills and combs of light

That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand

In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,

And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys

Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,

And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal

Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,

Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.

Incredible writing if you ask me, but then Kenneth Slessor was far beyond the reach of teenage angst by the time he penned Five Bells.

Which brings me to another of my favourite writers, George Orwell. I must admit to a touch of hubris in taking the title for this post from an essay he wrote in 1949. That said, there's nothing particularly unique about the title, and it does seem fair given that I'm discussing a similar subject – although maybe not quite with the same degree of finesse.

In his essay, Orwell took the time to outline "four great motives for writing": sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. By his standards, I'm guilty of sheer egoism simply by continuing to write past the age of 30; I'm not the sentimental type, so posterity in the guise of historical impulse holds little appeal for me; and yes, I am political, if you subscribe to Orwell's broadest definition of the term.

But what most strikes a chord in my heart is aesthetic enthusiasm: what Orwell describes as everything from "words and their right arrangement" to typography and even the width of margins.

For me, there's something wide-eyed and beautiful in an elegant turn of phrase. Each word gently pushed along by a mix of alliteration, juxtaposition, onomatopoeia, repetition, rhetoric, tempo, crescendo, cadence, the list goes on.

Which all goes to explain why I love the work we're doing for Griffin Theatre Company – apologies for the shameless plug!

And I was pretty excited when I found this recent Fiction issue of Vice, with every page dedicated to new writing.

However, words don't always comes all that easily for people. It takes time and effort and discipline, as well as creativity and flair and ideas. And that even goes for some of the most prolific writers, as Stephen Fry explained in what will be his last blog post for a little while.

For me, writing isn't always easy, but it is important. In a previous post, I wrote about how they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a single word can start ten thousand stories. That said, not too many of them start Yeah no but.

Death on a whiteboard

If you want to get something done, I've learned you don't write it on a whiteboard.

Over the years, I've had a number of clients with whiteboards mounted on the walls of their offices. Without exception, not much changed from one week to the next. Any scribbles were usually just that – scribbles. One client had even gone to the trouble of marking out a section for his kids to doodle, and I was always intrigued by the idea of holding serious business discussions as Laura woz 'ere would catch my eye across the room.

When it comes to workshops, whiteboards take centre stage. However, it usually doesn't take too long before they start to interrupt rather than illuminate the discussion. There's rarely any pens to hand that work for more than four words, after a couple of lines you start to realise that you're writing on a ridiculous slant that makes everything trail off into the bottom right hand corner, and it's only once you've riddled the board with a sheen of half-baked ideas that you discover you've been writing in permanent ink.

Technology doesn't make things any easier. If you have a whiteboard from which you can make prints, one of three things usually happens: there's no paper, you write on the one screen that doesn't print, or you fail to use the only colour that reproduces with any degree of legibility. And if you're lucky enough to have one of those whiteboards that saves everything to a central hard drive, you can be certain that it will be saved to the hard drive never to be seen again.

Unfortunately – and in spite of my better judgement and past experiences – I recently learned this the hard way.

Our studio is now the proud owner of a brand new, shimmering whiteboard. A breeding ground for cartoons and caricatures, it produces little in the way of insight or efficiency. To make matters worse, it has been hung (professionally, I might add) at the perfect height for anyone below 5 feet tall. Now and then, I stare longingly at the whiteboard, in the desperate hope that it will spring into life, but I'm also slightly worried that it will instead crash to the floor, pinning any nearby designers to the ground.

But then, it could always be worse. We could be having one of those brainstorms where there's no such thing as a bad idea – like buying a whiteboard.

Anarchy on the Internet (or, God save the blog)

I often wonder if corporate blogs will ever be anything more for me than a curious contradiction in terms.

What I mean is that the infinite potential of the Internet, and in particular social media, seems at odds with the finite parameters that corporations like to put in place to protect their commercial interests. Downloading music is a good example of this – although the sensitivity of artist copyright makes this a far more complicated issue in reality.

That said, the broader evolution of music and its impact on culture is a useful benchmark to explain my point in full.

Specifically, the rise of punk.

Until relatively recently, if you wanted to play music in some sort of musical ensemble, you had to be a professional, trained musician. Music school was the only credible path to the stage, and any exceptions made for more of a novelty act than a noteworthy performance.

But then in the 1970s, punk happened. No longer did the old rules apply. In fact, no longer did any rules apply.

All of a sudden, anyone could play guitar. In many cases, the fewer chords you knew, the better. Bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and countless others grasped the opportunity with enough energy to catapult themselves beyond the status quo and its restrictive social more – and whether or not you could actually play your instruments had no real bearing on the final outcome.

In the 1980s, local scenes like the infamous Manchester scene erupted in the wake of punk, followed in the 1990s by grunge with its roots in Seattle on America’s northwest coast. More recently, the Arctic Monkeys are a band who, like many others before them, started by first having to teach themselves how to play the instruments that they’d managed to acquire.

And even though punk may have started on the stage, its impact soon spilled onto the streets, and the effects on our society and culture are still felt today. Over time, it may have changed shape as the world around us has also changed, but its basic tenets and DIY aesthetics survive.

Nowhere is it more alive and well than on the Internet.

In the same way that punk meant that anyone could play guitar, the Internet has created a new wave of thinkers and writers, a world where anyone can be an author, journalist or social agitator of some description or other.

Who needs record companies when you have MySpace? Likewise, who needs publishers when you have blogs? That isn't to say those institutions are dead in the water, it's just that they can no longer rely solely upon maintaining the bottleneck that has kept them in business up to this point. New ideas are now being shared more freely than ever, and they now need to look for new angles.

The Internet is the champion of the individual, the home of the one-man band. There are no corporate patrons to please, no commercial agendas to follow. Where punk broke down musical barriers, the Internet has bulldozed constraints on how we communicate – and both have worked in ways that rail against our reliance on the so-called big end of town.

Anything is possible on the Internet. And as history shows, giving the masses free rein is not always good news for your average corporation.

God save the blog.

More than words

Humans are an inquisitive bunch, demonstrated no less than when we wonder what such-and-such would say if only the baby-pet-car-thingamajig could speak.

More often than not it's a rhetorical question. Nevertheless, I wonder whether it may also be a question asked in vain, given the propensity of most of those blessed with the power of speech to default to the drearier corners of the English language. Words are no less a form of self expression than a means of communication, however, most people rely on their words for mere data transfer.

Like humans, many brands also try to strike up conversations with those around them.

Try me, buy me, cook with me, look at me.

Yet they seem to struggle just as much as humans when it comes to using their voice as a vehicle to convey emotion. Communications feel cold and corporate, jargon jockeying for position amid an avalanche of acronyms. You can have the most pleasant and rewarding conversation with the person in the call centre, only to receive the standard, automated letter from the call centre's computer. It may very well provide a neat summary of your discussion with word perfect precision, but you are now left wondering if you are really a customer to be cared for or simply a statistic to be served.

I read a piece earlier this week from The Writer, an agency in London that specialises in writing (not surprisingly), in which they were discussing the language of the car industry.

It started with Mercedes-Benz, that colossus of German engineering, and the way Mercedes describe the SL 65 AMG Black Series (a long name, I know!) in standard yet soulless fashion. "The new design reduces exhaust gas back-pressure. The acoustic side effect of this is to produce a distinctive 12-cylinder sound, from the two trapezoidal tail-pipes."

There's nothing necessarily wrong with what Mercedes have written, but you do have to wonder whether they've missed the point of a sports car at full speed. Especially when you consider the energy that Lamborghini inject into their language. "The exhaust in this car makes a sound that ranges from the heavy rumble of a stormy night, through the trumpeting of mighty elephants, through to the roar of a raging lion."

The difference is startling. It's not just what you say, but it's how you say it.

In some other bits and pieces I've read this week, I found a comparison of two famous authors, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemmingway, in the way in which they write about feeling tired.

In the words of Faulkner. "He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course."

Or, according to Hemmingway. "Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited."

Neither is right or wrong. For all that you feel from the words of Faulkner, each thought flowing freely into the next, the brevity of Hemmingway makes for an equally powerful statement, every word loaded with impact. If only brands recruited as many great writers as graphic designers, then maybe the best looking brands wouldn't feel like such a let down as soon as they started to speak.

A few years back, I remember reading an interview with Brett Anderson, lead singer of an English band named Suede who found fame in the 90s. He was talking about how, for better or worse, everything should create an emotional response. Love and hate were always better than an indifferent shrug of the shoulders.

The next week, arch rivals Blur released their latest album and, in another publication, Brett Anderson was asked for his opinion. Two simple words said it all. "It's ok."

I worry that most brands strike a similar note of indifference, to the point that the language they use becomes unnoticeable. Undifferentiated, uninspiring, unimpressive.

As much as humans can be inquisitive – as I wrote at the top of this blog – we are also reputed to use only a small percentage of our brain power. Likewise, brands often fail to take advantage of anything more than the bare minimum when it comes to the breadth of language available to them and the range of emotions that their words can explore.

Brands need to speak to their audiences. But that means more than words.