Accuracy matters

Wednesday, 16th May, 2012 by Will

I came across this page: http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm the other day. It’s a long list of instances where mistakes caused by single keystrokes in spreadsheets have caused losses of millions of pounds or, in the case of the 2012 Olympics, the selling of 10,000 non-existent tickets.

For anyone who wasn’t already convinced, this shows it’s worth having someone check your figures. But is the same true of words?

We at Clarity naturally think it is. And there’s plenty of evidence that spelling mistakes can cost money. Online selling relies on the written word. Misspellings reduce users’ trust in a website and put customers off. One online retailer doubled its sales after identifying and correcting a spelling mistake.

For marketing via email, correct spelling matters too. With so many phishing emails out there, you have to convince consumers that your communication is genuine before they decide whether it’s something they’re interested in. If your marketing email raises too many red flags, your customer will never even see it because it will go straight to the ‘Junk’ folder.

For more guidance on how to write good marketing emails, check out about.com’s list of tips, tricks and secrets.

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Good websites save time

Friday, 27th April, 2012 by Susannah

I’ve just had an exchange of emails that started at the “Contact us” page on a company website. The website provided an enquiry form, I filled it in and got an email reply. I replied to their email and they replied to mine.

What’s the problem? The problem is that it was all unnecessary. The information I wanted could have been on the website. If it had been, I wouldn’t have needed to enquire and they wouldn’t have needed to reply.

The underlying problem is that too many organisations see their website as an opportunity to tell you what they want you to know, rather than what you in fact want to know.

In our web writing courses, I tell people that their websites exist to answer users’ questions. If they design and write their websites with that in mind, they save their companies time and money that is otherwise wasted in answering customers’ queries.

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Sentences can be too simple

Monday, 16th April, 2012 by Will

When we run training courses, we often say that sentences should be short and simple. As a rule, short, simple sentences are easier to read and understand than long, complicated ones. But sometimes simplifying can make a sentence less clear.

Here’s an example:

“People are eating more fruit and vegetables.”

It sounds simple enough, but it could mean several things:

  1. People are eating proportionally more fruit and veg – i.e. fruit and veg make up more of our food intake than they used to.
  2. People are eating a larger total volume of fruit and veg than in the past – possibly because there are more people on the planet or because people are eating more foods of all kinds than they used to.
  3. People are eating more kinds of fruit and veg – possibly because of better logistics, cross-cultural pollination or a desire to try new things.

I think this example shows it’s important to be clear when making a comparison. The reader must be able to answer the question “more than what?” If they can’t, you should add more information or rephrase the sentence.

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In speeches, be yourself

Wednesday, 21st March, 2012 by Rupert

Be yourself. This simple injunction is good advice for most kinds of writing, but when it comes to speechwriting, it overrides all other considerations.

I’ve spent the past two weeks running workshops on writing and giving speeches, and although we explored use of slides, preparation, structure and many other important issues, this is what lingered in my memory.

Three women went first, and all had prepared something to say on a particular topic. All three were excellent but the one who had chosen the most personal topic was the most engaging.

Then it was the turn of the men, and the same applied. When they were given a script to read, they were initially unconvincing, but as they practised and began to ad lib, they became better. Not surprising, perhaps, but utterly conclusive. In the end, all an audience really wants to hear is the authentic voice of whoever is in front of them.

Acquiring the confidence to be yourself is not always easy. But it is essential. We see the opposite at business conferences every day as yet another besuited figure gets up to work through a series of bullet-pointed slides – not being themselves but trying to represent what they think they ought to be, and utterly wasting that precious chance to connect with an audience.

Clarity can help you with your speechwriting. If you’d like a consultation, please contact us.

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Google’s new Terms of Service

Wednesday, 7th March, 2012 by Will

Google have had a lot of flak from privacy campaigners and even the EU for their new Terms of Service, which came into effect on 1 March.

More interesting for Clarity is that they’ve made a big effort to use simple language and avoid legalese. They’ve also included links to explain technical terms in plain English. Finally, they’ve taken out a lot of the repetition, turning 26 different privacy policies and agreements into one.

It’s much easier to read these two sentences:

We are constantly changing and improving our Services. We may add or remove functionalities or features and we may suspend or stop a Service altogether.

than the original:

13.3 Google may at any time, terminate its legal agreement with you if:

(A) you have breached any provision of the Terms (or have acted in manner which clearly shows that you do not intend to, or are unable to comply with the provisions of the Terms); or

(B) Google is required to do so by law (for example, where the provision of the Services to you is, or becomes, unlawful); or

(C) the partner with whom Google offered the Services to you has terminated its relationship with Google or ceased to offer the Services to you; or

(D) Google is transitioning to no longer providing the Services to users in the country in which you are resident or from which you use the service; or

(E) the provision of the Services to you by Google is, in Google’s opinion, no longer commercially viable.

Awkward sentences such as “Google is transitioning to no longer providing…” are a problem for readers. Many people would struggle to understand Google’s strange use of “transition” as an intransitive verb.

If you’re so inclined, you can compare the new and old versions: http://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/policies/privacy/archive/

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Could Dickens help your business writing?

Friday, 27th January, 2012 by Susannah

At the end of our Clarity training courses we give out a list of recommended reading. The idea is that people’s writing is influenced by what they read and that a dose of good fiction may counteract the corporate drivel that they are inundated with at work.

I’m thinking of adding Dickens’ novels to our list. But how, you may be wondering, could I possibly recommend a Victorian writer so often accused of long-windedness and sentimentality? The quality in Dickens that could be helpful is his vivid description of people and places.

The problem with so much business writing is its imprecision, its vagueness. It deals in processes and policies, and uses abstract nouns with other words piled in front of them as descriptors. For example, “the talent and development agenda” and “pragmatic effective learning and development solutions”.

Dickens wrote stories about individuals and places that we can visualise. We can hear them speak. We can almost smell them. That’s the way to communicate ideas – by creating pictures in the reader’s mind, by writing as far as possible about real people doing things. I think reading a bit of Dickens could help.

Time magazine is running a series of blog posts on why read Dickens in advance of the bicentenary of his birth on 7th February 2012.

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Proofing and credibility

Monday, 9th January, 2012 by Rupert

I’ve just been reading and thoroughly enjoying The House of Silk, the new Sherlock Holmes novel, written by Anthony Horowitz. My enjoyment was only spoilt by the publishers’ apparent refusal to engage the services of a proofreader.

I winced to read illiteracies such as “I remembered Carstairs telling Holmes and I that…”. Yet the grammatical glitches, typos and missing prepositions were not the most egregious errors. A character called Lord Horace Blackwater becomes Sir Horace Blackwater a couple of paragraphs later; while the villainous vicar Charles Fitzsimmons becomes Fitzwilliams on the next page. Most extraordinary of all, after one character has died in grisly circumstances with a knife embedded in his neck, his demise is referred to later on as “the shooting of X”!

I refuse to accept that my reaction is pure pedantry or pernicketiness. When a book is so lovingly written in the style of Conan Doyle, its credibility depends on sustaining that style, and those standards. Precision and accuracy are the essence of Sherlock Holmes. Fluent and elegant prose is Conan Doyle’s hallmark. Lose those qualities, and you lose the magic. It reminds us why proofreading matters.

P.S. Thank you to my own proofreader, Will, who corrected a mistake in my first draft!

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Collaborative writing

Wednesday, 7th December, 2011 by Chris Mohr

At its best, collaborative writing can result in something better than any of the writers might have produced alone. At its worst, it can be a horribly painful and undermining experience.

It goes like this: you write your draft report, then you send it round to all the other interested parties. They change what you’ve written, add bits of their own and send it back to you. You swallow hard, tweak it again and send it back for another round of changes. And so it goes back and forth, till your original is unrecognisable and the fight goes right out of you.

So here is a five-point strategy to help you manage the process.

  1. Send your draft as a read-only electronic version. That will prevent others from plunging in and tracking their changes all over it.

  2. Attach a separate sheet for feedback. Frame the questions so they elicit clear responses: for example, are the messages clear? is anything missing? is there anything you would like to change and, if so, why?
  3. Pick your battles. Concentrate on getting the main messages right.
  4. To resolve disagreements about style, grammar or punctuation, refer to a higher authority: your house style guide, if you have one, or a trusted external one such as Clarity or the Guardian style guide (http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide).
  5. If you are the owner of the document, make sure you can live with the final result.

What is your experience of collaborative writing? Maybe you have some tips to add.

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Don’t write – talk

Thursday, 1st December, 2011 by Chris Shevlin

I was about to start coaching Steve (not his real name). He looked nervous, waiting to hear what I thought of the writing sample he’d sent me. I’d only known him for ten minutes but I liked him: he was funny and straightforward.

Unfortunately, his writing was terrible. It was a speech for his boss, the head of a think tank, full of phrases like “business architecture restructuring” and “building a financial escalator”. Still, I’ve helped people become coherent before. We started working on some exercises, using techniques that have worked for other clients.

After two sessions we were in exactly the same position. He seemed to understand what I said, so why couldn’t he improve?

An idea occurred to me. Steve had told me that he felt he was less educated than his colleagues. I think he was unconsciously making his writing ‘difficult’, and therefore sound clever, to compensate. So for the next session, I took my dictaphone with me. I asked Steve what one of his more mystifying paragraphs meant; recorded his answer, typed it and printed it.

It was good: brief, concise, mentioning the most important points first and backing up assertions with real-world examples. True, it’s unlikely his boss would want to swear quite so much in a speech, but fixing that took a couple of minutes. Redrafting the abstract, complex, jargon-rich writing he’s been producing till now has taken hours, and never produced a good result.

Now we have something. We’ve found a way of getting Steve to write the way he talks.

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