Blog in 04 2014.

I love Cancer Research UK’s 2013 Race for Life ‘cancer, we’re coming to get you’ TV ads. There’s real attitude in the people talking straight-to-camera: You mess with her, you mess with all of us; I laugh in your stupid face; Up yours, cancer. It cuts right through the usual language of ‘victim’/‘survivor’, and even the way we talk about ‘battling’ cancer, and instead slaps us with the focused rage of actual fighting talk.

So it makes me sad that the current tube campaign just doesn’t capture the same spirit.
 

That first exclamation mark sets the wrong tone from the off (‘Oi, cancer’ has fight-picking menace; ‘Oi, cancer!’ is much less confident) and the comparisons just don’t have the defiance of the TV ad. Obviously we hate cancer more than ‘the girl whose headphones go bmmmm-tssssst’ and ‘the muppet who doesn’t get out of his seat for a pregnant lady’. Who wouldn’t? But those aren’t really things we hate are they? They’re just a few mildly annoying clichés of commuter life, used to make a forced link between ‘cancer’, ‘hate’ and ‘commuting’.

When your tone is that bold, your content needs to walk the walk, too.

Of course, it doesn’t change the fact that Race for Life is an amazing and inspiring thing. There are over 300 races this year – sign up for one.

The poster reminded me of this VSO ad from a few years back: in contrast, this is a brilliantly written call to arms that uses the truth of mundane commuter life to much, much better effect.
 

As you probably know, the Co-operative Group has been having a pretty bad time of it lately. And the day before the Easter break, we found out just how bad. Losses of £2.5bn, mostly down to the Co-operative Bank, which had to be bailed out by its own bond holders. In short, the worst results in the Co-op’s 150 years.

So how to break this badder-than-bad news? Well, the Co-op’s CEO, Richard Pennycook, just came right out and said it. ‘A disastrous year’ is the headline he gave the press, the savers and the analysts. And there’s the d-word again in his annual report intro – he uses it three times. No ‘weathering adversity’. No ‘working to restore confidence’. Just disaster, plain and simple. And you can bet the honesty will have earned the Co-op respect and probably a few friends just when they need them.

Of course, there’s a lesson for everyone here. If you’ve got bad news, don’t sugar-coat it. Even if it’s not as galactically bad as the Co-op’s. People know when they’re being spun to. And they won’t respect you for it.

(Okay, people also know when organisations time their announcements to limit damage. All of us on the sidelines went away for Easter and promptly forgot all about the Co-op. So consider this bit of bad news exhumation our way of helping you fight your inner sugar-coater.)

In helping clients with their writing, one of the most common misconceptions I have to fight against is the idea that good writing means a lot of writing.

I blame our schooling.

Grade school, high school, college and even grad school teachers in the US assign papers with a minimum page count requirement.

In some cases, that makes sense.

If the assignment’s on ‘The history of California’, it’s perfectly logical to have a minimum page count. That’s such an open-ended topic, and there’s a lot to cover. A minimum page count gives students some structure. (A maximum would probably be good too.)

But if the topic is ‘Why California should (or shouldn’t) be divided into two states’, that’s a different thing entirely. For that topic, the paper should be only as long as it takes to make the argument.

In that case, asking students to meet a minimum page count is begging them to pad whatever compelling points they have with fluff. It’s implicitly sending the message that quantity is as important as quality.

After writing dozens of papers over the course of a decade or so, it can be hard to shake that mentality. And before you know it, you’re writing a business brief or a bit of copy and instead of thinking, ‘The substance will determine the length of this thing,’ you’re thinking, ‘If this doesn’t reach a certain length, it can’t possibly be good.’ Which is counter-productive, to put it mildly.

I think most people are better writers than they realise. But then ingrained habits like minimum word counts enter their brains, practically forcing them into bad writing. It’s a shame.

So ask yourself: have I said everything my reader needs to hear? If the answer’s yes, then put your pen down.

There’s a new bit of jargon that seems to be having its 15 minutes of fame at the moment. It’s the word ‘land’:

‘That idea really landed well.’
‘We need to make sure our project lands.’
‘This initiative just isn’t landing.’

Superficially, what’s not to like? It’s a fine Old English word (which conjures up synonyms like ‘ground’, ‘earth’, ‘homeland’ and other down-to-earth expressions like ‘being safe on dry land’ and whatnot). There’s also an implicit sense of some kind of journey: your project ‘takes off’, then it ‘cruises along’, and finally it’ll need to ‘land’. And everybody likes a journey metaphor, don’t they?

But like most bits of corporate jargon, while it sounds precise and solid, it’s actually rather slippery. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it’s because it’s a word that lends itself to deflecting responsibility: ‘the idea hasn’t landed’ or ‘the initiative didn’t land’. Both of which help give the impression that the success or not of the ‘landing’ was probably something to do with the initiative itself, or was perhaps in the lap of the gods. Compare that to the word ‘embed’ – which has similar connotations of making something ‘stick’ or ‘take hold’. If you use embed like this you get ‘the idea hasn’t embedded’ or ‘the initiative didn’t embed’. Now it might be just me, but in those contexts the word ‘embed’ draws attention to itself, instantly making you think: ‘Yeah – but embedding doesn’t just happen by itself. Who was responsible for that, eh?’ (Grammarians might say it’s something to do with how ‘land’ works well in the context of passive sentence structures, and as an intransitive verb.)

And I’ve been in two meetings this month where clients have talked about their ‘ideas not landing’. Initial discussions about the big reasons behind this failure to land eventually got round to the truth – which was more like ‘we didn’t explain our ideas in a way that people could understand’, or even ‘people just didn’t “get” what we were saying’.

In both cases, the problem was a language one: the ideas needed explaining in a simpler way, or in language appropriate to the audience. Or they needed bringing to life with stories or examples.

So, next time you hear something hasn’t landed, check: is it really that there’s some complicated process problem — or is it just that something needs explaining better?

I got my daughter’s school report the other day. I was expecting the same old, same old: ‘well-behaved’, ‘hard-working’, ‘conscientious’ blah. (Sorry, I should warn you, she’s one of those kids... and there’ll be some more not-very-subtle parental showing off before we’re done.)

Anyway. Instead of the usual ‘pleasure to teach’ clichés, her form teacher had written:

‘I wonder how many people excel in both mathematics and dance, and indeed pretty much everything else?’

That’s different. I want to read more.

‘She’s great to have in 11R and a cracking young woman. Everybody says so.’

Now, that could have been written by a writer at The Writer. But it was written by Mr Hunter, chemistry teacher.

He’d done the things good writers do to connect with their audience: writing like you speak, using some surprising vocabulary, and a well-placed full stop before a really short sentence. (When someone else might have used a comma. Or not bothered with that last point at all.)

So at parents’ evening I mentioned to Mr Hunter how much I’d enjoyed his writing. He told me that lots of Mums and Dads had said the same.

Which got me thinking. The ‘cut and paste’ school report methodology is well-known. For all I know he’d written something more or less identical about all the other kids in 11R – substituting different subjects for maths and dance (and hopefully having the sense to say ‘cracking young man’ not ‘woman’ for the boys).

But even if he did*, it just shows that a standard letter can still bring a smile to your face, if some thought has gone into it. And get your message across. And make people like you.

So as a bit of customer comms it worked really well. Maybe your business could do better.
 

*I’m sure you didn’t, Mr Hunter