The fight against Newspeak needs you!

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

A few months ago, on a whim, I re-read George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ There really is no downside to doing this. If it’s been a while since you last picked up this book, allow me to give you a friendly nudge in its direction.

Orwell’s novel is always teetering on the edge of becoming that most dreaded of things: a National Treasure – a toothless ‘masterpiece,’ respectable, tamed and read by no-one except wave after wave of grudging A-level students.

In fact, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is highly volatile and strange – much more so than I remembered. Paranoid, vicious, kinky, and (of course) prophetic. As a copywriter, I was particularly struck by what it had to say about language, specifically Newspeak.

If you’ve read the book, you probably remember Newspeak: the state-mandated language in which, for example, nothing is ‘bad’ but rather ‘ungood’ (or ‘doubleplusungood’ in extreme cases).

What I had forgotten, though, was that the stated purpose of Newspeak is to shrink the size of the English vocabulary and deliberately make the language less expressive. As words vanish, goes the theory, so does the public’s capacity to think. “Don’t you know, Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?” crows one of its champions, a smooth talker called Syme.

This got me thinking about the language used by companies, charities and other organisations when they are trying to speak to me. The homogeneity, the jargon, the shrinking range of possible word choices, and hence, of ideas.

In the Newspeak of 2015, companies are forever ‘Providing solutions.’ They’re ‘Passionate about X’ or ‘Inspired by Y.’ They’re ‘Committed to quality’ or ‘Driven by excellence.’ And charities are all about ‘Changing lives’ or ‘Making a difference.’ They assure us they are ‘Having an impact’ and that this is ‘all thanks to the kind support of people like you.’

For us as readers, these phrases (and hundreds of others like them) have become so common as to be meaningless. They lie there on the page or screen and our eye slides right off them. They’re empty verbal calories, communicating nothing.

I recently worked with Blackwood on some recommendations for a hospice charity. As I looked through the charity’s website and fundraising materials, I could see they did amazing work, but the way they talked about it was abstract and sanitised. Care for the dying is a highly emotive topic, and yet here was this sea of safe, almost clinical word choices.

I urged them to warm up their language, to make more arresting or unusual or concrete word choices. Don’t talk about ‘life-limiting illness,’ talk about dying. Don’t talk about ‘enhanced quality of life,’ talk about holding people’s hands, talk about flowers, talk about pillows. Don’t tell me you ‘offer support to families and loved ones,’ make me see what that looks like. Make me feel what it feels like.

What I was asking them to do was the same thing I always try to do in the copy I write – to make use of Weird Words.

Never underestimate the power of a well placed Weird Word. In the first few paragraphs of this very post I used words like ‘whim,’ ‘nudge,’ ‘toothless,’ ‘kinky.’ I did this on purpose, knowing they would give those all-important kickoff paragraphs a pleasing, eyecatching texture. Now of course context is all, and words that are appropriate here in this relatively informal blog post might not suit a more high-profile piece of business communication.

But then again, they might.

I will never forget a writing exercise I foisted on my fellow copywriters at my last agency during an informal Copy Chat in a café around the corner from our Brighton office. I hope you’ll humour me if I foist it on you now, and encourage you to give it a try.

1)     Gather as many of your staff as you can around a table.

2)     Begin by each making a list of your favourite words. Not your favourite concepts (‘love,’ ‘happiness,’ etc.) but your actual words. The ones that are fun to say. The ones that have what our friends in the food industry call ‘mouthfeel.’ Words like ‘truculent’, ‘pizzazz,’ ‘plonk’ or ‘archangel.’

3)     Choose one from your list and write it, along with a short definition, at the top of a new sheet of paper.

4)     Pass this paper to the person on your right, and take the one from the person on your left.

5)     Using this word and definition as a first sentence, write a piece of communication – a sales letter, a radio ad, a job posting – for your business.

This fifth step is the kicker. The one that gets people scratching their heads. But push through that. Just start writing and see where you end up. You’ve started with a Weird Word. You’re breaking out of Newspeak. Chances are that much of what you write is going to be a little bonkers, but you may be pleasantly surprised.

I still remember some of the passages my fellow writers ended up composing that day. One memorably used the word ‘petrichor’ (the smell of rain on hot ground) as a springboard into a great descriptive piece about life in a drought-stricken country. The Weird Word gave her this totally surprising but tangible way in. It snapped her out of her usual pattern of writing, and me out of my pattern of reading.

Find ways to do this. If you hold language at arm’s length, as if with a pair of tweezers, then your readers will feel that distance and they’ll hold you at arm’s length too.

If you can find surprising and engaging ways to hook them, they’ll gratefully keep reading what you have to say. Creativity: it’s Big Brother’s worst nightmare.

Turns out most tech users are humans.

Interestingly, major tech companies have twigged that the overwhelming majority of their users are ... people.

According to an article in yesterday's Times, "Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google have begun employing people whose sole job is to add human warmth to the companies' products."

This is a welcome development -- a lot of the software and hardware we use on a daily basis has been gradually drifting us in a post-human direction. Like the proverbial frog in the pan of water, we've been tiptoeing into a disconnected corporate techno-dystopia so gradually that many of us have barely noticed.

So, more emphasis on the social in our social media: yay.

But it's important to remember that the companies' reason for doing this is not primarily a humanitarian one. Their eye is on the bottom line. They're keen to retain users. To stop them (i.e. us) from drifting off into using the more esoteric apps and platforms -- the upstarts and the johnny-come-latelys, the groovy new social media sites that may have less of a whiff of Big Brother about them.

A lot of people are feeling disgruntled with the level of corporate interference in what used to be a free and open -- a human -- space. Promoted tweets and other kinds of sponsored content are making millions for these companies, but they are clogging up our feeds and making us feel like we have been 'bait and switched' into a social media environment that seemed so fun at first, but which has lately revealed itself to be an advertiser's playground.

So let's be cautiously optimistic about all this rosy talk of 'curating' and 'stewardship'. It may well give us a richer, more satisfying online experience, but this will only be a side-benefit. Its true aim is to keep us clicking, to keep our eyeballs on the paid content, and to keep the coffers at HQ full.

A human response to a letter from a scary robot demanding £100

The other day I got an official-looking letter in the mail telling me I owed a £100 parking fine.

The letter itself was a small masterpiece of behavioural economics:

• It was on official-looking letterhead, including the prominent word 'reminder' (despite this being the first communication I had received).
• A big scary Johnson Box at the top had the key amount and call to action boldly displayed
• There was even a ‘pay right now and save £40’ option designed to short-circuit my instinct to sit down and think it over.

See how effective this all is?

I can easily imagine how it could have nudged someone into sitting down with a sigh and writing a cheque.

But on closer inspection, it appeared that I was being charged £100 for the shocking infraction of staying in a car park for 1 hour and 8 seconds, having only paid for an hour of parking.

Do the math, guys -- I was 8 seconds over.

A private firm (and proud provider of ‘Car Park Solutions,’ whatever those are) had installed a camera that snapped me entering and leaving the car park. Grainy B&W photos of my car were included in the letter, further bolstering their Orwellian case against me.

So I paid for an hour. I stayed for an hour and 8 seconds. And somewhere, in some distant business park, a machine whirred into life and automatically cranked out a letter.

Here is the response I submitted to the company website:

I recently received this notice, which I am contesting on the grounds that I did in fact buy a ticket to park at The White Horse on May 30th of this year (see attached pic of the ticket, which by some miracle was still in my car, having survived my recent attempt at cleaning).

It appears that you are trying to get £100 out of me because I arrived at 14:49:03 and left at 15:49:11 -- 8 whole seconds over the one-hour mark. You will have quite an uphill battle to fight in court, proving that there The White Horse incurred any major cost by my staying in its car park for 8 seconds longer than was paid for.

Something tells me that this scary, intimidating letter -- that this whole incident, in fact -- was automatically generated by a machine, as any sane or caring human being would have given me the benefit of the doubt and thrown in the 8 extra seconds free of charge. Ah well, human beings are in short supply these days. Give my regards to your creepy robot overlords.

Keep fighting the good fight, people.

The seven most common reasons people write badly. (Note that ‘Because they’re stupid’ is not one of them.)

 

Take a deep breath. Now read this sentence:

‘The development of our strategic goals is to be achieved through a combination of cross-platform brand synergy and outside-the-box solutioneering that will produce desirable outcomes while providing dynamic solutions to our entire client base.’

We’ve all come across professional writing like this. Writing that makes us dig our fingernails into our palms in an effort to stay conscious. Reports that don’t seem to be reporting anything except ‘Hey! Jargon is Still Awesome!’ PowerPoints that are seriously lacking in both Power and Point. Websites where ‘URL’ is simply the noise you make when you’re trying to read them.

But what makes people write like this? Why would a person sit down to pour his or her soul out and instead end up spewing waffle and management speak? Are they stupid?

There are actually quite a few reasons why people write badly. And stupidity is very much NOT one of them:

1)      They were never taught to write well.

In days gone by, schoolchildren had to spend large chunks of their time learning the rules of grammar and punctuation. Kids would be hauled up in front of their classmates and made to parse a sentence on the blackboard, drawing an elaborate tree that mapped out the subject, verb phrase, object and all kinds of sub-clauses.

If you were posh enough, these sentences were even in Latin.

This practice has now largely fallen by the wayside. The cold, hard gruel of technical literacy has been replaced by warmer, fuzzier activities aimed at cultivating a love of reading and writing.

THIS IS A GOOD THING. How many kids had their creativity crushed out of them as they went through the old system? How many boys and girls stepped down from the blackboard, wiping away tears of frustration with chalky fingers, filled with the knowledge that the English language was not something with which they were prepared to tangle?

But the disappearance of writing instruction from our schools has also stopped people from taking care and paying attention when they sit down to write. A first draft or late-night brain dump is all too often sent out into the world as if it were Good to Go. And we, the readers, we’re all left to just deal with the consequences. Instead of Dead Poets’ Society, we get writing that is merely Dead.

2)      They don’t know enough about their subject.

Picture yourself in a job interview – you are asked a question on a subject you know nothing about. The question feels important. The panel leans forward to hear your answer.

And so, you start talking.

The words start to flow, but you’re not saying anything. You are engaged in a verbal tap-dance to hide the fact that you have no idea what the question was about.

A lot of bad writing is in this vein. It fills the page, but the writer is papering over the cracks in their knowledge. They are hoping that the reader might be so impressed with the quantity of words that we will fail to notice their quality. The less they know, the more they write.

3)      They know way too much about their subject.

The converse can also be true. Like a pub bore hitting his stride, a writer will shamelessly hold forth on his pet topic without pausing to ask himself if the reader is still with him. (Gendered pronoun not entirely chosen at random.)

When writing for a specialised audience, this can sometimes work. But even the nerdiest specialist is still a human being, and nobody wants to be bombarded with dense jargon, arcane minutiae and unexplained abbreviations.

Please…Let us catch a breath. Give the uninitiated a fighting chance of following what you have to say. You don’t have to dumb it down, but at least try to meet people half way. To do otherwise is just plain rude – and we, the unlucky readers, shouldn’t stand for it. Like the child gazing upon the naked Emperor, we must feel empowered to stand up and say he’s naked.

‘Oi! Rude person!’ we must cry, ‘You think you’re communicating, but you’re not! You’re just going on and on without saying anything! The door is locked and we are on opposite sides! Let us in!’

4)      They are trying to impress someone.

If your boss likes what you’ve written, you must surely have done a good job. Right?

Well, not necessarily. If your boss is a phenomenal writer, then yes, they are someone you should strive to impress. But you don’t necessarily get put in charge because you’re a good writer.

So we often end up with a situation where a lowly writer might take a chance on a more creative approach to something – something daring and playful and engaging – and then they’ll catch themselves and say ‘Wait a sec, my boss is not going to like this. I’d better rewrite it the way S/HE writes. That’s sure to go down better.’ And so they self-edit. They water it down. They play it safe. And we are forever deprived of whatever sparkling gem that callow young minion WANTED to write. And the world is made a little duller. A little greyer.

It is only human to try to mirror the language cues of the person we’re talking to. If we’re talking to a young child, we’ll use a bit of Baby Talk. If we’re talking to someone from another country, we might use simple words and sentence structures they are likely to understand. If we’re flirting with someone else, our speech patterns might come to resemble theirs.

And what is a boss if not a baby from another country who we have to flirt with?

5)      They are scared.

Related to (2) above. A lot of bad writing is a product of fear. To write, especially publicly or professionally, is to put yourself out there. It is to stick your neck out and make a clear declaration. It is not a million miles away from that other well-worn nightmare staple: making a public speech.

We human beings are a pretty self-conscious bunch. We have all experienced rejection at some time or another, and in the professional realm rejection often means more than just ridicule – it could mean being passed over for promotion, denied a raise or even Let Go in the next reshuffle.

So there really is every incentive for a writer to hide behind their words rather than waving them proudly skyward. If someone is tasked with writing their company’s annual report, the more anonymous they make it, the better – especially if the company had a bad year. ‘Business conditions in FY14 were broadly unfavourable,’ means the same as, ‘Guys, this was a crappy year,’ but it somehow leaves the writer feeling less exposed. Those waffle words, sometimes they’re as comforting and delicious as actual waffles.

6)      They read way too much bad copy.

The business world is a huge echo chamber. Everyone’s going to the same conferences and reading the same white papers and subscribing to the same industry publications and e-zines. We’re all just so…wonderfully…connected.

One adverse side-effect of this connection is homogeneity. Clinging together in the choppy waters of enterprise, we’ve all drifted so far away from the shores of sense and meaning that we’ve completely lost sight of land. We read what we write and we write what we read. And on and on it goes.

Every once in a while we might read something that catches our attention, or that seems a little…special. But by its very definition that thing is an oddity, an outlier, and only serves to strengthen the status quo. The chatty, engaging corporate voice of Innocent smoothies (to pluck an obvious example) is just the exception that proves the rule. ‘I wish I was allowed to write that way,’ we think, ‘But I don’t work for Innocent, so I’d better not.’

7)      They don’t think of themselves as creative.

‘Oh, I’m not really a very creative person.’ This really is an actual sentence that some people actually say. About themselves! I know it sounds crazy, but it really does happen. And not only do they say it, but they actually THINK it, too.

This very same person who helped their child build an imaginary space station in the garden on the weekend. This person who can turn the uninspiring contents of their fridge into a delicious meal. This person who sings in a community choir. This person who looks around the Tube train and imagines weird and wonderful stories about the various faces they see. This person who has the strangest dreams every night but never quite manages to write them down on waking.

We all have the capacity to be creative. We just don’t all have structures in place or corporate cultures that tell us that it’s OK to express ourselves.

Words are like Lego blocks. There is virtually no limit to the ways in which we can arrange them. And yet rather than dumping the whole bucket onto the floor and devising new designs and structures, too many writers patiently follow the step-by-step directions and end up making exactly the same thing as everyone else. And lo and behold, everything is not awesome.

So what can we do, as writers, to avoid the slump into badness? We can cut the crap. We can try speaking our words out loud. We can recognise that if something bores or confuses us, it is likely to bore or confuse our reader. We can read more poetry and maybe inject a bit of it into our professional communications.

We can write like human beings. Readers the world over will be undyingly thankful.

Can you identify any other reasons why people write badly? If so, please share them below...