Laugh Break

Since last week's post was on the use of humor in writing, this seems a good time for another post on business writing that evokes laughs it wasn't seeking. Even perfect spelling doesn't always save a sentence from unintentionally hilarious implications:

• "The postponed president's speech has been rescheduled for December 2." (Will he still be a postponed president then?)
• "Our camp is the perfect place to go next time you feel the call of nature." (Maybe the camp's biggest attraction is its restrooms.)
• "Living in our apartments, a dozen bus routes are convenient." (Every bus route needs a home to go to at night.)
• "Our doctors don't misdiagnose medical problems. When they treat you for lung cancer, that's what you die of." (Comforting thought.)
• "When two trains meet each other at a railroad crossing, each shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed until the other has gone." (One from the law-books department. Word has it that the original intent was to kill the bill it was attached to--proving once again the folly of expecting committees to exercise common sense.)
• "The only way we'll ever see the economy pick up is if we can get the economy moving." (Who would have thought of that?)
• "Support space colonization research. One ruined planet isn't enough for the human race." (We all know humans can be destructive and greedy, but why encourage it?)
• "Firings will continue until we see some improvement in attitude around here." (Now that's real motivation.)
• "No drinking allowed on coffee breaks." (Please eat your coffee in powdered form.)
• "Thanks to all our friends and customers. Our business is no longer open." (We really appreciate your freeing us from the trouble of continuing to work every day.)
• "Our initial counseling sessions are free of service." (I think that was supposed to be "free of service charges.")
• "After using the automatic washing machines, please remove all your clothes when the light goes out." (At least they didn't advise customers to do it in broad daylight.)
• "Get your ears pierced here and we'll give you an extra pair free." (I've heard many people wish for extra arms and eyes, but never ears.)

Smile and have a great week!

A Touch of Laughter

The average child laughs up to 25 times as much as the average adult, who, indeed, is as likely as not to scold giggling youngsters for "being silly." The capacity for hilarity is something most people grow out of once they learn life is full of hard work and disappointment.

It's a shame in more ways than one. Medical research tells us that hearty laughter strengthens the immune system, improves cardiovascular circulation, relaxes tense muscles, and provides many other physical benefits. So if you mix a little humor into your business writing, not only will your contacts like you better for it, but you'll be doing their health a favor.

Beware, however. Being funny is a hard thing to do on command, and not everyone finds the same things laughable. Obscure or offensive humor can be worse than none at all. So when considering how to add chuckles to your writing:

Remember that off-color stories have no place in the business world.

Never make fun of any individual or group. Everyone knows that racial and cultural bigotry are verboten, but prudent writers also avoid jokes that emphasize the presumed failings of mothers-in-law, wives, lawyers, politicians, preachers, and majority groups--or that ostensibly advocate any sort of animal abuse. The idea that choosing a certain vocation or having a married relative automatically makes one impossible or evil is an idea long overdue for a quiet death; and while you have a right to avoid cats if you personally find them repugnant, the ailurophiles among us have a right to be spared the equally repugnant images evoked by "other white meat" remarks.

Never overdo or force humor. Two light remarks per page, or one side-splitter or "groaner" per article, is about right. Since business materials are rarely written purely to entertain, a pun in every paragraph can make readers wonder if you take your main goal seriously. Remember also that a good joke sounds like a natural part of the conversation, not like something plucked at random from the Internet or from a homonym brainstorming exercise.

By now, you may be wondering, "With all these 'don'ts,' what's left?" Probably more than you think. Everyone has some gift for some form of humor, be it puns, exaggeration, deadpan, relevant anecdotes, or simple subtlety. To find where your talent for humor lies, start by noticing when what you say makes your friends or family chuckle.

And remember this almost foolproof principle: A guaranteed laugh-getter is making fun of oneself. While criticizing others makes a person look snide and petty, everybody laughs along with--and respects--someone who admits his own weaknesses. Likewise, the exception to the "don't make fun of groups" rule is the universal foibles of humanity in general ("No one is sure how long the human race has been around, but everyone agrees it is old enough to know better"). 

May the new business your humor attracts leave you laughing all the way to the bank!

Say a Lot with a Little

A journalism school ran a contest for the most sensational headline: "need not feature actual events, but must be no more than three words long." The winner--two words and three syllables--was "Pope Elopes."

You can say a lot in amazingly few words, if they're the right words. Journalists and other periodical writers know this best. The typical feature article contains a few thousand words at most; a back-page article or op-ed may be no more than 500 words; anecdotal or "filler" articles may stop at 250. How does one tell a whole story, or explain the essential points of a subject, in five or ten short paragraphs? Often, by going through the manuscript six or seven times to prune it of every nonessential word.

Your Web site or sales letter may not be facing an "under 1,000 words or you don't get paid" dictate from an editor, but it will be facing hundreds of potential clients who are short on time and on attention spans. Many people run from the mere sight of a page of unbroken text. Here are a few professional-writing tricks for achieving readable-looking lengths:

Build up your vocabulary. Some writers pride themselves on learning a new word from the dictionary every day, or studying the thesaurus for fifteen minutes of each lunch hour. The more words you have stored in your brain, the less likely you are to waste fifteen words describing something because you don't know its name. Don't, however, show off and use words most of the public has never heard, or you'll be back to writing out the whole definition.

Consider syllable count as well as word count: 500 ten-letter words take up more space than 500 six-letter words. Most successful writers live by the rule "never use a five-syllable word where a two-syllable one will do."

Divide long paragraphs into short ones: white space makes the text look less daunting, and may be the deciding factor in whether people actually start reading a page.

Consider the sound of the words--and of the piece as a whole. To some extent, length is in the perception of the reader; J. K. Rowling got away with making the later Harry Potter books extra-long by sheer virtue of her storytelling ability. If your writing sounds monotonous or singsong, bored readers will find your 250-word piece twice as long as a more interesting 400-word piece. Use sentences of different lengths, cut the cliches, and save rhyme and alliteration for taglines!

Don't rush! One writer is said to have ended a ten-page letter with the apology, "Sorry this is so long, but I didn't have time to make it shorter." Experienced authors know that you never become practiced enough to get first drafts perfect; and the less time you leave between drafts, the more unneeded words and other imperfections you leave in the manuscript. Go ahead and write down everything you have to say about your product or news item; then, rather than sending the results immediately to the printer, go back and remove everything not vital to your central point. For really important materials, give yourself a minimum of two weeks to do three drafts.

And don't say you don't have time. The time you save your prospects will come back to you soon enough.

A Tale of Two Businesses

Once upon a time there were two business owners, Ace and Fizz.

Both made the same type of product, equally well. Both offered excellent customer service.

And both were planning marketing campaigns.

Ace thought, "Everyone loves a good story. I'll build my campaign for Business A around stories."

Fizz thought, "No one wants to waste time on trivial anecdotes. I'll stick to the bare facts in my campaign for Business B."

Ace thought, "People will be interested in hearing how my product helped other customers--people like themselves," and carefully selected the most humorous and interesting customer testimonials. Ace gave these testimonials a prominent page on Business A's Web site and made sure to include one in every press release.

Fizz thought, "I just need to explain to customers how my product will help them," and filled Business B's every Web page and press release with lengthy, tedious details of exactly how the product worked. Most of Fizz's advertisements were hard to tell from service manuals.

Ace threw in a few appropriate stories on Business A's own misadventures in the process of developing the product. After all, customers like to deal with businesses that sound human.

Fizz was careful never to admit that Business B had ever had a setback. After all, a business has to protect its perfect reputation.

Ace encouraged Business A's employees to build still more public rapport by contributing personal stories and new ideas to the PR materials.

Fizz drilled it into Business B's employees to keep their minds on their real work.

The public read Business A's materials all the way through, smiled and chuckled, and began following Business A's doings to hear more. Many new people decided to try the business's product, and soon the number of regular customers was multiplying exponentially.

The public glanced at Business B's advertisements, yawned, and tossed them in the recycling bin or hit the Delete button. No one bothered to investigate the business further.

And Ace sold happily ever after.

(Fizz, at last report, is back on the 8-to-5 grind.)

Perfection Isn't Everything

"That is something up with which I will not put." That quip, attributed (in various forms) to Winston Churchill, is the standard response to the claim that one must never end a sentence with a preposition.

The line between grammatical rules and grammatical customs can be thin. Is it ever acceptable to split an infinitive? If not, how would you edit "We are initiating a new training program to better prepare new employees for their duties"? Is "Ain't I a member of this team?" grammatically correct? Yes (if you accept "ain't," the only known contraction for "am not," as a real word), but who'd dare write it? The alternative "Aren't I?" sounds correct, never mind that no one would think of saying "I aren't." Likewise, they as a synonym for he or she has become so common that it no longer seems worth the effort to argue the grammatical incorrectness of using they as though it were singular.

Some people make the effort anyway; the "write like you speak" crowd and the purists (who insist that should be "write as you speak") can start wars over the most trivial matters. When one side is editing the other's writing, coworkers are well advised to stand out of the line of fire.

One might expect a blog called Good Writing Is Good Business to side with the purists. But the truth is, a piece of writing can be technically perfect and still be far from "good" on the average citizen's "worth reading" scale. There's a reason most popular books don't start out as graduate theses. While not generally caring to deal with businesses that sound ignorant, the typical client does want to interact with someone who sounds human--not like a computerized grammar checker or that seventh-grade English teacher nicknamed "the robot" by drowsy students.

If you write a press release that scores high on your word processor's readability scale but makes a newspaper editor yawn and toss it after two sentences, you haven't accomplished a thing.

No, you shouldn't write exactly like (or "as") you speak. Who'd bother following a blog that says "yeah" instead of "yes" and tosses in an "um" or "you see" every few sentences? But you needn't be afraid of using contractions. Or refuse on principle to start a sentence with a conjunction.

Or banish all one-sentence paragraphs.

On Not Stepping on Toes

"Above all give no offense" is a noble goal for business writing--and probably an impossible one, considering how easily some people get offended. There are people who consider "Mrs." the epitome of male chauvinism, and people who claim that using "Ms." is knuckling under to radical feminism. There are people who see the quoting of a Bible verse as the first step toward a fundamentalist totalitarian state; there are people who scream "racism" if none of four experts quoted represent their ethnic group. Any blog or booklet that reaches an audience of any size will be read by someone who goes around looking for excuses to feel insulted.

However, that doesn't excuse deliberate or callous insults on a writer's part. Saying that you believe someone is mistaken is one thing; calling him an idiot or a crook is something else altogether. And there is no excuse whatsoever for writing "retard," "cripple," or any number of ethnic words long used as deliberate insults. (One list of the latter can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs.)

For the gray areas between "everyone knows it's an insult" and "you'd have to be pretty unreasonable to make a scene over it," a few principles for coping follow. (And for insight on the issues that fuel inter-cultural clashes, visit the Cultural IQ blog.)

Wherever possible, verify the preferred term for any group referred to--the term currently preferred by the group itself, that is. Relying on what you hear secondhand or on what was standard thirty years ago can get you in trouble; even within groups, "acceptable" words change from decade to decade. The term your father's gardener thought nothing of may be anathema to his granddaughter.

Avoid all idioms that mention groups by name; most such are now considered stereotyping. It's not worth the risk.

Never, under any circumstances, contradict someone who is in a better position to know than you are. A surprising number of bloggers presume to "correct" an Ecuadorian diplomat on what country is southeast of Ecuador (without bothering to check the map, of course) or a seminary professor on what books are or aren't in the Bible.

Avoid contradicting anyone at all unless the wrong information could have significant consequences--and even then, be low-key and respectful. Correcting people just to show off your superior knowledge, or with words that imply "how can you be so stupid?," only says to others that you are too arrogant to work with.

Finally, for those times when someone expresses offense despite your best efforts, seriously consider that you may owe an apology--and be willing to deliver it, publicly if necessary, without argument or excuse. Genuine humility is so rare that it can only help your reputation. Even if your conscience or understanding of the facts won't let you go as far as "you were right, I was wrong," be willing to acknowledge the merits of your opponent's position. In those rare cases where there are none (the fanatic who insists that everyone who refuses to agree the earth will blow up next week is a tool of Satan), better to ignore it altogether than to argue, which only encourages your opponent and makes you look petty.

Perhaps an even better principle than "above all give no offense" is "above all, never imply you're incapable of a mistake." Where the facts support you, let them speak for themselves.

Jettison the Jargon

Would you send a sales letter written in Japanese to a prospect who understood only English?

Ludicrous as the idea sounds, many a businessperson does almost the same thing by loading writings for the general public with technical terms incomprehensible outside a specific industry. Today's post title, "Jettison the Jargon," was borrowed from a lay preacher's warning to beware of such phrases as "washed in the blood" when discussing theology with today's average citizen, who wasn't raised on the King James Bible. Every profession from medicine to manufacturing carries similar "jargon" hazards. Ask, "What immediately comes to mind when you hear 'CD'"? and the typical banker's response will be quite different from that of the typical person on the street.

The habit of saying--or writing--what immediately comes to mind is related to many a problem, but perhaps none so insidious as the unconscious assumption that because something is clear to you, it will naturally be clear to everyone else. Most of us know that repeating spoken words louder and louder doesn't really help puzzled listeners comprehend what we're saying; most of us do it anyway, because human "logic" says that we just have to get the words across. The truth is, it's fully possible for a listener of normal intelligence to understand every word or syllable spoken and yet be unable to mentally string them together into a comprehensible whole. Once a brain registers "I'll be going to Seattle" as "I'll be going to see Attel," the translator circuit considers its work done on that sentence--and it becomes all but impossible to clarify what was actually said without rewording or elaborating.

Written communications are more capable of getting exact words across accurately, but carry hazards of their own. Writers rarely see the bewildered or bored expressions that warn speakers to clarify their words. Asking a writer to explain himself is too complicated for most readers to even bother. Thus, the assumption that "of course everyone understands what I'm saying" is free to work its damage unhindered; readers simply throw out or click away from materials they don't understand, leaving writers to wonder why their PR campaigns are getting nowhere.

Industry jargon is particularly dangerous because, often, everyone immediately available to proofread is equally familiar with "insider language." A company editor or even the person at the next desk can check a written piece for general comprehensibility; but when it comes to jargon, fifteen coworkers may agree that the piece is easy to understand and it may still bewilder an outsider. References to non-universal business practices, words for technologies rarely used by the public, acronyms with alternate meanings--all are so easily understood once learned, one quickly forgets that they might as well be written in code if presented for the first time without explanation.

For really important materials--a sales campaign on which your quarterly business plan hangs--you could do far worse than hire an outside writer with experience in multiple industries or in dealing directly with the public. (If your immediate reaction is "But we have a team of staff writers," reread the last paragraph.) For a blog or social media page, try to link every industry reference directly to its definition. (You may want to include a "jargon" glossary in the template; you definitely should clarify the most-used terms in your Frequently Asked Questions section.) And wherever you can, define a term when it is first used. That's particularly easy for acronyms; just write out the whole phrase, followed by the abbreviation (in parentheses), after which you're free to save space by using the acronym throughout the rest of the document.

But unless it in fact has value to concise language (say a concept is essential to the document's purpose and there's no generic synonym for the industry term) or some other tenet of good writing, try to avoid jargon altogether. Like slang and clichés, it's too often the lazy person's substitute for thinking up better ways of saying things.