language

Can Good Writing be Learned? Give it a Go!

| Suzi Beerman

A colleague who manages a small marketing team recently asked my opinion about some resources for improving his team’s writing skills. My mind flashed immediately to Cool Runnings, the 1993 movie about the Jamaican bobsled team that went to the Olympics. It’s a fish-out-of-water story that celebrates the success of a team driven by passion to succeed. If a Jamaican team that was unfamiliar with snow learned to bobsled and win, good writing can be learned!

It takes passion and dedication to become a great writer. Anyone who is driven to write can tell you sometimes the words flow through you onto the page or screen with ease—and other times when you feel like banging your head on the desk because nothing comes out right. I cannot profess to be a great writer, but I enjoy it even on the most dreadful days when I read my own work and am shocked at my clumsiness. The thing is, I am dedicated to doing it correctly next time. I am passionate about writing stories that are accessible and engaging.

Does everyone who writes as part of their job have to be passionate about it? It helps, but the reality is that their passion is probably around some other aspect of their work and they are darned eager to get the writing over with, fast. In order to get the writing done—and not have to redo it—just dedicate yourself to several best practices. These are my recommendations for resources to help you learn how to write.

 One Basic Premise

No writer will succeed—no matter how many books they study or classes they attend—unless they follow one basic principle: know and respect your audience! The reader’s time is valuable and their attention is likely short, so it is to your advantage to be clear, concise, and authentic.

If you write with your audience in mind, you will hear what you have to say to them. Who are you talking to? What are they interested in? Why would they care about anything that you have to say? How much time do they have to read what you wrote? What action should they take or feeling should they have because of reading what you wrote? How much technical knowledge do they have, or lack? How much do they really have to know in order to buy in to what you are telling them?

Tell a Story

If the idea of writing gives you a little shiver of dread, try instead to think of it as telling a story, or chatting with a colleague. What would you say if you wanted someone to listen, believe, and act on what you are telling them? Engage them with a story! Make them care!

If you have used the elevator pitch technique to sell your idea/product/service/whatever, then you already understand that your writing has to grab your audience’s attention, get to the point without hyperbole or wordiness, and clearly state an action they can take to buy in. You can use the elements of an elevator pitch to guide you in writing good business communication—whether you are creating a newsletter, a press release, an executive memo, an intranet page, or an e-mail alert.

If the idea of storytelling is especially fascinating to you, you might want to dig into Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. Star Wars fans, who seem to be legion in the technology world, might be interested to know that this book inspired George Lucas. In it, Campbell asserts that every story has already been told but that, culturally, we must continue to retell and enliven the old stories.

May the force be with you, fledgling writers!

Although you likely won’t insert heroes and valiant quests into all of your business writing, it is fun to think how those concepts can be used to inspire every reader.

 Getting Down to Business

While I believe that excellent business communication is infused with good storytelling practices, I recognize that getting a lot done—being productive, as we like to spin it—can drive us to mediocrity. So, how do we handle our day-to-day communication workload effectively? I suggest looking to resources that help us understand the nuances of distinct communication vehicles. Here are three examples.

E-mail

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history—with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.”

– Mitch Ratcliffe, “Technology Review” (1992)

Whenever I see a mangled e-mail—where the author is emotional, incoherent, grandiose, and/or off-target—I can’t help but think of the above quote. E-mail is a daily communication tool that can get us in a lot of trouble, very quickly.

There is a fun and refreshing book about e-mail communication etiquette and writing techniques, Send. Who knew a book about e-mail would make me chuckle and think twice before I hit Send?

Presentations

A useful book, whether you are creating presentations or not, is Beyond Bullet Points from Microsoft Press. This book takes too many pages to communicate some simple concepts, but you can easily jump around through the chapters and use it as a quick reference whenever you are concerned that your writing is getting off track. The book is organized to help walk you through creating a presentation—or any communication, really—by taking these steps: Distill Your Ideas, Structure Your Story, Visualize Your Message, Create a Conversation, and Maintain Engagement.

Blogging

Blogging seems like the wild cousin of formal business writing—personal, opinionated, flamboyant, untamed—but the fact is that blogs should still conform to most of the rules of good writing. For a comprehensive primer on blogs, blogging, and some best practices, read The Rough Guide to Blogging.

What are your favorite writing guides? What’s the single most important thing you’ve learned to improve your writing?

How Smart Do Your Readers Have to Be?

| Suzi Beerman

When I was a student journalist at McKean High School in Hockessin, Delaware, I was thrilled to be learning the tricks of the trade.  I was eager to study style guides and practice inverted pyramids for the opportunity to write for a living – and to follow in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein.

The first disappointment of my journalistic career came when our teacher served up this golden rule: Newspapers must be written for the sixth to eighth grade reading level.  For gosh sake, I was a high school junior at the time and the last thing I wanted to do was write below my own level!  It was unimaginable to me that the average reader could be as dull as the nose pickers at the junior high two miles away.

I was all arrogance and disbelief until I realized I’d be writing for people like my dad.  Raised in a poor family and forced to quit school in seventh grade to help pay the bills, he struggled with reading for most of his life.

From that point on, I relished my role – writing simply so others could simply understand.  Today, as Managing Editor of Microsoft IT, I’m still passionate about readability. I believe we are obliged to respect our readers by writing clearly for them.

So how smart do your readers have to be in order to understand you?  Do you make them work to comprehend your message?  Do you risk their displeasure at your tortured sentence structure?  Worse, do you risk them ignoring what you write?

Back in high school, we pretty much guessed at what the eighth grade level sounded like.  We were instructed to write simple sentences.  We learned not to use $15 words when a $.50 word would do just fine.   We were reminded that Shakespeare wrote for the masses – and that he was very popular, indeed.

Sold yet?  How about if I offer you an easy-to-use tool that will help you analyze how readable your writing really is?  Great!  Just follow these instructions:

  1. Click the Microsoft Office Button in Word, and then click Word Options.
  2. Click Proofing.
  3. Make sure Check grammar with spelling is selected.
  4. Under When correcting grammar in Word, select the Show readability statistics check box.

 

When I ran the readability check on this entry, it scored at a 7.4 grade level.

To learn more about Word’s readability scores, go to Microsoft online.

For a contrarian view on readability, read Tim Porter’s blog entry about the role of readability in newspapers’ demise in the age of digital media.

 

PS — I am proud to say that by the time my father was in middle age, he had become a very good reader and earned his GED with my mother’s unwavering support and encouragement.

 

I HEART Antonyms!

| Suzi Beerman

Synonyms get all the glory. They are always listed in the dictionary next to the words they match. They get most of the real estate in all the thesauri. Antonyms, on the other hand, usually don’t get much mention.

What is up with the second-class status of antonyms? I think antonyms are fun. Weren’t opposites one of the first things we learned about as young children? Up, down. In, out. Black, white. Cat, dog. Boat, car. Ball, bat.

The lack of antonym visibility may go right to the core of being an opposite. To paraphrase Kermit, it’s not easy being opposite. An opposite is by definition that which is totally different: different from or contrary to something or each other in every respect. Under that definition, the opposites we learned as kids may not be opposites at all. Is a dog really the opposite of a cat? No, since they are both furry mammals, right?

A Wikipedia contributor touches on the problem that may be behind the lack of antonym references with this explanation, “Not all words have an opposite. Some words are non-opposable. For example, the word platypus has no word that stands in opposition to it (hence, the unanswerability of What is the opposite of platypus?).”

True, but since when is every synonym listed in a dictionary or thesaurus identical in meaning? The definition of synonym allows for identical or similar. It makes our language rich and wonderful to have nuances of meaning. Let’s loosen up on the definition of antonym, or at least of opposite.

Having antonyms listed in dictionaries and thesauri would support my personal goal of being more expressive and accurate in my use of language—and in giving others the tools to do so too.

As I get older–I mean smarter–and try to cram more information into the limited space of my small skull I always want resources online and at my fingertips. I want a ready resource when, for example, I am looking for the opposite of recommend. It turns out that it is not easy to find an antonym for that word. Some of my Microsoft colleagues are trying to create their own words to express the opposite of recommend. So far disrecommend is very popular, while there was a lone voice asking recently for a discommendation.

Although they’ve tried to create new words, a taboo among language purists, those folks aren’t entirely off base. We were taught as innocent, eager students that adding dis , des, in, or un could magically turn a word into its opposite. Mount, dismount. Respect, disrespect. Certain, uncertain.

Looking for a single word antonym can be tough. The Encarta Dictionary was one of the few online resources that did justice to antonyms, but alas, it is no more. A close substitute can be found at the Antonym tab in Synonym-Finder.com, but even that site name speaks to the issue I’m raising.  Other online resources, such as dictionary.com and m-w.com, don’t bother with antonyms for most words.

With so few reliable antonym dictionaries out there, what’s a writer to do? We could express the opposite by using more than one word. The opposite of recommend then could be recommend against. But will people use that in common everyday language? Will they use it in the fast communication channel of e-mail or chat?

One editor at Microsoft, Mike Pope, thinks not. He says people are using disrecommend because it makes sense to them in the context of their conversations. He believes we should support them in their use of that term and adopt the laissez-faire attitude expressed by Erin McKean in her Powell’s Books blog. “Some people have the idea that if a word isn’t in the dictionary, they can’t use it. This is not a rule any lexicographer ever came up with (think about it — if this were true, we’d all be out of jobs right quick) and luckily not a rule that most people follow. If a word you want to use isn’t in the dictionary (and you’re sure you haven’t just misspelled it — hey, don’t worry, it happens to everyone), go ahead and use it! That’s the best way to get it in the next edition, and then everyone’s happy.”

I can hear many of my editor friends out there gagging and hitting the floor in a dead faint. That’s my impulse too, but I am completely dissatisfied with the antonyms for recommend.

Will I slip to the dark side and allow a non-word to come into common usage? Stay tuned as I decide whether to be a language superhero today or just one of the kids. What would you do??