Operational excellence

Here’s a true story. The boss of a big company decided the company’s major internal comms message of the year was going to be “Operational Excellence”.

So every day “Operational Excellence” were the first words employees saw when they walked into the canteen; employees got e-mails explaining how their team’s operational excellence would be measured, and their manager told them they’d be focusing on how operationally excellent they personally were.

But six months later, when the results were measured, had anyone done anything about it? Of course not.

Oh, except for one team. One team where all the scores had gone up. A team that really had become operationally excellent. What had the manager of that team done differently to succeed where no-one else had?

He’d run a weekly meeting on the subject, just like the other managers, except he’d changed the name of the meeting from “Operational Excellence”, to “Doing Everyday Things, Better”.

Thanks to Neil Taylor at The Writer

Start from the end

The more you read something, the more your brain begins to memorise it. If you re-read a document over and over, eventually your brain knows what’s coming next, so you’re not actually reading the piece anymore, you’re just scanning it.

When you feel you’ve read your copy too many times, help your brain by mixing things up. Read the last sentence first and check for things like sentence structure and grammar. Then read the sentence above the last and do the same. Pull lines out of the copy at random and check for errors. By treating each sentence this way, your brain will break out of scanning mode and you’ll read your copy with a sharper eye.

Leave the office

You’ll never be a great writer of anything if you stare at your desk.

Look at people. Get outside and observe. It’s surprising what you might learn.

For example, did you know Black and Decker don’t sell drills, they sells holes? And deodorants aren’t about keeping dry, they’re about being loved. Computers aren’t about getting more work done, they’re about power. Cars aren’t about transportation, they’re about success. Food isn’t about hunger. Drink isn’t about thirst.

And these days money isn’t the most precious commodity; time is.

Before you open up Microsoft word and start the process of writing, go take a walk.

Outside you see things differently.

Reading out loud

Reading your words out aloud is a great tip for a writer. It helps you check how clear the sentences are and how well the copy flows. Sometimes it is almost impossible to catch some poorly written phrases or sentences without first testing them on the ear. In fact, you may not realise how complicated a sentence is until you’ve read it out aloud.

Hearing the piece also gives you a fresh take on the copy you’ve written. You can be more subjective and hear the words you’ve actually written on the page, rather than those you think are there.

Finally, reading a piece out loud helps you figure out where there may be holes in the piece, where your wording may become a bit cliche’, where transitions falter or where information needs to be broken up and possibly bullet pointed.

Legalese

Back in the 1800’s, legalese was the most favoured writing style for business. The Victorians thought penmanship was a solemn art and those that created stuffy and erudite commentaries were in high demand.

Look around and you’ll find a lot of overformal writing is still with us today. This passage, excerpted from the Ohio Traffic Code, is an example of how convoluted, wordy and formal writing can lead to confusion rather than clarity.

"No vehicle shall be turned so as to proceed in the opposite direction within an intersection, or upon any street in a business district, or upon a freeway, expressway or controlled-access highway, or where authorized signs are erected to prohibit such movement, or at any other location unless such movement can be made with reasonable safety to other users of the street and without interfering with the safe operation of any traffic that may be affected by such movement."

Thus, if you have a tendency to write like a solicitor from Surrey and you think stiff and archaic copy commands respect and elevates your writing – please re-read the aforementioned text.

The exclamation mark

Today, the exclamation mark has become so common in e-mail, texts, Facebook and 140-character Twitter communications that it’s almost being used as a word in its own right.

Fowler's Modern English Usage puts it like this: "Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational."

Times have changed and with the arrival of email these days the liberal use of the screamer is commonplace. In fact some argue that exclamation marks are not just marks of excitability, but of friendliness. Thanks!!!!'", they contend, "is way friendlier than 'Thanks'."

Lynn Truss in her book ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ says: "I do think people are generally trying to get expression into email - and exclamation marks are good for getting attention."

Well, here at Avvio we resist the temptation to puff-up our wordage with the liberal use of exclamation marks. If the copy requires an exclamation to give it emphasis, we’d say it’s simply not good enough in the first place.

And if you use it all the time your reader will soon realise you don't have anything to exclaim.

Some advice on writing from George Orwell

Rhythm

Writing effective copy is a lot more than throwing a bunch of sentences together. It’s about structure, it’s about pace, and it’s about rhythm.

In music, rhythm is the steady beat that takes the listener from start to finish. In writing however, rhythm is the opposite of a steady beat. It’s a variety of sentence lengths from short to long, from medium to very short. Sometimes very short sentences indeed.

By altering the length of your sentences you stop the copy flow from becoming boring. And even though Microsoft Word doesn’t approve, go ahead and fragment a sentence if it helps you create that all-important chatty and conversational tone.

Wait a minute! Isn’t this different to the way you were taught to write at school?

Yes.

But don’t worry, if someone questions the copious amounts of full stops in your copy just point them to The Economist Style Guide where they say this about punctuation: Use plenty. Keep sentences short. This helps the reader.

How The Church can help you with your PowerPoint presentations

The business world is full of rubbish PowerPoint presentations. One of the reasons they are so dire is that writers forget one important factor: people can only concentrate on one big idea for a maximum of twenty minutes.

The Church has known this for a long time; most sermons usually last no more than twenty minutes. And men of the cloth also know that if they should send their audience to sleep or overload them with too much information, churchgoers will be heading for pastures new.  

So before you start writing your presentation make sure you know what your big idea is. Then present it, illustrate it, compare it, and lastly repeat it.

Also remember the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple; a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Abide by this rule and your presentation will be understandable, memorable and successful. And you can be sure your audience will say amen to that.

Purple prose

Often found in romantic novels and estate agents property descriptions, purple prose is a kind of supercharged writing where the text becomes extravagant, overstylised or flowery in the extreme. 

An overuse of metaphors, clichés, similes, and adjectives along with a complex sentence structure and a turn of phrase such as 'rosy fingers of dawn' would qualify as examples of the genre.

In the copywriters style guide, fussy words and fancy expressions are usually avoided. The goal is not to sound intelligent, but to get your intelligent point across.