July’s Ugly Word of the Month

by Jack Posted on July 21, 2011

Beauty, so the saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder. And my eye certainly beholds some words to be more beautiful than others.

Beautiful is, itself, a beautiful word. So too is umbriferous (providing shade).

And when a friend told me recently that she had been out shopping for girlish fripperies, I knew immediately that it must have been a pleasant experience. How could shopping for fripperies be anything but?

William Zinsser, a man whose knowledge of words is not to be sneezed at, recently suggested oscillate, lapidary, and filigree as some of the words that he finds pleasing. (And I don’t think he will mind if we read pleasing as a synonym for beautiful.)

Of course different folk have different criteria. According to a survey carried out by The British Council, the top five most beautiful English words among new learners of English are mother, passion, smile, love, and eternity. Passion and eternity I could just about vote for. The others … I’m not so sure about.

Epiphany, opulent and quintessential score well in some surveys. So do cinnamon, cashmere, and soliloquy.

And then somewhere near the other end of the scale, we have mondayising.

Fantasising and harmonising are quite pleasant words. Mondayising (carrying public holidays that fall on a weekend over to the following Monday) is not.

But, as clunky as mondayising is, there is worse to be found in one of the definitions of postmodernism. Here is that definition:

Postmodernism: a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problematization of objective truth.

I have no idea what that means. But I do know that problematization is one very ugly word. And I nominate problematization as July’s Ugly Word of the Month.

Which word would you nominate? – Jack Scrivano

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Professional miscommunication

by Jack Posted on July 19, 2011

The apartment building in which I live is about to have some maintenance work done.

A couple of days ago, the company we have employed to do the work sent a note out to all residents. It’s just a short note. All in all there are fewer than 100 words. (Even shorter than this post.) But there are three misspellings and seven instances of decidedly-dodgy grammar. There is also one sentence that could mean … well … just about anything. Or, quite possibly, nothing at all. Who can tell?

I’m afraid any confidence that I may have had in the company is disappearing faster than a very small puddle on a hot summer’s day.

I think there may be a lesson here. – Jack Scrivano

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Misspelling means missed sales

by Jack Posted on July 18, 2011

A UK entrepreneur, Charles Duncombe, believes that poor spelling is costing online merchants millions of pounds in lost sales every week.

Mr Duncombe says ‘when you sell or communicate on the internet, 99% of the time it is done by the written word.’ Correct spelling, he says, is critical when it comes to establishing and maintaining a website’s credibility.

I have no idea if his estimate of millions of pounds lost every week is right or wrong. But I’m sure that his basic point is correct: misspelling leads to missed sales.

For most people, one of the things that helps to identify fake websites and dubious emails is poor spelling. Combine this with strange grammar and the alarm bells start ringing loud and clear.

‘Helo dear glorius friend I am Mr Bonjobi.’

Well, you may be Mr Bonjobi (although I have my doubts), but I’m pretty sure that I’m not your dear glorius friend. In fact, I’m almost certain that I am nobody’s ‘glorius friend’. I doubt if I am even a glorius acquaintance. Or a glorius anything else.

But that’s just the obvious tip of the rather disturbing iceberg.

According to people who study such things, online customers are slow to accept and quick to reject. Customers can take several minutes – or even several visits – to decide to do business with you. But they can decide not to do business with you in just five or six seconds.

Creating a good first impression is essential. And anything that gets in the way of creating a good first impression needs to be eliminated.

Maintaining a good impression is also essential. And, again, anything that prevents this needs to be eliminated.

Of all the things that might get in the way, a few misspellings and a bit of poor grammar are probably the simplest and least expensive to fix. And when you’ve spent serious money on everything else – concept, design, build, graphics, and more – it simply doesn’t make sense to skimp on copy editing.

Quality writing and quality editing really does help achieve quality business, both in the short term and in the longer term.

And sorry, Mr Bonjobi, my spam filter has got your number. – Jack Scrivano

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The simple authority of Plain English

by Jack Posted on July 15, 2011

I recently received some information from an organisation that, I understand, considers it warrants the epithet august.

The information was in a document that ran to just over 1500 words. Eighty-two of these words were in the first sentence.

The second paragraph also kicked off with a monster. This time the count was 77 words.

Long sentences are not necessarily bad. E L Doctorow begins his novel Billy Bathgate with a sentence that runs to more than 130 words. But E L Doctorow is a skilful writer. Whoever cobbled together the 77-word ‘august’ sentence was anything but.

I needed to read the sentence three or four times before I had even the vaguest idea of what the cobbler was trying to say.

To make matters worse, the cobbler appeared to be hopelessly addicted to nominalisations, those flabby abstract nouns formed from verbs.

Where ‘should provide’ would have been perfect, the cobbler chose ‘provision should be made for’. Where ‘should arrange’ would have told me what I needed to do, the cobbler stretched it out to ‘should make suitable arrangements for’.

And, evidently, he (or she) felt that ‘should consider’ would carry more weight if it was rendered as ‘consideration should be given to.’ In my opinion, he (or she) was wrong.

A few days later, I was talking with one of the august organisation’s senior managers on another matter and I mentioned the document that his colleague had sent me.

‘Helpful, was it?’ he asked.

‘No, not particularly,’ I told him. ‘I had to read it several times. And I’m still not sure that it told me what I needed to know.’

And then I asked if his organisation had ever considered adopting Plain English. ‘You know: simple, straightforward, to the point.’

From the expression on the chap’s face, a passer-by might have thought that I had just told the chap that his wife was unbelievably ugly and his children were the dumbest kids in the county.

‘We are aware of Plain English,’ he said. ‘But it’s too simple. It’s, well … chatty almost. We need to project a more considered tone. We need to convey a certain sense of gravitas. We need to project a certain sense of authority.’

Pompous twit, I thought. Authoritatively. – Jack Scrivano

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Clear, concise writing gets read

by Jack Posted on July 12, 2011

Here’s a true story.

A good friend of ours runs a small marketing consultancy.

A little while back, his firm was pitching against several much larger rivals for a contract to help launch a new courier service.

As the days went by, the courier company shortened the shortlist and then shortened it again. Eventually, the list was down to just two firms: our friend’s firm and one other.

The MD of the courier company phoned our friend. ‘I’d like to give you the business,’ he said. ‘But your Terms of Trade document is eight pages of what looks like dense legalese.’

Our friend tried to reassure him that it was pretty standard stuff.

‘It may be,’ the courier company boss said. ‘But I’m not going to sign something that I haven’t read. And I have better things to do with my time than to try to make sense of your guff. So here’s what I want you to do. Send me your terms, in plain English, on one side of an A4 sheet. If I understand them, and they’re not unreasonable, the contract’s yours.’

So our friend sat down and wrote a one-page, plain English version of the eight-page document. Then he showed it to the lawyer who had written the long version.

‘Does this one-pager say the same as the other one?’ he asked.

‘Well … yes,’ the lawyer said cautiously. ‘But obviously not in as much detail.’

‘But does it say the same thing?’ our friend asked.

‘It’s not the way a lawyer would write it,’ the lawyer said.

Our friend took a deep breath. ‘But does it say the same thing?’ he asked for a third time.

The lawyer read through the one-pager yet again. ‘Yes,’ he said.

An hour or so later, our friend personally handed the document to the boss of the courier company – who read it on the spot.

‘Fine,’ he said. And the two men shook hands on the biggest contract the small consultancy had ever won.

The reality of most business writing is that the reader is pressed for time. This is true of colleagues. It’s true of customers. And it’s true of suppliers. Whether people have the time and inclination to read what you write will largely depend on how well you write it.

If you write good clear prose, it stands a very good chance of getting read and understood. If you write dense obfuscatory prose, your intended reader will probably find something better to do with their time.

It really is that simple. – Jack Scrivano

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By the numbers

by Jack Posted on July 8, 2011

Confusing statistics are up 18.7 percent on the same period a year ago.  At least that’s how it looks to me.

As I flick through a selection of the online newspapers that accompany my early morning cup of coffee, I am warned that consumer spending is up a whopping 2.3 percent.

I am also warned that this is down a worrying 1.86 percent on last year.  Although it is up a whimsical 1.14 percent on the seasonally-adjusted average for the quarter that ended just over two months ago.  (Or was that just over two years ago?)

Apparently, Middletown is now the sixth best place in the Asia-Pacific region to purchase a sultana scone.  Metropolis City has replaced Somewhere-or-Other as the second most expensive place to have your socks dry cleaned.  And an airport that has yet to be built is the seventh most popular among people who never travel by air.

It seems that attaching a number – any number – creates the impression that the information is solid.  A number says: this is not just an opinion; this is a fact.  Trust it.

Although, as Albert Einstein once observed, ‘not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’.

By unhappy coincidence, I recently received three different property newsletters on the same day.  Each made extensive use of numbers to tell me what was happening – and what was ‘set to’ happen – to the property market in my little corner of the world.

Thanks to these carefully prepared newsletters, I can now report that property prices are either rising or falling.  And I can tell you that rental rates are flat or rising slightly or possibly rising alarmingly.

I can also tell you that residential property prices are set to rise, set to fall, or set to plummet by as much as 30 percent.  At the same time, mortgage rates will ease slightly, remain about the same, or rise by as much as 2.65 percent.

So there you are.  And these are not just opinions.  They are facts.  There are numbers attached. – Jack Scrivano

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Blogger set to say: Enough!

by Jack Posted on July 6, 2011

What is it with headline writers and the phrase ‘set to’? Is there something in their contracts that says they must use the two-word phrase on every possible occasion?

If you Google ‘set to’ you are likely to find that the first umpteen pages of results are recent headlines from online and print publications.

Prices are set to rise. Film stars are set to wed. Records are set to be broken.

Singers are set to excite. Cycling is set to get safer. Commuters are set to suffer. And I am set to say: Enough is enough!

Of the 18 headlines on the home page of a recent edition of a well-known news site, seven included the phrase ‘set to’. I won’t name and shame the site. It wouldn’t be fair. There are too many other publications that are just as bad. Or possibly worse.

There was even a recent press release from the New Zealand Government with the headline ‘High-powered air guns set to require licence’.

The first paragraph credited the Police Minister with announcing that ‘high-velocity air guns are set to require a firearms licence’. Difficult, I would have thought. Although by the second paragraph the Minister may have reached a similar conclusion. It was now ‘people who own and possess’ the guns who would be set to require a licence.

Personally, I would like to think that sub-editors everywhere are set to stop relying quite so heavily on ‘set to’. But maybe I am just set to be disappointed. – Jack Scrivano

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