{"id":1097,"date":"2015-08-10T11:23:28","date_gmt":"2015-08-09T23:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=1097"},"modified":"2015-08-11T17:08:03","modified_gmt":"2015-08-11T05:08:03","slug":"the-minister-of-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=1097","title":{"rendered":"The Minister of Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Shakespeare1\"<\/a>An old friend died recently.\u00a0 His death wasn\u2019t unexpected; he was nudging 90 and he had been unwell for almost two years.<\/p>\n

As a young man he had survived The Great Depression and The Second World War, and, despite coming from a relatively poor family, he had managed to acquire a good education.<\/p>\n

By the time I got to know him, his general knowledge was truly impressive, and he had an enviable facility with numbers.\u00a0 But what used to delight me most was his prose style.\u00a0 It was spare, but not too spare.\u00a0 And even when he engaged in fierce pen-and-paper combat, there was always an underlying tone of good humour.<\/p>\n

Helping his daughter to tidy up his \u2018stuff\u2019, I came across a draft of a letter to his bank manager.\u00a0 It was a masterpiece of grace and grumpiness.\u00a0 The bank manager would have been in no doubt as to where his bank had gone wrong and what it needed to do to put matters right.\u00a0 But I\u2019m also sure that, on reading my friend\u2019s letter, the bank manager would have smiled.<\/p>\n

Another friend of mine, a man who spent most of his working life teaching English to high school students, once suggested that you can\u2019t teach kids to write well.\u00a0 Each good writer learns for themselves.\u00a0 All of the exercises and tutorials are just opportunities to \u2018develop the writing muscles that the natural writers have been given\u2019.<\/p>\n

Back in the early-to-mid-1980s, when PCs first started appearing on people\u2019s desks, many arrived with bits of \u2018boilerplate\u2019, chunks of prose that could be inserted into documents of one sort or another in order to make life easier for the writers of letters and reports.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the people who composed the boilerplate sections often knew what<\/em> to say, but they seldom knew how<\/em> to say it.\u00a0 As a result, clunk reigned.\u00a0 Unfortunately, there is still a good deal of this clunk about today.<\/p>\n

Throughout many organisations, there is a tacit belief that everyone can write.\u00a0 \u2018Hey, if our people weren\u2019t literate, we wouldn\u2019t have hired them.\u2019\u00a0 But this is patently not true.\u00a0 Some people can write clearly, concisely, and with graceful style.\u00a0 Others can do little more than arrange words in some sort of order that, on a good day, hints at an attempt to communicate.<\/p>\n

Just as every organisation needs a strategy expert and a finance expert and an IT expert, every organisation also needs a prose expert, someone who can help your organisation to communicate with your customers, your suppliers, and everyone else that you need to get onside.\u00a0 Find that person in your organisation.\u00a0 And, if you don\u2019t have one, recruit one.\u00a0 And then make them the Minister of Words.\u00a0 You won\u2019t regret it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An old friend died recently.\u00a0 His death wasn\u2019t unexpected; he was nudging 90 and he had been unwell for almost two years. As a young man he had survived The Great Depression and The Second World War, and, despite coming … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1097"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1101,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1097\/revisions\/1101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}