Paint the schnauzer

Find examples to illustrate your point

The other day, I was brainstorming with clients for ways to make this abstract lead more concrete:

“As the weather warms up and the end of the school year looms, a familiar dread emerges among parents of preteens, middle schoolers and high school students: What will keep their children busy this summer?”

To make an abstract idea concrete, you might:

• Come up with a creative technique to illustrate your story angle.
• Run down a list of types of concrete details until you find one that fits your story.
• Ask questions that drill down from the abstract— “What will keep kids busy this summer?” — to the concrete.

We tried the third approach.

“What have your kids done that’s kept them engaged over the summer?” we asked. “What have they done when they were bored?”

And from the back of the room, Greg Smith, learning design specialist for Thrivent Financial, shouted out:

“Paint the schnauzer.”

“Paint the schnauzer” is my new mantra for finding examples that prove the point. That’s important. Because everything we know about how people respond to information tells us that they’re more likely to pay attention to, understand, remember and act on concrete messages than abstract ones.

Name names, number numbers.

One way to make your copy more concrete is to cite specific details. So name names and number numbers.

William H. Broad names names to make this passage about the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge more concrete:

“The span, at the time the world’s third-longest suspension bridge, crossed a strait of Puget Sound near Tacoma, Wash. A few months after its opening, high winds caused the bridge to fail in a roar of twisted metal and shattered concrete. No one died. The only fatality was a black cocker spaniel named Tubby.”

Poor Tubby. But notice how “black cocker spaniel” is way more effective than “dog” and how “Tubby” is way more effective than “black cocker spaniel” alone. As The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark counsels, “Get the name of the dog.”

Smith’s schnauzer’s name? Frisky.

But I’m still not seeing poor painted Frisky. We need to step down a rung on the ladder of abstraction to make him more vivid. So we asked, what color did the kids paint him?

“They used Pepto-Bismol,” Smith said.

Now I see.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a “Make Your Copy More Creative” workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to Make Your Copy More Creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next “Art of the Storyteller” webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. Find dozens of creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

Get to the verb faster

Avoid long parenthetical phrases

Quick! Where’s your verb?

For clarity’s sake, put it near the front of your sentence, right after your subject. It’s harder to follow sentences with delayed verbs, like this one, where the verb doesn’t show up until 28 words in:

“The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America (Guardian), one of the largest mutual life insurers and a leading provider of employee benefits for small and mid-sized companies, today announced that it will cover 100% of the cost associated with the administration of the H1N1 vaccine for employees and their eligible dependents enrolled in a fully-insured Guardian medical plan.”

(And let’s not even discuss the fact that “cover,” not “announced,” is the real verb in this story.)

Don’t bury your verb under a long parenthetical phrase (let alone your whole boilerplate). Remember: You can always explain what your company is the leading provider of in a separate sentence.

Writing short, simple sentences is one of the top two ways to make your copy more readable, according to 70 years of readability research. Here are three ways to make your sentences easier to read by getting to the verb faster.

1. Write low-depth sentences. 

High-depth sentences are harder to understand than low-depth sentences, found readability expert G. R. Klare in a 1976 review of 36 readability studies.

Depth refers to the number of words before the verb in a sentence. The deeper the sentence — the more words before the verb — the lower the comprehension. Twenty-two words, for instance, delay the verb in this sentence:

“Vital secrets of Britain’s first atomic submarine, the Dreadnought, and, by implication, of the entire United States navy’s still-building nuclear sub fleet, were stolen by a London-based soviet spy ring, secret service agents testified today.”

2. Limit dependent clauses. 

Bob Baker, a deputy metropolitan editor at the Los Angeles Times and creator of Newsthinking, writes:

“As journalism became more sophisticated in the 1970s, and started trying to carve out a niche that TV could not compete with, the notion of ‘interpretation’ came more and more into play. You started to see more dependent clauses that defined the importance of a story, which is OK if the clause isn’t too long, like maybe 8 to 10 words. But in my newspaper, and others, the desire to make an important statement gets out of control sometimes and you can have a 40-word lead sentence that includes a 17- or 18-word dependent clause, and the reader’s head is likely to explode taking all that information in without a period.”

So limit your dependent clauses to eight to 10 words. Even better: Limit parenthetical phrases and other background information in your lead paragraph to six words or less.

3. Force the verb to the front. 

And here’s a quick trick for pushing the verb toward the top of the sentence from Joseph M. Williams, author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

“Run a line under the first five or six words of every sentence. If you find that (1) you have to go more than six or seven words into a sentence to get past the subject to the verb and (2) the subject of the sentence is not one of your characters, take a hard look at that.”

Great advice.

Cut Through the Clutter

Want to make every piece you write easier to read and understand?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Cut Through the Clutter workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to cut the clutter in your own copy in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Cut Through the Clutter webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Cut Through the Clutter manual.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Cut Through the Clutter tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Banish the grammar police

Don’t let the editor in

When I started writing this piece, I wasn’t sure how to spell Robert Cormier’s last name, and I didn’t know what he’d written. But if I’d stopped writing long enough to hunt down his credentials and to confirm that Cormier isn’t spelled with a “U,” I would have made the transition from writer to editor.

When you’re freewriting, don’t stop to look up or correct anything. The minute you do, the left side of the brain wins out, and you have to start all over again the process of getting into writing mode.

Instead, lock the editor out and let the writer create. Then you’ll have something worth revising.

Fix it later.

When you write instead of editing, your copy will sound like you: fresh, fast, fascinating. When you edit instead of writing, your copy will sound like that: sluggish, inert, torpid.

So how do you keep the editor at bay? When you’re freewriting, don’t go back to read a sentence, paragraph or section you’ve just written. Instead, just write the next one and the next one and the next.

After you’ve finished writing the section you’ve assigned yourself and taken a break, then it makes sense to reread what you wrote in your previous writing session. At that point, you might even do a little tweaking (though not wholesale rewriting) before you move on to the next section.

So during freewriting, don’t worry about mistakes. Use a dash instead of a semicolon, write “you’re” when you mean “your” — even misspell the CEO’s name. You can always go back and fix your mistakes later, during rewriting.

What you can’t do is go back and breathe life into a stillborn draft — a draft that never really got written in the first place.

Polish your writing skills.

Want to master the art of writing better, easier and faster? Read “Block Busters: More than two dozen ways to break through writer’s block and get words on paper — now.”

Ann’s running out of time

Time to book 1st quarter 2012 workshops

Have you been thinking about bringing me in for a writing workshop early next year?

If so, let’s act fast.

I ran out of 2011 workshop dates in August this year — several months earlier than usual. (Thank you to all those of you who brought and are bringing me in to work with some fabulous communicators in fascinating organizations this year!)

As a result, my first quarter 2012 is already filling up. As I desperately want to work with you next year, please contact me today if you’re looking for a writing workshop in the first few months of the year.

No expenses in 2012

I’m offering a new No Surprises — No Expenses fee plan for 2012 workshop that should make both our lives easier.  No Surprises — No Expenses is just what it sounds like. My inclusive fee covers my customized workshop plus all travel and miscellaneous expenses, including:

• Air transportation within the continental United States
• Accommodations
• Ground transportation
• Meals
• Parking
• Shipping and courier services
• Phone calls
• Internet access
• Incidentals

You don’t need to worry about whether I fly first class or no-class, take a limo or the bus, sleep at the Ritz or in my car, dine on caviar and champagne or chomp on Cheetos and Diet Coke. I don’t have to collect, collate, scan and send receipts. You don’t have to do battle with the bean counters to get my invoice paid; I don’t have to stand by for my check while you fight with accounting. You know exactly what your expenses will be well in advance; I know I don’t have to hassle with paperwork.

No surprises: No expenses. No kidding.

How may I help you?

Please let me know how I can help your team members Think Like a Reader, Cut Through the Clutter, Write for the Web and otherwise get the word out in 2012.

Let’s talk!

Go social for PR

Journalist shares which tool to use for what

Which social media channel works best for private communications with journalists and bloggers? Which for time-sensitive announcements? And which should you never, ever use?

Robert Niles, founder and editor of “Theme Park Insider,” shares his insights on which tool is best for which PR function:

Twitter for announcing news

With short nuggets of information delivered instantly, Twitter’s best for breaking news. Make announcements here first.

Facebook for conversing

Without a 140-character limit, Facebook is a better medium for conversation and reaction. Converse with your community here. And post pieces that will elicit a reaction, spread the word and increase your reach and influence on Facebook.

Email for private communication

Email is best for one-on-one communication and planning. Alert reporters to upcoming Twitter announcements, schedule interviews and send documents via Twitter. Don’t use email for time-sensitive information, though, given the medium’s frequent delivery delays, Niles suggests. And be sure to target and tailor email blasts.

Websites and blogs for in-depth information

The problem with websites is that they make readers come to you. So use blogs and websites to share longer pieces with dedicated followers. If you want to reach larger audiences instantly, use Twitter to refer folks to your site.

Because websites are branded, your organization might feel uncomfortable hosting potentially negative conversations here. Use Facebook — a more visibly “neutral” forum — instead.

And which tool should you avoid?

Never use Twitter’s direct mail for private communication, Niles suggests.

One reason, of course, is Weiner’s Law (“Anything that’s meant to be private will go public on Twitter.”) Plus, Niles writes, “Twitter DM spam has become so common that I never look at DMs any more.”

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Bring Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. And find Ann’s out about Ann’s upcoming webinars on writing for the Web and social media.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of tipsheets on reaching readers online at RevUpReadership.com.

Addicted to email

1 in 3 wake up, check email immediately

“Email may well be your most productive marketing tool.”

Dan Zarrella, viral marketing scientist, HubSpot

Thirty-five percent of mobile workers check their email first thing in the morning, before getting dressed or having a cup of coffee.

That’s according to a 2011 study by iPass (pdf). The Enterprise Mobility Services company defines mobile workers as folks who use mobile devices to access networks other than the company LAN or WLAN for work.

Woke up, got out of bed …

iPass researchers learned that mobile workers check email:

• First thing in the morning, before doing anything else: 35%
• After dressing: 17%
• After having coffee or tea: 14%
• After arriving at the office: 12%
• After breakfast: 10%
• After starting a commute: 8%
• After entering a home office: 4%

Does your iPhone keep you warm at night?

But that’s nothing compared to the 38 percent who check their smartphones when they wake up at night. Or the 43 percent who store their smartphones within arm’s reach of their beds.

iPass surveyed 3,700 mobile enterprise employees at more than 1,100 enterprises worldwide.

Email dead? Don’t bet on it. How are you using this addictive medium?

Reach readers online

Want to get the word out on the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Bring Ann’s team in to write Web copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Web writing workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your Web writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching sessions. And find out about Ann’s upcoming webinars on writing for the Web and social media.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of tipsheets on reaching readers online at RevUpReadership.com.

Writing ROI

How much does bad writing cost your organization?

“Try to imagine the costs of poor writing … in business, government, and law. The costs are almost beyond imagining, and certainly beyond calculating.”

Joseph Kimble, chair of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Research & Writing Department

Bad writing causes 40 percent of the cost of managing business transactions, writes William H. DuBay, a readability expert at Impact Information, in Working with Plain Language (PDF).

In his plain language treatise, “Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please,” Joseph Kimble, chair of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Research & Writing Department goes beyond trying to imagine those costs. He shares 25 case studies of organizations that have saved time and money and otherwise improved business practices by making their copy easier to read. Among them:

• Save money. FedEx saved $400,000 per year by rewriting operations manuals to make it 80 percent less time consuming for users to find the information they were looking for. That doesn’t count the costs of mistakes when users couldn’t find the right answers.
• Save time. When the FCC rewrote CB regulations in plain language in 1977, the agency was able to reassign five full-time staff members. Before the rewrites, all five were needed to answer questions about the regulations from the public.
• Move people to act. When the U.S. Army rewrote a memo to 129 officers, suggesting that they perform a specific task, those who got the more readable version were twice as likely to act on the day they received it.
• Improve service. After technical writers at General Electric rewrote software manuals, customer calls asking questions about the software dropped by 125 calls per customer. The company estimates that it saves up to $375,000 a year for each business customer with the revised manual.
• Increase reading speed. The U.S. Navy learned that it could save $27 to $37 million a year in officer time by rewriting its business memos. Officers were able to read the revised memos in 17 to 27 percent less time.

Use more periods

Three ways to shorten your sentences

“No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”

Isaac Babel, Russian journalist

The story goes that when future columnist James J. Kilpatrick was a young newspaper reporter, he wrote lots of deadly long sentences. Finally, in frustration, the city editor gave Kilpatrick a piece of paper covered with dots.

“These interesting objects, which apparently you have never encountered before, are known as periods,” the editor said. “You would do well to use them.”

We’d all do well to use more periods. As William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, wrote:

“There’s not much to be said about the period, except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”

Here are three ways to reach the period sooner:

1. Search and destroy conjunctions.

Sentences too long? Use Microsoft Word’s “find” function to search for conjunctions. They include:

• And
• Or
• Also
• But
• So
• Then
• Plus

When one of my writing coachees tried this trick, she found 23 “and’s” in a 500-word article.

When you find them, see whether you can replace them with a period.

2. Break it with bullets.

If you have a series of three or more items, break them out of the sentence into a bulleted or numbered list. Readers perceive bullets as separate sentences and paragraphs.

This is especially important online, where readers skim even more than they do in print. In one test, usability expert Jakob Nielsen made a Web page 47 percent more usable by breaking copy up and lifting ideas off the page.

3. Don’t ‘fix’ fragments.

Mrs. Webb, your 3rd-grade teacher probably counseled you to avoid sentence fragments.

Mrs. Webb was wrong.

Sentence fragments can help you:

• Create drama
• Make a transition
• Emphasize an important idea
• Change the pace of your piece
• Make your copy sound conversational
• And, of course, make sentences shorter

Used well, fragments can make your copy tighter and more interesting.

Period.

Cut Through the Clutter

Want to make every piece you write easier to read and understand?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Cut Through the Clutter workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to cut the clutter in your own copy in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Cut Through the Clutter webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Cut Through the Clutter manual. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Cut Through the Clutter tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Pleading for shorter sentences

Sentence length one of top 2 predictors of readable copy

“Anyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable and question whether it is necessary.”

H.W. Fowler, English lexicographer

A professor of English Literature at the University of Nebraska was the first person to link sentence length to comprehension.

In the 1880s, Lucius Adelno Sherman took the first statistical look at writing when he calculated sentence length in historical literature. In his book, The Analytics of Literature (1893), he shared how sentences were growing shorter over time:

• Pre-Elizabethan times: Sentences averaged 50 words
• Elizabethan times: 45 words
• Victorian times: 29 words
• Sherman’s own time: 23 words

Today, sentences average 20 words, reports readability expert William H. DuBay in Unlocking Language (PDF).

In the 130 years since Sherman started counting words per sentence, dozens of other researchers have proven what Sherman posed: Shorter sentences make for easier reading.

Indeed, DuBay writes, sentence length and word length have been proven in the lab — again and again — to be the two strongest indicators of reading ease.

Write sentences to be read.

Bottom line? To make your copy easier to read and understand, the studies show, write sentences that are:

• Short
• Simple
• Active
• Positive

And reduce the number of:

• Prepositions
• Dependent, embedded and other clauses
• Phrases per sentence
• Conjunctions
• Words before the verb

How do you keep your sentences short and easy to understand?

Cut Through the Clutter

Want to make every piece you write easier to read and understand?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Cut Through the Clutter workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to cut the clutter in your own copy in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Cut Through the Clutter webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Cut Through the Clutter manual. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Cut Through the Clutter tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Trigger happy

USDA’s MyPlate puts its money where your mouth is

One of my brilliant clients at Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield once wrote in a healthy-eating column:

“Instead of our steak being the size of a deck of cards (a standard, four ounce serving), it’s often the size of small laptop computer.”

I’m not a steak woman, but I do like my brie-on-brioche sandwiches to be at least as big as my iPad.

Visualizations help us ‘see’ size.

Whatever your personal dietary demons, we can agree on this: Visualizations help people make better decisions. Telling people that a serving of salmon should be the size of the palm of their hand makes it easier to control portions than to say it should be about four ounces.

That’s one reason I love the USDA’s new MyPlate graphic. It helps you see what you should eat.

The plate’s the trigger.

But there’s another reason I love MyPlate: It uses environmental triggers to help audience members implement the new dietary guidelines.

I, for one, have never eaten off a pyramid. But tell me to fill half of my plate with fruits and vegetables — and show me what that looks like — and every time I look at my plate, I remember what I’m supposed to do.

Move your audience to act

Want to deliver copy that gets read?

• Read more: Learn about the USDA’s MyPlate.
• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a persuasive writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Think Like a Reader workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to think like a reader in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Think Like a Reader webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Think Like a Reader toolkit.
• Join the club: Find dozens of persuasive writing tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2011 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

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