I learn so much from my brilliant clients.

COME TOGETHER Bring your clients, lawyers and other reviewers to your writing workshop.

When CenterPoint Energy’s Eydie Pengelly brought me in for a writing workshop last month, it wasn’t just for the company’s communicators. Eydie invited her team’s clients and other reviewers to the sessions, too.

Among the benefits:

• Clients and communicators are on the same page about what makes a good story.
• Lawyers were able to clear up some misconceptions about what they feel comfortable about approving. Turns out communicators have more leeway than they thought.
• We had a great discussion about mitigating the risk of lawsuits against the risk of not being heard at all. Lawyers and communicators left feeling more like partners than adversaries.

My favorite outcome, though, was that one lawyer is considering a Chatter Monkey-esque blog for communicating legal and procurement guidelines to employees. Being hilarious is a brilliant approach for drawing attention to — forgive me — an often dry and finger-wagging topic.

Did you hear me say that the lawyers are planning to do this? I couldn’t be happier if I found out that the IT folks were creating technical manuals inspired by The Oatmeal.

The thing that really surprises me is that in 18 years of presenting in-house writing workshops, this is the first time I’ve been invited to teach writing techniques to reviewers as well as writers. Why not invite your clients, lawyers and other reviewers to a writing workshop this year? Contact me to schedule a seminar.

How can you help students remember the difference between affect and effect, all ready and already and among and between?

How about cartoons? In one study, students who received cartoons scored almost twice as high in understanding the differences as those who’d received written examples only.

For the study, researchers showed students at a large Midwestern university Web pages with lessons about confusing word pairs:

• Accept vs. Except
• Affect vs. Effect
• All ready vs. Already
• Among vs. Between
• Bring vs. Take
• Convince vs. Persuade
• Fewer vs. Less
• In vs. Into
• Infer vs. Imply
• Lay vs. Lie
• That vs. Which

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET Adding cartoons to examples doubled comprehension. Adding more words didn't help at all.

Four types of information. Each page presented one word pair in one of four formats:

• Examples only. These pages included examples of the words in use. (“Dave was happy to accept yours. Dave loved all the birthday presents except yours.”)
• Examples and rules. In addition to the examples, these pages included rules for using the words. (“The word accept is used when communicating that something is taken. The word except is used when communicating that something is excluded.”)
• Examples and pictures. In addition to the examples, these pages included a cartoon of the example in action.
• Examples, rules and pictures. These pages included all of the information.

I’m a sucker for an alliterative list.

When a client asked me to write a piece on the 28 languages now available on her company’s technology, I wrote this lead:

“Whether you speak Chinese or Czech, Korean or Catalan, Finnish or French, Tetra radios speak your language.”

Got a list? Why not alliterate a little?

“A spoonful of alliteration helps the medicine go down,” write Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

It helps the listings go down, too.

Siddhartha Mukherjee uses this approach to communicate a list of side effects in The Emperor of All Maladies:

“The acute, short-term effects of nitrogen mustard — the respiratory complications, the burnt skin, the blisters, the blindness — were so amply monstrous that its long-term effects were overlooked.”

Help readers remember. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink writes that there are three reasons we’re moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age:

“Abundance, Asia, Automation”

Alliterating a short list like this serves as a mnemonic: It makes the list easier to remember, especially for listeners at TED conferences, where Pink is a frequent speaker.

“Alliterative words … give listeners’ and readers’ minds an auditory hook on which to hang a memory,” writes Sam Horn, president of Action Seminars/Consulting, “Alliterating the key words tickles our intellect and makes ideas easier to grasp and remember.”

Communicate range. Alliteration works for a range as well as a list.

In Innocent, Scott Turow writes:

“But even by the standards of somebody whose emotional temperature usually ranges from blah to blue, I’ve been in a bad way awaiting today.”

I alliterate both a range and a list in my bio:

“Ann’s workshops take her from Hollywood to Helsinki, helping communicators in organizations like NASA, Nike and Nokia polish their skills and find new inspiration for their work.”

Alliterate a list today. Have a long, random list to alliterate? Use The Alphabetizer to quickly sort your list into alphabetical order.

How can you use alliteration to make your language more lyrical?

Play with your words

Want to master the art of making your copy more creative and engaging through wordplay?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to write creative copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your creative writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching. And find out about Ann’s next creative writing webinar.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of tipsheets on playing with your words at RevUpReadership.com.
• Learn more: Get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.

This is your brain on the Web: Constant problem solving (To click or not to click?) and divided attention (You’ve got mail) lead to cognitive overload.

DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION: Online multitasking makes it hard to think.

And that makes it harder for readers to concentrate when reading your copy online.

In fact, a 2005 study by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London showed that online multitasking temporarily lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana does. (And is not nearly as entertaining a way to get stupid, from what I’ve read.)

Now, where was I going with this?

Oh, yes.

In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr surveys the research on Web brain. Among the findings:

Links limit learning.

More than 20 years of research shows that links cause Web visitors to:

• Click instead of concentrating. Readers of hypertext often ended up clicking “through pages instead of reading them carefully,” according to a 1989 study.
• Click instead of finding. Participants in a 1990 study who searched for the answers to a series of questions in print outperformed those who searched Web pages.
• Click instead of comprehending. The more links included in a passage, the less people understood, found a 1999 study by Erping Zhu. That’s because readers have to devote more of their brain power to evaluating the links and deciding whether to click them.
• Click instead of remembering. Readers of hypertext often “could not remember what they had and had not read” in a 1990 experiment.

Bottom line: There’s “very little support that hypertext will lead to an enriched experience of the text,” according to a 2005 survey of research (PDF) by Diana DeStefano and Jo-Anne LeFevre, psychologists with the Centre for Applied Cognitive Research at Canada’s Carleton University.

Indeed, they wrote, “the increased demands of decision-making and visual processing in hypertext impaired reading performance [especially when compared to print]. Many features of hypertext resulted in increased cognitive load and thus may have required working memory capacity that exceeded readers’ capabilities.”

Reach readers online.

So how do you write blog posts, Web pages, email messages, status updates and other copy that get the word out online?

• Get to the point faster: Don’t expect readers to read even the first paragraph to figure out where you’re going.
• Chunk it up: Break your message into more, shorter Web pages.
• Write tight: Use all of the tools you use to condense copy for print, but use them more aggressively online.
• Lift your ideas off the screen: Make your copy easy to scan with microcontent, or online display copy.
• Cut the fluff: Drop the adjectives, adverbs, hyperbole and other blah-blah.
• Make it friendly: Engage readers with a conversational, me-to-you voice, not an off-putting, stiff corporate style.

Reach readers in print.

And don’t overlook print as your medium of choice. Writing a thought piece on the state of the industry, the CEO’s vision for the future or the company’s five-year plan? Put it on paper.

Sorry, what was I saying?

Oh, yeah. The way the Web distracts and overtaxes your readers’ brains makes it no place for long, complex messages. So deliver ideas in print, nuggets of data online.

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Invite 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. Or find out about Ann’s next microcontent webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools.
• Join the club: Find dozens of Web writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

When Don Murray arrived in the newsroom for his first day on the job as writing coach for the Boston Globe, he turned to his new boss and said: “I can tell you who your three best writers are.”

NOW EAR THIS Reading your copy aloud — hearing your words instead of just staring at them — is one of the techniques that separates master writers from the might-have-beens.

Then the Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Writing to Deadline proceeded to do just that.

“How did you know?” the editor asked.

“Their lips move when they write,” Murray said.

Reading your copy aloud — hearing your words instead of just staring at them — is one of the techniques that separates master writers from the might-have-beens.

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader,” said poet Robert Frost.

Do your lips move when you write? Reading your copy aloud will make you a better writer. So perform a sound check on your copy.

Benefits of reading aloud

Listening to your copy will help you:

1. Reduce errors. Your eyes are such good editors, they can “fix” your copy as they view it. Your ears will catch what your eyes miss.

Students taking remedial writing courses at the City University of New York, for instance, eliminated 60 percent of their grammatical errors by reading their copy aloud, according to Richard Andersen, author of Writing That Works.

2. Make your copy conversational. We want our copy to sound the way we do when we speak — not like some computer spit it out. Take this sounds-the-way-you-speak passage by Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, calling attention to a great bottom line in his 2006 letter to shareholders:

“Below is the tally on our underwriting and float for each major sector of insurance. Enjoy the view, because you won’t soon see another like it.”

3. Make your copy sound better. Reading aloud can smooth out rough passages, reduce fits and starts, and otherwise make your copy flow instead of stutter. It can help you find a voice and tone for your piece.

“Effective writing has the illusion of speech without its bad habits,” Murray writes. “The reader hears a writer speaking to a reader. The writing should flow with grace, pace and clarity — not the way we speak but, better than that, the way we should speak.”

4. Cut Through the Clutter. When you read your copy aloud, your tongue will trip over nine-syllable words; you’ll run out of breath before the ends of long sentences; you’ll stumble over redundancies, jargon and passive voice.

In short, you’ll Cut Through the Clutter in your copy.

Now ear this.

“When I started reading my stories aloud for a living and I’d hear myself, I would think, ‘Good heavens, that needs to be pointed up,’ or ‘That should be out.’ Now, as I go to colleges to do readings, I have revised a lot of my early stories so that they read more succinctly. I wish I had learned early on what a good test reading aloud was.”

— Eudora Welty, American author

Find a private place and read your copy aloud. When you identify passages that need help, talk them out until you hear something that works better.

Your readers will thank you for it.

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.

Cartoons are worth at least 600 words, according to a series of studies by Richard E. Mayer, professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team of researchers.

The researchers found that cartoons not only helped college students remember and understand complex physics lessons more than 600-word passages explaining those concepts. In most cases, the cartoons were more effective than the same cartoons with the 600-word passages.

1. Cartoons more memorable, understandable than text.

For the first study, Mayer’s team gave 56 college students:

• Cartoons with captions showing how lightning forms
• A 600-word passage describing how lightning forms
• Both the cartoons and the 600-word passage

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD These five cartoons helped college students learn better and remember longer than the same information in a 600-word passage or than the cartoon and passage combined.

Then the researchers asked the students to answer some questions about lightning. Some of the questions tested recall. Among them:

• What causes lightning?
• What does air temperature have to do with lightning?
• Suppose you see clouds in the sky, but not lightning. Why not?

Other questions tested problem solving, including:

• What could you do to decrease the intensity of a lighting storm?

Students who’d seen only the cartoons remembered 51 percent more than those who’d read the text only or looked at the cartoons and read the text:

• Cartoon alone: 5.6 units recalled
• Passage and cartoon: 3.7 units
• Passage alone: 2.8
• No instruction: .1

Students who’d seen the cartoons only were able to apply the material nearly as well as those who’d looked at the cartoons and read the text:

• Passage and cartoon: 4.9 problems solved
• Cartoon alone: 4.6
• Passage alone: 2.3
• No instruction: .3

2. Adding text to the cartoon made it harder to remember and apply.

For the third test, researchers gave students:

• The cartoon alone
• The cartoon with 50 words of text added to it
• The cartoon with 550 words of text added to it

The more text was added to the cartoon, the less students remembered. They remembered the cartoon alone 126 percent better than the cartoon including 550 words:

• Cartoon: 6.1 units recalled
• Cartoon + 50 words: 5.2
• Cartoon + 550 words: 2.7

The more text was added to the cartoon, the less effective students became at applying the information. They were half again as likely to be able to solve a problem if they saw the cartoon alone than if they saw the cartoon including 550 words:

• Cartoon: 4.5 problems solved
• Cartoon + 50 words: 3.4
• Cartoon + 550 words: 3.0

Bottom line: Adding a cartoon — or telling your story with a cartoon only — can increase recall and understanding significantly. Piling on the words, however, yields a net loss in communications.

___

Source: Richard E. Mayer, William Bove, Alexandra Bryman, Rebecca Mars, and Lene Tapangco, “When Less is More: Meaningful Learning From Visual and Verbal Summaries of Science Textbook Lessons,” Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 88, No. 1, 1996, pp. 64-73.

Make it a picture

Want to deliver copy that gets read?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to transform your words into a graphic story.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for an Open the Creativity Toolbox workshop. Learn to develop graphic stories and more.
• Join the club: Find dozens of graphic storytelling tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

Jakob Nielsen recently redesigned a mobile website to make its story index more usable.

DROP/ADD On mobile indexes, if it will help the visitor decide whether to click, add it. If it won't help the visitor decide whether to click, cut it.

Now you can steal his approaches for your own mobile site:

1. Add essential information.

If it will help the visitor decide whether to click, add it. Nielsen added:

• Full headlines. Don’t truncate them.
• Decks, aka one-sentence summaries under the headlines. Decks help non-mobile visitors use story lists, too. So don’t drop the deck.
• Photos instead of date icons. Who cares when the story was published? Besides, the photo gives information about the story that the date does not.
• A label instead of a triangle to show the drop-down menu.

2. Drop non-essential information.

If it won’t help the visitor decide whether to click, cut it. Nielsen cut:

• Bylines. Only the writer and the writer’s mother care who wrote it.
• Publication dates. Nielsen used these only as dividers between stories published on a certain day. “The story date is not worth the substantial screen real estate it occupies,” Nielsen writes. “In general, it’s good to question any mobile design that repeats the same information multiple times; such redundancy is probably a poor use of highly limited screen space.”
• Categories and tags. They were too small to hit reliably and didn’t add helpful information.
• Triangle button to tap for a drop-down article summary. Why not just publish the summary?

3. Make important information more prominent.

What else can you do to help mobile visitors find the stories they want to read? Take a tip from Nielsen and:

• Highlight key words in the headline.
• Make touch points bigger. Make the entire story tile clickable instead of just the headline. That will help you solve the “fat finger” syndrome.
• Show more story tiles without making visitors scroll.
• Add more space between the navigation bar options so users are less likely to tap the wrong one.

These approaches are essential to helping visitors use your information through a mobile peephole. Many of them would also make a standard site more usable as well.

Reach readers online

Want to master the art of writing for the Web?

• Get it off your desk: Invite 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. Or find out about Ann’s next microcontent webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s Web writing learning tools.
• Join the club: Find dozens of Web writing tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

When I conduct writing workshops at Tellabs, I always learn as much as I teach.

TURN STRUNK & WHITE UPSIDE DOWN Instead of omitting needless words, try highlighting needed words.

One day, watching the Tellabs team edit a press release during a practice session, I was surprised to see George Stenitzer, vice president of Corporate Communications, wielding a highlighter instead of a pencil. Instead of cutting words, phrases and ideas he wanted to remove from the piece, George was highlighting information he wanted to keep.

Forget Strunk and White. Instead of omitting needless words, why not identify needed words?

Focus on what to keep. It’s a great technique, because it focuses you on finding what you need instead of what you want to scrap. Here’s why George does it:

• “I use a highlighter to pluck a simple message from a sea of complexity.”
• “When we edit a technical paper, a highlighter helps capture its essence and translate it from technical jargon into plain language.”
• “Less is more. A highlighter is a quicker path to less.”

Give it a go. Having stolen George’s technique myself, I’ve come to believe that highlighting needed words is more effective than omitting needless words. It gets you there faster.

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.

The studies are in: If you want to communicate more clearly, use comics, cartoons, storyboards and other graphic storytelling approaches instead of or in addition to text.

Here’s a sampling of the research:

• Parents answered 25% more questions correctly when they watched an animated cartoon explaining the need for polio vaccines than when they read a leaflet covering the same material. (M. Leiner, et al, in a 2004 study at Texas Tech University)
• Students learned 51% more from cartoons with captions showing how lightning forms than from 600-word passages describing the process. The cartoons were also more effective at teaching the material than cartoons and passages combined. (Richard E. Mayer, et al, in a series of 1996 studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Students scored almost twice as high at knowing the differences between confusing word pairs (accept vs. except, for instance) if they looked at cartoons illustrating the examples instead of written examples only. (L. Brent Igo, et al, in a 2004 study at a large Midwestern university)
• Patients were 150% more likely to give correct responses when they received cartoons about wound care instead of text explaining the same information. (P.E. Austin, et al, in a 1995 study at the East Carolina University School of Medicine in Greenville, N.C.)
• In fact, cartoons communicate better than other forms of illustration, including stick figures, representational illustrations, symbols or photographs. (J.M. Moll in a 1977 study by at the Sheffield Centre for Rheumatic Diseases in England)

Comics, cartoons, storyboards and other graphic storytelling devices also increase readership, improve retention and move readers to act. Tap the power of cartoons, comics and other graphic storytelling devices when you want to:

1. Tell a story.

Did something interesting happen? Tell your story in a comic strip.

Former Marvel Comics illustrator Bill Wylie recently transformed a hospital’s monthly “Safety Moment” story from 200 words and a picture of a guy standing next to an electrical socket into a comic strip, complete with a hero who saves the day.

SAFE BET Comics tell dramatic stories better than 200 words and a lame photo. Comic strip by Bill Wylie

2. Communicate complex concepts.

Want to help readers understand brain surgery or rocket science? Comic strips, cartoons and other graphic storytelling devices clarify complex concepts.

Southwest Airlines, for instance, uses cartoon characters to teach employees the business. In its campaign “Knowing the Score,” it breaks down the financials, shows what happens to its revenue pie and makes sure employees understand what the numbers mean.

IN THE KNOW Southwest Airlines uses cartoons to teach employees "the numbers."

3. Make history.

Celebrating a big anniversary? Want to share your organization’s story or contributions to the industry?

A graphic novel can help. Children’s education publisher Harcourt uses graphic novels to profile the Wright brothers and Amelia Earhart. Wylie also illustrated these true stories of trial, error and eventual triumph.

UP IN THE AIR Did something interesting happen? Why not tell it in a graphic novel? Wright brothers graphic novel by Bill Wylie

Comic strips, graphic novels and cartoons are also great ways to:

• Explain step-by-step how-to’s
• Profile people or teams
• Express an opinion
• Connect with kids (and adults)
• Sell products, services and ideas

How can you use graphic storytelling to communicate your message?

Communicate With Comics.

Ready to try graphic storytelling for your communications?

I’ve recently teamed up with Bill Wylie, former Marvel Comics illustrator, to help organizations tell their stories and sell their messages through graphic storytelling. Let me know if we can help you get your message across with a:

• Comic strip
• Comic story
• Comic book
• Graphic novel
• Cartoon
• Caricature
• Storyboard

Bill and I look forward to working with you to bring the power of words + pictures to your next campaign or communication.

___

Sources: M. Leiner, G. Handal, D. Williams, “Patient communication: a multi-disciplinary approach using animated cartoons” (PDF), Health Education Research, 2004, Vol. 19, pp. 591–595

Richard E. Mayer, William Bove, Alexandra Bryman, Rebecca Mars, and Lene Tapangco, “When Less is More: Meaningful Learning From Visual and Verbal Summaries of Science Textbook Lessons,” Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 88, No. 1, 1996, pp. 64-73.

L. Brent Igo, Kenneth A. Kiewra and Roger Bruning, “Removing the Snare From the Pair: Using Pictures to Learn Confusing Word Pairs,” The Journal of Experimental Education, 2004, Vol. 72 (3), 165-178

P.E. Austin, R. Matlack, K.A. Dunn, C. Kosler, C.K. Brown, “Discharge instructions: do illustrations help our patients understand them?” Annals of Emergency Medicine 1995, Vol. 25, pp. 317–20

J.M. Moll, “Doctor–patient communication in rheumatology: studies of visual and verbal perception using educational booklets and other graphic material” (PDF), Annals of Rheumatic Diseases, 1986, Vol. 45, pp.198-209.

Peter S. Houts, Cecilia C. Doak, Leonard G. Doak, Matthew J. Loscalzo, “The Role of Pictures in Improving Health Communication: A Review of Research on Attention, Comprehension, Recall, and Adherence” (PDF), Patient Education and Counseling, Vol. 61, 2006, pp.173-190

J.E. Readance and D.W. Moore, “A meta-analytic review of the effect of adjunct pictures on reading comprehension,” Psychology in the Schools, 1981, Vol. 18, pp. 218–24