Faking It

 

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.

— Arthur Herzog

Fraudsters know it's easy to make a fast buck from a phony "news" website.

To prove how easy it is, journalist Megan Graham conducted an experiment a couple of years ago.

She built her own website and filled it with stories she stole from CNBC.

"Within days, I had the ability to monetize my site with legitimate advertisers," she reported. 

"It was shockingly easy."

Graham's success was no doubt due to advertisers' shoddy ad-buying systems, which funnel ad money through third parties.

Those companies take their fees off the top and buy ads with the money left over.

But in their haste to earn fees, the companies lose track of where that money is spent.

"Half a brand’s digital marketing spend is absorbed by middlemen," Graham says. "It’s impossible for advertisers to know exactly where their money is going."

But suckering advertisers and their agents isn't the real crime here. (It's perfectly legal to create a website filled with gobbledygook.)

Plagiarism is.

To sustain the illusion that they're legitimate publishers, fraudsters rip off stories from legitimate publishers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.  

Fraudsters can even automate plagiarism by using website plug-ins known as "scrapers," which swipe articles from legitimate publishers hourly.

To cover their crime, before posting the stolen stories, the more artful fraudsters run them through a paraphrasing app.

These apps thinly disguise the plagiarism—but only thinly.

They also provide inadvertent chuckles.

Consider, for example, how one fraudster mangled parts of a story about a Congressional hearing on stock-trading:

Original 

Some legislators called for more transparency. Rep. Nydia Velázquez asked about the lack of requirements for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

Fraudster

Some legislators necessitated additional transparency. Rep. Nydia old master asked regarding the shortage of needs for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

In this case, the fraudster simply published the paraphrasing app's results verbatim:

• Called for more was replaced by necessitated additional
   
• Velázquez was replaced by old master
  
  
• Asked about the lack of requirements was replaced by asked regarding the shortage of needs

How do the fraudsters get away with this?

As Graham showed, they count on advertisers' inability to detect original from plagiarized stories.

"It’s easy to make money from advertisers just by setting up a web page," she said, "That means there’s significant incentive to create sites filled with outright plagiarized content."

But fraudsters also count on visitors' shabby reading habits.

As studies have shown, digital readers are evincing ever-greater degrees of "cognitive impatience," robbing them of the ability to "deep-read."

To put it succinctly, digital readers lack discernment: we'll accept any crap that's dished out, no matter the source or the quality.

In a real sense, we're complicit in the fraudsters' crime.

Whoops a Daisy

A cleric I know lost his "dream job" when he wrote an email to a confidant complaining about a whiney congregant and by accident sent it to the whole congregation.

Mistakenly sent emails cost many people their jobs last year, according to a new study by cybersecurity firm Tessian.

In fact, one in four people.

According to the study, an employee sends four emails to the wrong person every month, on average; and one in four loses his job as a result.

Nearly one-third of employees say their businesses lost a customer last year because of a mistakenly sent email, the study also says.

Half of all employees blamed the mistakes on bosses pressuring them to work quickly.

The others blamed the mistakes on distractions and the fatigue brought on by working from home and meeting for hours on Zoom.

Whoops a daisy!

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Forbes columnist Edward Segal for alerting me to Tessian's study.

Start with You

When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author.

— John McPhee

Far too many writers inject themselves into otherwise interesting pieces.

If you're one of the culprits, please, get over yourself. 

We don't care that you struggled to start your piece; thought about it for days on end; wrote about the same topic in the past; wrote on a tablet; wrote with your cat in your lap; wrote while suffering anguish about the state of the world; wrote late into the night; absolutely adore your subject; absolutely loathe your subject; are uncertain you've done your subject justice; or are delighted with your final product.

We. Don't. Care.

We care about the world outside your ego. 

Readers, if nothing else, are avid. 

They're searching for news, opinions, and new ideas.

Your ego provides none of that.

The masterful writer John McPhee put it succinctly:

"Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader."

To the extent that your piece is "all about you"—your process, insecurities, devotion, or judgements—your editorial job is crystal clear.

Cut the crap.

NOTE: Here's an example of "it's all about me" writing.

Nouning

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

― Ernest Hemingway

The English language isn't precious; but it has its charms.

So when self-proclaimed wordsmiths defile it, I get pretty sore.

Among the greatest defilers are consultants.

When they speak, gibberish bursts from their mouths like puss from a boil; and when they write—or, as they prefer, when they "wordsmith"—clear English turns into hooey.

Consultants love, in particular, nouning: deadening verbs by converting them into nouns.

Nouning, they believe, elevates their jejune statements—and justifies their fees.

For example:

We're experiencing a disconnect.

Watch for my invite.

I know a foolproof hack.

That was an epic pivot.

That was an epic fail.

Equally vile are headline writers. 

When they start nouning, you'd better reach for the kidney dish. 

For example:

AMC hoping sales reach $5.2 billion. Here’s why that’s a big ask.

Windows 11 preview: What’s in the latest build?

Dems put divides aside, rally behind Biden.

Need a good eat plan?

Feeling anxious? Declutter your overwhlem.

Nouns like these aren't just pompous. They're nauseating.

"Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns," says wordsmith Henry Hitchens.

"We associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly."

Ugly is right.

So I ask—as your consultant—need a solve for this problem?

The next time you encounter a nouner, grab a hammer.

Get the Name of the Dog

My task is, by the power of the written word, 

to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, 

before all, to make you see.

— Joseph Conrad

In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White pooh-pooh lazy writers—the majority—because they're so often satisfied with imprecision.

You see their slothfulness on display every day:

• "The Searchers is the greatest Western ever made."
  
  
• "The number of Americans diagnosed with 'broken heart' syndrome has steadily risen in the past 15 years."
  
  
• "Some records from The British Invasion in the mid-'60s can be very valuable."

By saying so little, sentences like these tax readers' minds. They squander readers' energy in guessing what the writer means to say.

Good writing avoids imprecision by drawing word-pictures.

Word-pictures comprise concrete details—specifics—that allow readers easily to imagine the world the writer seeks to depict. 

Anything less is filler. Eyewash. Baloney. Horse hockey.

• "The Searchers is the greatest Western ever made" merely tells you the writer likes this cowboy movie.

• "The number of Americans diagnosed with 'broken heart' syndrome has steadily risen in the past 15 years" merely tells you that incidents of a weird disease have increased.

• "Some records from The British Invasion in the mid-'60s can be very valuable" merely tells you there's demand for vinyl recordings by bands like Peter & Gordon.

Precision, on the other hand, would have told you, among other things, what distinguishes The Searchers from all the other hundreds of Westerns; how fast cases of "broken heart" are accelerating—and whether the disease affects a lot of people, or only a few; and which mop-top bands' records are hot.

Lazy writers favor the generic, as Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer said in The Philosophy of Style; and, because they do, they always leave readers guessing. They should, instead, aim to produce "vivid impressions" with their words.

Writers should avoid, Spencer said, abstract sentences like "When the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the penal code will be severe." They should write instead "When men delight in battles, bullfights, and gladiatorial combat, they will punish by hanging, burning, and the rack."

Spencer calls the use of vivid word-pictures a "thorough maxim of composition."

Writing coach Peter Roy Clark calls Spencer's maxim "Get the name of the dog" (or the "Fido Theorem").

"Such was my affection for this writing strategy," Clark once told an interviewer, "I wanted to use it as a book title. 

"Anticipating the literalism of SEO, my publisher decided the title should reflect what the book was really about. In the end, Get the Name of the Dog became Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. 

"Get the name of the dog" does appear in Clark's Writing Tools as Tool Number 14. But it's much more important.

"It ranks as Number 1 in my heart," Clark said. "Every strategic move I’ve shared over 30 years derives its existence from the Fido Theorem. 

"'Get the name of the dog' stands, for me, for the whole. In other words, if the writer remembers to get the dog’s name, he or she will be curious enough and attentive enough to gather all the relevant details in their epiphanic particularity."

Got an email to write? A memo? A report? 

Get the name of the dog.

Writing Rule #26

An unnecessary word is like a cinderblock on the highway.

Let Your Discourse be Short and Comprehensive

To practice his penmanship, the 16-year-old George Washington copied the entirety of Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a 110-page book compiled by the Jesuits in 1595.

Rules contained the standards of morality and etiquette for Colonial America's elite—the class the impoverished Washington was anxious to enter.

Showing humility and respect—especially before superiors—was the keynote of Rules. Humility and respect formed the very pillars of civility.

Rule 35 applied that civility to writing and speaking: Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.

Today, we'd do well to alter that rule: Let your communication with customers be short and comprehensive.

When your customer communications are long-winded, you show them they don't deserve your respect. You signal you think they're stupid. Not a formula for sales or retention.

Here's an example of silly verbosity from a large insurance company's website:

Property insurance is a type of insurance policy that can provide coverage for property owners or renters. Examples of property insurance include homeowners, renters, and flood insurance policies. These policies can provide coverage for damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. Let us help protect where you live and what you own with our different types of property insurance. Get a property insurance quote for your home, apartment, and more. We also make managing your policy easy with online access. You can make changes, request documents, and make payments.

The company asks you to suffer through nearly a hundred words, simply to tell you it will sell you property insurance. The same message could be stated in fewer than half the words:

Property insurance protects owners and renters from bearing the costs of damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. And managing a policy is easy: you can make changes, request documents, and make payments on line. Contact us for a quote.

By George, show customers a little respect! Sharpen your red pencil before you publish.

Let your discourse be short and comprehensive.

First, Entertain

It’s a very recent thing that there’s a premium put on
making writing so difficult that only a charmed
aristocracy is capable of understanding it.

— Tom Wolfe

Besides brevity, what improves writing?

The aim to entertain.

When I was a college student, my professors would assign a mountain of papers to write—as many as one every week.

The papers were a serious matter, their grades representing two-thirds or more of the final grade for each class.

I decided early on that if I wasn't entertained by my paper, the professor surely wouldn't be; so I sought a quirky angle for nearly every one.

While I remember few of these papers today, one from a Theology course sticks in my mind. 

The assignment was to react to some book we had to read about the divinity of Christ. 

I wrote my paper all in dialog, from the viewpoint of a subject on a psychiatrist's couch. I swiped that gimmick from Philip Roth, who used it throughout Portnoy's Complaint.

The Theology professor commented that, although I had "underestimated Christ's divine nature," the paper was "entertaining." 

I received an A+.

The effort to enchant my professors worked like a charm for the most part, enabling me to ace papers on topics like Beowulf, Blake, Tolstoy, Bismarck, Hegel, epistemology, subcultures, collectives, and Muscovite hegemony in Yugoslavia.

It didn't quite work out with a paper on protein-deficient neurotransmitters.

The most frequent comment the professors offered was "shallowly thought out, but entertaining."

Aiming to entertain also provided a stimulant (along with coffee), helping me plow quickly through otherwise tedious material. 

That gave me more time to spend on my primary interest: coeds.

There was nothing original about my effort. 

Writers, if not undergrads, have been acting as entertainers since the Bronze Age.

Shakespeare, by injecting prankish novelties into his plays, upped their quotient of "fun" measurably. That effort paid him well at the box office. 

And the late best-selling novelist Tom Wolfe codified the writer's role as entertainer, telling editor Tom Freeman in 2004 that he wanted to make all writers swear to be entertaining.

"I’ve begun working on a writers’ Hippocratic oath,” Wolfe told Freeman. 

"The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is 'First, do no harm.' And I think for the writers it would be: 'First, entertain.'

"Entertain is a very simple word. I looked it up in the dictionary. Entertainment enables people to pass the time pleasantly. And any writing—I don’t care if it’s poetry or what—should first entertain."

But how would Wolfe's dictum apply, say, in business, where the writer's oath is more like, "First, inform."

You might lean on something your audience doesn't expect.

Here, for example, is an email I just received, in its entirety:

Your business is important to us. It's our mission to keep you up-to-date on what's happening with business in the Delaware region and how it affects you. But we need your help to fulfill that mission.

Right now, you're receiving our email newsletters, but you don't have access to our best resources and Insider-only content.

I've got great news.

Now through July 29, you can become a full Delaware Business Times Insider for only $4 per month. This is 50% off our normal rate and is our best rate of the year. As an Insider you'll get all 24 issues per year of Delaware Business Times (digitally or in print), immediate access to all of the Insider-only content on our website, priority registration for all DBT and Delaware Today virtual events and discounted registration for all DBT and Delaware Today in-person events.

Becoming a DBT Insider is a valuable investment for your own business and a strong investment in local business journalism right here in Delaware.

Here's the same email with the fun quotient upped by leaning on, of all things, a pharma commercial:

Physicians agree: there's one thing worse than FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). FOMB (Fear of Missing a Bargain).

Now you can cure both with one easy action.

Through July 29, become a full Delaware Business Times Insider for only $4 per month—half off the normal rate. By subscribing, you'll receive all 24 issues of Delaware Business Times (digitally or in print), access to Insider-only content on our website, priority registration for all DBT and Delaware Today virtual events, and discounted registration for all DBT and Delaware Today in-person events.

You'll never miss an important business story—or the year's biggest bargain—again!

The Business End of Your Pencil

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg,
he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said,
"This end is more important than the other."

— John Cage

It's one thing to praise brevity, another to achieve it. Brevity begins and ends with "chunks."

The basic chunk is the paragraph. 

Think of the paragraph as a form of punctuation. Just as sentences would be hard to read without commas, colons, and periods, writing would be hard to read without paragraphs.

As a rule, short paragraphs (like this one) are effective.

However, while writing short paragraphs can be a virtue, paragraphs need not be short to seem brief. They simply have to follow a proven, four-part formula:

1. First, get your thoughts down, even if they take the form a single paragraph.

2. Next, "chunk" your separate thoughts into separate paragraphs.

3. Then, polish your paragraphs:

• Make sure your topic sentence—establishing the main point of the paragraph—is up front.
  
  
• Make sure the topic sentence transitions from the prior paragraph. That means it begins with something familiar to your reader, namely, the idea last expressed at the end of the previous paragraph. 
  
  
• Shape the entirety of your paragraph so it progresses cohesively and coherently. Your sentences should flow one from another (that makes them cohesive) and at the same time link to a single topic—the one captured in your topic sentence (that makes them coherent). Whenever your sentences don't link readily to the main topic, introduce bullets or numbers, or simply begin a new paragraph. And don't bother writing a "summation" or "conclusion" at the end of your paragraph. Just leap to the next one.

4. Lastly, apply the business end of your pencil and revise. As you're doing so, be sure to express all your ideas with precision and to cut your words by a third, at least.

“Writing is revision,” as Tracy Kidder says.

Here's an example of a paltry paragraph—lacking a topic sentence, lacking cohesiveness, lacking coherence, lacking precision. It's short, but godawful:

London's weather had been unusual for September, so Londoners took advantage of it to linger in the parks and visit the popular department stores. Even though an occasional air-raid siren would sound, the barrage balloons that flew overhead provided them a sense of security. They also attended plays and went to "picture shows," seeing films like Rebecca, The Thin Man and Gaslight. Considering England was at war, Londoners on the whole were quite complacent.

Here's the same content in the hands of Erik Larson, a writer who knows the business end of a pencil (the passage is from his new best-seller The Splendid and the Vile):

The day was warm and still, the sky blue above a rising haze. Temperatures by afternoon were in the nineties, odd for London. People thronged Hyde Park and lounged on chairs set out beside the Serpentine. Shoppers jammed the stores of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The giant barrage balloons overhead cast lumbering shadows on the streets below. After the August air raid when bombs first fell on London proper, the city had retreated back into a dream of invulnerability, punctuated now and then by false alerts whose once-terrifying novelty was muted by the failure of bombers to appear. The late-summer heat imparted an air of languid complacency. In the city’s West End, theaters hosted twenty-four productions, among them the play Rebecca, adapted for the stage by Daphne du Maurier from her novel of the same name. Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, was also playing in London, as were the films The Thin Man and the long-running Gaslight.

Birds Sing from the Heart, Revisited

Five years ago this week, author Erik Deckers invited me to guest-post on his blog. "Birds Sing from the Heart" was the result, one that still holds up years later. Here it is in its entirety.

Erik recently invited me to discuss “My Writing Process,” a dead-horse topic if there ever were one.

But I’ll beat that horse anyway, just because Erik asked.

Here you go:

Where I find ideas. The wellsprings of ideas are many and inexhaustible. The ones I return to again and again are:

• Other writers—from the sublime (e.g., Emerson, Faulkner, Sartre, Updike) to the ridiculous (names withheld)
  
• Pop culture (songs, movies, TV shows, blogs, etc.)
  
• Current events (AKA La Comédie humaine)
  
• Memories, dreams, reflections
  
• Other people’s observations (my wife’s, in particular)

How I write the ideas down. My secret sauce is no secret. Writing isn’t thinking. It isn’t even writing. “Writing is revision,” as Tracy Kidder says. “Write once, edit five times,” David Ogilvy urged office mates.” Priceless advice. Your fifth draft may not excel, but it will beat your first by a long shot. And, as you edit five times, be like the birds. An ornithologist mentioned during a recent NPR interview that birds’ voice boxes are lodged deep within their chests. “Birds sing from the heart,” she said. You should, too. Readers like it and will respond accordingly.

How I assure quality. Copy’s never error free, but I try hard to check my facts. In fact, I often spend more time fact-checking sources than writing and editing. (Don’t hem and haw: fact-checking is enlightening.) And I proofread, both twice before I hit publish and twice afterwards. Boring task, but my reputation’s on the line.

How I spread ideas. Outposting has helped aggrandize my scribblings more than any of my other activities. Adman Gary Slack advises clients to invest in “other people’s audiences” more than their own. He’s 100% on the money.

For more advice about writing. If you’re hungry for sound advice, listen to Paul Simon and Chuck Close discuss the creative process in a podcast for The Atlantic. You’ll learn more than you will by reading 50 how-to books, with these four noteworthy exceptions:

• The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William E. Blunder
• On the Art of Writing Copy by Herschel Gordon Lewis
• Secrets of a Freelance Writer by Bob Bly
• Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

Oh yeah, don’t forget No Bullshit Social Media.

Above: Little Bird by Jose Trujillo. Oil on canvas. 14 x 14 inches.

Verbosity

Verbosity wastes a portion of the reader’s life.

— Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In the midst of Britain's "darkest hour," Winston Churchill paused to write a one-page memo scolding his war cabinet ministers for verbosity.

"Clarity and cogency can be reconciled with a greater brevity," he told one of them. "It is slothful not to compress your thoughts."

That memo, entitled "Brevity," is one of Churchill's most famous.

It demanded that all ministers and their underlings avoid "officialese" in writing, and keep all memos brief—no more than a page long.

Brevity, Churchill promised, would save readers time—time better spent outsmarting their Nazi adversaries.

Churchill singled out pompous and clichéd gobbledygook as particularly wasteful.

"Let us have an end of such phrases as these: 'It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations,' or 'Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect,'" Churchill wrote. 

"Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational."

Brevity, Churchill promised, would not only save the government time, but "prove an aid to clear thinking."

Churchill was right, on both counts. 

Concise usually is precise—provided you avoid clichés.

I once had a boss who traveled a lot. 

When responding to draft sales copy or ideas and suggestions from me while she was out of town, she'd send me extremely concise emails.

But they consisted of nothing but clichés like "Off brand," Wait, what?'' and "Meh."

Concise, but not precise.

I always had to await her return to the office to learn what she expected me to do. 

She both wasted my time and set back my projects.

Clichés are fine when you have nothing but praise or approval to offer. "Lovin' it!" for example. "Good stuff!" Or, my favorite, "Boffo!"

Clichés are also fine when you can't help out. "Sorry, haven't a clue." "Sorry, not in my wheelhouse. "Sorry, no can do." (Churchill, for example, telegrammed FDR asking for help with the evacuation of Dunkirk. FDR replied simply, "Good luck.")

If you want to be a good boss or colleague—a helpful, thoughtful one—take the time to write concise, but precise, directions. 

"Ask Legal to review the entire contract one more time before you send it to the customer. The sales guy changed a lot of our boilerplate. Not sure that's kosher. Ask for it back within 24 hours."

"Make the subhead the major headline. It's stronger. And add a call to action."

"Ask Meghan whether she wrote code for another client that calculates shipping costs. You can just plug her code in. But be sure it can handle Euros."

In The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Australian philosopher David Stove argued that verbosity is more than long-windedness and muddled thinking.

Verbosity reflects a grotesque "character defect;" a trait he calls "pathology of thought."

Verbosity, Stove says, signals "a simple inability to shut up; a determination to be thought deep; a hunger for power; and fear—especially fear of an indifferent universe."

I've certainly observed that character defect during my career.

The best bosses I've ever had were also succinct and enviable writers; the worst were inarticulate psychopaths who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. 

The memos they produced were long, flatulent and inscrutable. 

The next email you write, please, take a few moments to edit yourself. Kill the clichés. Get to the point. Be specific. Then trim every third word. 

Your reader will thank you. 

Zoom-Shirt Marketing

Confession is always weakness.

— Dorothy Dix

There's an easily-crossed border between authenticity and unseemliness.

I've noticed a lot of content marketers are crossing it, and am not sure they're making a wise move.

They may soon come to regret the confessional tone they've struck in their writing. One of weakness, wariness, weariness, and regret.

Blame Covid-19 if you want. 

It's forced everyone to examine the inauthentic lives they were living.

But whatever the cause, I can't recommend Zoom-shirt marketing: looking okay on the surface while confessing that—in reality—you're overwhelmed.

Zoom-shirt marketing hopes to build intimacy. 

But more often than not it's unseemly, and no way to build trust—the very foundation of sales.

In your efforts to appear authentic, be careful how confessional your content becomes.

"Confession is good for the soul," an old Scottish proverb holds. 

It's not so good for sales.

Confession is a style of writing better left to literature; to Rousseau and Thoreau; to Lowell and to Plath.

It has little place in content marketing.

FOOTNOTE: Here's an example of Zoom-shirt marketing. Here's another.

An Exercise in Gobbledygook

Anything is better than not to write clearly.

— Somerset Maugham

"Dear Neighbors," the 16-page letter begins.

The author, Jean Wodnicki, say she hopes to advise Champlain Towers residents of the "state of the building," because answering their pesky questions has become an annoyance and "all-consuming." 

The issue at hand: a repairs estimate for $15 million. The homeowners association, over which she presides, has almost no money.

Three long, boring paragraphs in, Wodnicki notes that the building's state is lousy and "has gotten significantly worse" since the estimate was received. 

It appears the pillars are "spalling."

I've read Wodnicki's letter—sent three months before last week's collapse of Champlain Towers South—and can only say don't ever send a letter like this.

Anything is better than not to write clearly.

Monday-morning quarterbacking is easy; but were I to have written Wodnicki's letter, I might have opened it like this:

Dear Neighbors,

We have talked for years about the need to repair our crumbling building. There's no more time for talk. Now is the time to proceed. The repair will cost $15 million. Because there is little cash on hand, all of us will have to pony up.

With the benefit of clairvoyance, I would have added a second lead-in paragraph:

Dear Neighbors,

We have talked for years about the need to repair our crumbling building. There's no more time for talk. Now is the time to proceed. The repair will cost $15 million. Because there is little cash on hand, all of us will have to pony up. 

If we don't pony up, 150 of us will be crushed to death in three months. That's painful—much more painful than finding the money.

Clairvoyance or not, I would have made sure the letter fit on one side of a piece of paper, and that readers understood by the close that the repairs must commence—immediately.

Jean Wodnicki's letter is an extended exercise in gobbledygook sandwiched in self-pity.

“An honest tale speeds best being plainly told," Shakespeare said.

Don't ever send a letter like this.

Lean Expression

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

— Cicero

The Kansas City Star taught 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway "the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.”

When Hemingway began as a copywriter at the paper in 1917, The Star's rules demanded brevity: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Eliminate every superfluous word."

With few exceptions, writers before him were masters of verbalism; but with a boost from The Star, Hemingway forged a new, vigorous and modern style of expression.

Lean expression.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about," Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, "he may omit things that he knows and the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

Hemingway helped his reader not only by omitting superfluous words, but by chaining sensations to emotions, as in this passage from A Moveable Feast illustrates:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

That's the "Hemingway style." Frill-free storytelling, uplifted by the compounding of repetition, rhyme, alliteration, stream of consciousness, Biblical and Bachian cadences, and strict avoidance of the flowery, routine and trite—no Latinate words, for example, like "mollusk;" no adjectives like "slippery;" no adverbs like "eagerly;" no clichés like "the world is your oyster;" and no mention of oysters' effect on the libido.

Eloquent, keen and lean.

POSTSCRIPT: Go here for more assessment. And treat yourself to A Moveable Feast. It's free.

Gasbagging

The fewer the words, the truer the words.

— Robert Brault

Logorrhea, the gasbag's debility, eventually becomes our affliction as well.

That's because, through his torrent of words, the gasbag seeks to divert us from the inconvenient truth.

We often hear, in regard to politicians, talk about gaslighting; we hear much less about gasbagging.

Gasbagging—bloviating to distract and cover up—has become the weapon of choice for many politicos, especially ones on the right. Personally speaking, I can't stomach the tactic. I associate it with bullies and con men.

George Orwell warned against gasbagging in his essay Politics and the English Language. 

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell said. 

When confronted by an inconvenient truth, the insincere gasbag—then deny they're "playing politics" when that's precisely what they're doing.

"In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics,’" Orwell says. "All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."

"The fewer the words, the better the prayer," Martin Luther said. I like that formula.

So, let us pray: 

Lord, make them SHUT UP.

Amen.

Banking on Brevity

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and
a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.

― George Burns

New-media company Axios, launched in January by former Politico staffers, intends to distinguish itself among the legions of online newsletters by "writing short."

There's a lesson in this for business bloggers, egged on by experts to blather for SEO's sake.

“Journalists are writing for journalists. That’s the biggest problem in media right now,” says Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei. “People don’t want the pieces we’re writing. They’re too damn long.”

Ad-free for now, Axios will generate revenue eventually through $10,000 subscriptions, the founders hope.

"Smart brevity" is the key to attracting those subscribers. The newsletter's website describes the idea:

If you think about your evolving habits for consuming news and information, you realize you have less time, and a shorter attention span. Our content, our ads and our platforms are designed specifically to adjust to these new habits and demands. We aim to make the experience more substantive and meaningful—and therefore more valuable. When we pull this off, it will free people up to spend time on content truly WORTHY of their time, on our platform or elsewhere.

Axios, you might guess, is Greek for "worthy." By writing short, VandeHei plans to steer clear of the "crap trap"―the dead end publishers turn onto when they forget readers come first.

The Guaranteed Cure for Writer's Block

Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.

― Charles Bukowski

A Freudian psychoanalyst, Edmund Bergler, dreamed up the term "writer's block" in the late 1940s. His remedy, naturally, was the "talking cure." At today's prices, that costs $300 a session.

Fine, if you can afford it.

A fiction writer like Stephen King cures writer's block less expensively.

King simply goes for a three-mile stroll, and conjures up another unhinged politico, demonic pet, or zombie retiree, to move a gridlocked story forward.

B2B writers can't use that trick (although walking is good for everyone).

You'll find lots of nutty advice (climb into a sleeping bag, or listen to pink noise, or down a martini), but the best cure for writer's block, in my experience, is a three-step technique I learned from copywriter Bob Bly:

• Locate a project you wrote that's similar to the current project
• Make a copy of the file and open it
• Start rewriting your own copy

You'll not only avoid writer's block, you'll quick-start the new project. Don't have a similar project? Then swipe another writer's and start to rewrite that.

Try it. Don't wait til writer's block besets you.