Writing Rule #26

An unnecessary word is like a cinderblock on the highway.

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.

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.

Downtown

Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn't fetched.

— Stephen King, from The Stand

A recent radio interview with the author has prompted me to re-read Stephen King's 40-year-old doorstop The Stand. 

On Page 101, I encountered the sentence above: perhaps the worst in all of King's novels; perhaps the worst in American literature.

I have relished reading trash ever since high school, where the Jesuits, hoping to instill in us "catholic tastes," encouraged our indulgence in "middlebrow" literature (after all, they said, Shakespeare aimed to please the groundlings as much as the audience in the seats; and Faulkner supported a family of ten writing short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post).

And so I've consumed scores of best-sellers by the likes of Upton Sinclair, John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, James Michener, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Herman Wouk, John leCarre’, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Henning Mankell, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and, yes, Stephen King.

My teachers understood: reading middlebrow authors would help us appreciate the skills of highbrow ones (authors like Hardy, Conrad, Maughm, Hemingway, Faulkner and Heller).

I adore all those best-selling writers; and, besides, sometimes you need to go downtown to get uptown.

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.

Give Hooptedoodle the Heave-Ho

There’s a great power in words,
if you don’t hitch too many of them together.

— Josh Billings

"Delete" is the key to sharper storytelling—and maybe the cure for Content Shock.

Or, as novelist Elmore Leonard put it, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

The web's awash with crap content, writing that confuses and bores and bogs down readers with too much "too much."

Prolix writing exhausts us; and writers who produce it, Leonard says, are "perpetrating hooptedoodle," a word coined by another novelist, John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday (a sequel to Cannery Row) included a prologue that featured two characters speaking, Mack and Whitey No. 1.

One night Mack lay back on his bed in the Palace Flop house and he said, “I ain’t never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row. I would of went about it different.”

And after a while he rolled over and raised his head on his hand and he said, “I guess I’m just a critic. But if I ever come across the guy that wrote that book I could tell him a few things.”

“Like what?” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well,” said Mack, “like this here. Suppose there’s chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That’s all right, as far as it goes, but I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don’t mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I’d know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to.”

“Go on,” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing—I kind of like to figure out what the guy’s thinking by what he says. I like some description too,” he went on. “I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it—but not too much of that.”

“You sure are a critic,” said Whitey No. 2. “Mack, I never give you credit before. Is that all?”

“No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”

Indeed, Sweet Thursday readers could encounter two fancy chapters inside, "Hooptedoodle 1" and "Hooptedoodle 2." They could skip them, if they wished.

Storytelling won't advance your goals if you don't recognize the power of well-chosen words. Don't burden readers with hooptedoodle; leave long-form flights of fancy to the poets.

There's power in your "Delete" key.

Use it.

Exorcise Adverbs

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Stephen King

Click-baiters adore adverbs:

• Powerfully Effective Content Marketing
• The Writing Resolution You Can Actually Keep
• The Amazingly Simple Anatomy of a Meaningful Marketing Story
• 8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content
• How to Immediately Become a More Productive (and Better) Writer
• What to Do When You Absolutely, Positively Must Know If Your Content Will Rock

But adverbs overpromise and add little; in fact, they weaken the words they modify.

Dressing up a word with an adverb is like "putting a hat on a horse," claims The Elements of Style.

Don't do it.

Don't overdress your words.

Understatement's the best way to put forth an idea, as the late copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis insisted.

Good writers get this.

Adverbs rarely appear on pages crafted by Kurt Vonnegut, Elmore Leonard or Stephen King.

But look at a passage by an over-writer like William Peter Blatty (taken from his novel The Exorcist):

The Jesuit moved slowly forward, oblivious of Chris, who was gaping in wonder; of Karl, stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. He went calmly up the staircase, slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister.

Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin came out. He closed the door and started down the hall. Behind him, the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him, an odd expression on her face.

Here the same passage again, with the adverbs exorcised:

The Jesuit moved forward, oblivious of Chris, who was gaping in wonder; of Karl, stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. He went up the staircase, slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister.

Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then the demon laughed and Merrin came out. He closed the door and started down the hall. Behind him, the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him, an odd expression on her face.

More chilling, no?

Employers Want People Who Can Write

This just in: Employers want people who can write.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a survey of 180 companies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found 4 of the top 5 skills valued by employers are "hallmarks of a traditional liberal-arts education."

Clear-writing skill was ranked Number 3 (following leadership and teamwork).

“It’s easier to hire people who can write—and teach them how to read financial statements—rather than hire accountants in hopes of teaching them to be strong writers,” head recruiter for the investment firm Morningstar told The Wall Street Journal.

One Morningstar employee—the firm's expert on more than a dozen well-known equity-strategy funds—was a philosophy and classics major who earned a PhD in theology.

Want to improve your job or promotion prospects?

Go back to school and study philosophy (expensive), or read Writing Tools and The Art and Craft of Feature Writing (cheap).

HAT TIP: Thanks to Kevin Daum for informing me of NACE's survey.

4 Writing Defects You Should Eliminate

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.

― Louise Brooks

Your boss demands you do more with less.

Start with your writing.

Slow down and try to write more concisely; in particular, eliminate these four common defects:

Roadblocks. Cut needless words and phrases like "very," "actually," "I think" and "in my opinion." And replace modified verbs with strong verbs; for example, replace "consider thoroughly" with "evaluate."

Jerks. Smooth the breaks between sentences by using transitional words and phrases like "because," "for example," and “in contrast.” Use short introductory questions like "Seem reasonable?" to ease the transition into new paragraphs. Use phrases like "Let me explain why" to end paragraphs.

Clichés. Replace clichés with vivid descriptions. Instead of saying "we raised the bar in customer support," say "our Help Desk is hyperfocused."

Monotony. Give your writing some rhythm. Alter the cadence with a mix of long and short sentences. And don't forget those sentence fragments. Yes, fragments.

Believe it or not, elimination adds. It adds spark to your prose readers will notice.

Here's an example:

Before

In my opinion, we substantially raised the bar for responsiveness in customer support last quarter. I think the team was very careful to consider thoroughly the numerous challenges customers routinely experience whenever they called our Help Desk seeking assistance. I would like therefore to offer a big thumbs up to the Sales Operations team for the can-do attitude they demonstrated in tackling this really difficult issue.

After 

Sales Operations streamlined a number of critical Help Desk procedures last quarter, improving the customer experience. Without exception, my kudos to team members. You tackled one tough job―and succeeded!

Unmistakable

If you can't explain something in a few words, try fewer.

― Robert Brault

When Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage appeared in 1895, reviewers sang the writer's praises.

"They all insist that I am a veteran of the Civil War," he told fellow journalist John Hilliard, "whereas the fact is, as you know, I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle."

The story succeeded, Crane said, not because he wrote from observation, but because, "I endeavored to express myself in the simplest and most concise way."

He told Hilliard his goal, following Emerson's advice, was to leave unsaid the "long logic beneath the story."

"My chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand. That, to my mind, is good writing."

5 Keys to Creativity

Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

—Walter Winchell

We link creativity to talent, but blogger Greg Satell insists "talent is overrated" and says the least talented among us can find the keys to creativity. For Satell, they are:

Habit. Rain or shine, Satell writes every day. A friend calls it , “Letting the muse know you’re serious.”

Experience. Satell brings a wealth of experience in different businesses, countries and cultures to his writing. "That gives me a lot of raw material to work with."

Productivity.  "The more work you produce the more likely you are to come up with something truly creative," Satell says. "The more you produce, the more skilled you become and the more you can experiment with different combinations."

Serenity. Writer's block can be overcome by finding a distraction that calms your mind. Exercise, walks, coffee with a friend, reading or movie-watching all work.

Compromise. "When you start something it’s always crap," Satell says. "I dare to be crap, knowing that it really doesn’t matter what my first draft looks like." It's easy to fix a first draft, he says. "The only problem that can’t be fixed is a blank page."

Garbage In, Garbage Out

New research appearing in the International Journal of Business Administration suggests junk content consumption lowers the quality of your writing.

Sixty-five adults participated in the study.

They provided the researchers writing samples and reports of the time spent reading various books, newspapers and websites.

Using an algorithmic tool, the researchers compared the quality of participants' writing samples to samples taken from the books, newspapers and websites the participants most read.

The comparisons show a strong correlation between reading and writing skills: people who read more complex stories have more complex writing, and vice versa.

The researchers blamed junk peddlers like Reddit and Tumblr for participants' worst writing habits.

Consumption of content rife with jargon, slang and shorthand threatens an adult's ability to compose complex sentences.

Neuroanatomy is also to blame.

"Neuroanatomy may predispose even adults to mimicry and synchrony with the language they routinely encounter in their reading, directly impacting their writing," the researchers say.

Or as Ludwig Feuerbach once said, "You are what you eat."

The researchers prescribe heavy doses of literary fiction and academic journals to counteract the effects of emojis, memes, tweets and listicles on writing skill.

Hack vs. Hacker

Never mistake a hack for a hacker.

Unless she's evil, a hacker creates code.

A hack creates crap.

In general, a hack's a writer who produces undistinguished prose. (The opprobious name derives from hackney, a horse for hire.)

In marketing, a hack's a writer who's:

• Passionate about content; immune to ideas.
• Happy to plagiarize; put off by research.
• Enamored of opinions; averse to facts.
• Obsessed with quantity; indifferent to quality.

Foremost, a hack's a writer who chases eyeballs.

Speaking of quantity, Express Writers offers a useful hack: publish content of "ideal length."

I'll hack the info graphic. Here's the bottom line:

• Write blog posts 2,000 words long; 
• Write Facebook posts 40 characters long; 
• Write Tweets 11 characters long; and 
• Write Pinterest captions 200 characters long.

Nunsense

Contrary to Sister Aloysius' teachings, some nonsensical statements can be unimpeachably grammatical.

Your dangling modifier can be ludicrous, yet your statement can be perfectly grammatical, as this Tweet demonstrates:
   

We develop tests for flu and other diseases that help patients.

You can ignore an absolute quality, yet your statement can be perfectly grammatical, as this web ad headline demonstrates:

Transparency you will see.

You can flout a determiner, yet your statement can be perfectly grammatical, as this newspaper headline demonstrates:

One-armed man applauds the kindness of strangers.

Your decision to recast statements like the three above is a matter of judgement, not grammar.

By letting them stand, you risk slowing readers, confusing them, or inviting them to think you're a dope.

But you don't deserve Sister's wrath.

NOTE: The examples you have just seen are true. The names have been withheld to protect the innocent. For more examples, read the final chapter of Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style.

Eschew Inkhorn Terms

Queen Elizabeth's confidant Thomas Wilson warned writers away from fancy words 450 years ago in his Art of Rhetoric.

Wilson paid no court to "clerks" who used "outlandish English."

He called their fandangles "inkhorn terms"—words only pedants prefer.

Wilson warned:

Among all other lessons this should first be learned, that we never affect any strange inkhorn terms, but to speak as is commonly received: neither seeking to be over-fine or yet living over-careless, using our speech as most men do.

Think you're immune from Wilson's law, because yours is a C-level audience?

Think again.

Inkhorn terms could cost you credibility, no matter how well-paid your audience, says copywriter Keith Lewis.

Convoluted copy backfires, Lewis says. 

"Far from making you or your company sound intelligent, it alienates audiences. It turns them off, no matter how high up the income chain a potential reader might be."

The Clarity Commandment

The B2B marketing-scape is littered with statements like this one:

SpineMap 3.0 Navigation Software is designed to optimize the surgical experience through an intuitive solution which includes a personalized surgical workflow to help support OR efficiency.

Much of B2B copy not only bores, but breaks a rule Herschell Gordon Lewis calls "The Clarity Commandment:"

When you choose words and phrases, clarity is paramount. Don’t let any other component of your communication interfere with it. 

Like other commandants handed down, easier said than done.

Clarity comes from more than short words and phrases.

It comes from avoiding jargon and any terms with less than laser-precision.

"In our enthusiasm for creating uniqueness, sometimes we lapse into poetry or in-talk, or we pick up phraseology that may make sense within the office but is gobbledygook to outsiders," Lewis says. 

"Or we go just one step beyond clarity—not a cardinal sin, but not a message that’s quickly and clearly understood."

Clarity's at risk whenever ambiguity rears its head.

Think about the example above:

Really, what's an optimized surgical experience?

A personalized surgical workflow?

What is OR efficiency?

And clarity's at risk whenever we add the unnecessary.

Why an intuitive solution? 

Why to help support?

"Clarity is hog-tied to simplicity," Lewis says.

And simplicity's, well, simple.

Copy that doesn’t demand analysis is more likely to hit its goal—command of the reader’s attention—than complex copy.

PS. An inquiring reader asks, How would you handle the statement above? Here goes:

SpineMap 3.0 Navigation Software gives you a second pair of eyes and hands during back surgery. Less time in the OR means more time on the green.

Now, I think I'll go watch This is Spinal Tap.

Short and Easy

"It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’"                               

― A.A. Milne

Most often, your purpose in publishing is to inform and persuade. Why mask your meaning with long, difficult words?

Why say your product "will provide seamless multi-user functionality," when you mean it "supports up to 15 users?"

Why sound like some abstruse academic or dodgy bureaucrat?

"Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, " George Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language."

Latin and Greek words are grand, but their use in business is dreadful.

Just look at this balderdash from Accenture:

Insurers will need to open up to their ecosystem partners, sharing not only customer data, but customers themselves. To encourage and support such ecosystems, IT architectures will need to evolve, ensuring flexibility and interoperability with external partners and providers. A key challenge will be to orchestrate innovation and legacy evolutions while simultaneously managing security threats and changing IT processes to roll out and manage new products and services faster and cheaper.

Acccenture means:

Insurance companies need to upgrade their IT systems so suppliers can use their customer data. But they can't let the changes interrupt routine business.

This morning's lesson: short and easy.

Now, what about lunch?

Potpourri

Concise writing achieves communication in pure form.

So it's considerate on his 207th birthday to celebrate Edgar Allen Poe's "one-sitting rule" of writing.

In "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe extols brevity for the effect it creates.

"If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed."

Long-windedness deprives a piece "of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect," Poe says.

"It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting."

Using the right tools are just as important, Poe insists in "How to Write a Blackwood Article."

"In the first place, your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib. No individual, of however great genius, ever wrote without a good pen a good article."

B2B Marketers: Help Customers Browse Your Content

When will B2B marketers get the memo?

Minimalism is back.

The style's all the rage with runners, designers, gastronomers, photographers—even white guys.

But B2B marketers keep pushing bloated content.

When will they get it? When you subtract, you attract.  

Tight copy encourages browsing.

In their writer's guide Clear and Simple as the Truth, Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner implore writers to write in the "classic style," cutting the excess and making every word count.

Making words count boosts your content's value. 

And that discourages skimming.

"It is possible to skim certain styles," Thomas and Turner write. "Most after-dinner speeches are presented in styles that claim only part of our attention. Many textbooks and news articles are written in styles that allow us to bounce over words and phrases and still feel that we have extracted the sense accurately."

By making words count, you encourage readers to browse.

"Classic style allows browsing but not skimming. We may turn to just one paragraph, say, in an essay, or even to one sentence, and focus on just that. But once we focus on a unit in classic style, and intend to understand it, then we must pay attention to every detail. Writer and reader assume that every word counts. If the reader skips a single word or phrase or sentence, the sense of the unit may be lost. Classic style contains crucial nuances, which can be lost in skimming."

Skim-reading is mindless; browsing's another thing. Browsing is considerate. Browsing is window-shopping.

Customers love to window-shop.

So help them.

"Perfection is achieved, novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, "not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

It's 2016. How Do You Make Customers Click?

Powerful headlines grab customers' attention, as David Ogilvy insisted.

But that was in 1963. Only basements, barns and cartoons had mice.

What makes customers click in 2016?

Subheads.

Eye-tracking studies show customers dwell longer on headlines than any other part of a web page. (Ogilvy nailed it.)

But, even when you care to say the very best, headlines can't say it all.

Their smaller, wordier siblings, subheads can. 

Subheads expand and inspire. They let you telegraph additional benefits and urge customers to act.

Headlines hook customers. 

Subheads reel them in.

Want examples of effective subheads?

Here's a baker's dozen, courtesy of Hubspot.