All the Money You'll Ever Need

The noted playwright Robert Anderson once wrote, "You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can't make a living" (for that, he stooped to screenwriting).

While crowdfunding could put an end to "starving artists," no amount of money will spare us sniveling ones.

At grad school, I worked for a professor who counted among his friends many renowned intellectuals.

One day, he invited me to join him and a neighbor for lunch in his home. 

The neighbor turned out to be best-selling novelist Herman Wouk. 

I thought our lunch conversation might revolve around love and war. But Wouk spent most of the 90 minutes kvetching about the sum ABC had just paid him for the rights to make The Winds of War into a TV epic. (Wouk lived in a stately townhouse in Georgetown, but still resented the fact that stars Robert Mitchum and Ali McGraw received more money than he.)

On another day, my professor recounted a visit he'd made to the posh Left Bank apartment of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Instead of discussing his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre spent the whole hour griping about his royalties.

When it comes to money, even giants in the humanities can feel discontent. 

"Money isn't everything," novelist Lillian Day wrote. "Your health is the other ten percent."

Or as comedian Henny Youngman said, "I've got all the money I'll ever need. If I die by four o'clock."

Exorcize This

Few people know I played a bit part in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist.

It's true. I appear with two of the stars, Ellen Burstyn and Max von Sydow, in a wide shot that's on screen for a full three seconds.

Don't cover your eyes, because you'll miss me. Don't blink, either.

Want to know what's super-scary?

I'm always playing bit parts.

Edward Bernays used to warn students who were considering a career in marketing to think twice, because his was strictly a "sidelines job." 

Your sweat will go into glorifying others, Bernays warned. All of it. And that's as it should be. Marketers are paid to make non-marketers look good. 

But most social marketers have never heard of Bernays, nor heed his advice. They continue to break social marketing's Number 1 rule: It's not about you.

Get with the program, please. Quit striving for stardom. Get used to bit parts. It's about the glory of others.

As Geoffrey James puts it in Inc, "Stop talking about yourself. Stop thinking about yourself. Stop trying to be unique. Put yourself in service to the world. Figure out how to help other people."

It's the perfect time of year to exorcize your ego from your social marketing.

Bread and Circuses

For 25% of Americans, entertainment trumps accuracy in content, according to a new study by Adobe, The State of Content: Expectations on the Rise.

And the younger you are, the more entertainment counts, the study shows.

Entertainment is more important than accuracy for 10% of Boomers; 20% of Gen Xer's; 35% of Millennials.

In his new collection of essays, Notes on the Death of Culture, Nobel Prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa laments the fact we've become puppets of “emotions and sensations triggered by an unusual and at times very brilliant bombardment of images that capture our attention, though they dull our sensibilities and intelligence due to their primary and transitory nature."

Our addiction to spectacle shows its worst side in politics, today a “mediocre and grubby activity that puts off the most honest and capable people and instead mainly recruits nonentities and rogues," he says.

Instead of leaders, we settle for clowns, ready to do anything to grab a moment of our attention.

Why is So Much Business Writing So Bad?

Why is so much business writing so bad, irritating customers and wasting workers' time?

It begins with box checking.

In the race to "get it done"—and check yet another box—marketers and product managers flout good-writing fundamentals.

Foremost, as journalist Shane Snow points up, is simple diction.

Readers are impatient drivers. Simple diction lets them speed. They want writers to keep the highways open. And they prefer the ones who do.

To prove the point, Snow entered passages from a variety of popular writers—including Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell—into five proven calculators of "reading ease."

The resulting scores showed:

• McCarthy, King and Rowling write for people with fifth-grade reading skills; and

• Godin and Gladwell, for people with eighth-grade skills.

Snow asks: Do readers love only these writers' story-telling abilities? Or do they also love their approachability—in other words, their simple diction?

With half the US population reading at no better than an eighth-grade level, the answer's obvious. 

Yet most business communications are written as if we all could read like grad students, who don't slow down for Latinate words, jargon, run-on sentences, and page-long paragraphs.

But unapproachable diction isn't the only problem.

Good writing takes time. Time and the determination to inform, research facts, and think critically.

It takes more than the urge to check another box.

Ing-lish Spoken Here

Junior copywriters love to add "ing" to verbs.

Poor souls. 

No one's told them it weakens the most powerful words in our language.

In Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark gives two reasons why "ing" sucks strength from writing:

• It adds a syllable. Simple's better. Adding syllables complicates verbs.

• It often appears in a crowd. Writers who love "ing" tack it onto every verb they use. The words quickly begin to resemble each other.

In a 2002 article in The New York Times, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg first named the latter habit "ing-lish."

The junior copywriter's defense: "Marketing copy breaks the rules. Ing-lish is fine. No, it's even better. It's perfect."

Lovers of ing-lish think "ing" strengthens every verb by adding a sense of the here and now; of progress; of the urgent.

But, before you decide whether ing-lish is perfect, consider a few alternate taglines:

• Avis. We're trying harder.

• Nike. Just doing it.

• California Milk Processors. Getting milk?

• M&M: Melting in your mouth, not in your hands.

• State of New York. I'm loving New York.

• Burger King. Having it your way.

• Hamlet. Being, or not being, that is the question.

NOTE: Thanks go to graphic designer Clif Dickens for his "honest" tagline above. Enjoy more honest taglines here.