Why Clarity Counts

I was the guest speaker for a lively group of business analysts at the Treasure Valley IIBA lunch meeting today. During the Q&A they gave me some wonderful examples of miscommunication. (For those of you who don’t already know this, I’ll explain here that I collect such examples to use for trainings, workshops, and just for a good laugh, so please send me any good ones you come across.)

At the meeting, we were discussing business writing and the importance of putting yourself in the reader’s position to check for things that could be misunderstood. One of the analysts told the story of a client of hers who is a short-term disability expert. The client habitually refers to her field as “STD” and recently sent out a customer sales letter touting the benefits of STD, talking about how everyone needs STD, etc.

In this client’s mind, STD means short-term disability coverage. But to the rest of the world, the first thing that comes to mind when we see STD is “s**ually transmitted diseases.”The moral of the story? Get a second opinion about what you’ve written before sending out any important piece of communication.

It is especially helpful if your reviewer/proofreader/editor is NOT in your field or your profession, because they’ll be more likely to catch any terms or concepts that only insiders are familiar with.

It’s very difficult to imagine how it feels not to know the things one knows well. That’s why so many how-to books do such a poor job of explaining how to do something. Being able to work from a beginner’s mind, even though you are an expert, is the secret to being a good communicator, a good teacher, even a good business analyst. One of the best ways to find out whether you’re succeeding is to get feedback, whether from your target audience, a friend, or a professional communicator.

The other example the group gave me was a joke (with special thanks to Jane Francis!):

A truck driver has penguins in his truck and is on his way to deliver them to the zoo. His truck breaks down. He flags down another trucker and says,“I’ll pay you $500 to take these penguins to the zoo.”“OK, I’ll be happy to do that,” says the second trucker.

Hours later, the first trucker is in town and sees the second trucker in a crosswalk with the penguins following behind him. “Hey, I thought I told you to take the penguins to the zoo.”

“Right,” trucker two replies. “We went to the zoo and had money left over so now we’re going to the movies.”

As George Bernard Shaw once said: “The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”

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Here is the corrected link to the freerice.com site.

Many thanks to the alert subscriber who pointed out that the link in my earlier post wasn’t working! I fixed it there, too.

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Language mavens take heed: you can feed the hungry and build your vocabulary at the same time, while slacking off online, by visiting www.freerice.com. The home page is built around an interactive vocabulary quiz, and for every word you guess correctly, the site’s sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations’ World Food Program.

I learned about it from the Idaho Foodbank’s latest newsletter and couldn’t resist logging on and spending way too much time there immediately. In the process of contributing thousands of grains of rice, I also learned that a “sastruga” is a wind-formed snow ridge and that “luculent” is another word for clear. That’s my idea of a good day.

The vocabulary is challenging, even for a person who brags that she has to buy a massive dictionary to find one that contains words she doesn’t know. The site lets you customize the level of difficulty and track your progress, and you can hear how a word should be pronounced by clicking the speaker icon next to it.

Not only does FreeRice give slackers everywhere a way to feed their brains while feeding the hungry, it also exemplifies elegant simplicity in website design. Everything works: the navigation is logical, the design clean and appropriate to the subject, and the content is informative, interesting, and well-written. For an example of what I mean, take a look at the about page. Does clean, clear copy get any better than that?

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Next Tuesday, April 8th, I’m presenting a luncheon seminar for the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce called “Words That Work: Business Writing Basics.” Can’t wait. It’s always a treat to get a chance to share useful, practical information that makes life and work easier for people. There’s nothing like witnessing those “aha” moments when something that was once daunting suddenly seems doable.

I’ve given this talk numerous times, and I typically customize it to have either a marketing, or technical, or formal slant depending on the audience. But the core material is always built around what I consider the three commandments of communication: Know your audience, know your purpose, and keep it simple. I didn’t invent this message, obviously they’re widely available from many knowledgeable sources, but I certainly delight in passing it on, partly as a way of paying back all the wise souls who enlightened me.

It’s amazing how easy it is to make things much harder than they actually are, especially in the middle of a project with the deadline looming and the pressure turned up, but coming back to those three key concepts can put everything back into perspective. Audience, purpose, and K.I.S.S. Can’t you feel your blood pressure easing down just reading that? Doesn’t it make you want to explore the ins and outs of better business writing at the very first opportunity? I know I’m excited about it, in fact I could go on and on at some length — but I promise to keep the presentation under 90 minutes.

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How many times have you asked someone, “What do you do?” only to get a pretty much incomprehensible answer? For some reason, people tend to get lofty when they try to think of a boilerplate phrase to introduce themselves and their business. Unfortunately it’s very easy to get caught up in words like “optimize,” “facilitate,” “customized,” “mission-critical,” and so on. I actually know consultants I see and talk with at meetings and events regularly, whose websites I’ve read thoroughly — and I still have no idea what they actually do.

Whether you call it a tagline, a magnetic introduction, a sixty-second commercial, an elevator pitch, or something else — we all need one. I’ve recently had a great time helping a few clients develop new pitches that are working well for them. In the process, I began to realize how important it is to practice and test whichever words you use. Even if you hire a brilliant writer to write a captivating script for you, you’re still the one who’ll have to believe in it and deliver it. It’s like learning to snowplow when you’re skiing downhill: until you try it and have the experience of it actually working, you’re scared to death of crashing or careening out of control.

I’ve also discovered how much fun it is to get two or more clients together to try out their new pitches. The client is usually self-conscious and reluctant to have faith in the new phrase, and they can’t totally trust my opinion because I wrote it. But having other people around to provide an immediate non-verbal reaction really does the trick.

In fact, maybe I should take my own medicine for a change and get a few peers together to help me work on a pitch for myself? I’ll have to get around to that one of these days.

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Not long ago, I heard Pamela Dell of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce deliver a delightfully to-the-point talk about marketing. She took the whole daunting subject and broke it down into three steps:

• Make time.
• Have fun.
• Follow up.

How can you not love that? As a writer, of course I also love it that she also used parallel construction and made each step a declarative, two-word sentence. Very nicely done—in only six words, she made a point more effectively than some books I’ve read on the subject.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the rush of ideas. Diving deep into the details of planning, messaging, branding, strategy, and so on is important, of course. But so is coming up for air. Marketing is about connecting with people, and ideas that don’t surface don’t reach anybody.

Like many of my clients and most of my colleagues, I can get easily carried away and need to remember not to make things harder than they are. It’s that old K.I.S.S. thing. Pam’s message is a welcome reminder that the most important step in marketing is to keep doing it.

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Whenever a person, company, or agency starts manipulating language and resorting to euphemisms, it’s time to pay very close attention. For any of us who make our living as communicators – or who hire communicators to get our messages out – it’s important to realize that our audiences are not stupid. Obfuscation doesn’t fool people; it merely alerts them that somebody is trying to hide something.

According to Webster’s, to “obfuscate” is “to make dark or unclear” in order to “muddle, confuse, or bewilder.” At a public hearing last week about the proposed Idaho Roadless Rule, I heard quite a bit of obfuscation in action.

The issue being discussed was whether to open up currently protected backcountry roadless areas in Idaho to road construction for logging and mining. The Idaho Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service representatives wouldn’t come right out and admit that, though.

Instead, those who attended the hearing were assured that “temporary roads” were only to be permitted in rare instances of “mineral activity” and “stewardship projects” for forest health.

Right. Many critical thinkers in attendance pointed out that there is no such thing as a temporary road. Wagon ruts on the Oregon Trail are still visible more than 100 years after the last wagon made the trek. Clearly, roads built with bulldozers and modern grading equipment to accommodate multi-ton trucks will not just disappear.

And what exactly are forest health “stewardship projects?” It wasn’t made clear what “stewardship” means. But my guess is that it will have more to do with cutting down trees than feeding them compost tea.

My favorite fuzzy term of all, though, was “mineral activity.” Minerals are rocks, and it’s been my experience that they are not especially active, nor does phosphate get restless and spring out of the ground on its own. What’s with the smokescreen? Do the governor’s team and the Forest Service honestly expect the public to believe that “mineral activity” is not really phosphate mining?

By underestimating their audience’s intelligence, obfuscators lose that audience’s trust along with their own credibility.

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I saw this sign in a dry cleaner’s window the other day:
“We honor all competitors’ coupons (with some exceptions).”

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A well-educated, sophisticated client of mine whose practice serves her own well-educated, sophisticated clients brought up an interesting question about headlines this week. She had learned in an online marketing course that capitalizing every word in a headline — regardless of grammatical correctness — is a good way to get people’s attention, and she wanted to know my opinion.

The answer depends on whose attention you’re trying to get and what impression you want them to have. The headline in question went with a long copy sales page describing an intensive training retreat. The goal of the headline was to get the right people to read it and then to win their respect for, and trust in, my client’s professionalism.

Everyone alive in this century is skeptical of anything that smells like advertising. Headlines in all caps (including articles and prepositions like “a” and “to,” for example) may catch more eyeballs initially but, if the eyeballs belong to, say, a liberal arts major, the brain attached to them is likely to say, “Oh no, another cheesy long copy sales pitch,” and click away to another site.

If you’re selling something to an educated audience, ignoring grammatical conventions in favor of what is flashy or catchy risks insulting their intelligence. And if your product or service is expensive, gimmicky marketing materials will devalue it. Put another way, if you’re charging Nordstrom prices, you don’t use K-Mart merchandising techniques.

My client is all about quality and expertise. And in my admittedly biased opinion as a writer and an English major, her image and her audience deserve flawless grammar.

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Have you been meaning to write a book “someday?”

Well, how would you like to get that book written by Christmas?

As a market-savvy entrepreneur, you’re probably aware that writing a book is one of the best ways to advance your career and build your practice.

As a committed professional who is driven by the passion for making your clients’ lives more successful and more rewarding, you also know that a book is the perfect vehicle for capturing and sharing your passion and expertise.

Chances are that you’ve been meaning to write your own business book. But where do you start? Maybe you’ve even started a book, but somehow couldn’t make it happen on your own.

My next Biz Book Writers workshop, starting 9/26/2007, is designed to help you turn your notes and ideas into a real draft of your book by the end of the year. Using methods tested and proven by a pilot workshop earlier this year, I’ll provide the structure, support, and personalized action plan to help you make the most of your time and energy and get tangible results. This is a hands-on, action-oriented approach designed for busy professionals who want to make this happen now, not someday.

For more information, see the Biz Book Writers Workshop! page at workingbizwords.com

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