By Francis Moran
Like my friend Ian Graham over at The Code Factory, I subscribe to what he calls “the law of three.” That is, if something is mentioned three times in a short period, you should do something about it. Well, two different people over the past week asked me for advice on how to improve their writing. I shared some of my usual tips and I pointed each of them to a couple of posts on this blog where I previously wrote about our fondness for the The Chicago Manual of Style and about my personal approach in quizzing job applicants to determine if they are real writers or not.
Then this morning, my regular email from the excellent Daily Writing Tips was all about online style guides, making it the third mention in short order about ways to help improve your writing. So I thought I’d share some good counsel from my own experience and from Daily Writing Tips.
1. Read a really good newspaper every day
I’ve been telling eager writing students this for years, especially if they’re looking to get into the journalism or communications professions. But it holds true for any writer because excellent journalism is a daily lesson in effective writing. Journalists are trained to impart solid information in very quick order while avoiding superfluous wording and hyperbole. I can’t think of a better definition of what ought to constitute good writing in almost any business context.
Here in Canada, we are extraordinarily fortunate to have the Globe and Mail, in my opinion one of the top five English-language newspapers in the world. While the Globe and the others make my list mainly for their journalistic strengths, the Globe is my personal favourite because of the consistently high quality of its writing. My other top writing pick, London’s The Guardian, is now within easy reach for all of us, thanks to the Internet. Read either — or, even better, both — of these newspapers every day with a critical eye for how the stories are written and you’ll not only become a better writer, you’ll also be very well informed.
2. Practice makes perfect
If you want to be a writer, you must write. Malcom Gladwell in his book “Outliers” suggested that besides talent and opportunity, it takes a lot of hard work to become proficient at something; in fact, 10,000 hours of hard work. If I have spent just one quarter of each working day writing — and many, many days I have spent much, much more than that — then I have logged in excess of 15,000 hours at my keyboard. So maybe by now, I’m getting good at it! How many hours have you put in?
A fascinating study out of Stanford University suggests that text-messaging and Twitter updating are actually improving the literacy standards and writing skills of today’s young people, a sharp contradiction to conventional wisdom that would suggest the shortened words and fractured syntax usually employed in these communications forms would erode writing skills. Turns out, according to writing and rhetoric professor Andrea Lunsford, it’s a simple matter of practice — young people are spending a lot of time using text online, honing writing skills that they otherwise would have abandoned with their textbooks and essay assignments. “We’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” Lunsford is quoted as saying by Wired magazine.
3. Everyone needs an editor
Anyone who has ever worked with me knows this is one of my utterly intractable rules. Nothing, including this post, leaves our shop without at least one set of eyes reviewing it. A good proofreader catches the typos and what my wife likes to call the “thinkos” that always find their way into our copy, and this is hugely valuable. But a good editor does for your writing what going up against a better tennis player does for your tennis — she or he improves your game. Invite that challenge.
4. Have a good library of reference books
I have often mentioned how my copy of “The Pocket Oxford Dictionary” that always sits right beside my keyboard bears testimony, through its missing spine and generally dog-eared and bedraggled appearance, to the regularity with which I consult it. In the same short stack of references that I always keep at hand can be found “CP Style Book” and “CP Caps and Spelling” as well as a basic French-English dictionary and an ASCII character table. These are the tools of my trade.
If I swing my chair around to look at the bookshelves that line my office wall, I estimate that a good 10 feet of shelf space are devoted to other dictionaries, a thesaurus or three, and many other textbooks, references, style guides and general-interest books about writing. (One particularly treasured volume, even more ragged than my own Pocket Oxford, is a slim little work of ink-stained and yellowed paper titled, “The Educational Dictionary.” It has no date in it so I don’t know when it was published. But on the otherwise blank first page, it bears, in Gaelic, my late mother’s signature and the name of the school she attended in the early 1940s. Both for what it is and, mainly, for who owned it and gave it to me, it bears pride of place on my bookshelf.)
The rest of my top 10 list refers to specific sources either that I use or that were recommended in this morning’s Daily Writing Tips.
5. The Chicago Manual of Style
This is probably the definitive bible of American-English writing. You can buy it for about $50 or, even better, subscribe online.
6. The Canadian Press references
For we Canadians living between the American and British versions of the English language, the various references published by our domestic news-gathering service, The Canadian Press, are indispensable. You can subscribe online or buy dead-tree versions here.
7. When using the Queen’s English
I have never used them but Daily Writing Tips recommends the free, downloadable “The BBC News Style Guide” and “Guardian Style”, available free online and for sale as a book.
By Linda Forrest
The Bad Pitch Blog is an entertaining, albeit harrowing, waltz through our industry, showcasing the epic fails of the worst of our colleagues. A recent post highlighted the unfortunate correspondence between a journalist looking to become a PR practitioner and a prospective employer. It’s not pretty.
MediaBistro summarized the piece late last week, offering its own two cents on the matter.
By Linda Forrest
Senator Ted Kennedy died late yesterday, the latest tragedy in the long string to befall the family that has so captivated the world these last 50 years. His passing is also the latest high-profile death to spawn a flurry of internet traffic, blog posts, Tweets, and the like.
Being a child of the 80s, it has been a rough year, with iconic figures like Michael Jackson and John Hughes, director of some of my favourite movies, passing away unexpectedly, shocking their many followers.
We truly live in an era of mass communication. Sometimes that brings us together, other times it alienates us. In times when people need to have even a virtual shoulder to cry on, the many means of expression available to them, the virtual support system at their ready disposal is of great comfort indeed.
Bob Lefsetz, editor of the Lefsetz Letter, a music industry trade newsletter, was on the Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos last year talking about just how messed up the music industry is (quite) and he touched on the fact that in today’s modern age, there is so much media available that we’re less connected to one another. Ironically, the glut of media channels meant to provide us with more content, ostensibly, one assumes, in order to provide us with more cultural touch points to be able to discuss with one another, is providing each of us with customized content that it’s unlikely that any of our friends or contacts are aware of. His example was a television show that he’d seen and adored that aired on an obscure cable channel and despite his evangelism about the program, had yet to meet another human who had seen it.
These recent high profile deaths and the public’s reaction to them represent the flip side to Lefsetz’s argument. When Michael Jackson died, it was said that he almost took the internet with him, so compelled were his legions of fans to flock to news sites, to write blog posts about what his music had meant to them, what his impact on our society had been, some to mock, others to mourn…
What can we as modern marketers learn from this? In the same way that on a personal level the many channels available to us can draw us closer or push us further apart, they accomplish the same when used for business, for promotion. The media channels are many, the messages on them innumerable, but focused messaging on the proper channels can bring your market closer, can provide them with the niche information that they need, can, in short, sell more of your stuff.
By Francis Moran
When baggage handlers for U.S. air carrier United Airlines manhandled and broke Dave Carroll’s beloved, custom-made, $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar while he and his band-mates looked in impotent disbelief from inside the aircraft, and then refused to compensate him for it, the Canadian musician didn’t get mad, he got even. He wrote a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” posted it on YouTube and, nearly five-million viewings later, Carroll has become the lyrical poster-boy for disgruntled airline passengers everywhere and United is learning very difficult and expensive lessons about the power of the individual in the age of social media.
The key lesson United needs to learn here is that it broke much more than Carroll’s guitar. It broke the cardinal rule of customer service and it broke my first law of competitive differentiation. That law states that the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies in today’s economy is superior customer service. In an era where a technological advantage lasts only as long as it takes competitors to reverse engineer your product or leap-frog over it with an innovation of their own, and where a price advantage erodes just as swiftly as your competitors can off-shore their own manufacturing, keeping your customers happy is the sole long-term strategy you can employ to develop and sustain a sharp differentiation from those competitors.
In the challenging world of airline travel, where every operator goes to the same places at the same time for much the same price, it’s the only differentiator.
Canada’s WestJet Airlines, which used to be an upstart little operation out of Calgary, has stolen fully 37 percent of the domestic airline business right out from under the nose of the once-monopolistic Air Canada by emphasising and delivering on a promise to treat its customers better. Air Canada’s reputation for lousy customer service is so well established I have named my annual award for the worst customer-service experience of the year after the airline and one of its (surprise!) baggage people who displayed the same indifference that drove Carroll to song.
Superior customer service doesn’t mean nothing will ever go wrong, and you’ll never have a disgruntled customer on your hands. However, if you assume an orientation from the outset that says your customers will be well treated, it’s amazing how many fewer things will actually go wrong and how forgiving those consumers will be when they do. And when something does go wrong, superior customer service is all about setting it right again. It’s all about how you treat customers in good times and in bad.
When I awarded the 2008 edition of my “Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service” to the Canadian online DVD-rental service Zip back in November, the post I wrote on our blog unleashed a fury of responses the likes of which I had never before or since experienced. I had to block most of them because they were simply frothing-at-the-mouth irrational and offensive. And they completely missed the point. My complaint was much less about my actual experience with the service, which, in my view, had deteriorated substantially over the few years I was a subscriber, and all about the utterly indifferent response I got from Zip’s customer-service people.
One more recent responder, whose slightly more reasonable comment I now wish I had actually allowed, told me I wasn’t the centre of the universe. How completely wrong. As a customer, I am exactly the centre of the universe since no company will have a universe without customers.
Taylor Guitars, by way of sharp contrast to United, offered to repair Carroll’s guitar for free and further capitalised with a YouTube video of their own directing viewers to their web site to learn more about how to protect your guitar when travelling.
The singer himself has shot to newfound stardom and is booking new gigs left, right and centre, and the world awaits the second in what he promises will be a trilogy of songs about his experiences with United. He has also turned down all new offers of compensation from United, saying it had its chance to deal properly with his complaint. (In fact, the second song promises to be all about United customer-relations agent Ms. Irlweg who, Carroll says, was the last person at United to tell him he would be receiving no compensation.)
And United? Well, the Times of London claimed the fallout delivered a 10 per cent hit to United’s stock price, costing its shareholders about $180-million. It would be nice to think a consumer backlash of this nature could cause that kind of real pain to an unfeeling global corporation, but the stock-price dive probably had more to do with lousy second-quarter results that were released as Carroll’s video was going viral. Still, the airline and its utterly indifferent front-line agents, whom Carroll names and shames in his catchy and witty song, have become the laughing stock of the world wide web.
Update: The second in Carroll’s trilogy of revenge hymns is now up on YouTube.
By Linda Forrest
The last year for me has been filled with work of a different sort entirely.
It’s hard to believe that I bid a fond farewell to the blogosphere just over one year ago, as I went on maternity leave. We welcomed wee Parker in early September of last year and since he was last written about in this forum, he’s changed from a baby to a little boy, toddling around, saying first words, changing our world in so many delightful ways.
I returned from leave to find some new clients in the stable, some familiar clients with new stories to tell and a heavy schedule of releases and launches slated for the Fall. It’s a busy time here at inmedia and I’m glad to be back on board to help lighten the load of my colleagues, connect with clients new and old and get back in touch with the media and analyst targets on their behalf.
As Francis has said, we’re renewing our commitment to the blog and look forward to reconnecting with our readers and with other writers in the marketing and PR realms online.
