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 Francis Moran
Regular followers of this blog will know that lousy customer service is one subject certain to get my rant on. My consistent points are that the cost of acquiring customers is almost always far higher than the cost of keeping them, that effective customer service is the only sustainable competitive differentiator, and that most customer-service operations fail by forcing their agents to be powerless automatons more interested in getting the customer off the line than actually servicing them.
So while browsing through the WhyHire.Me blog of my pal Andy Church today, I was delighted to come across his happy experience with what he called empowered customer service from Canadian cellular carrier Rogers Wireless. The fact that he gives a shout-out to what, in my experience, is one of the least helpful categories of customer-service providers in existence, cellular telephone companies, makes it all the more necessary to give his experience a broader airing.
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
I have often said that my first job in this business was taking pictures, and it’s quite true. The very first money I made in the media-communications racket came from squinting through the viewfinder of a single-lens-reflex camera and capturing what I saw on a strip of plastic coated with a light-sensitive emulsion that was then run through a couple of baths of chemicals that turned the latent image in the emulsion into a visible image. Light was then projected through that image onto a different kind of light-sensitive medium, photographic paper, and a picture emerged.
It was — and, just barely, still is — a nearly magical process that has been an integral part of my life since before I can remember, thanks to a father who was also a keen shutterbug.
If all this means very little to you, chances are you were born after 1984, when Canon introduced the world’s first digital camera, and taking pictures is for you a cold and disposable affair of rearranging electronic bits on a piece of memory circuitry somewhere.
But for those of us for whom picture taking and print making are that warm, analog and ultimately high-fidelity alchemy between silver-halide and light, yesterday’s announcement by Eastman Kodak Company that it is discontinuing its 74-year old Kodachrome brand of camera film is another — and nearly the final — nail in the coffin of analog photography.
I have been an avid photographer ever since I grabbed my older brother’s little Instamatic and whipped off five or six frames before realising it had film in it. Man, did I get whupped for that. In high school, the year book editor, still a good pal notwithstanding, had to forcibly lock me out of his office because I’d use all the film stock he had. When I worked on the Halifax Daily News, I once overheard our parsimonious owner call up our film supplier to find out how much the masses of black-and-whilte film I had shot the day before actually cost him. (The paper bought its film in 500-foot rolls; the seven or eight 36-shot rolls I had used cost no more than a couple of bucks but he still thought it excessive.)
My older son, who studied photography as part of his fine arts courses at Canterbury High School this past semester, asked me if I had any black-and-white negatives he could use to practice his new-found darkroom techniques. He asked me in a tentative way that suggested he doubted that not even I, grizzled and ancient thought I might be to him, could possibly possess an artifact as old and archaic as a negative! I introduced him to to three very large Rubbermaid bins containing nothing but black-and-white negatives, and he happily selected a tidy shot of a container pier in Halifax that he promptly printed back to front.
My ability to crank through three or four rolls at one sitting when my two lads were so much smaller and so much cuter eventually drove me to buy my first digital. I traded in my top-of-the-line 35mm Nikon gear and bought what was then an advanced – and expensive — point-and-shoot. Every time I pick up that little digital and can’t wrap my hands around the lusciously ergonomic body of that Nikon F4 and manually rotate a lens into the precise focus and framing I’m seeking, I regret the trade.
BUT — I used some of my trade-in cash to also buy a new body for my medium-format film camera and when I want to take real pictures, like an iconic Seine River-framed view of Paris’s most recognised landmark or a sunset shot of the hill-top cathedral in Cobh in County Cork, Ireland, both pictured here, I load that sucker up with colour transparency film and go to town. I, and an ever-shrinking band of film fanatics, believe it is simply not possible to capture a real picture unless silver and other chemicals are involved.
In a terrible twist of irony, however, it is now impossible to make a print from a colour transparency — except through the garish Cibrachrome process that I have never liked — without going digital. Today, I must hand my transparencies over to Jim Lamont, a phenomenal print-maker and incredibly accomplished landscape photographer, who runs my trannies through a sophisticated drum scanner that creates massive 25-meg files from which he then painstakingly makes and frames flawless, gallery-quality prints for me that are weighing down the walls of my house.
Kodak is still making film, including the Ektachrome colour transparency I love so much, but I wonder for how much longer. Already, if I want some, I have to get it shipped to me from Montréal or Toronto because no-one in Ottawa stocks it any more. It will be a sad, sad day when it, too, goes the way of the Kodachrome, a faithful witness to history over eight decades.
