They Said It on The West Wing
C. J. Cregg at the press-room lectern
Are you a Wingnut—that is, a person who still enjoys watching and discussing episodes of the TV show The West Wing more than a decade after the program went off the air? Do you know what the characters are going to say before they say it? Do you have entire conversations committed to memory? Have you ever asked, “What’s next, Mrs. Landingham?” for no particular reason? Did you view the film The American President multiple times so as to spot similarities with The West Wing in plot, script, and casting?
If so, you’re a little bit loopy—and I’m your lawyer. No, wait! Ainsley Hayes (played by Emily Procter) is your lawyer. I, on the other hand, am your grammar and pronunciation critic.
It’s been many years since I owned a television set, but once I discovered Netflix I quickly found my way to more than 150 West Wing episodes spanning seven seasons from 1999 to 2007. The series is so intelligent, witty, and well paced—particularly the first four seasons, before Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme left the show—it practically ruined me for other televised entertainment.
But I was ready to move on. Enough is enough, I thought. I tried to watch House of Cards—Netflix seemed to think I’d enjoy it—but House of Cards was too dark and took itself too seriously. The characters were amoral and scheming, and I didn’t care if they lived, died, or ate each other’s digestive organs for breakfast, much less gained positions of power and influence. I had the same reaction to Mad Men.
I had just settled in to watch the BBC’s Planet Earth when I learned of a new podcast, The West Wing Weekly. Podcast hosts Hrishikesh Hirway (Hrishi) and Joshua Malina (Josh, who played Will Bailey on The West Wing) were funny and charming, and they were going to devote an entire hour, once a week, to the discussion of a single West Wing episode. What could I do but go along?
When examining a program minutely, naturally you’re going to pick it to pieces. You’re going to recall your favorite moments, rave about the acting, and criticize the ways in which the TV show isn’t like Real Life. That’s what you do. “That could never have happened,” you think, forgetting for a moment that The West Wing isn’t a documentary. Hrishi once observed that, after Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (played by Bradley Whitford) was shot and rushed to the hospital, he was removed from the ambulance head first, whereas an actual gunshot victim would come out feet first since the oxygen and other lifesaving equipment are kept toward the front of the vehicle.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT
PRESIDENT BARTLET: I like your sass.
C. J. You’ve got a very nice sass yourself… sir.
***
The argument starts when Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) compliments Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter) on her appearance—“Hayes, you could make a good dog break his leash”—offending office temp Celia Walton (Alanna Ubach), who upbraids Sam for what she considers a sexist remark. Also present are Charlie Young (Dulé Hill) and Ginger (Kim Webster). Ainsley—appealed to when she returns to the room—says flatly, “He’s not a sexist.” Celia presses the point.
CELIA: If you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.
AINSLEY: I’m sorry?
CELIA: I said, I’m surprised you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.
AINSLEY: I don’t even know what that means.
CELIA: I think you do.
AINSLEY: And I think you think I’m made out of candy glass, Celia. If somebody says something that offends you, tell them. But all women don’t have to think alike.
CELIA: I didn’t say they did. And when someone said something that offended me, I did say so.
AINSLEY: I like it when the guys tease me. It’s an inadvertent show of respect I’m on the team, and I don’t mind it when it gets sexual. And you know what? I like sex.
CHARLIE: Hello!
AINSLEY: I don’t think whatever sexuality I may have diminishes my power. I think it enhances it.
CELIA: And what kind of feminism do you call that?
AINSLEY: My kind.
GINGER: It’s called lipstick feminism. I call it stiletto feminism.
SAM: Stilettos?
AINSLEY: You’re not in enough trouble already?
SAM: I suppose I am.
CELIA: Isn’t the point that Sam wouldn’t have been able to find another way to be chummy with a woman who wasn’t sexually appealing?
AINSLEY: He would be able to. But that isn’t the point. The point is that sexual revolution tends to get in the way of actual revolution. Nonsense issues distract attention away from real ones. Pay equity, child care, honest-to-God sexual harassment. And in this case, a speech in front of the U. N. General Assembly. So… stop trying to take the fun out of my day. With that, I’m going to get a cupcake.
WHY WE DON’T LIKE MANDY
Mandy Hampton (Moira Kelly) lasts only one season as a White House media-relations consultant. Hard to believe, as she tells us early on how young and cute she is, despite having earned a bachelor’s degree in art history, a master’s degree in communications, and a Ph.D. in political science.
I’ve never seen this actor elsewhere; on The West Wing, at least, she’s shrill, abrasive, and self-absorbed. The writers don’t give her lines that are likely to endear her to audiences, but her delivery is alternately scolding and just short of hysterical. Here she is in repartee with Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and C. J. Cregg (Allison Janney):
MANDY: Are you listening to me?
TOBY: Yes.
MANDY: What was the last thing I said?
TOBY: The last thing you said was, “Are you listening to me?”
MANDY: You guys are idiots, did you know that?
C. J.: In our own defense, we actually do know that.
MANDY: Would you tell him that signing the bill and, thus, swallowing the bitter pill of strip mining would not foreclose a PR approach that would trumpet banking reforms while at the same time excoriating the special-interest strip-mining scam which, by the way, is what I am happy to call it? Tell him that.
C. J.: Toby, Mandy wants you to recommend to the president that we do it her way.
TOBY: Did you understand what she said?
C. J.: No, but she seemed pretty confident.
GRADUATING COLLEGE
West Wing First Daughter Zoey Bartlet (Elisabeth Moss) reminds her father that she “graduated high school.” White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler mentions that he “graduated college.” Zoey and Toby, both of whom are bright and well educated, surely meant to say “graduated from high school [or college]” but were, we suppose, distracted by a flying insect of some sort.
You can’t “graduate college” any more than you can “go college” or “arrive college.” In this instance, the verb “to graduate” is acting as an intransitive verb, and intransitive verbs cannot take on an object. —writersdigest.com Sept. 14, 2010
HOMAGE
Podcast cohost Hrishikesh Hirway is an accomplished musician and composer who comes across as brilliant, poised, and so likable that it made me a little sad to hear him mispronounce homage as oh-MAZH.
The Cambridge Dictionary gives the U.S. pronunciation of homage as HOM-ij, while the New York Times has this to say (nytimes.com, Nov. 5, 2010):
As with other leading American dictionaries, Webster’s New World currently recognizes two equally accepted pronunciations of the word: either HOM-ij or OM-ij. Since the pronunciation with “h” is listed first, that would favor “a homage” over “an homage.”
Refrain from saying oh-MAZH unless you are French and you cannot help yourself.
HISTORY, HISTORICAL
Numerous West Wing characters have been known to drop their H’s. To drop or not to drop—that is the question, as it pertains to the initial H in an English word. A pronounced H is said with a burst of sound, as in house, history, and high. People who would never say “an HIS-tor-y of Rome” may yet be heard to omit the H sound in a phrase such as “an ‘is-TOR-i-cal account.”
It is commonly noted in literature from late Victorian times to the early 20th century that some lower-class people consistently drop h in words that should have it, while adding h to words that should not have it. An example from the musical My Fair Lady is, “In ‘Artford, ‘Ereford, and ‘Ampshire, ‘urricanes ‘ardly hever ‘appen.” —Wikipedia
Don’t try to formulate a rule about this; it’s complicated, depending in part on how words entered the English language and what happened after they got here. It’s more a matter of custom than logic. For herb, the British pronounce the initial H—HERB. American-English–speakers say the older version, ERB, though to kill weeds they buy HERB-i-cide.
SHORT-LIVED
Eli Attie, a onetime West Wing writer and consultant, is a regular guest on The West Wing Weekly podcast. During one of his guest spots, he says short-LIVED with a short I, as in GIVE. Actually, the I in -lived should be long, as in HIVE.
PULITZER
C. J. pronounces this word PEW-litz-er. Josh and Hrishi discuss the matter at some length on a podcast episode. Hrishi reveals that the correct pronunciation is “PULL-it-sir,” and to make double-darn sure he telephones the Pulitzer offices to see how callers are greeted. If C. J. didn’t know better, someone else should have, wouldn’t you think—at least one of the other members of the West Wing cast and crew. Sigh.
PODIUM
Practically everybody on The West Wing says podium when they mean lectern or rostrum. You stand ON a podium and BEHIND a lectern, people. I have written (superbly) on this very topic; please see https://writingqueen.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/podium-vs-lectern/.
ERR
To err is human, but if you don’t want to compound your error, do not pronounce ERR like “AIR.” It should rhyme with FUR. It was Toby Ziegler who committed this solecism on The West Wing, and I still haven’t quite gotten over it.
Nine Life Instructions
Is there mercury in this salmon?
ONE—FOLLOW YOUR GUT. Everybody—people who don’t even know you—wants to tell you how to live. Some of the stuff is useful and necessary, like (a) you don’t have to give your baby a bath every day and (b) those little fluorescent light bulbs last forever but you can’t just throw them in the trash when they do burn out. Some of it will “resonate” with you, as meditation advice did for me. But all the opinions about spirituality, about exercise, about diet, about replacing your pillows twice a year, and so forth, can make you crazy. And they keep changing it…. Omigosh, how many grams of protein have I had today? Oh, hey, this is Alaskan salmon, is that the poison kind with mercury? Were the salmon humanely treated? Coffee is chock full of antioxidants? Who knew? Does antioxidant mean “against oxygen”? Help!
Relax. The way I see it, we have as many lifetimes as we need to get it right.
TWO—KEEP AN OPEN MIND. How do you know there’s no such thing as a leprechaun?
Old Faithful
THREE—WRITE DOWN YOUR WILD IDEAS and bursts of inspiration. You’ll think of a thousand reasons why they won’t work, and you’ll discard them… at your peril. They’re like geysers: They come from the depths. They’re your Self talking to yourself. So keep track of them, even if you’re not ready to act on them.
FOUR—COLLECT SOMETHING, like coins or stamps or antique butter chips (little tiny plates for pats of butter), or colored bottles. See, it’s fun and you meet interesting people, but the best thing is that your friends and family will know what to get you for holiday and birthday presents. And start collections for other people—your children or grandchildren, for example. I gave two of my grandsons starter coin-collecting kits for Christmas this year, and I’ll be giving them coins for their upcoming birthdays. If for some reason they don’t want to save and collect coins, at least they’re getting something useful—not just money, but interesting money.
FIVE—WRITE NOTES, REAL ONES, ON PAPER, or send cards, whatever, in the actual U.S. mail. It might seem quaint, but it’s a thoughtful going-out-of-your-way sort of thing… a mitzvah, if you will.
SIX—LIGHTEN UP, IN EVERY WAY. Bring light into your environment—physically, mentally, whatever lifts your spirit: music, flowers, bright prints in pretty frames, lace curtains, whimsical lamps, people who make you laugh. The flip side is, don’t let negativity come in and steal your joy. I allow people with minor problems (and they’re almost all minor) ten minutes to vent, and that’s it. Any more than that contaminates your space, and you have to have a priest or shaman or somebody come in and expel the gloom and do a house blessing.
SEVEN—This is vital, and it will serve you well: BECOME AN EXPERT IN SOMETHING OR SOMEONE—Jesse Owens, protein in human nutrition, the Isle of Man, the reign of King Henry VIII, making your own “green” housekeeping products, growing tomatoes, U.S. vice presidents, reiki—whatever turns you on. That woman wrote a best-selling book entirely about commas, for crying out loud. I, personally, am an expert on so many things that it’s unmanageable. I need to sharpen my focus and hone my expertise on, say, mindfulness meditation or the proper use of the em dash.
Why? For one thing, the object of your expertise becomes its own little universe, and if you study it exhaustively you will become not only smart but wise. Moreover, it’s satisfying and energizing to keep learning new stuff. Most important, it’s a good way to market your “brand,” personally or professionally. You can write articles or books, speak at a Kiwanis luncheon, teach at a community college, put up an authoritative website or blog, sell things… the possibilities are virtually endless.
EIGHT—TAKE THE SCENIC ROUTE (Join AAA before you go).
NINE—LET’S GET THE PAPER COMPANIES TO STOP BLEACHING EVERYTHING. Why bleach toilet paper, for example? It’s just going to get brown again. Likewise with napkins, paper towels, and so forth. Bleaching household paper products is an absolutely unnecessary and environmentally harmful practice, and we should start an internet campaign via email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, to get consumers to demand that the practice be stopped. (But see “ONE” above.)
The Cancer Diaries: Ride On
Life is hard. Even when things are going well, daily living requires a lot of effort—as a response to our own demands, needs, and expectations or those of other people. When you are retired, the demands slacken and you have more control over your time. But if you’re anything at all like me, you might actually miss the good old days when you had to show up somewhere every morning at 8 a.m. Without effort, there’s no payoff.
For many retirees, it’s easy to follow the path of least resistance, sleeping too much and accomplishing too little. The farther down that path you go, the more susceptible you are to depression. We all need a reason to stay awake, and we need people to validate us. Loneliness is a serious health problem among the elderly. Studies have shown that the risk of premature death from loneliness equals that from smoking.
Since my lung-cancer diagnosis a few months ago, loneliness is the least of my worries. For one thing, my friends and family have treated me like royalty. For another, I’m aware of the dangers of isolation, so I make more phone calls and schedule more outings. And finally, between doctors, nurses, and chemo, I have too many appointments to get lonely.
So instead of being solitary, my days are cluttered and disorganized. Now, when time is more precious than ever, I don’t treasure it the way I ought to. My meditation practice is spotty, as is my church attendance. I’m not as useful as I’d like to be, to humankind in general and to my friends and family in particular. I spend little or no time in natural surroundings. The only exercise I get is when I’m forced to walk up and down the single flight of stairs between my individual apartment door and the main front door.
In part, whoever stole my electric bike is to blame for this sorry state of affairs. I had a nifty Cyclamatic CX2 folding electric bike until someone sawed through the cable lock and made off with the bike while I was in the hospital last month. I had relied on the Cyclamatic to transport me when I wanted to run errands, visit friends, get a little exercise, and enjoy some fresh air, plus it was just a whole lot of fun to ride. I could adjust the power level to determine how much effort I wanted to expend, so I could zip up hills without breaking a sweat or I could power down and elevate my heart rate.
The problem was that I had to keep the bike outside. It was securely locked—or so I thought—and was practically invisible from the street, but it was still vulnerable. The bike could be folded to fit in small spaces, but it weighed 57 pounds—much more than I could manhandle up and down a flight of steps.
Since I acquired the Cyclamatic, I’ve seen Amazon listings for e-bikes weighing as little as 25 pounds. These, too, are foldable. The sensibly priced ones cost $400 to $600, plus $100 for assembly. The sturdiest lock I could find is priced at $150, though I wouldn’t need to secure the bike outside if it weighed only 25 pounds. I might have to do some arm-strengthening exercises, but I think I could manage a 25-pound two-wheeled vehicle.
I’m considering crowd-funding the whole shebang—e-bike, assembly, lock, a basket for “cargo,” and a better helmet than my old one, plus tax. That comes to a total of about a thousand dollars. I’ve never crowd-funded anything before. It feels a little tacky, asking strangers to pay for something that was taken from me in part due to my own carelessness. On the other hand, it’s the only way I’m going to get a replacement for my beloved e-bike, so I should probably get over my squeamishness and just do it.
There’s an elephant in the room, and it’s called “life expectancy.” Am I likely to live long enough to get my money’s worth? And how long am I going to have the energy and optimism I have today? Not very long, I’m thinking, if I make every decision as if I’m going to pop off in a week or two. So I think I’ll get the bike—to improve the present and as an investment in the future. And if I’m right about Heaven, it’s lousy with e-bikes. No golden chariots on the other side of the pearly gates. Just electric bikes, lined up neatly and waiting for angels with weary wings to hop on.
A Sunny Square of Sidewalk
For the past few months, since I was diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer, I’ve felt my life contracting. Time is a gift that arrives in little packets, not the vast, mysterious plain it was when I thought I’d live forever. This has happened before… when my children were newborns, for example, and I got to be a stay-at-home mom for a while. Nothing that happened before they were born and nothing that was going to happen when I went back to work mattered much. The only things in sharp focus were the baby and the new routine… warm bathwater, fresh clothes, mealtime, and overpowering love.
These days, metaphorically I’m playing Barbies with little kids in a sunny square of sidewalk. I’ve developed the spontaneous mindfulness of children. My new superpower is the ability to shut off guilt and regret, anxiety, and fear, living inside the spatial perimeter of that square and the temporal boundary of that hour. Physically I’m warmed and comforted by sunlight and toddler kisses.
This works great for me, but people have questions. They want to know what I’m doing about the cancer and what’s going to happen when the chemo stops working. They’d probably like to know how long I’m going to live, too, but, politely, they don’t ask. Still, it seems as if I should care about these questions, and right now I don’t. I have to trust that when I need certain answers, I’ll get them. Meanwhile, I let the questions bounce off my square of sidewalk. Otherwise they interrupt my dancing.
In the weeks and months B.C. (Before Cancer), I fretted. My life seemed too small. Rather than appreciating the sunrises and sunsets I was dependably receiving, I chafed at limitations. I wanted to be out there in the world, doing things, going to concerts, riding my e-bike, waltzing in a pavilion, meeting friends for lunch. Truth be told, I longed to buy a mini-motor home and take to the road. These days (A.D.—After Diagnosis), I’m enchanted by late-summer sounds—katydids, crickets, and the change in the pitch of children’s voices as they wring every drop of joy out of the final days of summer vacation.
A cancer diagnosis has an unexpected cushion: People treat you like you’re special—or maybe you just feel special and people react accordingly. It’s as if they think you’re particularly brave or strong when, really, all you are is unusually conscious. And your cancer gives them something to do to demonstrate their love for you. Trust me on this—every card, letter, phone call, email… every token of friendship… means the world. Don’t for a minute think the little things don’t matter. Maybe they can’t cure cancer, but the hugs warm my heart and the prayers keep me afloat.
To be continued…
Thoughts during Chemotherapy
Everyone is kind here. They smile with their eyes. I’ve known people who bend the corners of their mouth upward mechanically, but not these people. These people are compassionate. They understand why you’d do just about anything to change places with them. And deep down, in a place they might not even be acquainted with, they’re thinking, “I feel bad for you, honey, but you have cancer and I don’t.”
I used to jolt myself out of depression this way. Maybe I was going through the heartbreak of a faithless boyfriend or the despair of an empty bank account, but there was always something worse. “At least,” I told myself smugly, “I don’t have cancer.”
I could hardly bring myself to say “cancer.” It’s an ugly, inelegant word with a flat, midwestern A, like “splat” or “blam.” Why can’t we call it “Piccadilly” or “popsicle”? The announcement, “I was just diagnosed with popsicle” doesn’t sound nearly as ominous as, “My doctor says I have cancer.”
And why do people choose to become oncology nurses? It eludes me. For seventy years I’ve run away from cancer the way mobsters fled from Al Capone. My make-believe world was cancer-free, although fate didn’t always play along. My dad died of a witches’ brew of maladies at the age of 71: Lou Gehrig’s disease, lung cancer, heart failure, and finally a stroke. But I created a cancer-immune bubble around myself and was somehow convinced that—though I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for forty years—I would live to be at least 85 and when I did succumb, it would happen in the middle of a country line dance such as “Cotton Eye Joe” or “Boot-Scootin’ Boogie.”
In any case, no one was more surprised than I was by my lung-cancer diagnosis. There was a period of four or five days between when I began to suspect that I had lung cancer and when it was confirmed. During those few days, I tried it on for size. I stood in front of the mirror, looked my reflected self in the eye, said, “I have lung cancer,” and waited for the tears and hysteria, the weeping, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth. When none of these was forthcoming, I ratcheted it up a bit.
“I have lung cancer and it will probably do me in,” I said to my reflection. Still no emotional breakdown. The best I could come up with was a peevish, “Oh, shit!” Annoyance because my last will and testament was only half completed. Anxiety—the type that comes on when you realize that it’s December 1 and you haven’t started your Christmas shopping. But the only actual trauma I experienced was the sort of knee-jerk panic that happens when you’re in a car accident, before you take attendance and realize that everyone is more or less all right.
I am sad for my friends and family, though I have every intention of lurking around after my demise in such a way as to make their lives interesting, dropping in whimsical surprises now and then. But, try as I might, I can’t work up a sense of tragedy for myself. I’m pretty sure that the change we call “death” is just exactly that—a change leading to a new way of being. I suspect it’s a thrilling ride, but I could be wrong. It could be a huge yawn, or it could be oblivion, which is what it looks like from the outside. Either way, it makes no more sense to fear dying than to fear falling asleep.
The way I see it, quite a few people have died—trillions, probably more—and hardly any of those people have been known to suffer horrendously after death. We do know that chickens run around with their heads cut off for a while after the decapitation has occurred, but that hardly qualifies as suffering. If anything, the chickens seem quite chipper, almost gleeful, as one might feel when one discovers that one can carry on without one’s head for a bit. But being merely operational could get tedious after a while, and we humans are conditioned to aim higher than merely “not suffering.”
Stage 4 lung cancer is not the diagnosis you want if you are a college freshman with aspirations to be a neurosurgeon, but it’s an excellent primer in mindful living. You’re going to live one day at a time whether you want to or not, so you might as well focus most of your attention on the sunny square of sidewalk you’re sitting in, playing Barbies with your grandchildren. Right now I’m perched next to a small machine whose purpose is to poison me without killing me. The machine is dispensing precise amounts of chemicals that are designed to destroy fast-growing cells—cancer cells, but also cells of skin, nails, hair, and bone. This is why I am wearing a wig so obvious it might as well bear a sign that screams “wig” through a bullhorn. I thought I’d have a few weeks to prepare for wearing the wig. I didn’t expect to reach up one day, pat my head, and look down at a hand that might belong to Chewbacca… or to brush at a snarl and find half my hair on the hairbrush.
Fortunately, I had bought a wig about two years ago for no particular reason. Finding myself suddenly and virtually hairless, there was nothing to do except take my wig to the beauty salon, have it trimmed, and emerge as a comparatively hirsute redhead. To tell the truth, the wig looks much better than my real hair, which is thin, gray, limp, lifeless, and—at the moment—absent. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you can’t improve your appearance one-hundred percent by spending $11.11 on eBay. My son Eli sent me a much nicer wig from Amazon, so I now have a go-to wig and a backup—something every moderately vain 70-year-old chemo patient needs if she wants to show her face in public.
I believe in the sort of reincarnation in which you continue to make progress as you move from one life to the next. I hope that one’s hair makes progress too—although it might be that as one grows spiritually one cares less and less what one looks like. Vanity, I believe, is not a hallmark of spiritually advanced life.
To be continued….
Creating News
You’re writing a media release (formerly called a “press release”) announcing the hiring of a new president.
Your opening paragraph might look something like this:
XYZ Corporation is announcing the hiring of Mary Doe as president. Mary has been with Acme Widgets for twelve years, the past six as vice president for product development. She invented the Writing Widget, which surpassed revenue projections by more than 150 percent in the first twelve months….
After you scribble a few more paragraphs about Mary and her background and achievements—having said everything that might be considered pertinent for a media release—you’re ready to edit. As you read what you’ve written, tweaking the vocabulary and correcting the punctuation, you might notice something that many writers of media releases notice when they review their first drafts:
It’s boring. It’s not news. There’s no “hook,” nothing to grab the reader’s attention.
Media releases: What’s news?
Writing a media release is more about promotional savvy than writing skill. The fact that your company has lured Mary away from Acme offers little news value unless Mary is famous, has climbed Mount Everest in a bikini, is 14 years old, or stands out in some other way. Being hired is not newsworthy.
Whatever the anomaly that makes Mary special or her hiring a reason to celebrate, you owe it to your audience to share that information. As you are seeking to serve your readers or listeners, you need to give them something useful, interesting, amusing, or otherwise beneficial. Without that, all you’ve done is throw more words onto the massive pile that grows by the trillions minute by minute. I suspect that all that hot air is the real cause of global warming.
Let’s assume that if there were nothing remarkable about Mary you wouldn’t have hired her. It’s possible, though, that her qualifications are esoteric, not of interest to the general public. If that’s the case, then the newsworthy portion of your media release might be the open house that XYZ Corp is going to host in order to introduce Mary to the community.
Once you’ve etched the bare facts onto your shitty first draft, checked it out to see if it makes its point and that point is worth reading, and revised it if necessary, then it’s time to rewrite—making it succinct, well organized, grammatically correct, and so forth. Finally, ask someone else to look it over for those same attributes. Every company has an employee who seems to have a knack for proofing. Enlist that person’s aid.
The finished product might begin like this:
Meet Mary Doe, the new president of XYZ Corporation and inventor of the Writing Widget, the popular handheld device that supplies instant vocabulary on thousands of topics.
Mary will present five free 30-minute Widget Workshops at the times and places listed below. Sign up and you’ll automatically enter a drawing for a free Writing Widget, a $49 value.
Why is the final media release so different from the first draft? XYZ Corp has wisely determined that Mary’s new job, in itself, has little news value but could be a vehicle for exposure of its hottest product.
Not every media release requires a lot of fanfare. News stories should answer the basic questions—who, what, where, when, why, and how? But you should put all your media releases to the final test—the key question—which is “so what?” If you pass the draft around to colleagues and the typical reaction is a very long yawn, you’d better go back to the drawing board and find a way to pump up your story so that media will be interested enough to print, broadcast, or otherwise disseminate it.
To be continued…
No, no, no, no, no, no…
You and I might speak to one another for an hour and communicate little. Communication doesn’t take place without meaning.
Meaning is information that enriches or expands a basic message. It is a layer of communication, adding dimensions beyond the basic message. Successive layers of meaning go from the concrete to the abstract and often from the universal to the personal, the objective to the subjective.
Everything you write, from a laundry list to an inaugural address, has at least three dimensions of meaning: (a) what it means to you, (b) what it means to your principal audience, and (c) what it means to disinterested bystanders or secondary audiences—your coworkers, for example.
Disinterested, by the way, is not synonymous with uninterested. Disinterested means “neutral” or “uninvolved,” “impartial,” “unbiased.” If you’re a defendant in a jury trial, you want jurors who are disinterested but certainly not uninterested.
Your meaning can be straightforward or complex, but finding the relationship between (a) and (b), with a nod to (c), provides structure and direction as you write.
Remember to aim
The careless writers we’re discussing probably don’t intend to shoot themselves in the foot. Some might start out organized and sensible but become impatient and a little scared, so they rush the process. Maybe they have a hidden agenda. For whatever reason, they lose sight of the audience; they forget to serve.
Don’t make the same mistake. In a matter of minutes you can put your writing project in perspective, giving it the proper weight and emphasis and improving the odds that your message will be
- read
- understood
- believed
- persuasive
Maintain that perspective as your work progresses, checking now and then to ensure that your prose is
- clear and concise
- free of jargon, convoluted phrases, verbal showing-off
- consistent with your brand
Use the Writing Wheel
As you prepare to write, put yourself in the proper frame of mind.
- Know what you want to say and why. Develop a clear idea of your purpose, and make sure it’s consistent with your USP or UIS.
- Determine who your audiences are and how your writing will serve them—even if you’re writing to criticize or complain.
- Unfailingly address your audiences with respect.
- Be honest and transparent. Don’t use language to conceal the truth.
- When writing a first draft, let your writing flow freely. It’s okay—even desirable—to write a “shitty first draft” (see page 23). When you edit, choose your words carefully.
- Less is usually more—short words, short sentences, short paragraphs show respect for your readers and their attention spans.
Wait! Stop! Back up!
As you were preparing to write, was your message in focus? Did you understand…
- what you wanted or needed to say [= your meaning]?
- how your message was relevant to your principal audience [=audience meaning]?
- whether there were important secondary audiences (colleagues, critics, or competitors, for example) who might construe additional or conflicting meanings?
Ideally, once you’ve decided (a) that you have something worthwhile to say and (b) how and to whom you want to say it, you’ll take whatever time is necessary to determine (c) what it means to your audiences.
Exercise
Read the following scenario and then prepare a message to convey the necessary information. Indicate the medium (or media), delivery methods, transmission schedule, and other details.
Scenario. You’re an elementary-school principal and your message
- deals with next Wednesday’s early school closing—ninety minutes before the usual bell—due to maintenance requiring that the water be shut off. (Today is Thursday.)
- must be conveyed to students, parents, teachers and other staff, district administrators, bus drivers, child-care facilities, and all others with a need to know.
What does it mean?
To you, it’s of minor administrative importance, but it could turn into a major bureaucratic headache if not everyone is informed. The meaning from your perspective is initially a matter of penetration.
You’ve identified numerous audiences and you address the matter of perception. Within each audience there might be dozens of interpretations buzzing around. No audience will interpret your message uniformly, but there might be one or two prevalent understandings.
For example—
Students will be thrilled at the prospect of a shorter school day, you think, before it occurs to you that there are a number of kids for whom school is safer and more hospitable than home.
Some parents will enjoy a little extra time with their kids; other parents will have to scramble for child-care arrangements; still others will shrug it off since their children are latchkey kids no matter when the bell rings.
Teachers will have to adjust lesson plans and, if the hour and a half isn’t made up, cram a little more learning into a little less time.
Transportation planners and drivers will have to change bus schedules with an eye to factors such as hour-to-hour traffic patterns and the possibility that some parents will forget to meet the bus ninety minutes earlier.
Just a brief mental scan of students’, parents’, and staff’s attitudes toward school-closing time reminds you that your announcement is far from trivial. Feelings of sympathy might tug at you as you’re drafting the announcement, and your tone becomes softer, less abrupt.
When you see how an apparently simple message can be understood in dozens of ways (not all of which you can realistically consider), accounting for a reasonable variety of interpretations will automatically become part of your writing process.
Getting their attention
There will be other times when some or all of your message will be of scant interest to your audience. Be prepared to improve your communication or, starting from scratch, to rethink the relevance of your message. To do neither is a declaration of war.
Maybe you’re required by law to inform parents about school-board meetings. Maybe half of them don’t care. You can’t make them care, but you can (a) embed the meeting details in announcements of popular sports events and concerts; (b) place relevant topics on the board’s agenda; or (c) format the school-board notice like an ad, keeping it brief and eye-catching… among other creative approaches.
If you mean to be understood, your writing will address the various levels of interest and understanding among your audiences.
If you have communicated clearly and respectfully, and your audience understands but rejects your message, don’t blame your writing. Knowing about a particular audience’s distaste for your point of view doesn’t obligate you to satisfy that audience’s appetite.
You don’t have to do all the work. Your readers can be expected to meet you partway. It’s your job to figure out how far they’ll advance and on which path.
Good writing is the truth as you know it that communicates as intended. It’s as much a matter of how it’s received as how it’s delivered. Whether your writing is “correct” in terms of grammar and mechanics, whether it’s clever, whether it’s lyrical… these are secondary considerations, less important than clarity, respect, and honesty.
Postscript
Consider nonverbal factors in written and public forums. There are dozens of potential sources of interference that can weaken your message. A few examples:
- the paper you print on
- the delivery method
- parking availability at your venue
- your fragrance
- a preexisting relationship with your audience; in particular,
- a hostile audience (a situation that might require your defusing of the situation ahead of time)
Early-closing announcement
Do you need to prepare more than one announcement? If so, how many, and to whom will you address your messages?
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What media will you use? (Letter, convocation, school PA system, weekly newsletter, and so on)
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How will you transmit your message or messages? (Send home with students, U.S. mail, broadcast, and so forth)
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When will you transmit your message or messages? (For example, send first announcement immediately with reminder the day before the early closing.)
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Text
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How well does your audience know you?
Apart from the content of your message, being liked and respected by a large and expanding audience will contribute to your persuasiveness and further your objectives.
You might make any number of assumptions, correct or otherwise, about me and my spoken message based on, for example,
- eye contact and other body language
- the site I choose—meeting you for coffee or treating you to lunch at a swank restaurant
- my slovenly appearance or expensive manicure and wardrobe
- my age, gender, cultural background, accent
These factors are differently understood across cultures and send unintended messages, only some of which I can control.
In written communication, examples of nonverbal cues about me and my message include:
- communication medium—text message, email, snail mail
- type of paper
- visual presentation—design, illustrations
A note about nonprofits: I am often perplexed by fundraisers’ lavish appeals, and am less likely to be persuaded by slick, expensive-looking pamphlets than by well-written, -designed, and -presented one-color appeals on, say, matte recycled 24-pound stock.
Fundraising professionals have told me that their wealthy target donors expect, and respond more favorably to, slick, glossy, full-color pamphlets. I believe, however, that creative, resourceful writers and designers get the job done without appearing to waste money better spent on the charitable cause they represent.
A positive relationship with your audience has impact at many levels and over time and is a huge factor in how well you communicate. Remember that when it comes to your audience, there is no hard line between your public self and your private self. If you are well known, a public figure, perhaps, and are observed manhandling your weeping toddler in public, it can undo much of your good communication work.
Be accessible and transparent. Your reputation matters. Your secrets matter even more.
“Wait a minute!” you might be thinking. “Are you trying to tell me that my personal life and emotional stability have an effect on how well I write a business letter or an instruction manual?”
You bet. I’m telling you that your attitude toward other people—those you know and those you don’t—shows up loud and clear in what you write and how you write it. Those classified ads on page 11 and page 39 might have been written by bullies, deeply insecure individuals who get a power jab by throwing jargon around like dice on a Monopoly board.
“But… but… but…” (that’s you, spluttering), “my personal life is nobody’s business.”
That might very well be true, in principle. But many experienced CEOs have set up employee assistance plans and offer other fringe benefits geared toward helping staff with financial and mental-health issues. They know how personal problems affect employee performance.
Happy, healthy employees are better workers in all areas of their jobs, but their attitudes are especially evident in their writing because it reveals so much to so many, and also because it’s on the record. So, yes, the quickest way to improve an employee’s writing might be to arrange for marriage counseling.
How well do you know your audience?
It’s my belief that the best writers and speakers know (at least via research and personal knowledge of representative populations), respect, even love their audiences. With some exceptions, they don’t brandish their bylines or trumpet their credentials. First-class public speaking and writing invite civilized human interaction, not armed conflict.
Let’s work with the assumption that the better you know your audience and consciously use that knowledge in developing your message, the more effective your communication will be… and vice versa.
In January 1999, at city hall in Washington, D.C., this incident took place (as reported in the Christian Science Monitor, February 2, 1999):
David Howard, the mayor’s white ombudsman, said he would have to be “niggardly” with the scarce funds in the department’s budget. One of his two interlocutors, Marshall Brown, who is black, left the room in anger. Mr. Howard offered his resignation, and Mayor Anthony Williams accepted it.
Niggardly means “stingy,” but what it very likely meant to Marshall Brown is that his colleague lacked the character and the class to avoid using a word that sounds like a racial slur. That particular word sears the air like a lightning strike when used unexpectedly and publicly.
An example of the opposite approach—hypersensitivity to cultural identity—was hilariously portrayed on the immortal Jimmy Smits Saturday Night Live sketch “Enchilada” (season 16, 1990), in which NBC News employees (played by Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and Julia Sweeney) overenunciate Spanish words such as enchilada in the presence of the new Hispanic economics correspondent (Jimmy Smits), who speaks… well, like the Anglo guy next door.
You don’t have to be your audience to know your audience. Oscar Wilde had it on the nose when he said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
No, no, no, no, no…
When the powerful are addressing the comparatively powerless, they would do well to study their audience exhaustively. A wealthy politician talking to or about the poor is entering a mine field, as Mitt Romney discovered during his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2012.
“I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien during a February 1 interview.
“I’m not concerned about the very poor—we have a safety net there,” he said. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich—they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
Whatever came after “I’m not concerned about the very poor” was lost in the booming echo of that thoughtless statement. Apart from the obvious—if the “safety net” were working, there would be no “very poor”—Romney required less than ten seconds to disenfranchise nearly 50 million food-bank-dependent Americans by excluding them from “the very heart of America”—whatever that means.
Later that day, Romney told reporters on his campaign plane that the statement about his lack of concern for the very poor was taken out of context.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I — no, no,” he said. “You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying, and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different. I’ve said throughout the campaign my focus, my concern, my energy is gonna be devoted to helping middle-income people, all right?”
Oh, dear. Romney doesn’t come off well here. He entered a mine field without sweeping it first. He’d forgotten a key rule of communication—respect. An honest admission—”I have no idea what it’s like to be poor, but I intend to find out”—would have served him better, though it would backfire if he didn’t follow through.
Contrast Romney’s credibility among the poor with that of President Jimmy Carter. According to the organization Habitat for Humanity,
[President and Mrs. Carter]… have seen firsthand the effects of poor living conditions….Throughout their involvement with the Carter Work Project, President and Mrs. Carter have become tireless advocates, active fundraisers, and some of our best hands-on construction volunteers…. To date, President and Mrs. Carter have served with over 92,260 volunteers in 14 countries to build, renovate and repair 3,944 homes. They have also made quite an impression on thousands of Habitat homeowners and volunteers.
—www.habitat.org
You don’t have to be elected president or build four thousand houses to gain credibility among the disadvantaged. You do need to know enough about any audience to address its members with respect. That might mean becoming familiar with intricacies of culture, environment, needs, and interests.
Addressing a hostile audience
If you are a chief of police speaking to the black community after a racially charged incident, nonverbal factors are as important as what is said, maybe more so. If you have scheduled a news conference, for example…
First, seek to serve. Open your mind and be willing to learn. No matter what your position, don’t insult your audience by riding on your stature.
Defuse the situation in advance, if possible. Lay the groundwork ahead of time through small meetings at schools and churches. Go to them; don’t make them come to you. Ideally, you will already have strong relationships with community leaders.
Blur the line between “us” and “them.”
- Be transparent; toss out your hidden agenda, if you have one. Be generous with information.
- Recruit respected individuals from the black community to support your intention to reach consensus.
- Ask them to write even-handed op-ed pieces for local media. Messages from different sources will resonate differently.
- At meetings and news conferences, don’t stand, figuratively or literally, at a pulpit, and don’t insulate yourself with your cronies.
- Distribute an agenda (the printed kind, not the hidden kind) and include contact information.
Your starting place should be how the audience feels right now. Articulate their position as you understand it. Then move with them, step by step, to consensus. Try to reach agreement on each step before moving to the next. You might move through the steps with statements like these:
- Of course you’re angry. Decent human beings are right to oppose injustice.
- We can’t undo what has happened. We can take action to see that it doesn’t happen again.
- We all want to feel safe in our environment.
- What needs to happen for you to feel that justice has been done?
- What needs to happen for you to feel safe in your community?
Continue in this vein, using “active listening,” validating people’s feelings even if you disagree with their opinions, and showing willingness to compromise. Keep moving through the agenda, offering opportunities for future communication in writing or at additional meetings.
Depending on the setting, you might want to use the brainstorming technique of recording all ideas on a flip pad without comment, no matter how impractical or absurd some of them might be.
Record, transcribe, and distribute proceedings of meetings; include assignments, action steps, and contact information.
More nonverbal ways to respect your audience:
- If at all possible, avoid conducting meetings on stormy nights or during the Super Bowl.
- Ensure adequate parking and seating.
- Keep the venue at a comfortable room temperature.
- Use a wireless microphone with someone to carry it to those who wish to speak. It keeps things orderly and discourages outbursts.
- You’ll need more elaborate arrangements for larger meetings; for example, collect names before the meeting starts, have speakers step up to a stationary microphone, limit speaking time.
To be continued…
From Annagrammatica’s Little Book of Practical Writing
All about Attitude
Communicators have a reason to be cranky
In 2012 I started revising my 2007 writers’ guide and changing the world… beginning with my target readership: entrepreneurs, managers, executives, educators, and other people who aren’t professional writers but whose work requires writing, public speaking, or both. They do (at a guess) 25 percent of the writing that shows up on the Internet, in letters and reports, in certain periodicals, in government documents, and in other settings—though many are reluctant writers who would rather be doing almost anything else. They don’t like to write, they tell me, adding that writing takes them away from the work they were trained for, which might be medicine, architecture, R & D, client consultation, or sales calls.
For the last forty years I’ve been working with nonwriters who have to write. Though many would rather not and are perfectly happy to give the job to someone else, others believe that they write well… or at least well enough. They do a fair job of arranging words on pages, I’ll grant, though few of these architects and educators and executives consistently communicate well in writing.
This is bad news. It means that there are millions of writers who are certain that their work is being read and understood, and millions of readers who think that they’re getting the information they need, and nearly all are mistaken, and it’s making them cranky.
An act of love…
If you write much at all, you might have found that writing to communicate with anyone—from your mom to your constituents—begins as an act of love and courage: love for the values and goals that move you to write… love for your readers, perhaps… and courage to tell the truth to a reading (or listening) audience of a single relative or ten million strangers.
Some writing is motivated by fear—the flip side of love. But implicit in fear is the loss of what is loved—life, liberty, ease, and the power to choose. Writing that stems from fear can be an attempt to clobber readers with weighty clumps of words arranged in perplexing disorder and leaving the reader disgusted, confused, or resigned… possibly intimidated into compliance by the narrative’s sheer bulk and heavy-handed vocabulary. When I started creating websites, using software that was simpler than your basic word processor, I discovered that my clients—unfamiliar with the technology geek’s deceptively thorny lexicon—were convinced that websites were far too complicated to be attempted with their (my clients’) meager skill sets.
That strategy works for a while, until a savvier entrepreneur comes along with a product that is genuinely serviceable and understandable. The innovator’s clientele remains grateful and keeps shelling out reasonable fees for upgrades and support as long as the seller stays focused on service rather than deception. Just ask the purchasers of 80 million Macintosh computers.
Writing is visual talking
If you write letters, proposals, reports, news releases, and other ordinary documents—even if you write well by business standards—you might be missing an opportunity to convey friendliness, respect, empathy… traits that in conversation you intuitively transmit. (If you’re prone to writers’ block, you might actually want to use dictation equipment instead of drafting at a keyboard.)
Some writers say that they feel naked in print much as some performers do onstage, so they use sarcasm, untruths, hyperbole, and obscure vocabulary (jargon) as barriers or disguises. Clever writers develop signature strategies for commanding and abusing a sort of transient power long enough to impress, perhaps ultimately to control, well-targeted audiences. Multiply one writer’s power by the billions of documents—electronic and otherwise—produced daily on the planet, and you can see how cynicism creeps so slyly into our unconscious attitudes.
View writing as essentially a long-cherished and protected form of human interaction, however, and sarcasm comes across not as clever but as ugly… a huge verbal sneer, or worse. So let’s turn it around.
No matter how trivial the medium and homely the message, writing presents continual and abundant opportunities to convey beauty and serenity, joy and excitement, or comfort and compassion. Apply the math to those opportunities, let a smile be your palette, and in a single day feel the world hum with a more hopeful, peaceful, whimsical vibration.
This is no joke!
Research for the new edition of my writers’ guide turned up a fascinating bit of data: Bad writing is more harmful than many of us understood. We thought that a particular business plan, editorial, annual report, or media release was merely annoying… overwritten, stuffed with jargon and buzzwords, or merely inexplicable. But did we understand that the writer wasn’t feeling friendly toward us readers… that being in something of a snit caused her to rely more on power than on honesty and charm to win us over… and that it wasn’t working?
When a given piece of writing goes horribly wrong, it might not be purely out of the writer’s ignorance or inexperience. This morning’s five-minute whirlwind tour of websites turned up a dozen examples of writing styles that in my view are offensive and misleading. The meanings are skewed, clarity is absent, and communication opportunities are wasted. I chose to illustrate this point with examples of corporate-speak and memes because they appeared more than once, and because they’re easy to recognize. You’ve already been treated to a few such dollops, including the medical center’s help-wanted ad in the introduction to this book (page 11). Here’s another:
Sample 1: Corporate-speak — buzzwords and jargon
At base level, this just comes down to systemized reciprocal contingencies. The consultants recommend responsive monitored matrix approaches. It’s time to revamp and reboot our outside-the-box administrative paradigm shifts. We need a more contemporary reimagining of our integrated relative innovation. This is no time to bite the bullet with our knowledge-based policy capability.
♦
What picture is painted here? I see a weary bureaucracy with a thesaurus. I see a shallow and murky answer to the essential marketing question why should I do business with you rather than your competitors?
This common and tedious business-writing style actually holds readers at arm’s length and fails, I believe, to forward the writer’s objectives. Beyond that, there’s a sly animus that I find in much of the writing for public audiences and that might fuel the polarities and feelings of isolation many find troubling… by way of the sample’s
- patronizing tone and attitude (I’m smart and you’re not, so I can feed you this word salad though it lacks both flavor and substance)
- unfamiliar or esoteric vocabulary
- overwriting, clumsy verbiage, “stringing”
Sample 2: Memes infiltrate minds
I’m especially interested these days in the effect of “memes”—common perceptions or assumptions similar to “sweeping generalizations.”
Heard on the radio recently —
- We live in a swamp of greed and materialism.
- The parents of your generation didn’t understand the importance of children’s self-esteem.
- Most people don’t notice or care about the homeless.
In my experience, there’s not much you could say about “most people” that would be accurate, unless you’ve actually looked into “most people’s” eyes while personally interviewing “most people.” Bogus statistics and unsubstantiated trends become “public knowledge” when introduced with words and phrases such as everybody and most people or the pronoun we (antecedent unclear). Similar results can be achieved with headlines that readers fail to examine. The 2008 headline “Teen pregnancy numbers are skyrocketing!” appeared when the number of teen pregnancies had actually reached a record low—42 percent of the 1990 figure.
During my high-school and college years in the 1960s, journalism and English instructors decried sweeping generalizations and unsubstantiated statistics wherever they appeared. I was among the students who lost points for all manner of fuzziness in the assignments we turned in, exemplified by unsubstantiated “facts” about “our society” and “our culture” as in the following:
- What’s wrong with society today? …Smartphones have taken over our lives. —digitalsynopsis.com
- Unfortunately, Americans today are obsessed with losing weight. Everybody wants to be thin! —brightkite.com
- We live in a toxic culture. —Michael Neill, Supercoach, Hay House Radio
- With the traditional homeless population, we turn a blind eye. We tell ourselves, and our friends, that these people just need to get a job. —GrantCountyBeat.com
Allegations such as these (a) foster cynicism and distrust within “our culture” (whatever that might be), and (b) mislead readers, being wholly or partially inaccurate. If I were editing this woolly writing, I’d recommend that the writers (a) define everybody, we, our, society, culture, and Americans today, and (b) include data and other documentation, both supporting and examining the claims.
What is “our culture” anyway? Who, exactly, are the citizens of “our society”? I’ve yet to see a “typical” human being. As an individual, I experience radically different cultures from zip code to zip code, in universities and factories, and across state and county lines. It’s probably nearer the mark to say that we live in a stew of cultures that are continually splashing over into one another without ever congealing into “a thing” that can be packaged and sold.
It occurs to me that many writers use phrases such as these at least occasionally when what they really mean is “popular media.” Magazines, movies, and television programs and commercials might glamorize skinny girls with generous bosoms. In the world I live in, however, young women who are overweight greatly outnumber the curvy or the pathologically thin.
I wonder how many casual readers or listeners infer that they are living in an impersonal, uncaring, even malevolent oligarchy. Feeling powerless, do they retaliate by padding insurance claims or understating taxable income on their annual returns? Cheating their nameless, faceless enemies is justified, isn’t it, since these very enemies exploit women and ignore the homeless. Don’t they?
Sure, to some extent… but don’t tell the National Coalition for the Homeless, which helps millions of Americans obtain short- and long-term housing as well as furniture, food, education, healthcare, and other goods and services. The implication that the societal evils cited are pervasive is a bayonet thrust, much unprovoked, into the ranks of all who respect women, support human rights, and work on behalf of the homeless.
Who are ‘we’?
My advice: Be very careful with the use of the generic pronouns you (your, yours) and we (us, our, ours) and phrases that begin with most people or most of us or just people.
The popular astrologer Mark Hussan made this statement on the air:
We are run by fear. We are controlled by fear-makers…. Most of us have not a single-digit clue….
—Mark Husson, Power Peek Hour,
Hay House Radio, September 11, 2012
When I hear we and most of us used in this way, I am instantly predisposed to quarrel with whatever follows unless it’s patently self-evident, as in, “Most of us are unlikely to be mistaken for pomegranates.”
The late Hay House founder Louise Hay—who should have known better—made the statement “Most people work at jobs they don’t like” on ThisIsAWar.com. And there’s this from Rush Limbaugh: “Work is how most people identify themselves” (The Rush Limbaugh Show, June 22, 2012).
Hay’s and Limbaugh’s assertions are, in my opinion, particularly dangerous in that they don’t send up warning flags. Uncritical readers might well let pass an assertion that most people don’t like their jobs—which, it turns out, is false, at least according to a 2017 Gallup Poll indicating that 51 percent of U.S. employees are “not engaged” with their jobs… barely more than half, which means that the other half are fairly satisfied or thrilled to pieces in the workplace.
Regarding Limbaugh’s assertion, I couldn’t find confirmation more specific than “Americans often identify themselves through their jobs” (Guttmacher Institute, February 2012).
Well, it sounded true
According to the Writing Center at UNC–Chapel Hill, it’s easy to slip into untruthfulness without realizing it, especially if you have strong feelings about your topic. The Writing Center lists about a dozen common types of fallacies to watch for in your own writing or others’, including…
Hasty generalizations—Example: Christians are hypocrites.
Missing the point—Example: The U.S. constitution mandates separation of church and state, so no one should be allowed to pray in state-owned facilities.
Post hoc (false cause)—Example: Ninety-five percent of people who smoke weed also drink milk; therefore, milk-drinking causes pot-smoking.
Slippery slope, a chain of worst-case outcomes—Example: (As an argument for forced sterilization) Girls who get pregnant in high school tend to drop out of school and get minimum-wage jobs that don’t pay enough to support their babies, so they become prostitutes, sell drugs, use drugs, and give birth to crack babies.
Weak analogy—Example: Tough is pronounced like “tuff,” so through must be pronounced “thruff.”
Ad hominem—Example: Physicist Stephen Hawking doesn’t believe in God. Dr. Hawking is the smartest guy on the planet, so God is a myth. (The flaws here are numerous, including: [a] not all truth is scientifically accessible; [b] Stephen Hawking might or might not be the most intelligent among the highly visible scientists in his field; [c] many brilliant people—some of them scientists—do believe in God. Another kind of ad hominem fallacy dismisses a premise because someone vile—say, Adolph Hitler—believes it. Thus, for example, Hitler was not an atheist; he was evil and insane; thus, people who believe in God are evil, insane, and certainly not credible.)
Ad populum—Example: (a) There is a God, according to the 89 percent of the world’s population who adhere to some sort of religion. (b) And what about atrocities committed in the name of God—the Inquisition, the Crusades, Jihad? (Rebuttal: [a] Sometimes, the whole world is wrong. At some point in the distant past, virtually 100 percent of the earth’s population believed that the earth was flat, if they thought about it at all. [b] Atrocities committed “in the name of God” are generally about divergent religious beliefs; religion and God are not identical.)
There are dozens of types of fallacies floating around, and you’ll often find one or more mixed with statements that are demonstrably true. The story below has elements of truth and falsehood that are hard to separate. Data that apply to the larger group of six- to nine-year-olds are manipulated such that they seem relevant to the six-year-olds taken separately. The qualifier 68 percent of [group] is paraphrased and positioned as most of [group].
What does “most of…” actually mean? Three-fourths? Eighty-five percent? Ninety-nine and 44/100ths percent, as in the old Ivory soap ad campaign? What do you think?
Why 6-Year-Old Girls Want to Be Sexy (Study)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/17/6-year-old-girls-sexy_n_1679088.html
Most girls as young as 6 are already beginning to think of themselves as sex objects, according to a new study of elementary school-age kids in the Midwest….
Psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., used paper dolls to assess self-sexualization in 6- to 9-year-old girls. Sixty girls were shown two dolls, one dressed in tight and revealing “sexy” clothes and the other wearing a trendy but covered-up, loose outfit.
Using a different set of dolls for each question, the researchers then asked each girl to choose the doll that: (a) looked like herself, (b) looked how she wanted to look, (c) was the popular girl in school, (d) she wanted to play with.
Across the board, girls chose the “sexy” doll most often. The results were significant in two categories: 68 percent of the girls said the doll looked how she wanted to look, and 72 percent said she was more popular than the nonsexy doll.
The data simply don’t support the sensational claim. Sixty-eight percent of the 6- to 9-year-olds studied hardly equates to most 6-year-old girls. Preferring the “sexy” doll doesn’t equate to “thinking of… [oneself] as a sex object.” But I suspect that many readers take news stories such as this one at face value, as I too often do. We don’t give them more time or scrutiny than the usual cues prompt us to. Why should we? We don’t expect to have to read the Huffington Post with a microscope.
To be continued….
Why Me?
Why should I do business with you instead of somebody else?
What is your organization’s unique selling proposition (USP)? Generally, companies try to attract customers based on some combination of price, quality, and convenience. If your product or service isn’t the cheapest and it’s not the most convenient, then it had better be the best. Are you the best at what you do, at least in your niche? Is that niche well defined? Most important, do your employees understand it?
Note: The USP principle applies whether you are selling a product or service, an idea, a thesis, or yourself. The question remains: Why should I believe you rather than someone else who is making a comparable claim? Why should I hire you instead of another applicant? Why should I accept the premise of your essay? In fact, why should I even read what you’ve written? If USP stands for “unique selling proposition,” UIS can be an abbreviation for “unique identity statement.”
Note that USP and UIS are initialisms, not acronym.s. An acronym is pronounceable as a word. UNICEF is an acronym, as is NASA. When acronyms get comfortably embedded in the language, and they represent phrases that don’t require initial caps, they tend to go lower-case—hence radar for “radio detection and ranging,” laser for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” and snafu for “situation normal, all f***ed up.”
The fact is, people tend to do business with you because they like you. There’s nothing wrong with that, but likability alone isn’t usually enough to ensure long-term success.
Define your USP
Develop a USP (or UIS) that’s easy to understand. Your USP will be the basis for most of your communication: advertising, promotion, media releases, annual reports, correspondence, and so forth. Your writing tasks become easier when you are thoroughly and habitually aware of your organization’s identity (or your own).
Your USP might be similar to but not identical with your mission statement. If you are a home-health-care provider, for example, your mission might be “to help people with health challenges feel comfortable, safe, and as independent as possible in their own homes… to offer comprehensive home-health services delivered by loving, experienced, and continuously trained companions… to attract and retain the most skilled and experienced caregivers… to establish mutually beneficial relationships within the healthcare community…” and so forth.
Not so long ago I thought mission statements were a waste of time. Most of the mission statements I had seen were puffballs of verbosity, loaded with jargon and largely ignored in the organization’s day-to-day operation. But I now believe that developing a mission statement, like writing a business plan, can help a company pinpoint its USP—its reason for being and its advantages over the competition.
The sample mission statement above, however, doesn’t qualify as a USP. It could be a mission statement for any home-health-care provider. It doesn’t specify what sets you apart. It doesn’t answer the question “Why should I do business with your company and not XYZ Inc. down the street?” Among the criteria of (a) price, (b) service, and (c) convenience, where do you excel?
As a marketing consultant, I once spent six months helping “ABC Interior Design” improve its proposals… which were lackluster, to say the least. The firm had a stunning portfolio. Especially lovely were the church interiors—naves, chapels, and parlors, all gloriously yet tastefully appointed. But not one of the designers could state the company’s USP. Other firms had pretty pictures, too. In fact, three of the five lead designers had worked for the competition.
Finally, Jane, one of the three interns, mentioned that ABC was known in the profession as the best firm to work for. The corporate culture was fun and easygoing. Every so often the boss would declare “Pizza Day” and drive across town to the metro area’s primo pizzeria, paying out of pocket for luscious pies that honored every individual preference, from gluten-free to grease-soaked. In every respect, ABC treated its employees like solid gold, promoting and paying generously, understanding that relationships were the key to success and that loyal longtime employees were the key to relationships.
To broadcast this attribute, I set up a newsletter for clients, suppliers, and “strategic partners”—architects, engineers, and landscapers—highlighting personalities and relationships.
The “relationships” theme was incorporated into ABC’s branding and permeated the company culture. Hostility on the job—backbiting, unhealthy competitiveness—was nipped in the bud. The company even offered workshops on developing and sustaining positive personal relationships outside the workplace. Recognizing the need for balance, ABC’s culture and benefits were family-friendly. No employee ever had to worry that staying home with a sick kid might cost him his job.
Exercise
Summarize your organization’s USP or your UIS.
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Product strategies? Off with their heads!
Craigslist handed me a beautiful gift the other day—a help-wanted ad that’s more ridiculous than one I could make up. Like many ads written in corporate-speak, it expresses a preference for applicants who “exhibit strong written & verbal communication skills” that are so plainly absent in the ad itself.
Note: By verbal, the writer probably means spoken. It’s common to see the phrase “verbal agreement,” as if any agreement expressed in words—written or spoken—were not verbal. But I pick nits, when there’s so much more to bewail in this misguided verbal-communication endeavor.
Hyphens do matter, as “exhibited” in phrases such as “cross portfolio strategies” and “cross functional stakeholders.” If there’s anything worse than a functional stakeholder, it’s an irritable functional stakeholder, I always say, when I’m talking about stakeholders of any stripe—something I go out of my way to avoid. But maybe that’s because I lack the ability to “evolve strategic & tactical elements based on research, data, & industry trends.” Perhaps one can learn to evolve such elements only in “highly matrixed” organizations. Most of my experience has evolved in organizations with lowly matrixes. I suspect I’ve even “executed collateral among stakeholders” in matrix-deficient organizations. Let’s have that be our little secret, if you don’t mind. I might need to pull the matrix card in a job interview some day.
As buzzwords go, transparency is a useful one, and this ad is anything but transparent. An organization that’s transparent doesn’t have a lot of secrets, knowing that secrets are not good for business. They’re like roaches, hiding in the dark, skittering around only when they think they won’t be noticed. Eventually someone turns a light on and they run for cover, but it’s too late. They’ve been found out.
Transparency is not served by jargon, which gives the impression that the writer is more interested in showing off—exhibiting power—than in telling a story, answering a question, or solving a problem.
Below you’ll find (a) the ad, (b) my reaction, some of which I shared in a friendly, helpful way with the advertiser, and (c) an excerpt from the Harvard Business Review Guide to Better Business Writing, whose author gleefully deplores the sort of verbiage you’re about to read… if you have the stomach for it.
The Ad
Organization seeks Marketing Specialist who supports the execution of product strategies and cross portfolio strategies and works with moderate guidance across businesses to create and execute supporting communications.
- Assists in the design, development, editing & execution of marketing messaging & collateral including advertisements, direct mail & technical information for targeted audiences in conjunction with internal marketing team and external agencies, including LMR processes and requirements.
Skills:
- Understands the sales budgeting process and participates in the prioritization of tactics.
- Exhibit strong written & verbal communication skills along with excellent interpersonal skills.
- Demonstrated strategic thinking, initiative, and creativity.
- Show agility with a proven ability to evolve strategic & tactical elements based on research, data & industry trends.
- Demonstrated problem solving and analytical skills.
- Demonstrated ability to work with cross functional stakeholders. OR. Demonstrated ability to work in a highly matrixed organization.
- Proven track record of achieving goals. OR. Proven track record of meeting financial and other quantitative goals.
- Demonstrated success working in a team environment.Critique
Critique
The ad reads as if it’s meant to test your knowledge of industry jargon. For example, if you don’t know what LMR stands for, evidently you need not apply. I had to look it up, and there are several definitions, not all of them printable. It could be “late-model restoration.” “Labor-management relations” is more likely, but without knowing the industry it’s hard to say. And the industry is only one of the secrets this inscrutable ad fails to communicate. The unwritten message is that this potential employer holds all the cards, some of which might be revealed if you make the cut. It’s a bullying sort of prose that hints at a bullying sort of employer. Self-important, verbally bloated, jargon-laden—these traits don’t speak well of the company. How can management possibly hire sensible people with ads like this? “Cross functional stakeholders”? “Highly matrixed organization”? Seriously?
The day after I espied this ridiculous ad, I lambasted it on my blog with a link to a first-rate article from the Harvard Business Review, which, among other things, bemoans the use of jargon in business communication. Here’s an excerpt:
A Bizspeak Blacklist
It’s mission-critical to be plain-spoken, whether you’re trying to be best-of-breed at outside-the-box thinking or simply incentivizing colleagues to achieve a paradigm shift in core-performance value-adds. Leading-edge leveraging of your plain-English skill set will ensure that your actionable items synergize future-proof assets with your global-knowledge repository.
Just kidding.
Seriously, though, it’s important to write plainly. You want to sound like a person, not an institution. But it’s hard to do, especially if you work with people who are addicted to buzzwords. It takes a lot of practice….
[Below is]… an “index expurgatorius,” a roster of [undesirable buzzwords and jargon.] [Ed. note: (a) A few of these terms are occasionally useful and even necessary. Strategic alliance, for example, is a good term for a temporary partnership, and synergy is the only word I know of that describes how such a partnership can yield benefits greater than would be achieved by the two organizations separately. (b) I have added jargon examples from other sources.]
actionable (apart from legal action)
agreeance
as per
at the end of the day
back of the envelope
bandwidth (apart from elec tronics)
best of breed
best practices
boil the ocean
bring our A game
bring to the table
business model
buy-in
c-level
centers of excellence
circle back around
circle with
client-centered
close the loop
come-to-Jesus
componentize
deliverables
descope
dial-in
dialogue with
disintermediate
disambiguate
disincent
drill down
drink the Kool-Aid
ducks in a row
eating your own dog food
facetime
forward initiative
functionality
gain traction
going forward
go-live
go rogue
granular, granularity
harvesting efficiencies
heads-up
helicopter view
impact (verb)
impactful
incent
incentivize
instantiate
kick the can down the road
leapfrog
learnings
let’s do lunch
let’s take this offline
level the playing field
leverage (verb)
level set
liaise
long-pole item
loop in, keep in the loop
low-hanging fruit
mindshare
mission-critical
monetize
net-net
operationalize
out of pocket (apart from
reference to expenses)paradigm shift
parameters
planful
push the envelope
pursuant to
putting lipstick on a pig
recontextualize
rightsize
scalable
seamless integration
seismic shift (apart from
reference to earthquake)smartsized
strategic alliance
strategic dynamism
synergize
think outside the box
throw it against the wall and see if it sticks
throw under the bus
turnkey
under the radar
utilization, utilize
value-added
verbage (the correct term is verbiage—in reference only to verboseness)
where the rubber meets the road
win-win
—February 2013. Bryan A. Garner’s blog series on business writing draws on advice in his book The HBR Guide to Better Business Writing.
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from Annagrammatica’s Little Book of Practical Writing
Show Up, Not Off
I and Thou
You can write with joy, efficiency, clarity, kindness, and style… while you support your organization’s image and reinforce its brand… or you can bumble along, communicating awkwardly, putting off writing tasks or paying people like me $60 an hour or more to do them for you.
Whether you are writing to
- tell a story,
- answer a question, or
- solve a problem,
if you begin with respect for your reader (or listener), the job is half done. It really is that simple.
The flip side of helping is hostile. I’m not going to use this space to explain why we don’t need more hostility in the world or why companies perceived as hostile tend not to thrive. Let’s agree to agree on those points and move on.
You keep your readers at arm’s length—or worse, put them off altogether—by being
- untruthful
- secretive
- unavailable
- incoherent
- unfocused
I have been asked, as a marketer, to be all these things—to concoct a stew of jargon, half-truths, smoke, and superlatives and feed it to a skeptical public—usually to sell a product or service that was touted as “exciting” but barely achieved “ordinary.” In my experience, through dozens of marketing campaigns, we were more successful when our promises were realistic and our products were outstanding.
Tell the truth
I have sat in on a least a dozen meetings whose purpose was to design the message that callers hear when they are placed on HOLD. In these meetings, very little attention was given to the text. We spent much more time listening to different speakers and registering our opinions: Should the voice be masculine or feminine? High or low? Soothing or animated? How many different messages should we record? Should there be music between them? What genre? Jazz? What sort of jazz? Be-bop? Cool jazz? Swing?
While we were parked in meetings, minutely critiquing various voices (Too squeaky. Sounds angry. Slight lisp), we failed to notice that the message itself was plainly, obviously, patently a lie. We knew it was a lie, because if it were not a lie there would be no need for it, no justification for its existence, no meetings to evaluate tonal qualities and calculate the optimal length of time between repetitions.
What was that message?
Your call is important to us
I heard this message at least thirty times just this morning, during two calls to the optical department at Shopko. A few months ago I got a new prescription for bifocals. Last week I received the frames I ordered from eBay. I called my regular eye clinic about filling the prescription, but the optician told me that my insurance is no longer accepted there. “Try Shopko,” he suggested.
Called Shopko, spoke with Stacey, and learned that Shopko would indeed fill my prescription, at no charge. Hurray. Open seven days a week. Hallelujah.
Darn! Forgot to ask whether I needed an appointment. Called back. Stacey must have gone to lunch and everyone else was evidently “busy helping other customers,” because I was placed on HOLD. Not to worry, though. My call was important to them.
My call was, in fact, so significant that they felt compelled to tell me so every ten or twelve seconds. Due to a glitch in the recording, sometimes two voices at once told me how much they cared. Call me cranky, but after five or six repetitions, the more times they told me I was important, the less important I felt.
The missing link
After all, I thought my call was important to CenturyLink last week, when I reported that my Internet connection wasn’t working. I spent the better part of four days on HOLD with CenturyLink, and they told me my call was important to them, too—although they wouldn’t mind at all if I were to hang up and conduct my business online. I’d still be important.
The first automated voice you hear when you call CenturyLink is probably familiar to anyone who has had a “land line” in the past twenty years. I call the voice “Kirk,” because he sounds like someone whose name might be “Kirk”—wholesome fellow, crew cut, recent college graduate who was vice president of his fraternity and the one male cheerleader on the squad. When I call CenturyLink, Kirk always answers, just as he did when I called Century Link’s predecessors, Qwest and US West.
Kirk is on duty 24/7, and I think the long hours are taking their toll, because when I finally get through to a human representative and my call gets dropped—which happens fairly often—and then I call back, Kirk remembers nothing from our earlier conversation and I have to start at the beginning.
Even though I pushed “2” for “internet repair” as instructed, Kirk urged me to take advantage of CenturyLink’s “automated options” available at centurylink.com, replete with advantages, such as (a) no waiting, and also (b) no waiting. “Kirk,” I say, a little sternly, “you’re not paying attention.”
In the course of more than two dozen phone calls over four days, I was given these assurances:
Statement / Repetitions
Your call is important to us / 96
We’re sorry you’re having this problem / 21
We’ll solve the problem immediately / 10
They threw thousands of words at me, with content meant to reassure, but the context said otherwise. Eventually I got connected to Sean, and my call was important enough to him that when we got disconnected he called me back, and he had excellent news: A human repair person would come to my home the very next morning.
As kind and helpful as Sean was, I was not inclined to believe him, but I got up early, dusted the modem and the shelf it sits on, and cleaned the bathroom, just in case. At 10:30, just as I was calling CenturyLink to report a no-show, there was a knock at the door. Could it be…? It was! CenturyLink Human Repair Guy Mike was standing in the hall, brandishing his tools and looking competent. Within ten minutes, the problem was solved and I was back online, nominating Mike for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Twitter: Nobody home
Companies such as CenturyLink pay marketing firms great sums of money in an exercise called branding. They develop graphics, taking great care with fonts and logos, labels and emblems, ads and promotions. They want to be perceived as sleek and modern, high-tech, state-of-the-art, competent, efficient… or warm and friendly, accessible, “service-oriented.” Whatever style they want to project is incorporated in their visuals… but all it takes is one customer’s experience with a disgruntled employee to erase the desired perception and replace it with “snarly.” Brand identity is reinforced or undermined not only by how customers are treated but also by employee satisfaction and the company’s relationships with its vendors and strategic partners.
As damaging to your brand as an owlish employee can be, even worse is no interaction at all. If a company makes no one accessible to outsiders, that company is making a statement: We don’t like you, we don’t care about you, now go away and let us get back to our geekery.
Mark my words
I want to go on record with my prediction that the social-media phenomenon Twitter is not long for this world. The folks at Twitter have better things to do than talking to you about their screw-up with your account. If you’re going to have a problem with Twitter, it had better slide neatly into one of six or seven common categories, such as “can’t log in” or “forgot my username.” Otherwise, Twitter customer service consists of a very short loop. If your question isn’t answered on the page you’re routed to, they send you back to the list of ordinary problems that aren’t yours.
If, out of desperation, you choose “my hashtags aren’t working”—just so they’ll give you space amounting to one hundred and forty characters to explain that hashtags aren’t really your problem, it’s that your account has gotten tangled up with someone else’s and when you post to Twitter your tweets show up on the other person’s Twitter feed—then Twitter emails you instructions for the proper use of hashtags.
In more than an hour spent scouring the Web for advice from people with a similar dilemma—and they are legion—I learned that it is virtually impossible to talk to or even chat online with an actual Twitter representative. There is, however, a small industry developing around Twitter’s arrogant unhelpfulness: Starting at $20, some enterprising individual, presumably with inside information, will try to get Twitter’s attention. It strikes me as being a little like asking one of the lesser-known saints to intercede for you because God’s busy elsewhere. Twitter, are you listening?
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