On Words and Business

To me, the granddaddy of all stylebooks is the Chicago Manual of Style. Nowadays, like the AP Stylebook, it has an online forum for questions and answers. Things not yet covered in the book or online version, or questions from folks who need clarification. (Because it sure can be obtuse sometimes, especially when you don’t know exactly how to define what you’re looking for.)

Not glamorous really. But to those of us who, like me, just really enjoy our language and words, and who enjoy playing around with how to express it in writing, it’s fun to browse (or thumb) through Chicago.

To keep up to date on the official rules of our language. And to better know exactly how and when to break ‘em!

What Pico Iyer recently wrote about travel writing is true of the best writing of any kind, from marketing materials to blogs, from white papers to web pages, from biography to literary fiction:

The…writer’s place is on the threshold, one eye turned toward the reader, one toward the subject.

Read. A lot. Books, magazines, blogs. Anything you can get your hands on. It builds vocabulary and feeds the idea engine.

As my dentist repaired some substandard work done by a previous dentist, we discussed the issue of trust. How one must trust that a dentist knows what he or she is doing. You hate to find out, three years on, that it was done wrong and now you have to pay to have it redone, and go through the annoyance (or agony, depending on how you feel about dental work) all over again.

Many professionals provide services that we, as consumers, can neither do ourselves nor truly judge, unless something goes wrong.  Dentists, doctors, auto mechanics. So we have to trust the person, trust he is honest, trust that she knows what she’s doing.

Writers don’t have exactly the same problem with trust. Trust is still a very important component–writers write for clients, so copy should address the specific need and audience, and the relationship should be open and honest, in both directions. But with writing, clients can judge the work the moment you put it in their hands. They can tell if it’s too formal or not persuasive enough for their audience.  And they can judge the work based on their own opinions, too.

It can be an interesting conversation when a writer and client have different opinions about the final product. But I’d much rather have my clients be able to judge my work immediately, and address the issue immediately, than to have someone find out three years from now that they are really disappointed with my work.

If you are like me, you read everything critically, even if you aren’t trying. Once I read something that doesn’t make sense, the rest of the article or whatever it is I’m reading isn’t worth the paper or bytes it’s printed on. Which is why I get so upset when I make a mistake–even after double and triple-checking.

It isn’t too much to ask that words be spelled correctly, are not their own homonyms, that grammar is basically correct, and that the piece flow logically from start to finish. Unless, it’s obviously a play on words or a deliberate mangling of the grammar.
Do you read things this critically? Does an apparent mistake negate the message?

Does word choice matter?

Friends have heard me say again and again that the purpose of language is to communicate. So it doesn’t matter to me if, on occasion, some thoughts or words are a bit muddled, as long as I understand what they are trying to convey. This is true with friends and family. None of us is perfect all the time, right?

This isn’t true, however, in business. When communicating with customers and potential customers, it is important to take the time to determine what you want to communicate and the best way, and the best words, to do that.

It starts with the headline. You gotta grab ‘em and pull ‘em in.

Michel Fortin discusses some principles of communicating effectively with headlines.