I don’t know about you, but I’ve been sent reams of content over the past few weeks, far more than usual. Sadly, most of it has been indistinctive, template-originated offerings that come across as bland and impersonal. I wonder if in our rush to churn out an all-you-can-eat menu of ‘content’, we’re missing a trick? Merely dishing up an indigestible fusion of 1980’s biz-speak, garnished with the after-effects of early social media exploration, isn’t going to engage anyone.
If everything uses language that’s about as enriching as a ‘note to the milkman’, no wonder we have to send more and more ‘stuff’ to get our ‘stuff’ noticed.
Where words are concerned, quality outranks quantity every time
Where’s the substance, the joy of language, the emotional triggers, the nuances and subtleties that make people smile or rant, buy or boycott?
Perhaps we don’t have the time or imagination for that, so we default to repetition?
Don’t feed the beast.
Undoubtedly, the point is to engage people. Have we forgotten that people buy on emotion?
Words do that!
I recently revisited the principles of Plain English. Remember that, hailed as something of a revolution in customer communication? Rightly lauded as bright new business thinking of the 1980s, it wasn’t new then, and it isn’t old now.
The Plain English campaign’s core message, spearheaded by Chrissie Maher OBE (whom I have had the privilege of working with) wasn’t the over-simplification of language. People who regarded it as ‘dumbing down’ missed the point entirely. It was, as it remains today, the use of active rather than passive language.
- Active language makes your writing lively with shorter sentences (15-20 words, ideally).
- Use positive language – ‘please do this’ rather than ‘please don’t do that’.
- Cut out useless words like ‘actually’, ‘just’, ‘basically’ and ‘so’.
And, by varying our vocabulary (we’re all guilty of defaulting to safe words).
- We repeatedly use ‘develop’ when we could use augment, elaborate, or cultivate to make the same point.
- We continuously hear ‘unique’ when it would be great to hear incomparable, peerless, or unrivalled.
And whilst we’re at it, instead of the ubiquitous term ‘change’, let’s see transition, transform and progression cropping up now and again.
This piece, according to the Flesch reading ease scale, is 96% active. It uses sentences as short as three words and has one that’s 22 words long (who wants to write by rules)?
Good writing can be plain but doesn’t have to lack flavour.
