So I looked it up in my trusty Chambers dictionary, and it seems we were both right.  It means “the terminology of a profession, art, group, etc; an artificial or barbarous language; a pidgin; unintelligible talk, gibberish; chatter, twittering”.  Jargon can also be used as a verb meaning to twitter or chatter (the poem King David, set to music by Herbert Howells, talks of a nightingale that “jargoned on and on”).

As you may know, I’m a scuba diver, and there’s a lot of jargon involved in that, as in so many other sports (think of googlies – lobs – piked dives – mohawks and salchows in ice skating – the list is almost endless).  If I’m writing for divers I don’t need to explain what a regulator is – in fact I’m more likely to call it a reg – or that bottles tend to contain air under water and beer on land.  If I’m writing for non-divers, the regulator would be described as “the thing you hold in your mouth and breathe through” and I might even explain that it’s called a regulator because it helps regulate the flow of air, reducing the pressure in the bottle to something that won’t blow your lungs apart when you inhale.  I’d then say that the bottle, correctly know as a cylinder, holds breathing gas (air or another mixture) sufficient to let most divers stay under water for around 40-60 minutes.  (I’d probably skip any mention of the beer bottles.  Don’t want to give the sport a bad name!)

Last week I was learning all about dealing with diving emergencies, which can involve administering oxygen to a casualty.  One of the signs to look out for with burst lungs is “crepitation”.  That’s not a word I use in everyday life (the spellcheck has just drawn a squiggly line under it, so obviously Microsoft doesn’t use it in everyday life either), so I looked it up.   Chambers describes it as “a soft crackling sound detected through a stethoscope, and usually resulting from inflammation due to pneumonia or other disease”.  As we don’t have a stethoscope in our first aid kit, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to hear it.  Maybe it’s more obvious in something as drastic as a burst lung; with a bit of luck I’ll never find out.

Anyway, what’s your take on jargon, however you define it?  And how do you define it?  Do let me know!

Image gratefully pinched from youblog.typepad.com

With Valentine’s Day coming up I thought it was a good time to talk about when “we” is not the best word to use.

If you’re visiting a website is it
a) to read the history of the company, who designed its premises, and the number of widgets it can churn out on any given day? or
b) to solve a problem, find information or buy something?

Forgive my jumping to conclusions, but I would bet it’s b).  Simply because it is for most people.

Including your readers, O Wise Business Person.

Therefore there is a saying in the copywriting business: “Don’t ‘we’ on your copy”.  In other words, don’t write about us, we, our, I, me, my… except on the About Us page.  That’s what it’s there for.  (At least I hope it’s there – it’s very useful for people researching who to send communications to, if it’s properly thought out.)

The same goes for any other business communication: speak to your reader as a person who needs a solution that you can supply, whatever that solution is. 

Don’t bother them with facts – they probably don’t care when your factory was built, unless they’re industrial archaeologists or potential landlords; they definitely won’t care whose grandfather founded the business, unless he was really famous (in which case they can email or phone for details).  They want to know if you can get your widgets to them by yesterday.

So use you, your, yours (yourser, yoursest – sorry, getting a bit carried away here) – no-one will mind if you ‘you’ all over the page.  And write to one reader, because that’s typically who’ll be reading – one reader per screen, though potentially millions of screens at once – not a group. 

If you follow this advice you’ll set yourself up above nine-tenths of businesses who take the easy route.  Solve one person’s problem, scratch an individual itch, sell one customer your product, and those ones will  become millions.

One of the speakers was the co-owner of The Scarlet Bakery, who uses Facebook for all their marketing.  They have no website, have never spent a bean on ads of any sort, have never distributed fliers or used any of the other “normal” ways of finding customers, and they’ve gone from start-up in June 2010 to selling 4,000 cupcakes a week by November 2010.    All the cakes are pre-ordered online so there’s absolutely no wastage.   (You can find them at http://www.facebook.com/?sk=apps&ap=1#!/pages/Dundee-United-Kingdom/The-Scarlet-Bakery/122153114489088).  I thought that was brilliant.

Immediately after the workshop I met a potential client to talk about promoting her health-drink business.  She wanted some press releases written in the short term and her website updated later, when she had the money.  Press releases aren’t really my forte, but I was able to give her the details of a specialist.  Then I told her The Scarlet Bakery’s story and she lit up: I’d just given her the ideal no-cost answer for her marketing.  No need to update the website; possibly no need to pay the press release specialist.  Certainly no need to pay me – though she did buy me lunch (she said it was the best £10 she’d ever spent).

I do hope this isn’t “the future” for all small businesses, or mine will go down the tubes

Mind you, my halo’s shining that wee bit brighter….

Another guest article, this time by Pete Savage.  Find more details about Pete at the end of this post.

Sometimes when you learn of the work habits and rituals of
successful people in your field, a funny thing can happen.
Perhaps it has happened to you before, whether you were reading
a self-development book, attending a live event, or listening to
a teleseminar…

When learning about someone’s personal success journey, and the
wisdom they have to share about their experience, sometimes the
learning can be both inspiring and intimidating at the same
time!

Have you ever experienced this? I have. And the intimidation, I
think, comes from a momentary onset of what I call “Easier Said
Than Done“-itis, or “ESTD-itis” for short. Here’s how I define
this term:

ESTD-itis [noun; "es-die-tis"] The momentary mental muttering of
the phrase “easier said than done” when presented with a new
idea, concept, tool, or technique for achieving success.

ESTD-itis is brought on by the sudden realization that a certain
level of success involves a certain amount of honest effort.
Unfortunately, the Internet, Hollywood, the tabloids and all the
other elements of today’s modern media machine have created this
illusion of “overnight success” in so many fields.

As we observe this media, we can’t help but be influenced by it,
and be tricked into thinking that success, fame, and fortune
comes easily and without effort to “those people”.

But sometimes we learn more about the back story of the
individuals who we view as successful, and we see the real blood
sweat and tears that often goes into their achievement. This
gives us a better appreciate of “what it takes” to succeed.

So… on Friday and Saturday, as part of the International
Freelancers Day conference you’ll see a lot of accomplished
people teaching you what they know about succeeding in business.
As you watch, keep in mind the true effort – the blood, sweat
and tears – that each presenter went through in order to get to
a place where they can now teach and share their wisdom.

In other words, as you watch, hold in your mind the expectation
that what you’re learning will require a certain amount of
honest effort if you aspire to achieve similar results. The new
concepts, tips and strategies you learn may be presented as
“simple” but every speaker will tell you, they require a lot of
elbow grease to actually put into action.

Do this, and the phrase “Easier said than done” will disappear
from your language when you come upon ideas, concepts, tools, or
techniques that have the power to lead you toward success.

I know that you’ll enjoy what’s coming your way – for free – as
part of the International Freelancers Day online conference on
Friday and Saturday. If you still need to register for this
event, you still can – just click here.

To your success!
Pete 

Pete Savage is the co-founder of TheWealthyFreelancer.com and
co-author of The Wealthy Freelancer: 12 Secrets to a Great
Income and an Enviable Lifestyle. To download 3 free chapters of
his book, visit www.TheWealthyFreelancer.com.

I’ve been a member for a year.  So far no-one’s asked me to speak, so when I got the email asking me to renew my declaration that I had no criminal involvement, past or present, I thought I wouldjust  let it lapse.  I emailed the founder and MD of Growing Ambitions, Sally Davis, who replied:  “We are looking to merge with another organisation in the autumn that has the ear of more employers, and the government and momentum will really start to pick up then. We are a non-profit, providing a lean and mean brokerage solution but we have no government or other funding.” 

She added, ”I do hope you can see you way to still point people to us”.  How could I refuse? 

I think it’s a great idea, telling kids how it really is, and by what tortuous route you’ve got where you are.  A lot of people have never heard of copywriting; I’m sure there are students who’d love to write for a living but think the only ways are the cut-throat world of journalism or the lottery of “writing proper books” of whatever sort and trying to get them published.  Certainly my careers mistress never mentioned it (but that could have been because I wanted to go to music college; it didn’t occur to me I could earn a living as a writer until much later).

If you’re interested in finding out more about Growing Ambitions and how you could become a Partner (it doesn’t cost anything, talks only last half an hour, and it’s good exposure for your business too), go to http://www.growingambitions.org/index.php and read all about it.

Thank you!

Well, no – I also have a part-time job at a tourist attraction during the summer (I officially left last October, but they get lots of Italian tourists and I speak Italian, so I’m quite busy there July/August) and I’m working there tomorrow and Thursday.  By the time I come home after a day of marshalling groups of multi-national tourists and their small children around the castle, my brain is fried and I really can’t produce good copy.  Which leaves this afternoon and Friday to write it.

So I need the information now.  It was supposedly being sent on Thursday, when they commissioned me to do it.  I was away for a long weekend and expected to find it in my inbox when I got back – but no.  So I’m left twiddling my thumbs and writing blog posts while I wait for the real work to come in.  I’ll get it done by Friday night, as promised, as long as they don’t wait ’til Friday afternoon to send it (I can’t type that fast!).

I’m getting quite good at this deadline lark.  The same company that wants the brochures asked me for 11 pages of web content (including research) within three days last week.  I managed it.  I’ve never thought of myself as a fast writer, but it is coming more easily now.  In fact I think deadlines are quite good for me because I don’t have time for my usual endless editing, so I have to think more clearly and write it better first off.  And I can’t procrastinate, nor rearrange the office, do my accounts or engage in any other of my favourite work-displacement activities.

Deadlines are good.  As King Charles I said of his impending death, they ‘concentrate the mind wonderfully’.  In a way they’re teaching me my job: to get the words written and not faff about being all “artistic”.  They make me use my time efficiently, research faster, cut out the timewasting and write more tightly.

Who needs deadlines?  I do!

First and most important: it means you don’t have to do it.  You have plenty of other claims on your time, mainly for things only you can do properly.  Writing copy (if it’s not something you do every day) takes time – effort – blood, sweat and tears.  It could take several weeks to get the necessary content for a website together: weeks of frustration when you can’t get on with doing what you’re best at.

Second: research shows you have just seven seconds to capture your readers’ attention on the internet.  Get it wrong and they’ve gone to your competitors.  Do you or your staff have the writing skills to grab them in seven seconds?

Third: a trained writer can write it faster than you can, just as a trained runner can run faster than someone who only jogs once a week.  They know the sort of questions to ask to create the unique copy you need; they’ll have a system for their research.  Your website will be up and working for you far sooner and you’ll see a return on your investment much earlier.

Fourth: a professional copywriter knows how to persuade people in print.  It’s not the same as selling in person: you need different techniques when you can’t use body language to get your point across.  You have to make things clear both for those who skim and for the detail-lovers – and you can’t tell which sort of person will be reading.  You have to write from the reader’s point of view and understand in advance what questions they need answered.  So many websites don’t do this and they’re basically a waste of money.

Fifth: a trained copywriter will work with your web designer to optimise your site for the search engines (SEO).  Keywords are vital to this process, but writing keyword-rich text that reads naturally is an art that takes practice.

Sixth: a good copywriter writes good English.  There are still plenty of people out there who get a jolt when they see an apostrophe in the wrong place or a comma where there should be a full stop – and they’ll jump to another site for a solution to their problem.  There’s a lot of competition on the internet and you can’t afford to lose customers for a silly mistake.

Seventh: it will cost you less.  That’s counter-intuitive, I know, but think about it.  If you add up all the time you’re sitting there, staring at a blank piece of paper or computer screen, plus all the time you’re struggling to find the right words to communicate your message, plus all the other things you can’t be doing while you’re writing (but still need doing) – and charge it all at whatever rate you pay yourself – a copywriter is going to seem a real bargain.

So: less effort + attention + faster RoI + effectiveness + smooth SEO + retention + cost-saving = perfect sense. 

In other words, using a professional copywriter for your website saves you time, hassle and money, just as using a professional web designer does.

The question I was burning to have answered concerned literacy skills.  So much of what one sees written these days is so badly put together it appears to have been translated from ancient Egyptian by a non-native speaker of English (or Egyptian).  Did the honchos think that was likely to improve?

The short – and to me very sad – answer was “No”.  There were references to txt lngage as a means of communication, and to the “death” of the apostrophe, but no hope was held out for the survival of one of the richest and subtlest languages on the planet.  Nor for basic literacy (the ability to string together a sentence that actually means what the writer thinks it does and that can be understood by readers), which is vital to most employees.

I know that English is a constantly developing language.  That’s one of the things that makes it so rich and so rewarding to study.  To limit people to the fringes of the language, which is effectively how it’s “taught” at the moment, seems to me depressing.  If you don’t teach children their own language why should they treasure it?  How can they roll words round their tongues like fine wine, savouring all the nuances?  Why – for heaven’s sake – would they even consider bothering to learn a second language?

Text language is very fine in its place, fitting a message onto a tiny screen and getting it across in the fewest possible characters, but its place does not include academic essays, company reports or any message aimed at a business reader.  It can have a place in advertising to a young audience but, I would argue, not to sell top-end cars or jewellery or even soap-powder.  It’s not persuasive, it’s abrupt tell-’em-and-move-on language.  I use it myself sometimes, but I’d never write web content or a brochure in txt.

And, while I would be the last person to require children to spend hours in the stultifying boredom of parsing, it is useful to know the parts of speech and the uses of punctuation – basic grammar.  Putting a comma in the wrong place can change the whole meaning of a sentence.  A missed apostrophe, or one in the wrong place, sets people’s teeth on edge; leaving it out can cause confusion.  If you’re trying to persuade someone to do or buy something none of these is a good strategy.

Good English is a subject (as you’ve probably guessed) that I feel strongly about.  I realise it makes me sound like that old fuddy-duddy, “Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells”, but I think it’s really important.  Without proper literacy skills children are less employable.  They are also being deprived of a huge chunk of their heritage.  That is unkind and unforgivable. 

And the claim that a curriculum that allows it is one for “excellence” is a downright, barefaced, brass-necked, lie.  

Excellence requires effort, not the path of least resistance – both from the teachers and from the students.  It’s worth it in the end.  There’s the feeling of satisfaction at something achieved; there’s the knowledge that you’re much more likely to get a good job, and a liveable salary to go with it; not to mention the fact that all the glories of English literature, theatre, poetry and culture will be open to you.

Please – let “excellence” mean exactly that, not the easy way to keep bored kids sweet through their school years.

Thank you -?

Rubbish!

I don’t believe people’s attention-spans really are shorter now than they were 50 years ago, or even 10.  I think that, if they’re interested in the subject, readers can cope with several sub-clauses, even a few digressions, without losing their places or going off to do something else completely.  (See – you made it this far, didn’t you?)  If you write (and read) as though you were talking (or being talked to), all of that becomes irrelevant because people don’t talk in short, simple sentences; they talk in paragraphs, mostly hoping-they-won’t-be-interrupted-before-they-can-finish-what-they’re-trying-to-say-and-have-to-start-listening-to-the-other-person-in-the-conversation.  Apart from the taciturn types who can hardly get a word out with any degree of comfort, of course.

The  reason this subject arose is the book I’m reading, Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond.  Those of you who’ve read it will remember the gloriously discursive style of the writing, mirroring the heroine-and-narrator’s thoughts.  If you haven’t yet read it, do, especially if you know anything about the Anglican church (it’s not about that, but it does poke some wonderful gentle fun at it).  It’s very amusing, though I have to put it down after about an hour as the mixture’s pretty rich: one can have too much of a good thing at one sitting, even chocolate mousse.  But I digress….

The problem with long sentences is not that people can’t read them; it’s that many authors can’t write them.  If you’re going to produce a long sentence you need to be more Proust or Trollope (Anthony, not Joanna) than Nietzsche: use words that people recognise, in contexts where they make sense.  Then you can let your stream of consciousness range about like a mountain stream forging around and through the rocks and tree-roots in its way, as it leaps and tumbles down the hill to the river below. 

Or words to that effect.  (There is also a place for short sentences.  And yes, I know that the five words at the beginning of this paragraph don’t constitute a proper sentence.)

Don’t let the thought police dumb you down.  Long live the long sentence - written and spoken!

Why that should be I don’t know, as most of the names in those books are very cleverly chosen, often from Latin and classical Greek.  I thought that was because she studied Classics at University (I’m sure I read that somewhere), but I’ve just checked the biography on her own site and she studied French.  Another myth blown out of the water! 

I love both those words, though thestral is more onomatopoeic than caliginous, which sounds as though it should have something to do with body parts, as in cartilaginous.  And because thestral has connotations of death (the illustration given in the PDofCandIW is from Gardner’s Jason and Medeia, “… the mightiest mortal who’d ever reached that thestral shore …”) it applies very well to what I was doing last Sunday morning: diving my first wreck, the Breda, sunk near Oban in 1943.

It truly was thestral.  The water was slightly murky at 18 metres, there was all sorts of stuff lying around on deck that had once been trucks and other cargo, and there were great gaping holes in the deck.  Very spooky.  But very beautiful, too, with all the anemones, soft corals (graphically called “dead men’s fingers”) and other flora and fauna that had colonised every available surface.  Occasionally there was a sort of low booming roar which at first I thought was the sound of the sea against the hull.  I heard it later that day in open water with not a wreck in sight so I think it was just the noise of the support-boat’s engine, but it certainly added to the atmosphere.

I can see myself using thestral, in the right circumstances.  Caliginous?  Probably not – but it’s good to know it’s there, another of the nearly-forgotten riches of the English language.

Thanks to Oxford BSAC branch 0034′s Brian for the photo which I borrowed from their blog post “Mull 2008″.  It gives a good idea of the thestral qualities of the wreck.