All power to the geeks

I'm sending a virtual bouquet to the New Plymouth teenager who has offered to help people correct the grammar in their online advertising, for free. Megan Smith, who is 17, was reported in her local daily newspaper as saying that she sees too many advertisements on websites like TradeMe that are just plain wrong. She thinks that poor spelling and grammatical mistakes are ruining the writers' chances of success, by reducing their credibility.

So Megan is offering to do something about it. She will correct people's copy for free, to make their advertisements error-free and less cringe-worthy. All right, I admit that last phrase is mine. But isn't it true? Basic spelling and grammatical errors do make many of us cringe.

And Megan is on to something when she says that she thinks grammatical mistakes reflect badly on the writer, and reduce their credibility. Mounting evidence supports her view.

The BBC reported in 2011 that spelling mistakes in web copy cost the website millions in online sales. A study by the Confederation of British Industry said spelling mistakes alone can cut online sales in half.

A report in the US business magazine Forbes quoted a study by the online grammar software company, Grammarly. It carried out a study of Linked-In profiles amongst professionals, and found that those with fewer grammatical mistakes in their profiles achieved better jobs. Few errors also correlated with more and better promotions, the study found.

And a British study by Global Lingo in 2013 found that 59% of those who took part would not use a company that had obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes on its website. When people were asked why, 61% of respondents said they wouldn't trust a company to provide a quality service if it had mistakes in its marketing material. A third of respondents simply said they'd be 'put off', and 20% said they would consider the company that made such mistakes 'unprofessional'.

So Megan Smith is definitely on to something. Good on her. And I love her reported comment that 'the geek thing is quite trendy now.' All power to the geeks.

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Everyday Things are Broken

Office talk on the first day back turned to what we read on holiday.

Donald Norman’s book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ (published by Basic Books, 2002 edition) was a good holiday read. As the blurb on the back says, ‘It will do your heart good…’.

Norman’s book examines how people interact with Everyday Things — devices, equipment, appliances. He examines the tasks we need to perform to use Everyday Things, and they’re often not as straightforward as they should be. Norman is firmly on the side of the user.

We may blame ourselves when we can’t open this, or programme that. So it does your heart good when Norman clearly shows that struggling with the mechanical and information demands of everyday life is not always our fault. Many Everyday Things are not well designed.

So how do we cope? The answer is a complex mix of:
•  the psychology of human thought and knowledge — what we know about how things work
•  the psychology of Everyday Things — what information we get from how things look
•  the ability of designers to apply their knowledge of the first two points.

The designer needs to start with the goal to be achieved, consider the actions the user must do, make logical links between the tasks, and provide the user with visual clues.

We like Donald Norman’s debate about Everyday Things because we recognise the designer’s challenge with every document we write. The Write Plain English Standard mirrors the designer’s process — begin with the purpose of the task, consider what the reader must do, make logical links between chunks of information, and provide visual clues to make the reader’s task easy.

10 New Year’s Resolutions — ‘What to do, and how not to do it’

1. Passive voice will not be used in the writing of this author.
   
2. Jargon will be the primary framework for communications from this operational silo.
   
3. We’ll just ignore the buzzword that’s the elephant in the room, and keep our eyes to the ground as we do some blue-sky thinking.
   
4. Something I learned when I studied business administration in 1982, and that I’m sticking to because it’s long-established best practice, is that recommendations in the report come at the end.
   
5. Some of my words will be precise and familiar, but most of my words will be dubious, abstruse, and obfuscatory.
   
6. In order to communicate the least opaque indication that the working group’s combined academic and professional expertise has leveraged our knowledge base in this specialisation, and to optimise our success of this product as a service in advance of its early April launch in San Francisco and Auckland to non-commercial markets, we will require a sentence length of a minimum of 45 words, and preferably in excess of this going forward.
   
7. If you know there’s a word in a sentence that isn’t really adding much to the meaning, then it’s probably what’s called a clutter word, so feel free to leave it out.
   
8. I’ll write the points in a bulleted list to agree with the grammar of the stem so that:
   •   the bullets flow on as if each forms the end of the sentence
   •   their construction is ‘parallel’
   •   check the list is no longer than seven bullets, without a page break,
       and put a full stop at the end
   
9. Don’t make your readers think ‘WT? (what the…?)’. Tell them that acronyms are AOK if every IA, ICBM, LIM, and ITO is spelt out in full the first time it’s used.
   
10. Our agency-wide mar-comms facilitation advisers have enacted for the sake of complete clarification and organisational probity an absolute and binding moratorium on the utilisation of adjectivally rich but potentially ambiguous noun strings.
    
11. And finally, remember… The linguistic construction of normative value(s) furnishes a provisional lens for the analysis of the authentication of linguistic transparency.

(This last one is from the Write your own academic sentence generator. Try it for yourself!)

Starting afresh as an antidote to complexity

Here's an extract from Lynda's speech at  the Plain English Awards ceremony on 3 December. Many of you wanted the details of the book she referred to in her speech, so we've included them at the bottom of this post.

"We’ve being reading a brilliant book lately called Simple — Conquering the crisis of complexity, by ‘simplicity warriors’ Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn.

Simple addresses the question of why we tolerate complexity in our lives and offers the concept of ‘breakthrough simplicity’ (starting afresh) as the antidote. The book is about:

• how complexity is costing us money, undermining government and business, and putting our health and even our lives at risk.  (The book is full of stories and facts and figures.)

• how people are overwhelmed by quantity and complexity and are looking for a ‘back to basics’ approach as a way to simplify their own lives

• how organisations can use the concept of simplicity (especially in documents) to revolutionise the way they operate and achieve their purpose.  

Simple is also about focusing on simplicity as a bottom-line business issue. It’s about simplifying products, services, and communications to improve relationship with customers and stakeholders, and about being more productive and saving time and money.

Much as I loved Simple, it told me (in very inspiring ways) what I already knew from our work over 23 years, and by the stories we know from the organisations we work with.

We’re also writing a book (called Rewrite) that captures the stories of mostly New Zealand organisations that are fighting the complexity battle. For one section of the book, we asked organisations we have worked with what their motive was for starting afresh (to find breakthrough simplicity) and investing heavily in plain language. You’ll find their stories inspiring too."

Read more about Rewrite and pre-order a copy

Buy Simple here

Clear disclosure will win customer loyalty and improve compliance all round

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/9470981/Simple-loan-disclosures-recommended

The debate continues: how much should banks tell customers about their loan arrangements? And how best to do it clearly? Stuff today discusses the idea of a standardised document across all financial institutions to allow customers to shop around and easily compare terms and conditions.

Our financial decisions and experiences have a lot in common with our health decisions and experiences. In both areas, we have to take in a lot of information, understand it and use it to make a decision we may have to live with for many years.

In New Zealand, the Code of Health and Disability Consumers' Rights (1996) protects consumers in their health decisions and experiences with health providers.

Right 6 (1) says 'You have the right to all the information you need to make an informed choice or give your informed consent'.

So banks could learn from the health and disability sector and give people all the information they need to make an informed choice. Information written in plain language in a well-designed document will encourage customer loyalty, and make it easier for customers to understand their financial obligations.

Setting trends; setting type

Remember when the word ‘trendy’ was, well, trendy? Yet now it is the kiss of death for anything purporting to be modern, innovative, or contemporary — used by people trying desperately to sound ‘cutting edge’ (is this the replacement for ‘trendy’?).

We are all constantly bombarded with change, software updates, new ‘rules’, and fashionable terms. We are urged to keep moving with the times, or risk the infamy caused by using an outdated word to mean ‘up to date’.

This brings me, rather circuitously, to the knotty issue of the number of spaces that should be used after a full stop in normal text. When editors receive a document with double spaces after full stops (or worse!), we tend to sigh and resignedly bring up the Search and Replace function. (But we never use the Search and Replace All option: we’ve all clicked this once in a burst of optimism, with disastrous results.)

The Heraclitean River blog addresses this question comprehensively in its essay here — but leaves editors mumbling into their (metaphorical) beards. In changing times we all tend to accept reasoning when it is backed up by enough people who agree with us. We’re not joining the Flat Earth Society, but it may be time for us to be a little more flexible about the thorny spacing issue.

By Corinna Lines

From our bookshelf: FISH! Tales

At every staff meeting the chair reviews a book from our bookshelf, to remind us of the wealth of knowledge we have at our fingertips.

Jack Ponting, our client services co-ordinator, picked FISH! Tales. Here's what he said:

'The series of FISH! books are based around a special fish market in Seattle. They contain real-life stories to help you transform your workplace and your life.

'They promote four principles for engaging:

• play
• make their day
• be there
• choose your attitude

'Living this philosophy results in a workplace where the quality of life is satisfying and meaningful, and the experience for customers, internal and external, is compelling.

'PLAY — Work made fun gets done, especially when we choose to do serious tasks in a light-hearted, spontaneous way. Play is not just an activity; it’s a state of mind that brings new energy to the tasks at hand and sparks creative solutions.

'MAKE THEIR DAY — When you ‘make someone’s day’ (or moment) through a small kindness or unforgettable engagement, you can turn even routine encounters into special memories.

'BE THERE — The glue in our humanity is in being fully present for one another. Being there is also a great way to practise wholeheartedness and fight burnout, for it is those half-hearted tasks you perform while juggling other things that wear you out.

'CHOOSE YOUR ATTITUDE — When you look for the worst, you will find it everywhere. When you learn you have the power to choose your response to what life brings, you can look for the best and find opportunities you never imagined possible. If you find yourself with an attitude that is not what you want it to be, you can choose a new one.

'Applied Principles touched many who applied them in their workplaces. This book is a collection of some of these stories and experiences.

'On page 137 the challenge is offered to ‘Let’s go fishing!’ This offers 12 weeks of discovering the richer and more rewarding life that is just a few choices away.

'William Hope, from Arrow Electronics UK Limited said, ‘The FISH! Philosophy has spread across our organisation like an electric shock, leaving people tingling with the energy it leaves behind.’

Thanks, Jack, for advice that enhances happiness at work, and outside it.

FISH! Tales is by Stephen C Lundin, John Christensen, and Harry Paul.

Take a look on Amazon