Older people write better digital content

I’ve just turned 41. I played football on my Birthday, ruptured my Achilles tendon and now I’m here with my leg in plaster. So I thought I’d mention one benefit of getting older.

Age (like laziness) makes people do things more efficiently. No unnecessary movements. The young squash player sprints about while his wiry old opponent barely moves from the ideal centre-T spot. The veteran wins (tendons willing).

Older writers learn to stay close to that ideal spot, because age brings wisdom about what does and doesn’t need saying. Ernest Hemingway (a particularly wiry veteran) called it iceberg theory:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. (from Death in the Afternoon)

The art of omission matures with age. There are many exceptions (several at The Art of Explaining), but in an era that’s made brevity a premium product, I’ve found older copywriters are more likely to command the T-spot.

Thomas Heath

How to explain first time

‘If you’re explaining you’re losing.’ That phrase recently came out to bite President Obama, after he gave a 17-minute answer to a short question about healthcare and taxes.

Healthcare and taxes, human rights, banking, the environment … too many of the most vital messages get beached like whales in our attention deficit disordered world. People have to understand first time. Get it? Got it. Good. If not, you lose.

To avoid losing, answer these questions before you try to explain:

1. Who cares and why?

2. How will I make a difference?

3. What’s the big idea?

We use this approach for scripting everything except Post-it notes. You can too.

Step One: Who cares and why?

Who’s your audience? What are they thinking? And why exactly would they be interested in you? Great if you know these people as individuals. If not then imagine them into life — and don’t be afraid to get creative. One trick is to find and print off an image that fits the person you imagine, then brainstorm the page into a collage of all the things that matter to them, personally and professionally, publicly and privately. (This is also a great way to profile customers. You can go further and turn the collage into a magazine cover.)

When you’ve decided what they want, ask how they’d like to be told. You can do communication preference analyses, or just use gut feeling: would they prefer a slick presentation, a detailed document and time to reflect, quick-fire emails, a phone call, or lunch?

Step Two: How will I make a difference?

What exactly are you going to explain and what will be the outcome? President Obama spent 17 minutes attempting to explain the inexplicable. Healthcare and taxes? That’s a game without frontiers: you lose before you begin.

So take time to define an outcome that is specific, achievable, positive, imaginable and measurable. A well-formed outcome sets the parameters for explaining. And there’s a good reason why this is step two: to set a relevant outcome you need to see through the eyes of your audience.

Step Three: What’s the big idea?

You wanted to explain something, remember? Since then, you’ve worked out who wants to know, why they’re interested and what you can do for them. So take all this insight and sum up your message as one big idea. You can do this using the situation/challenge/answer method for introductions: if you describe the situation and the challenge first then the big idea should fall into place as an answer to the challenge. You should be able to state your big idea in no more than a Tweet (140 characters).

Get this right and you’ve won: from here it’s just a matter of reinforcing the message. By explaining first time you can start to change the way people think. Here are three starting points that have helped shape our world:

Earth moves round the sun – Galileo

People are basically good – Ebay

Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do – Dyson

How computer code can improve your writing

As a writer, more and more of my words are published online. The more I work with web developers and designers, the more I see of the dark arts of coding. And do you know what? Writing code is just the same as writing words.

Developers and writers are doing the same things – the only difference is that while I want to communicate clearly to my reader, my developer is communicating with a web browser. Either way, we’re both using language to create specific outcomes.

Not convinced? Well, let me give you a few things that a good writer can learn from their web developer:

1. Know your outcomes

When a developer starts writing a piece of code, they’ll always have an outcome in mind.

They might be adding a sign-up box to capture email addresses. They might be adding more navigation links to a site’s navigation. They might be changing fonts and layout. They’ll know exactly what they want their code to do before they start writing that first line.

It’s the same for a writer – you need to know why you’re writing. Are you sharing information, or encouraging people to act? What exactly do you want them to take away? How are they going to do it? So for an email newsletter, your outcome might be clickthroughs to a specific news article. Once you know, you can start thinking about what to say.

2. Everything needs a purpose

Every single line of code, every single tag, should do something.

It’s all too easy to lose sight of that on a long-running project, though. There might be leftover code from previous versions, or hidden functionality that you’re not using. A good developer will keep this to the minimum, and keep their code lean.

It’s the same with writing – especially with big projects like annual reports or websites. As you refine your messages, you realise there are certain things you don’t need to say any more. To keep the writing – and the thinking – clear, you must edit ruthlessly, and ensure that every single word has a strong purpose.

3. Separate content from presentation

Individual web pages don’t carry any information about how they should look – they just hold the content. No colours, no font types, no background images – in fact, not much more than the words. All this data’s stored in another file, a ‘style sheet’, and linked to the web page. A savvy developer knows how the two work together, and keeping them separate makes it easier to get things right.

It’s similar to putting your words into design. Writing means concentrating on the content first, and then working with your designer to present them properly. So take a cue from programmers and put together your first draft in a simple text editor like notepad. Only having to worry about the words can be liberating, and soon shows up any weaknesses that you might paper over with bold type, headings and italics.

4. Get the order right

Information flows best with a clear order. And unless you’ve got a very good reason, that means the most important stuff comes first and then the details follow.

In HTML, information needs to follow a particular hierarchy. Get it wrong and your site won’t work – it either won’t render properly, or the search engines will ignore it.

It’s the same for writers – if you’re not up-front with what’s important, people won’t read it. Make it easy to grasp your message from the start, and then follow it up with the specifics.

While HTML markup might be an unusual place to look for inspiration, there are more than a handful of similarities.

Pete Cornes

Unusual advice on how to begin a proposal

Decision makers love to say ‘I only ever read the executive summary’. And the way you start your proposal tends to seal its fate. It’s your Dragon’s Den moment: 45 seconds to convince a tough audience. Better make it good.

But I see many proposal writers get overwhelmed by the occasion. The point gets lost in a parade of corporate niceties, with much cap doffing and polite procrastination: ‘we’re delighted to submit this proposal for your attention… the company is committed to…’. That kind of thing.

Look up advice on writing executive summaries and you’ll find differing lists of items you might want to include: mission statements, team members, and so on. Combine those lists together and you’ve got a monster. Meanwhile, your dragon’s flown away.

What to do? First be clear what ‘executive summary’ means:

1. You’re summarising an idea, not a document.

2. You want an executive outcome — decisions, action.

So how can you use the executive summary to sell your idea and achieve the outcome? By telling a story.

Seriously. All stories have three basic parts: a situation that interests the audience, a challenge to that situation, and an answer to that challenge. Smart thinkers such as Barbara Minto and Neil Rackham have shown how these ingredients make a magic mixture for winning hearts and minds. Here’s a recipe*:

1. Say something positive about the situation, which is undeniably true (obvious, in fact) and sparks the most interest.

2. Describe the challenge or complication to the situation that’s prompted this document and ask: what’s to be done?

3. Present your answer to this challenge — with fanfare, because this is the big idea that defines and organises everything else your document should say.

Can you see the story structure in this post? I began with the spark: executive summaries matter. I described the challenge: how to make them effective? And I gave my answer: use the power of storytelling.

It works whatever the subject of your proposal:

Engineering contract:

- Situation: pipeline safety matters
- Challenge: safety being compromised
- Answer: this gadget will fix it.

Customer service policy:

- Situation: our products can empower our customers
- Challenge: poor technical support is holding them back
- Answer: we need this new support package.

Procurement decision:

- Situation: we depend on our suppliers
- Challenge: we’ve now got to choose: A or B?
- Answer: Supplier B is best (as our document will explain).

Something for the weekend:

- Situation: We love family outings
- Challenge: how to keep up with Grandpa + little Ben
- Answer: Let’s go surfing.

So — to sell your idea by the end of the executive summary, ditch the niceties, look your reader in the eye and tell them a story.

*based on guidelines for introductions from Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle.

Why you should start at the end, and why we don’t

Remember science at school? That’s where I learned to dice rats, mix volatile substances, handle electric shocks and melt biros with a Bunsen burner. It’s also where most of us were conditioned to save the main point until last.

Writing up experiments was always the same: start with objectives, talk through the method (saying ‘this was done’, never ‘I did this’), set out the results, analyse them and … finally … give your conclusion. It was similar but more vague for essay subjects: start by saying what you’re going to say; say it, then say what you’ve said.

This format is ideal for Teacher, who already knows the conclusion and wants to see how well you’ve understood.

(Heath! See me about the Bunsen burner…)

But in the real world our reader won’t know the answer until we tell them. And they need to be told at the start, so they can make sense of everything else we say. For example, by stating your conclusion that X is best at the start of your document, the reader can see that what follows is the proof that X is best.

The problem’s easily fixed with a quick cut & paste to move your conclusion up to the start.

But it’s a hard habit to break. School has set the template most of us use to plan documents, with the answer at the end and all workings shown. Think of insurance claim resolution letters. The bit we want to read – do I or don’t I get paid? – sits at the end of a vast essay explaining, so diligently, how the decision was made.

School is where we learned to read and write. But it’s time the professional world noticed we’re not writing for Teacher any more.

The writer’s job: looking after gorillas

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you write a report in which you carefully deal with items A to Z, then your boss or client asks why you didn’t mention item G. ‘It’s there, you idiot’ you say (to yourself) ‘all covered on page 17, third paragraph, with a diagram too.’ Why did your reader miss item G? For the same reason that most of us can miss a gorilla.

Since 1999 the Harvard psychologists Simons and Chabris have been making news with their gleeful demonstrations of human perception. In one test they got participants to watch a film of a basketball game and count the number of times one team passed the ball. During the clip, someone in a gorilla suit strolls onto the court, faces the camera, does a little jig then slowly walks off. And guess what? 70% of subjects who were counting basketball passes failed to notice the gorilla. You’re doubtful? Then try this.

It’s called ‘inattentional blindness’ — our failure to notice things that distract us from our immediate tasks and goals. We perceive and remember only those details that get our focused attention.

So your reader probably missed what you said about item G because your report failed to connect this information with everything else you said. While items A to Z were all happily playing ball together, G was stuck in a gorilla suit.

Part of my work with writers involves helping spot gorillas in documents — those blind spots that readers instinctively ignore, because they don’t fit with the flow of the message.

Your gorillas might be lurking in the form of charts and tables that don’t support a particular point, unnecessary background information, generalised company statements pasted in, or legal provisos that belong elsewhere.

Unfortunately for us, gorillas are the writer’s responsibility. We can’t blame readers for missing a point — it’s our fault for failing to appreciate their inattentional blindspots. It’s our job as writers to understand those blindspots and keep the gorillas at bay. And, yes the same goes for moonwalking bears…

Don’t blame the messenger

Professor Michael Shayer of King’s College London recently repeated a study first done in 1976 to test the problem-solving abilities of 800 secondary pupils. He found they’ve got better at quick-fire descriptive responses, but worse at more complex reasoning.

Text message culture is widely blamed for this ‘dumbing down’, but let’s not accuse the medium — telegrams never made us stupid. What matters is the writer’s intent. More than 350 years ago, Blaise Pascal felt compelled to apologise for a long letter because he hadn’t time to make it short. Being concise is hard; it takes effort to pack a tight snowball.

Texts, Twitter and other messaging services force the writer to be brief, so we inevitably use them for speed. But what happens, what has always happened, when you ration the words of a writer with creative intentions? You get poetry. Consider haikus — ancient Japanese poems with a strict format, most commonly one verse of three lines, with five syllables in the first line (re-frid-ger-ra-tor — that’s your lot) seven in the second and five in the last. They’re popular as ever today for the way they pack meaning. Ten years ago Salon magazine began a mini subculture with a competition to rewrite Microsoft’s on-screen error messages as haiku poems:

Something you entered / transcended parameters / So much is unknown.

Your file was so big / It might be very useful / But now it is gone.

Three things are certain / Death, taxes and lost data / Guess which has occurred.

A crash reduces / Your expensive computer / To a simple stone.

The average character count for each of these is 65. That’s a lot less than the 160 you get to write a text message, or even the 140 allowed for ‘tweeting’ on the microblogging service Twitter.

So it’s unfair to blame lazy language and shallow thought on Messenger, Twitter or any other technology that forces conciseness upon us. The expansive Stephen Fry has become an unlikely champion of Twitter. Last week he found himself stuck with his mobile and time to kill, but took no more than his 140 character allowance to convey it all — fact, feeling and personality — in what has already become a classic ‘tweet’:

‘OK. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s Teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle.’