Misuse of bullet points

Bullet points are useful for lists, but I have three gripes about the way they are misused.

First gripe
They are often used when a paragraph would be more effective. Take this following example from a hospital information sheet:

After surgery:

• sit on the side of the bed initially
• transfer to the bedside chair
• walk to the bathroom
• walk freely around the ward
• progress should be gradual, no exertion.

The main idea here is that the patient should move gently at first, but it's buried at the end of the list. And isn't 'transfer' an odd word choice?

Second gripe
Another common mistake is long bulleted lists with no introductory paragraph. This causes two problems — you don't know what's most important and as the information isn't grouped, you have to mentally sort it as you read. You can easily overlook key information in such lists.

An example from the same hospital information sheet dumps sport, sex and bathing in the same list.

Following surgery:

• Short baths can be taken (10–15 minutes).
• Showers may be taken as soon as you are able to walk around.
• Wounds may get wet but should be dried thoroughly. Use a hairdryer if necessary and leave Steristrips on wounds for 5 days.
• Sport: start gradually and build up (walking, swimming, jogging), no exertion, avoid high-impact exercises for 6 weeks (3 months for pelvic floor surgery) and stop if it hurts.
• Sexual intercourse can resume after 4–6 weeks.
• After major surgery avoid heavy lifting for 3 months (i.e. no more than 10kg/2 telephone books).
• Avoid standing for long periods.
• Recommence driving when pain medication is no longer required (check with your insurance company regarding cover following surgery).
• Recovery from major surgery is dependant [sic] on the individual and may take from 4 weeks to several months.

Third gripe
My third gripe is inconsistency of style. When all bullet points relate back to the same stem statement, you should be able to read them as if they were separate statements.

Look at the structure of the above list and you can see that several of the bullet points do not relate to the stem statement (Following surgery recovery from major surgery is dependant on the individual ... ).

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Storytelling in your marketing

We all love a good story, so how can we use stories in our marketing material? It’s easier to tell stories when face-to-face with a prospect, but we can also use some storytelling concepts in our written marketing material.

How to use a storytelling structure
A storytelling structure is easy to follow as we are all familiar with how stories work. Ros Jay, author of How to Write Proposals and Reports that get Results says writing using a storytelling structure has four components: position, problem, possibilities and proposal.

Take Hansel and Gretel, for instance.

Position
Hansel and Gretel were left in the woods by their parents (woodcutter and stepmother), who couldn’t afford to look after them any longer.

Problem
They found a house made of gingerbread, but unfortunately it belonged to a wicked witch who imprisoned them.

Possibilities
They could try to escape or they could trick the witch. Otherwise they would be cooked and eaten by her.

Proposal
In the end the best option was to trick the witch by pushing her into her own oven so she burnt to death. Then Hansel and Gretel escaped and ran home.

Using this structure, if are writing a brochure or proposal, you first set the scene and make your potential clients feel you understand their situation. Often this means stating what both you and the reader already know, but you are establishing common ground.

Once you have demonstrated you understand their situation, you can discuss their problems (you would probably choose a word other than ‘problem’) and how you can help. You may not write about possibilities, but considering your client’s options helps you state the benefits, rather than just the features, of your products or services.

In my view, this structure doesn’t work as well with web copy where your writing has to be more direct. You don’t have time in web writing to do much scene setting. The exception is the US style of long-copy marketing pages (e.g. www.mequoda.com/free-reports/master-landing-page-templates).

Telling stories in your case studies
Case studies allow you to demonstrate how your products and services work in practice or how other clients have benefitted from them. In other words, they are stories, and are powerful on the web as well as in your print material.

In a blog posting, Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars, itemises some of the ingredients of great stories that you can use to make your case studies powerful.

• Great stories are true and trusted.
• Great stories make a promise. They promise fun, safety or a shortcut.
• Great stories are subtle. The fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story.
• Great stories happen fast.
• Great stories appeal to our senses.
• Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. The most effective stories match the world view of a tiny audience that spreads the story.

You can read the full blog post on Seth Godin's website. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html

This article first appeared on Flying Solo's website: http://www.flyingsolo.com.au

Find out about Mary's writing courses online at www.onlinewritingtraining.com.au

Writing to change behaviour

Communicators have a large role to play in changing our behaviour. For example, we would not be nearly as aware of the dangers of sunbathing or speeding without regular campaigns. Issues such as climate change and obesity have become difficult ones to tackle. How can you write in such a way as to make people want to change their behaviour, particularly if there is a financial cost to changing?

A website worth looking at is http://www.cbsm.com

Dr Doug McKenzie-Mohr is a pioneer in community-based social marketing and his work draws on social psychology at the community level.

On his website, you can download his free e-book, browse a number of case studies and read articles on how to target specific behavioural changes (e.g. encouraging people to install low-flow shower heads). Each article looks at:

• why the behavioural change is important (e.g. low-flow shower heads reduce water consumption, enhance energy efficiency and lower CO2 emissions)
• what is known about the perceived barriers to change
• the most effective programs to date that foster the behavioural change.

The colleague, who told me about this website, attended a workshop where Dr McKenzie-Mohr told the following anecdote. Forest vegetation in a park was being damaged by people wandering off the pathway. Signs asking people to stay off the vegetation made no difference. Research identified that people were trampling the vegetation to take photos, so the sign was replaced with a new one stating that the best place to take photos in the park was a short way ahead. Problem solved.

If only all change were so easy!

You can download Dr McKenzie-Mohr’s free book at http://www.cbsm.com/public/images/FosteringSustainableBehavior.pdf

Write your own marketing material

Many of us have to write our own marketing material whether or not we enjoy writing. Often we’re so busy thinking about what we want to say that we lose sight of our audience. Even experienced writers can fall into this trap.

The problem with writing marketing material for ourselves is that we tend to waffle before we get to the point. Sam Leader, director and editor of Flying Solo, says that having edited some 600 articles for Flying Solo, she has “to get rid of an average of two or three warm-up paras time and time again”.

So how can we avoid this? I suggest you clarify your thoughts before you start writing by asking yourselves questions using PACKO: purpose, audience, context, key messages and outcome.

Purpose
Why are you writing this document? What do you want to achieve?

You may want to provide information, make a recommendation to solve a problem or persuade your readers to buy your products or services. Sometimes you may have more than one purpose.

Understanding your purpose helps determine the structure of your writing. For example, if you’re writing an informative piece, you can often get straight to the point without much preamble. You simply record your information in order of importance to the reader.

If you want to persuade your readers, you may need to spend more time setting the scene to demonstrate that you understand their situation. The challenge is to write from their point of view, not yours.

Audience/s
Having established what you want to achieve, think about your audience/s. What do you know about them? Are your writing for single or multiple audiences?

The more you tailor your writing to suit your readers, the more powerful it will be. As Cicero said:

If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.

Context
I never used to think about context, but I have become increasingly aware that many writers make assumptions about their readers’ knowledge when writing marketing material. Explaining the context or background may not always be relevant, but if you think about it, you’ll know whether or not you need to explain your terms or include some background information.

For example, at the end of 2008, the media covered how Bernard Madoff lost his clients a lot of money through a Ponzi scheme. Many newspapers did not explain what a Ponzi scheme is, leaving readers to guess or look up the information. (According to Wikipedia: “It’s a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors out of the money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit.”)

Key messages
What are your key messages?
You must be able to articulate your key messages in clear statements that even a 12-year-old can understand.

This sounds common sense, but it’s amazing how many highly intelligent writers don’t make their key messages clear. I think it’s sometimes because they think they’re obvious. Professor Chip Heath of Stanford University calls this the “curse of knowledge”.

Outcome/s
How do you want your readers to respond? This question relates back to purpose, but thinking about it separately reminds you to check your details.

For example, a friend of mine, who owns a restaurant, sends a wonderful chatty email to customers. A recent email was as interesting as usual, but she’d forgotten to include the restaurant’s phone number. Had she thought: “bookings, bookings, bookings”, the phone number would have been prominently displayed.

So before you start writing marketing material next time, just pause for a moment and ask yourself the PACKO questions.

This article first appeared on www.flyingsolo.com.au

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The art of storytelling in business

A colleague was lamenting the lack of storytelling training in the business world. Thinking there must be some experts in this field, I googled and came up with Australian-born Steve Denning, author of several books including The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

Steve believes storytelling in business can be used for a variety of purposes, such as igniting organisational change, innovation and building community.

Storytelling is often a one-way process, with a storyteller and a listener. In the business world, Steve says business leaders need to see storytelling as a two-way process: as well as telling a good story, they must anticipate how the audience will respond, and interact with them. He defines this as ‘narrative intelligence’.

Steve describes different types of stories, such as ‘springboard’ stories that enable an audience to understand how an organisation or community may change; anti-stories, which undermine original stories, such as office gossip; and accounts, such as the reckoning of a financial matter.

In the first chapter of his latest book, which you can download online, he says the three key steps in the language of leadership are getting the audience’s attention, eliciting desire for a different future, and reinforcing with reasons.
www.stevedenning.com

Storytelling in marketing
In a blog posting, Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars, itemises some of the ingredients of great stories:

• Great stories are true and trusted.
• Great stories make a promise. They promise fun, safety or a shortcut.
• Great stories are subtle. The fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story.
• Great stories happen fast.
• Great stories appeal to our senses.
• Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. The most effective stories match the world view of a tiny audience that spreads the story.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html

A story

All this theory needs a story, so here’s a little story about testing assumptions.

The creators of Sesame Street assumed you couldn’t mix fantasy with reality, so originally there were no Muppets in the street scenes.

When they tested the show with children just before it went live, they found the children were bored with the street scenes. That’s when Big Bird, Oscar, the Grouch and Snuffleupagus were born.
Source: Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

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Review and edit your work

We all make grammatical mistakes and typos. Often readers are forgiving; but not always.

Unfortunately, when a reader sees a mistake, they don't think 'that person has probably worked on this document so long they can't see it clearly any more'. No, they think 'careless, sloppy writing'.

And sometimes they even judge the writer's integrity based on grammatical errors. When I was facilitating a business writing course once, a woman came back after a break and said: 'I’ve just received an email from a barrister. I didn’t feel comfortable about his advice and this email confirmed it. He used a wrong apostrophe! I’ll never trust him again.'

Ouch. It was just an apostrophe!

So how can we make our copy ‘as good as it’s going to get’? Here are my self-editing tips.

1. Take a break. If you edit your work straight after you’ve finished writing, you don’t see it clearly. Any break is helpful, but overnight is best as then you approach your work with fresh eyes.

2. Use Spell Check and set the default to Australian spelling if you live in Australia. I think it’s worth using Microsoft’s grammar check, even though it’s hopeless, as it will occasionally pick up something basic, such as a subject-verb agreement that you’ve missed.

3. Read your work through five times for a Rolls Royce edit:

• once for meaning (Is it clear?)
• twice to change grammar, words etc. (Is there a better way of saying this?)
• once for layout, headings, hyperlinks, tables etc.
• one last time for anything you’ve missed.

I realise this is a bit over-the-top, but I want to stress that one quick read-through is not enough and you edit more thoroughly if you look for different things on separate readings.

4. When editing the second and third times, concentrate on:

• sentences – are they too long?
• words – are any unnecessary?
• grammar
• consistency
• unnecessary repetitions
• typos
• layout.

5. If you’re editing on screen, proofread on a hard copy as well. Unfortunately, we don’t see things as clearly on the screen.

6. Some people find it helpful to read:

• word-by-word
• with a ruler underneath each line
• aloud
• with another person – one person reads and the other follows the text
• in reverse order, i.e. they either read point 7 before point 6 or literally read sentences in reverse order.

7. Ask a friend or colleague to read your work for you. But choose someone with an eye for detail –not all people have that skill.

With self-editing, you may pick up that rogue apostrophe.

These tips first appeared in Flying Solo (http://www.flyingsolo.com.au)

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Phrases we love to hate

In an entertaining article 'Are you going forward? Then stop now' (BBC Magazine), Lucy Kellaway looks at the epidemic use of the phrase 'going forward' and makes fun of some of our other pet hates.
Two of the most amusing examples of the use of 'going forward' are:

'When asked if he was going to be the England captain again after his triumph with Trinidad and Tobago, David Beckham came out with the gnomic reply "Going forward, who knows." It seems that the less one has to say, the more likely one is to reach for a going forward as a crutch. Politicians find it comforting for this reason. "We are going forward" poor Hillary Clinton said just before the last, fatal primary . . . when it became indisputable that she was going nowhere of the kind.'

For nearly a decade, Lucy Kellaway wrote a fictional column in the Financial Times about a senior manager who spoke in business cliches.

She says: 'Martin Lukes talked the talk. Or rather, he added value by reaching out and sharing his blue sky thinking. At the end of the day he stepped up to the plate and delivered world class jargon that really pushed the envelope. After eight years of being him I came to accept the nouns pretending to be verbs. To task and to impact. Even the new verb to architect I almost took in my stride. I didn't even really mind the impenetrable sentences full of leveraging value and paradigm shifts. But what still rankled after so long were the little things: that he said myself instead of me and that he would never talk about a problem, when he could dialogue around an issue instead.'

It is often the little things, isn't it? I cringe when I see 'myself' used wrongly, but I think it's here to stay.

As I read on, I smiled even more broadly when Lucy Kellaway dealt with the word 'passion'.

'Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office — unless things have gone very wrong indeed. And yet passion is something that every employee must attest to in order to get through any selection process.'

If you enjoy being a pedant and want to smile at our crankiness about words, visit http://news.bbc.co.uk:80/1/hi/magazine/7453584.stm

You can also click through to 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7457287.stm

Sign up for my newsletter and learn about my writing courses online at www.onlinewritingtraining.com.au