1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Legend. If discovering or being reminded of these rules is what you take away from this post – then my work here is done. However, if you want to know what Orwell was really getting at, read on.

Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, from which the above is an excerpt, makes a more fundamental point than simply how to write good. He is concerned with the effect of language on our ability to think.

He claims that not only do foolish thoughts lead to ugly, stale and inaccurate language – but that ugly, stale and inaccurate language ‘makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.’ He says: ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’

The more we use poor language, the poorer our thoughts become.

If we don’t have the words we can’t have the thoughts.

Orwell was writing about the language used by politicians. He was concerned, not just that they all get their points across clearly, but that they preserve the ability to have a point worth making in the first place. That, when alone in their minds, their attempt to formulate ideas is equipped with the best arsenal possible – in array, range, and accuracy. That they are able to have the important thoughts in the first place, before they even say a word.

It is easy to imagine that for politicians the thoughts that they have are a matter of life and death to others, because they consider and discuss policies concerning military action, social welfare, security, crime and health.

But what are the consequences of your thoughts? On your business, your relationships, your health, your future, your art, your contribution? The popularity of cognitive therapy suggests that the ability to change what you think about yourself and your environment is crucial to your ability to change at all. But from where will you get the language for those new thoughts?

What if improving your language could unlock a greater range of options for your work? That by learning to speak and write more accurately – as we all can – you might begin to think more accurately too?

Orwell wanted people to say more clearly what they meant. But he wanted them to mean something worthwhile to begin with. Behind his excellent editorial tips lie two principles that should underpin everything that we write:

1. Mean something before you say anything
2. The clearer your language, the better your thoughts

Something to think about the next time you use leverage as a verb.

What do you think?

What if I added that it was completely free, and that I would share this knowledge with you right now?

Ready to slam the back button?

Because these results have been measured by psychologists as the outcome of just one thing (and no, it’s not a deodorant).

It’s not something difficult or unnatural. It doesn’t involve parting with your sense, your shekels, or your soul.

In fact, it’s something that all good web professionals have been talking about for ages already.

It’s – are you ready for this?

It’s fluency.

It gets even better

Now you might be thinking that ‘fluency’ is going to turn out to be a complicated process involving qualifications, time or mental capacities that you haven’t got.

Far from it. Fluency is simply making tasks easy to accomplish.

New psychological research has found that when people find something easy to accomplish, they are more likely to believe it. In psychology this is called cognitive fluency.

Here’s the science bit: if people find something easy, it’s as though they have done it before. In other words, they find it familiar. To our cave-dwelling ancestors, familiar was a good thing, because in the words of late psychologist Robert Zajonc, ‘if it is familiar, it has not eaten you yet.’ So the familiar – the easy – is experienced by humans as more trustworthy, more believable, more true.

That wasn’t so painful, was it?

Drake Bennett, who reported the research findings for The Boston Globe, says:

… when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process … like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.

Simply writing a statement on your web site in a more legible font, or repeating it or making it rhyme, can make readers not only believe it more, but think that you are smarter and that they are more capable.

That’s incredible. Easy equals true.

And here’s the other side of the coin: ‘disfluency’ (horrible word – fear for what the marketers will do with it) sets up a mental roadblock. When something is hard to read or understand, or information is difficult to find, people feel frustrated, confused and obstructed. They believe less what you have to say and start to question your intelligence.

For example, Bennett says that if you write in a font that is difficult to read, people ‘transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about’.

Your web site – easy or hard?

If it’s hard to accomplish basic tasks on your web site, then I’m going to question your intelligence too. Web sites are all about simple tasks. Visitors arrive with little task lists, conscious and otherwise:

• Find out what this site is about
• Discover if it is useful to me
• Get what I was searching for in the first place
• Gain a piece of information

If you can make accomplishing those tasks easy, you have not only boosted the credibility of your business, you have made yourself seem more intelligent and made them feel good about themselves into the bargain.

But give a payment process twice as many steps as necessary – or crowd the front page with a bit of everything so that your core business gets overlooked – or create a cool design that leaves people uncertain where to click next – or ask unwanted questions of your potential customers in pop-ups – and you have just undermined the whole reason you set up a site in the first place.

‘Easy’ for the customer might mean more work for you in simplifying your web site. It certainly takes discipline to keep a site fluent. But if you want to be believed, esteemed and leave your customers feeling confident about your business – it’s the only way.

There is much more to be said about cognitive fluency, about how to make web sites – and in particular their content – more fluent. Also about when disfluency can be used to our advantage. All to be explored later on SmyWord.

Right now I’m curious about your stories of fluency – how you felt when a site wasn’t easy, or your experience when it was. What have you done to make your own site easier to use? Did you notice a difference?

As the memory comes back to you, think about the nature of what you are actually remembering. Are you recalling the things that were said, and that you say to yourself about what happened? Or are you picturing it, and even visualising the concept of happiness? Or perhaps the memory brings up strong feelings that you can almost feel again right now in your body?

For most people, it will be one of those more than the others. People experience the world in three different ways. They either hear it, see it, or feel it. When they recall experiences, it will mainly be through sounds, pictures or physical feelings.

We are all capable of experiencing in all three ways (and more), but there is usually one way that dominates all the others: hearing (auditory), seeing (visual), or feeling (kinesthetic).

These are called Representational Systems

Don’t let the name put you off. The concept comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Don’t let that name put you off either (if you haven’t heard of NLP, now might not be the best time to start – you’ll have a lot more fun reading the rest of this post).

Have you got which way you process information yet? Auditory, visual, or kinesthetic?

Let’s break it down to make it easier. If I asked a mixed group of people to think of something good that happened to them recently:

1. Auditory people

– would remember what was said and the things they tell themselves about what happened. “Jeffrey said my blog post was lovely”. “I remember thinking ‘that’s a nice surprise’”. They have the experience in sound bites. They can hear the story in words, and will remember other sounds as well. High noise levels or silence. A bird singing. The woman’s unusual voice.

2. Visual people

– would recall images and visual impressions of the experience. Specific snapshots of the scene, but also darkness and light, and even colours to represent how they felt. “It’s all a bit misty now”. They will recall visual details that others will have missed, such as the shadow a window frame cast on the wall.

3. Kinesthetic people

– would locate what happened in their bodies, either specifically (“like a bubble bursting upwards in my chest”) or as a general feeling (“I felt really light”). They’ll remember how they felt and also physical parts of the experience such as contact with others, or temperature in the room. They’ll probably remember being hungry or stuffed, or carrying an injury to a part of their bodies.

You can often spot which system people favour the most by watching their eyes when they recall experiences. If they look upwards, they’re most likely to be visual. Sideways indicates auditory, and down suggests more kinesthetic. A more reliable way is to listen to the words and phrases that they repeat.

But why am I telling you about this?

People engage best with information that appeals to their own system

You’re writing on the web to move your audience. You want them to get the picture that you’re painting. To believe your voice. If only you knew more about how they processed information…

Well now you do. People will be most receptive to ideas expressed in their dominant representational system.

Talk to auditory people in the language of hearing:

I heard an important truth and I need to tell you.
Does that sound good to you?
Let’s tone down the discussion.
Listen, we need to talk.

Show visual people what it looks like:

I saw this incredible example – does it look okay to you?
You need to see this.
Imagine the bigger picture for a moment.
Let’s make it as clear as day.

Touch kinesthetic people with physical descriptions:

Will they get a grip on this?
You’ll feel good about this tomorrow.
Hold that thought, don’t let it go.
We need to touch on the most important issue.

When writing to one person you can craft your communication to match their style (as long as you’ve found it out first). When writing to more than one, perhaps millions, on a web site for example, the important thing is to mix up the language and target all three types throughout your copy.

Don’t be restricted to your own system alone

My writing is usually heavy with imagery and visual expressions because I experience things visually. The first challenge for me is to expand my phrases and vocabulary to embrace the listeners and feelers too.

Appealing to your audience is a must if you’re a writer. Knowing that they don’t all experience the world in the same way that you do must be a good thing, as long as you can find new ways to engage on their terms. ‘Appealing’ for example is a more auditory concept – you must enlighten and grab them as well.

What is your preferred system? Do you get trapped in one way of describing things? Does mixing it up sound like a helpful tip for writing? Can you spot the ways I’ve appealed to the auditory, visual and kinesthetic in this post?

They are all names thrown at Generation Y. Although you can never actually define a generation – these things will always be gross generalisations – people talk about a generation born between the late 1970’s and the mid 1990’s. Let’s say 1979–1994.

From my basic, generalised grasp of what Generation Y is about, we’re talking:

1. Want to be happy, and instantly
2. Concerned for their friends – very peer-orientated
3. There’s no bigger picture – less competitive, don’t trust corporate

Compare that with some observations about the way that information is accessed and engaged with on the web:

1. We want usefulness from short, scannable content
2. We use social media and constant communication
3. It’s too fast paced for big picture learning, need authority to trust

Anyone else see the connection?

Of course, it’s rather obvious. If the need wasn’t out there, we would have built a different web (or a different environment altogether). But I got thinking about what the relationship between the current teens and twenties and the emerging web really is.

On the one hand, it’s a stupid exercise, because it’s based on generalisations and can never be answered. On the other hand, I like the questions it throws up.

So which one is it?

1. If Generation Y has caused the web to be the way it is

– then what will the next generation cause?

Early comments about Generation Z, the digital natives, have little to say as yet. They’re only small, bless ‘em. But what we can see is that they have grown up with instant, connected technology and less traditional family setups. Raised by Facebook. How can we prepare for what they will demand from the web?

And if the web has been shaped by Gen Y’s values of instant–useful–peer–personal then surely they are also demanding the same things from other offline environments: traditional communications, retail and services, and education. Is the only difference between online and offline that offline takes longer to change? In other words, never mind the differences between print and the web – all of it needs to change to be relevant. Or die.

2. If the web has shaped the way a generation behaves

– then what responsibility do we have for what we’re shaping?

If each time we make it easier and social we contribute to a generation being centred on instant–self–friends–happiness, is that what we wanted to create? Are we doing a good job? For example, if shorter, scannable content is leading to shorter, shallower attention engagement, should we raise the game? This far but no further?

3. If the two are unconnected

–  then we are lucky that they match so well, but shouldn’t take it for granted that the next generation will be the same.

4. If the two are interdependent

– then all of the above apply. Where will the generations take us next, and what responsibiliity do we have in shaping them?

Just a handful of trivial questions for a Friday afternoon. What do you think?

(Far too general a rant for specific attribution but Jakob Nielsen, Wikipedia, Graham Cray and Radiohead all in there somewhere.)

Change comes to us in many forms in business. Usually it feels like just as we’ve got used to a way of working – something changes. New personnel, new roles, new management, new expectations, new clients, new equipment, new web sites, new applications, new policies; it can all become a whirl of chaos in which we wonder how we’re ever going to get anything done.

When Google released their new web browser Chrome a colleague of mine reeled with horror. ‘It has no home button!’ he shouted. ‘I hate change’. Being a developer, it only took him few seconds to add the missing feature himself. But his reaction was telling.

Google are trying to change the way that we browse the web, by integrating searching and surfing history into the browser itself. It’s a small jump to browsing more intuitively, one that could make home pages and search bars redundant.

But it’s still a jump.

And for one developer, it was the jump that he noticed first. Perhaps he really cared in the long run about having a home button (probably). Yet I wonder if his reaction was more about having to jump – having to change – than it was about the actual alteration.

In other words, his relationship to change itself.

If change is a problem for us then any change is inconvenient, however small. If change represents new possibilities and opportunities to us, then any change can bring delight.

Do we have any choice in our relationship to change?

Nearly all change – big or small – follows the same pattern in our emotional response to it. The change and our response comes in four stages.

1. Disruption and loss

The first stage is disruption and the first feeling is usually one of loss. Something is being taken away from us. Security, knowledge, position, or comfort can all be threatened at the beginning. Because this is the feeling that we experience first of all, we often resist the change as soon as we hear about it. After all, who wants to experience loss?

2. Disorder and chaos

It gets worse. The second stage is disorder. We enter personal chaos. Under threat, anxiety and fear can pop up. Sometimes we oscillate between stages one and two by refusing to live with the anxiety, and so denying that change needs to occur. But that just pushes us back towards having to accept that change is inevitable, and the loss kicks in all over again. Yet if we hang in there, the good news eventually arrives.

3. New order and hope

Stage three is where a new order is formed. Out of the confusion we begin to think about what we might need to thrive in our new environment. We begin to see how it might work, and surprisingly, this leads us on to thinking about what good things might come out of the change.

4. New relationship and confidence

And by stage four – when a new relationship is formed to things – we are confident that we can thrive with the change, and focus on what has improved and the new possibilities now available.

To simplify, feeling only the loss and fearing the disorder will make us hate change. But being able to look ahead and anticipate the confidence, improvements and new opportunities that will inevitably arrive will help us to embrace it.

And embrace it we must, because we all know what happens after stage four is complete. It’s back round to disruption and loss as something else shifts in the way that we work.

Now the browser home button has gone, nothing is sacred. At least we know how to surf the changes when they come.