And, in nearly all cases, that’s been happening.

According to Google’s recent update, my faith in this simple approach will now be rewarded even more. The ‘Panda’ algorithm change earlier this year was designed to assess website quality. Later, Google said: ‘Our site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content.’

Google will never disclose exactly how they are attempting to discern “high-quality” – an element so ambiguous it comes with its own set of speech marks – but they do provide a telling list of questions to provide guidance. A bit like Eastern mysticism, the questions will lead us, trembling, towards an unknowable higher state…

The list of questions is worth bookmarking, and there are common themes to pull out of the list. If I had to sum up what Google is looking for in online content, this is what I’d say:

Authoritative and trustworthy

Authority and trust permeate the list, which is tricky, because you can’t just turn up one day and proclaim that you are either (well you could, but no one would believe you). To become authoritative and trustworthy, you need to write strongly and accurately, provide information that checks out, on a website with an experience that doesn’t leave users anxious or confused. You need to make a name for yourself with reliable content over time, and care about the subject.

Original and useful

These two go together like Jedward or Brangelina. I bang the usefulness drum all the time, because if your website is not useful, people simply don’t stick around. But useful alone is not enough – your content must also be original. In other words, it must be more useful than the other websites showing up on the same search results page.

It might be in more depth or take an unusual slant on the subject. It might provide unique information, be comprehensive, or be presented in a more compelling way. Whatever it is, you must avoid your content being too short, unsubstantial or unspecific.

And ‘original’ has another application: Google likes content that is original on the site, that is, not duplicated among your pages. Repetition is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to SEO.

Well written

Well duh. Of course it should be well written. But if that’s the case why do so many businesses spend so little on quality, error-free writing?

Good writing is not something abstract and hard to pin down. In fact the Google questions nail it. They talk about quality control, and eliminating spelling, stylistic and factual errors. They mention the role of editing, attention to detail, producing a print level standard of writing.

Hint: if you’re mass-producing copy through a large number of creators (and probably paying them very little), then you haven’t got a hope. I like this question: ‘Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail?’ Well, are they?

Not annoying

There is a strand in the reasoning of Google that is best summed up as: don’t piss people off. Write content for readers, not to get them. Tricking them to your site undermines your trustworthiness. Bye-bye. Don’t produce content that is likely to draw complaint (which is not the same as controversy). And guess what? Excessive adverts annoy people.

All of which is hardly surprising, and yet people still get a glimpse in their eye when a spammer tries to flog them peripheral SEO services to pimp up their search performance.

Of course it’s important how you structure your site, what you do with the metadata and keywords. But these are lesser considerations compared with creating core content that is authoritative, original, useful, well-written and doesn’t drive people mad.

In Google’s own words: ‘focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.’

Or, as Socrates said: ‘endeavour to be what you desire to appear.’

Talk about naïve.

The worst example I found was the home delivery information page on the Homebase website. It was long, ugly, and featured 33 mistakes. The gravest of the lot was this bad boy:

…have your order delivered to your workplace, a neighbors’s, etc.

Neighbors’s? To combine a localisation fail (UK English, anyone?), a grammar fail (apostrophe rage!) and a syntactical fail (neighbour’s workplace? Why would I want it delivered there?) in one single word is a miraculous feat. One could say Herculean, if Hercules had been really, really stupid.

There were also asterisks that linked to nothing, commas and full stops awry or missing, and three different notations for time (6.00pm, 6pm, 6 pm). That’s without touching the inconsistent person (‘you’, ‘the customer’), the Americanisms (‘neighorhood’) and the internal jargon (‘delivery lead time’). And the fact that the whole page took 1,493 words to explain how a delivery would work.

Several spellchecks later…

But that was years ago; back when businesses were trying to work out how to get their systems and information onto the web. Of course mistakes were being made, and things being overlooked. In some ways it must have been easy for web copy in a massive outfit like Homebase to slip through the cracks.

So what’s the same page like today?

The good news is that someone has worked on it. The am/pm denotations have been cleaned up and it is now written in UK English. A few words have been shaved off (still 1,377 words long though) and the punctuation reined in.

But the fact that someone has worked on the page makes the extant mistakes even worse. The very first line begins: ‘We’ll deliver it all for from only £5.95…’ (my emphasis). And the second paragraph is word-for-word the same nonsensical sentence from the old page:

Please note that your order is made up of a combination of items / delivery services, deliveries may be made separately.

How does this happen? Someone has looked at the page and implemented changes. Why are there still big, obvious mistakes?

I don’t run a colossal retail business. So when I ask this question, I genuinely want to know: when you’re Homebase, how hard is it to eradicate mistakes in your web copy?

Spelling mistakes cost money

The point is that mistakes look sloppy. They erode trust. In the case of a large corporation like Homebase, they say to the customer: we simply don’t care enough about you to provide you with clear, thoughtful information. We’re not even going to proofread it properly. Enough people buy from us anyway – who cares if you can’t work out what our delivery terms are?

How many businesses can afford to take this attitude? If you’re not as big as Homebase, mistakes may hurt you a lot more. Instead of taking it for sloppiness, people will think your spelling mistakes are the sign of an amateur. It was the moment that I spotted the word ‘Sreenplay’ on a film poster that I realised it was not the real thing.

And let’s not just talk in the vague terms of trust and professionalism. One online retailer doubled its revenue by correcting a single error on its website. The BBC story claims: ‘when there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.’

We need to know, on an unfamiliar website, that it is secure and reliable before we will buy anything through it. Spelling mistakes do not give us that reassurance. Spelling mistakes put a business in the same company as spam emails about enlarged organs and updates from that guy on Facebook who quit school a bit too early.

A few years into this work and I am not surprised by mistakes any more. Nor do I think it is merely a basic consideration that you write your copy properly. Rather, I think it’s a fundamental, strategic and essential one.

Photo: adapted from a photo by iirraa on Flickr

Web represented the family business and met many other words through his work. His colleagues included design and browser. He got on well with these ordinary nouns, but they never got too close – it was just business. ‘I have nothing against the lower cases,’ he’d say; ‘some of my best friends are common nouns.’ Each night he would return to the safety of his trademarked ivory tower, alone.

In society, people found it hard to believe he was still single.

Then one day, Web met a noun who was more common than muck. She had been around for years, and had been paired with too many words to recall (there were few she would not go with – she had even been married to camp). Her name was site.

Despite her reputation, from the moment they started working together people said how good they looked. It was an irresistible partnership. And they were successful. She was easy to work with, and they appeared together all over the world. People assumed that they were already an item.

But Web kept his distance. He had a reputation, he was part of a proud family. He had an enormous W—-. She, on the other hand, was from a hard-working home. She didn’t know what to do with a capital letter and felt uncomfortable appearing in title case.

How could it ever work?

Yet they could not stop thinking of each other. At night, from his tower, Web would look at the stars and sing, ‘I want to sleep with common vocables like you,’ while site would appear in public and speak for them both. ‘I am Web,’ she would shout. They were in love. They were seen together in public all the time.

When Web’s family caught wind of the tryst his brothers tried to dissuade him from marrying down. They called on pernickety subeditors to argue the case. They got the grammar Nazis to torture him. Internet worried about what might happen to his capital if Web relinquished his. But it was no good. The proper noun had fallen in love with a commoner, and there was nothing they could do to keep them apart.

Finally, they surrendered to the inevitable. Web and site shunned a long engagement (unlike her tarty friend e who is still dashing around in front of mail without committing) and jumped straight into marriage. The AP Stylebook recorded their union early last year. No pernickety subeditors were invited to the wedding. Web was forced to abandon his capital, but they both agreed that what mattered was being together.

Now website live joyfully as one. World and Wide in their finery have not been seen around so much. And everyone, well nearly everyone, hopes that the lovers live happily ever after.

The End.

I shall, from this moment forth, be acknowledging their union on my website.

Happy Valentine’s Day to loved-up words everywhere.

Image from 123pimpin.com

So here you go. 40 tips for writing well, on the web especially. Happy Christmas.

1. Don’t worry about whether you’re a writer or not. Write, and you’re a writer.
2. What’s your point? Have something to say before you start.
3. What do you want me to do about it? Identify a single call to action in response to what you are writing and make it clear.
4. Write in the same voice you talk in. Read what you’ve written out loud. If it doesn’t roll off the tongue and doesn’t sound like you then start again.
5. Worry about your title more than anything else. Spend as long on the heading as all the other elements on the page put together.
6. Write loads and then cut nearly all of it. Edit, edit, edit.
7. Convince me. Everything is an argument.
8. Visualise a single individual to represent your target readership. Address everything you write directly to him or her.
9. Why should the reader give a crap about this? Ask this question at every point.
10. Use a thesaurus to remind you of words you already know.
11. Show what you have written to someone else who writes well and ask him or her how you could improve it.
12. Stick to your person. I/we/you/he/she/they should all refer to the same thing all the way through your article.
13. Stick to your tense. put the whole article in the past or present and don’t muck around.
14. Use words that 13-year-olds understand.
15. Cut redundancies: ‘in my opinion… the fact of the matter is…’ are unnecessary. Of course it’s your opinion – you’re saying it.
16. Vary sentence and paragraph length, keeping the average very short. They should be punchy but not monotonous.
17. Be specific.
18. Avoid repetition of words, rhetoric, syntax, structure, sentiments.
19. Eliminate bland words: very, awesome, super, nice, great, so, interesting.
20. Invent fresh metaphors or speak plainly rather than opt for tired clichés.
21. Qualify what you mean by ‘just’.
22. Argue the opposite of what you have written. If it’s not convincing, your original argument lacks power too.
23. Opine. Whatever the subject, take an angle on it; the more original the better.
24. Crucify corporate buzzwords such as leverage assets. Ugh.
25. Show don’t tell. Cut out everything that you can demonstrate without the use of words.
26. Spend a small amount of time finding the best tools and environment in which to write. After that, stop blaming them if it doesn’t happen. It’s your fault, not theirs.
27. If spelling mistakes get through you have a process problem not a writing one. Everyone makes mistakes. That’s what spellcheck, dictionaries, proofreading, and editing are for.
28. Copy the style of writing on web sites that you find useful. Not well written, but useful.
29. Assume that the people you are writing for are kind and well-intentioned but with very little time on their hands.
30. Be kind. It pays off better than being arrogant, cynical or mean.
31. Clarity, above all.
32. Never use a long word when a short word will do. Orwell said that.
33. Write in active sentences rather than passive. The dog ate my homework, not my homework was eaten by the dog. It’s more vigorous. Hemingway said that. Kind of.
34. Don’t tell your reader what you are going to write and why. Just write it.
35. After you have finished, behead your writing. Remove the first paragraph: it is almost always redundant and dull.
36. For punctuation, read your text aloud. Where you pause slightly there should be a comma, where you break for longer there should be a full stop. Don’t use any other punctuation unless you really know what you’re doing.
37. Never write ‘click here’.
38. Get a decent grip on the main rules of grammar so that you can break them for effect.
39. Insert scannable elements: subheadings that make sense, hyperlinks, bullet points and lists, numerals (41 instead of forty-one).
40. Never publish immediately. A hiatus gives you fresh eyes to see how you can improve what you’ve written.

Sustaining freshness in metaphors is difficult but it is not unattainable. Many writers have attained it. One commenter on the post gives the example of P.G Wodehouse whose series of unusual metaphors makes his writing hilarious (‘I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanor was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back’). Laying down writing with innovative metaphors seamed throughout is a hallmark of many great writers, from Will Shakespeare to Will Self. Reading these writers does not exhaust us. Far from it.

Dead is not dying

Besides, when you want to avoid cliché, the alternative is not only to think up new metaphors; equally it can be to write plainly with no allusion at all, or at least employ what Orwell called ‘dead’ metaphors. His fight was not against those metaphors that have been around the longest, sparing those that have ‘in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness’.

Orwell did not advocate constant inventiveness; he rather wished us to avoid sounding hackneyed. Language should be alive or dead – but not dying pathetically from our lips. The blog post misses this distinction, arguing against ‘dead and dying’ metaphors as though they are the same thing.

Cliché is not always bad

Where I have sympathy with the author though is that he questions the refrain that cliché is always wrong. Clichés can be useful. I may put down a novel that raps out tired and familiar phrases in the first chapter but when I’m buying something with my credit card details online, I want the instructions to be as plain, dull, and even tiresomely familiar as possible.

From a psychological perspective, familiarity can breed trust. If you say things in a way familiar to them people are more likely to believe what you say. I am not sure that cognitive fluency can be applied so readily to cliché in language but perhaps it is one of the reasons that social tribes – whether religious communities, music scenes or firms of SEO consultants – all end up using the same phrases and idioms.

I even feel sorry for football pundits. They are criticised for the clichés they use perhaps more than any other profession, and yet, what can they say the thousandth time they have to answer the same question about a game that throws up few variables on which to comment? It was a win or a draw. There were refereeing decisions that seemed unfair. Some players played well, others didn’t. What is there to say?

Even if all pundits could do a Stuart Hall (or imagine PG Wodehouse reporting Wigan versus Blackpool on a Saturday afternoon), how many listeners would then start to miss the point? Sports clichés may be some of the deadliest around but supporters interested in the results know exactly what they mean straight away. They provide information when information is due. At the end of the day, you know where you stand.

[UPDATE: Seth Godin just blogged about the balance between familiar clichés and the innovations that make you stand out.]

Context, context, context

As ever, discussion about any rules comes down to context.

If I am writing the copy for a company’s web site there are places where fresh images are desirable, such as to describe their unique selling points, to grab readers’ attention or to create a unique tone of voice for their site. But there are plenty of places where dead clichés will do just fine: such as describing conventional processes that need to feel familiar like making contact, paying for a product or service, or describing services in ways that potential customers understand.

On this blog I use cliché all the time, deliberately (mostly) hoping to create a conversational tone. But when writing fiction I try much harder to bleach the creeping mould of familiarity, to increase the chances that one day people will actually stick with and enjoy 350 pages of my prose.

Where I find Orwell’s rule helpful is not as an absolute linguistic truth, but as an internal check whenever I am about to trot out a well-used phrase. Orwell’s dictum makes me think as I write: would this be better with a new metaphor? Or should I use the old one on purpose, for effect (perhaps ironically dude)? Or would it be better to strip the sentence down to plain words without disturbing my readers on a visual level at all?

In other words, Orwell was right to make the rule, but that doesn’t mean we have to obey it.

1. If you are unsure where the apostrophe goes, don’t look it up. Just have a guess. No one really cares anyway, especially not on the Internet.
2. Exclamation marks make you appear friendly. The more you use, the friendlier you appear!!!!!! Friendly is almost the exact opposite of psychotic!!!!!!!!
3. The Spanish add an inverted exclamation mark at the beginning of sentences as a philosophical reminder that what was at the beginning will also be at the end. Only upside down. That’s also why they give their babies margaritas.
4. Americans: say period enough and the Brits will understand. They won’t be thinking of menstruation at all. Period.
5. We really need a new punctuation mark denoting sarcasm, otherwise how will we be able to tell?
6. With dashes – it is not size — but performance that counts.
7. Commas are used to separate clauses, such as Santa, his wife, or Gollum’s cat.
8. The Oxford comma should only be employed whilst punting a boat the wrong way down a river, losing the boat race and coming a long way behind Cambridge in the world’s best universities ranking.
9. When an English Graduate corrects your punctuation, apologise, and then order your meal again more correctly.
10. Colons are tricky in an office environment. Think twice before you show your colleagues a semi in case it does not stand up.

Any more?

Bespoke is another ugly word, this time an adjective, as in:

We provide bespoke software solutions

It is not common in US English, but is increasingly found in Britain being used to describe services, especially in IT. It is traditionally a tailoring term, coming from the archaic verb bespeak, indicating speaking about or arranging something in advance.

Tailors have used it for centuries to describe suits that are hand-made to an individual’s measurements, as opposed to off the peg, pre-cut garments. Originally, the term described the process whereby a piece of cloth would be reserved for an individual customer. It suggested craft, care and unique personalisation. More recently, it has broadened in tailoring to imply anything that is made to measure.

I would happily enter a bespoke tailor’s and buy a bespoke suit (if I could afford it). What I object to is people taking this old-fashioned word that has been so long allied to one profession and applying it liberally to anything else that they think might in some way be adaptable for their customers. Just search Google for ‘bespoke solutions’ and you’ll see what I mean.

Some dictionaries have picked up on this trend, not least the Oxford English Dictionary. But I’m going to dig my heels in and say that’s enough, for the following reasons:

Quite a lot of people don’t know what it means

Ask a few people who aren’t language students or IT professionals what bespoke means and you will draw a few blank expressions. Some of the people I have asked got the connection to tailoring. Others didn’t know at all. If you are looking for ways to describe how your service works to new customers, I would suggest using words that they do not understand is a bad idea.

Especially if they are not British

If you want your website to be comprehended by English speakers outside of the UK, then picking such localised terms will not help. It is fine to have a British tone and personality (if being British is important to your brand), but you do not want your international readers to be reaching for the dictionary to try and decode even the basics about what your business does.

Bespoke is ugly out of context

It is a strange word. Words with the prefix be– have a dated sound to them. It is not a common way to form words in modern English, especially combined with spoke which is the past of a verb. The original verb bespeak has little modern usage. When it comes to suits, this unusual, old sound chimes perfectly with the image of generations of tailors on Savile Row crafting garments to the same exacting standards. But to describe your software or cake company? It just sounds weird.

It is losing potency as a metaphor

Bespoke is an evocative metaphor from tailoring, provided people know what it means. But the more marketers use it to describe anything that is in some vague way customised for the client, the more it loses the richness of the association. It not only fails Orwell’s freshness test but is a case in point for finding ‘an everyday English equivalent‘.

See: customised, custom-made, purpose-built, tailored, made-to-measure, specially designed.

As with leverage it is not just the ugly, contorted formation of bespoke that I object to. It is its weakness as a metaphor: not only that it is ailing, but that many people simply don’t know what it means in the first place. The question of how language progresses aside, it strikes me that if you want to describe your product or service to potential customers in favourable terms, then those terms should be clear and fresh.

Bespoke joins leverage in my dead pool of abused words. Any reason I should fish it out?

I am not talking about LOL-ing up your copy with txtspk, slang and swearwords FTW! But undoing the top button and taking off the tie will allow you to appear friendly, trustworthy, approachable and willing to interact. Here are 9 practical tips to soften up your style:

1. Use contractions

‘From a standing start back in 1998, we’ve grown into a successful online bank. We’ve done this by helping customers to understand and manage their money more effectively.’ Egg

We’ve is a contraction (of we have). Formal training says that you should not contract words in proper writing. That’s something to bear in mind the next time you write to a judge, but for describing your company or service online, this, along with point 2, is the most important trick for creating a more relatable style.

2. Be a person or group of people

‘We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple… We’ve aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.’ Zappos

Technically this is about person: write in the first person (I, we) rather than the third (Zappos believes…). It is important to mention your company name occasionally, which you can do by saying ‘At Zappos, we…’, but overall the more it is about we and us the more human you will appear.

3. Embrace fragments

‘For years project management software was about charts, graphs, and stats. And you know what? It didn’t work.’ Basecamp

Fragments, bless them, haven’t quite got enough parts of speech to be called real sentences. Who cares? (Hey, there’s one). We speak in fragments all the time, and dropping them occasionally into our copy creates a natural voice.

4. Put in a single line paragraph

‘It’s my favourite place in the world.’ Seven Holidays

I love this bad boy. Just as your reader is following your thoughtful argument through well-constructed paragraphs you hit them with a single line like a poke in the eye. Don’t use it more than once on a page.

5. Use simple words

‘Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.’

Search for twitter in Google and this is what appears as Twitter’s own description of itself. Compare with Wikipedia’s description on the same page: ‘Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., that enables its users to send and read other user messages’.

Remember that you are not just conveying information, but personality. As soon as you begin sounding like the dictionary, you’re not being taken to the party any more.

6. Go casual with your phrases and metaphors

‘Hello. We are Ryan, Nick and Sam. A while back we got interested in the idea of lending. Sam had had a good experience with his next-door neighbours. They had been lending stuff to him – small stuff mainly (like a cup of sugar), but it got bigger (like a ladder) and in time he found he was actually hanging out with his neighbours who turned out to be quite surprisingly nice once he got to know them.’ Streetbank

This is a particularly casual way of talking about your organisation. Note the parentheses, like little vocal asides, and the otherwise woolly words like stuff, hanging out and quite surprisingly nice. How casual your company should sound is up to you. But one of the traits for cultivating a more relaxed tone of voice is the use of lazy phrases and metaphors.

Catch my drift?

7. Share a little joke

‘Can I be banned from commenting? Yes, if your comments are self-promotional, obnoxious, highly offensive, spam, or even worse, boring. There will be no warning, and little mercy.’ Gawker

Don’t force it, and don’t try to have your users in stitches. But a friendly joke or a bit of irony used sparingly and at appropriate moments – such as to relieve the tension of a long form or error page – goes a long way to make your company seem approachable.

8. Cut out the company blah bits

‘A large, high-resolution LED-backlit IPS display. An incredibly responsive Multi-Touch screen. And an amazingly powerful Apple-designed chip. All in a design that’s thin and light enough to take anywhere. iPad isn’t just the best device of its kind. It’s a whole new kind of device.’ Apple (UK)

Apple could tell you many things about their philosophy, values and marketing principles. Instead, they show you what you are looking for.

However informal you try to make it sound there is still something stuffy about ‘our core values’ and ‘we believe’ and ‘our history’ and ‘our mission statement’. Customers do not care. They will infer all that from your products and service anyway. What you choose to tell them is another essential constituent of your tone.

9. Start sentences with conjunctions

‘But here we are 24 months later and those predictions couldn’t appear more misplaced […] So occasionally at The World Tonight, we decide to devote special coverage to a significant issue and this Friday it’s this.’ BBC News, The Editors

To round off the generally-chill-out-about-grammar theme: start the occasional sentence with or, and or but.

In a word: conversational

Overall, instead of writing like you are providing a legal defence for your company, write like you are chatting to individual customers in person. Talk like you’re, well, talking. Read your copy to yourself in the mirror and try not to laugh.

How informal you get is up to you (I recommend keeping the shirt on). You could create a style guide to maintain the level that you want. But I hope that these practical tips help you to find ways to undo at least the top button, and write like you are human after all.

What other companies have a great informal tone of voice? Have you any other tips for developing a more relaxed style?

Them’s good rules.

They are the conclusion to his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, in which he talks about the relationship between clear language and clear thinking. He ends his argument with 6 rules for sharp and accurate writing, in the hope that, not only will people express themselves more clearly, but that they might think more clearly too – that their communication might become meaning-full.

And yet halfway through the article, Orwell mentions another list for writers that gets me just as excited. This list is not talked about half as much (like omg it’s buried in a monster para surely you don’t expect me to like actually read this thing wtf), but it is pure platinum. Reading it is like discovering that The Godfather has a sequel or that Dannii’s sister can sing a bit too.

Orwell says that a ‘scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:’

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

‘And he will probably ask himself two more:’

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

If more writers (of anything at all) were to ask themselves these questions, then the world would be a much clearer and more beautiful place.

Why not ask them about the next thing that you write?

Thank you, Eric Blair.

If required [Company name] can therefore provide an introduction to a solicitor.

This is what George Orwell hated. It is an unnecessarily inflated way to say something simple. Look at all the extraneous parts:

If required – the whole thing is if required. It’s a sales brochure. Just describe your service and let the reader decide if it is required or not.

Therefore is also redundant. There is no need to state explicitly that this sentence follows the previous one in logical argument. If I said: I like plums. Therefore can I have one of yours? – it would make sense. But take ‘therefore’ out and it still makes sense. Human-sounding sense.

Provide an introduction to is one of Orwell’s ‘false limbs’. Keep it simple. Choose the basic verb: introduce.

Orwell deplored this sort of language in politics. It is everywhere in business, inflating sentences to sound grandiose. I call it the faux legal style. It sounds like a contract or piece of legislation, yet is thin in actual meaning. Far from convince, it is more likely to put customers off, by forcing them to read more than they have to for little reward.

What the writer meant to say was:

We can introduce you to a solicitor.

Isn’t that better? Not just for understanding but for tone of voice too?

Writing in the faux legal style

Ten tips to say lots while saying nothing at all:

1. Use unnecessary phrases, such as this one.
2. Choose a protracted and more lengthy phrase where possible.
3. In addition, employ words that therefore reinforce the obvious logical connections, thus.
4. Let your verbs exhibit a tendency to complexity.
5. Capitalise certain Nouns whenever they appear.
6. Sprinkle in some Latin or Greek ad nauseam.
7. Talk about yourself in the third person as SmyWord here illustrates.
8. Qualify your assertions endlessly, regardless of necessity, whether they need to be qualified or not.
9. Omit all feeling that is what some would recognise to be emotional terminology.
10. Let the passive be used instead of the active.

In conclusion, therefore, a suitable area for the Reader’s comments upon this subject is afforded space below, should the Reader wish to remark, ruminate or give exposition to his or her thoughts upon the matters raised by the Author in this article.

That is, any comments?