The would-you-rather that Fluent encounters repeatedly with clients is: would you rather have some sales or more enquiries? Usually the question relates to the hiding of key information. Tell prospects everything and they might not buy. Conceal something vital and they’ll have to get in touch.

For example, in the hunt for more bookings, one hospitality client is being tempted to remove the availability calendar. The reasoning is twofold: first, that an empty calendar might scare people away; and second, that forcing an enquiry form request gives the company an opportunity to sell alternative dates or holidays if the original dates are not going to work out.

Sellers gotta sell

The first point is pretty compelling. An empty calendar is negative social proof. It drains confidence from the consumer. What do other people know about this place that I don’t?

However, if you’ve got no bookings, it’s probably not your calendar to blame. Make people want your product enough, through rich descriptions, compelling marketing and social proof, like positive reviews – and the empty calendar won’t matter. It might even be seen as a stroke of good luck – we found this gem before anyone else did.

The second point is more convincing. It is similar to the argument for concealing price. It gives prospects a reason to get in touch with you. Instead of a few sales, you can get many enquiries. Some of our clients feel that this puts them in control of the sales funnel – instead of people just bouncing off their website, they get to talk to potential sales. They can explain the benefits that justify the price in person. Or offer alternative dates. They can put on their sales hat, roll up their sleeves, and do everything within their power to convert each lead.

Which is my idea of hell.

I hate being sold to. I just turned down a better phone contract from a company because of their hideous sales technique. I would rather pay to keep my dignity and be afforded, calmly, the space to make my own decision.

It’s no surprise then that I also hate having to sell. But there are plenty of other people who are good at it. Who love it. Perhaps for them, creating some intrigue and drumming up enquiries is the way to go.

User experience and the long-term

I do wonder, though, if some of the businesses keen on getting direct enquiries don’t trust their own websites. If they suspect that prospects are slipping through the net, and that the only way they can know for sure is to talk to the leads in person.

Obviously that doesn’t scale so well. But also – you’ve got to create a website for your company that you trust. Take time to craft a compelling sales message with all the information that users need to make a decision up front. Create an easy, useful, delightful user experience. That is, after all, what our hospitality client said himself:

When I look for places to stay I find it really frustrating when they don’t show when they are full because I have to complete so many enquiry forms and then try to keep track of who have replied.

Exactly. Doesn’t helpfulness and clarity make people’s lives easier and make them more likely to buy from you? You may not get all those enquiries, but you’ll get some bookings, and, crucially, you’re playing a longer-term game of building trust with your users.

It’s do unto others – with UX. Create the experience for users that you would like to have yourself.

Have cake, eat cake

Surrendering to a helpful user experience doesn’t have to mean being in the dark about what is happening on your website. You can measure specific behaviours in analytics to see how people are using your site –what they look at before buying, or at what point they turn away.

And there is a middle way with sales versus enquiries. Why not be as useful and informative as possible up front but provide an opportunity for enquiry as well? Under the calendar put ‘get in touch if you’d like to know about cancellations’. Under the price put ‘call us to find out what discounts we are running this month’.

At Fluent we lean towards fashioning the most useful user experience: to create a strong, trustworthy image online for our clients. Having said that, if they are salespeople, and like nothing more than a hot lead on the end of the phone … we don’t stand in their way.

Of course, there are much more significant questions for us all to consider anyway. How can we worry about our websites when there are such vital decisions to be made as: crushed to oblivion by a rhinoceros or tickled to death by monkeys?

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.

On the one hand, I’m guessing few of us are enamoured by the language of estate agents. Although clichés can be useful for getting a standard set of information across to a loyal audience, the problem with estate agents’ lingo is that there are simpler, more honest ways to say the same thing, if it needs saying at all.

So should we be rejoicing that one estate agent, in an effort to desist from trundling out the same-old phrases, sent their staff on a poetry course? Instead of ‘direct sea views’ we are told ‘without feeling lonely, the room has an echo.’ Or try this:

Crossing the threshold
Passing into history
Near seafront and shops
Cobbles and tarmac meet

Historic Hove and the new come together in a mews house, light, comfortable and homely … and with parking.

As a lover of the way poetry shuffles about in ordinary words and situations, I think this is fun. As someone with an eye on marketing I see that the stunt has generated widespread publicity for the company. But will it sell more houses?

Solving the wrong problem

Estate agent owner Paul Bonett said he was fed up with the ‘meaningless jargon that potential buyers could see through in an instant. Boring old clichés like immaculate condition, delightful, compact and bijoux are hindering, not helping sales.’

So he wants property descriptions that we can’t see through?

At Endis Solutions we have worked with a few property agents now, as well as hunting for properties ourselves. We’re beginning to get a feel for what people want from an estate agent’s web site. And it’s not poetry.

Most people looking for properties online are trawling through hundreds of descriptions, trying to filter out the irrelevant ones as quickly as possible, flicking through what’s left to see if any of them meet their requirements and desires. It is not particularly fun and they do not have all day to do it.

Anything that slows down the process – animated picture galleries, long download times, unclear or protracted navigation, confusing text – is a pain in the neck the first time, never mind the fiftieth. And then for people to have to decipher a poetic riddle that does not actually tell them what the house is like – what a terrible idea.

Home-hunters do not dislike ‘compact’ because it is boring. They dislike it because it’s disingenuous. And no, they would not rather read draws the evenings into charming cosiness – they would prefer an agent to come out and say: it’s small. And ‘bijoux’? What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Delightful’? Isn’t that up to the customer to decide?

The problem is not that we’re bored with estate agents’ clichés, it is that they are unhelpful and unnecessary at a time when, rather boringly, we just want the facts, and fast.

No one reads the description anyway

Or at least they shouldn’t have to. If our clients are to be believed, people go straight for either the photo gallery or the floorplan to find out what a house is like. The best thing you can do on the property description page as an estate agent is make your gallery large, prominent and full of decent photographs that are easy and quick to scroll through, with a big, clearly labelled, detailed floorplan next to it. Here’s a good example.

Apart from the square footage for city dwellers, that’s pretty much everything we need to know. At a glance. It’s a classic case of show don’t tell.

It’s great to hear about estate agents getting creative in the way they present properties. My tip: give visual information, quickly. If you have to write anything after that, bare facts will do just fine.

Or am I just a killjoy? What do you find helpful when looking for properties online?

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.

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.