Clichés are not rocket science

‘Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’ Is Orwell right to make this rule? One recent blog post on clichés, This metaphor aint dead, it’s just restin’ claims that writing without ‘dying’ phrases is in fact unattainable; and even if it wasn’t, the results of such overwhelming linguistic inventiveness would be ‘utterly exhausting to read’.

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.

10 Tips to Prevent Punctuation Misuse!!!

Apparently today is National Punctuation Day. In America. I decided to contribute to the celebrations by helping writers worldwide get to grips with their punctuation. Because badly punctuated prose really shows up one’s short (ee) cummings.

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 services are for tailors and halfwits

After the fun of Are you stupid enough to use leverage as a verb? (in which you added well-considered perspectives on the evolution of language to my fairly bald argument of that’s one ugly word) I’m going to have to break my silence about the word bespoke.

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?

No charge for the photo: marketing Cambridge’s biggest landlord

How many properties do you think the biggest landlord in Cambridge owns? 20? 50? 100? Amazingly, having bought his first home in 1965, Dennis Whitfield has accumulated a portfolio of over 500 properties in the area. That’s a lot of houses.

The Whitfield Group are a genuine, local success story. The only thing they didn’t have in place was a useful presence on the web so they approached us at Endis Solutions asking for a simple site to advertise their services and empty properties.

The challenges from the content side:

• Appealing to different markets, professional and student
• Helping Whitfield to raise their game with photos and copy for the property descriptions
• Finding a unique sales message in a very crowded market
• SEO, in an even more crowded market

To appeal distinctly to their two main types of tenant, we gave them a site each: Whitfield Residential and Whitfield Students. We wrote the student site in a chatty tone, replete with puns. The message is: no agents means fewer fees, plus it’s perfect for Anglia Ruskin University.

Whitfield Students web site

The Residential site does not joke around but we kept the collar loose. The selling point is simplicity. For a long time I had ‘the uncomplicated way to rent’ as the strapline, but had to concede, based in part on cognitive fluency, that simple was simpler than uncomplicated.

We also put an umbrella page up at their old address to build on the search engine ranking. This has worked well: on UK Google searching for ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

Googling ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

As for helping their staff to create compelling property pages, I wrote them a style guide for descriptions as well as a guide to taking photos with their specific (and somewhat lower end) model cameras. Remember the blog post? A bonus was giving a photo of my own – a quick snap during my son’s nursery’s annual float down the River Cam – to our designer, who turned it into an image for the front page. Whitfield have since adopted it for their wider branding.

We are hopefully about to do another raft of work for Whitfield, adding some advanced features to the sites. But in this first stage it was a pleasure to focus on creating something simple, well executed and with a clear message.

Uncomplicated, even.

My River Cam photo, coming soon to some lettings signage near you

How to loosen the collar of your web copy

Social media has made the web more of a conversation (it was already pretty chatty). Companies who want to maintain a one-sided, sales pitch relationship with their customers come off as stiffs. For many businesses with web sites, adopting a tone of voice online that is a little less formal, a little more smart casual, will help their users to connect with them.

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?

My 2-year-old eats iPlayer for breakfast

The other morning I came downstairs to find my 2-year-old already up, watching his favourite programme on the Internet. Nothing remarkable in that per se, except that he was alone. And I had shut the computer down the night before.

This isn’t about how smart my child is (although he can complete a Cat-in-a-Hat jigsaw in under 5 minutes reverse-side up and calculate the exact opposite of everything we ask him to do instantaneously, before implementing it without flaw).

No, the point is that in iPlayer the BBC have designed a web site so easy to use that a 2-year-old can master it.

After turning the computer on he clicks the browser icon and iPlayer opens as the homepage. From there, he clicks on an image that he recognises – perhaps Charlie, Lola or Mister Tumble – or on one that looks like it’s for kids.

Admittedly, the homepage is set to the Children’s page. But I’ve seen him get there from the front page too, by clicking on ‘Last Played’ or one of the many pictures in ‘Highlights’ or ‘Most Popular’.

Once one kids’ programme is open, he skips through a chain of large thumbnails displayed below in ‘More’ and ‘Recommendations’ until it brings up something appealing. Then he clicks the play and full screen icons, and kicks back with a little bowl of whatever he found at toddler height in the cupboard (dry noodles, honey, an unripe plum, that sort of thing).

How easy is that?

Elements of toddler-friendly design

iPlayer is doing something right that children as young as two are able to operate it. This is not news. But that someone so young should be comfortable navigating a web site made me wonder what design elements enabled his success. Here are some of my suspicions:

1) Navigation is image-based

My son can’t read a word. Not a single word. He gets the content he wants by clicking on the pictures. An adult might take shortcuts by reading the text – find the right episode straight away or employ the search box – but a preliterate child can get to the same place in time purely by clicking on pictures.

2) Images have good affordance

It is not just that the menus are images, but that the pictures are instantly recognisable (a character he has seen before) or representative (something that looks like it is for children). This provides the simple experience of seeing what you want and clicking on it to get it, otherwise known as show don’t tell.

3) Many points of entry into content and many routes between

Searching iPlayer my son rarely gets stuck. There are always more images to click on in some type of menu, scrolling gallery, or after-play recommendation. He can enter the content many ways and because they are all connected together can hop between programmes easily.

4) Identifiable and simple buttons for universal actions

iPlayer has buttons big and conventional enough for a 2-year-old to click on; for selecting, sideways scrolling, playing, pausing, and enlarging to full screen.

5) Key content above the fold, and all in one window

He doesn’t scroll down yet which shows that all this navigation is accomplished in the top part of the page.

6) One-screen experience

It helps that iPlayer works without popups or multiple windows. Otherwise he can accidentally click on the wrong window and get confused, poor chap.

Just because a web site is well designed for a non-reading 2-year-old doesn’t mean that it is well designed for anyone else. But this example proves that even with complex navigation and copious content a site can be simple to get around.

And the hardest part of the process, apart from tackling the plum? – Trying to do all of that clicking on only one side of a clunky, domed, single sprung piece of white plastic. My two-year-old might be a whizz on iPlayer, but he’s no fan of Mighty Mouse.

Orwell’s other advice about writing

If you are writing (anything at all: emails to colleagues, notices on the fridge, product descriptions, text messages to your friends…) then I hope at some point you have come across George Orwell’s 6 rules for writing.

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.

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