Don’t Let Language Rules Hamstring Your Business Writing

"From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put."~Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

I love that thought from the old statesman/historian/blowhard because it illustrates a collective affliction in the way we use our native tongue. Not only do we fall unthinkingly into copying each other when it comes to the latest trite phrase (see “Language Hall of Shame” in recent and upcoming issues); we also adhere rigidly to grammar shibboleths such as “proper” sentence closure.

In the writing classes that I teach for federal agencies, nonprofits and private firms, otherwise intelligent men and women admit to hang-ups that have bedeviled them all the way back to that blue-haired high school English teacher diagramming sentences on the dusty blackboard.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against rules -- if they make sense. Take capitalization and spelling. If you casual email communicators can’t exert the effort to capitalize the first letter of the first word in a sentence, I assume you’re just as indolent in the “thinking” that goes into the message itself. By the same token, if you rely solely on “spell-check” and blissfully ignore the distinction between “their,” “they’re” and “there,” or fail to edit your writing for proper name spelling, I have a perfect right to ask: “What else is wrong with this email (or white paper, memo, proposal, etc.)?” Or worse: “I thought this guy was a professional.”

No, the “rules” that trouble me are the imagined ones, such as not ending a sentence with a preposition, or avoiding “And” to start a sentence, or placing commas. My advice: Lighten up and be yourself. Back in my Washington journalism days, when I was struggling with the transition from covering civil and military aviation for a trade publication to covering the Pentagon for a lay readership at Business Week magazine, I got some great advice from an editor: “Write as if you’re having a conversation with an intelligent friend.”

Try it. When you talk to your boss, a colleague, a vendor, etc., I guarantee you already end your sentences on a preposition and start the next sentence with “And.” And when you actually write, try saying the words out loud. Reach a natural pause, and it’s comma time. Try it. The key here is to keep process from hamstringing product, to avoid focusing on form so much that content suffers.

Media Training Lessons, Thanks To Tiger

Here’s my take on Tiger Woods:

But first, some background: I do crisis communications training, and the topic is usually a short-term challenge. At a Portland (Maine) Water District exercise involving a chemical leak, officials had to deal with broadcast media (that was me) clamoring to know whether 50,000 customers could drink from their taps. I also helped senior officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security learn how to deal with a simulated emergency involving illegal immigrants in a holding facility on the Arizona-Mexico border. In any such case, the goal is to get the information out quickly, but only when you know it’s accurate and as comprehensive as time allows.

But what about Tiger? His problem has some legs to it. Speculation, rumors and jokes are going to sell lots of ads on cable TV and grow in intensity as the Masters looms next April. Against that background, is it enough for Tiger to say “I’m sorry” on his website, then disappear from public view while his wife lets it be known that she wants a divorce?

I don’t think so. When I was in Washington, some of the most highly regarded public relations experts could be found at NASA, the Israeli lobby, the Marine Corps and the Air Force. The trait they shared was openness, or at least the appearance of openness. Rarely if ever would you hear a “no comment” or any blatantly evasive communications tactics.

Closest to my beat was the Air Force, which did a splendid job of quietly promoting the B-1 bomber, even though President Carter cancelled it. Fortunately for the men and women in blue, Ronald Reagan made the cancellation a campaign issue in 1980, then reinstated the program. (I thought then, and I think now, that the B-1 was an unnecessary and costly interlude between the venerable B-52, which is still flying, and the Stealth bomber, but I kept that opinion out of my reporting).

Now that the B-1 was back in, the Air Force was primed to usher it through the shoals of budgetary politics. What the defense establishment in DC didn’t expect was a glitch in the plane itself. But that’s what it got -- fuel leaking from the wing tanks. At that point, the Air Force could have hunkered down and said little more than “No comment. This is a classified matter,” or “No comment. We’re working on it.”

What it did instead was call a press conference, admit some hardware development errors, and lay out the fixes in detail. After a couple weeks, the story faded from sight, and the B-1 eventually went into full-scale production, enriching contractors all over the U.S. The immediate goal, at a time when Democratic legislators were looking for ways to embarrass the Reagan Administration, was to stay out in front of a rapidly developing story. The ultimate point was to build 100 B-1s, and they did.

That kind of PR thinking was ingrained in the Air Force. When USAF colonels got their first star (brigadier general), the service’s public relations specialists put them through intensive media training, including videotaped interviews with “60 Minutes-type” ambush questioning.

How does all this apply to Tiger Woods? It might be painful short-term, but just imagine if he’d come out a few weeks ago and gone through a bunch of interviews. Supposing he’d kept his AIM: audience -- damn near the whole world; intent -- get back to being the best golfer in the world and all those product endorsements; message -- “I made a mistake, I love my family, and I’m a new man.”

He’s got the charisma and the smile to pull off the interviews. (His deadly serious eyes are a different matter, but as any fan knows, they’re just windows into the mind of the fiercest competitor on the planet.)

That's how I see things. Up here in Maine, we just came out the other side of a three-day, snow-laden nor'easter. Now it's time to ski.

Best wishes for the New Year.

Dave

Rebirth of a Blog

Back and forth I’ve gone on all this “social media” business, and I’m a long way from making up my mind. Somehow the notion of “tweeting” hasn’t quite penetrated my thinking when it comes to serious and productive marketing. But I am reintroducing my blog. Why I let it slip I don’t know, but I do recall that it made for relaxed and stimulating conversation. Please join me at http://www.businesscommunications.wordpress.com, and react by sounding off on anything touching on business communications, presentation skills and writing skills, and all their promise and pitfalls. I'll continue to share what I know about the news media and how you can gain from press encounters, as well as writing and public speaking for success.