The M Factor: July 2008

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Euro English

A reader of my e-newsletter, sent me this joke (old, but still funny) about a five-year plan to phase in EuroEnglish.

In the first year, 's' will replace the soft 'c'. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. Also, the hard 'c' will be dropped in favor of the 'k'. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter. The 'C' kan have two lines drawn through it and be used for the new EURO kurrensy symbol.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome 'ph' will be replaced with the 'f'. This will make words like 'fotograf' 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent 'e's in the languag is disgrasful, and they should go away.

By the 4th yer, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing 'th' with 'z' and 'w' with 'v'. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary 'o' kan be dropd from vords kontaining 'ou' and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!

Labels: business writing, Euro English

Sticky ideas are concrete, simple and use stories

In an excellent interview in The McKinsey Quarterly, Professor Chip Heath states that sticky ideas must be simple, concrete and use stories.

Chip Heath says simplicity is the hardest concept to grasp. He gives the example of a non-profit organisation having eight core values when research has shown that even a few good choices can paralyse people and prevent them from making a decision. He says Bill Clinton had only one guiding message in his presidential campaign: 'It's the economy, stupid'.

As well as being simple, messages have to be concrete. He says: 'Take an abstract message like "Maximise stakeholder value". What should one of your employees do tomorrow to make that happen?'

Far better to use a story. Chip Heath gives the example of a FedEx employee who couldn't open a pickup box on his route as he'd left the key behind in the office. His deadline was tight and so he unbolted the whole box with a wrench — he knew he could open the box back in the office.

Chip Heath goes on to say messages are often abstract because of the 'curse of knowledge'. When we know a lot, it's hard for us to imagine what it's like not to have that knowledge.

So if you want your message to stick, make sure your ideas share the properties of sticky ideas — simplicity, concreteness and stories.

I recommend that you read the whole interview at http://tinyurl.com/29ycr2 and subscribe to The McKinsey Quarterly at www.mckinseyquarterly.com.

Labels: business writing, concrete, simple, sticky ideas, stories

Good use of bullet points

Many bulleted lists could be improved by:

turning the bullet points into a paragraph
writing a more comprehensive introductory statement
breaking items into groups
using fewer bullet points
using consistent styles — structure and punctuation.

Turning the bullet points into a paragraph
An example I gave in my previous blog entry would be more effective as prose.

Original version
After surgery:

sit on the side of the bed initially
transfer to the bedside chair
walk to the bathroom
walk freely around the ward
progress should be gradual, no exertion.Original version

Rewrite
You need to move gradually after surgery to regain your strength. Start by sitting on the side of the bed and then move to the bedside chair. When you feel ready, you can walk to the bathroom and then walk around the ward.

Writing a more comprehensive introductory statement
A long list in my previous blog had a stem statement 'Following surgery', followed by jumbled instructions on bathing, sport, lifting etc. A possible rewrite conveying one of the main messages is:

Recovery from major surgery varies from person to person and may take four weeks to several months.

Breaking items into groups
The items in the 'recovery from surgery' list could easily have been grouped into categories, such as bathing, lifting, sport. Then each group could have been a separate list with a stem statement. If something needed particular emphasis, for example, not removing Steristrips, it could have come first.

Using fewer bullet points
Our eyes glaze over when we see a whole page of bullet points. We have no idea what is most important so we 'skim read' them, often reading only the first and last few bullet points. My rule of thumb is no more than seven bullet points in a list although I break this rule if eight bullet points makes more sense.

Using consistent styles — structure and punctuation
Structure: If your list is a run-on sentence (i.e. every point relates back to the stem statement), each bullet point should relate grammatically to the stem statement.
Punctuation: Styles have changed and semi-colons are not used very often in lists today.

Some guidelines are:

If each bullet point is a separate statement, as in this list, use normal sentence punctuation.
If the list is a run-on sentence, start each bullet with an initial lower case letter and just have a final full stop at the end of the last bullet point. You don't need a comma at the end of each point. (Unfortunately, Microsoft Word always wants to default to an initial capital.)
If your list consists of single words or short phrases, you can use initial capitals and no end punctuation, i.e. no commas, semi-colons or full stops.

Labels: bullet points, business writing

Misuse of bullet points

Bullet points are useful for lists, but I have three gripes about the way they are misused.

1. They are often used when a paragraph would be more effective. Take this following example from a hospital information sheet:

After surgery:

sit on the side of the bed initially
transfer to the bedside chair
walk to the bathroom
walk freely around the ward
progress should be gradual, no exertion.

The main idea here is that the patient should move gently at first, but it's buried at the end of the list. And isn't 'transfer' an odd word choice?

2. Another common mistake is long bulleted lists with no introductory paragraph. This causes two problems — you don't know what's most important and as the information isn't grouped, you have to mentally sort it as you read. You can easily overlook key information in such lists.
An example from the same hospital information sheet dumps sport, sex and bathing in the same list.

Following surgery:

Short baths can be taken (10–15 minutes).
Showers may be taken as soon as you are able to walk around.
Wounds may get wet but should be dried thoroughly. Use a hairdryer if necessary and leave Steristrips on wounds for 5 days.
Sport: start gradually and build up (walking, swimming, jogging), no exertion, avoid high-impact exercises for 6 weeks (3 months for pelvic floor surgery) and stop if it hurts.
Sexual intercourse can resume after 4–6 weeks.
After major surgery avoid heavy lifting for 3 months (i.e. no more than 10kg/2 telephone books).
Avoid standing for long periods.
Recommence driving when pain medication is no longer required (check with your insurance company regarding cover following surgery).
Recovery from major surgery is dependant (sic) on the individual and may take from 4 weeks to several months.

3. My third gripe is inconsistency of style. When all bullet points relate back to the same stem statement, you should be able to read them as if they were separate statements. Look at the structure of the above list and you can see that several of the bullet points do not relate to the stem statement (Following surgery recovery from major surgery is dependant on the individual ... ).

Labels: bullet points, business writing

Is PowerPoint an effective learning tool?

An article in The Sydney Morning Herald (4 April, 2007) quotes Professor John Sweller, University of NSW, as saying PowerPoint has been a disaster as a learning tool and should be ditched.

John Sweller, who has developed a 'cognitive load theory' about how much information we can handle at once in our working memory, is reported as saying:

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

Are Microsoft's templates the best?
I am not a great fan of PowerPoint as it is so often badly used (too much information on each slide, poorly proofread etc.). In my opinion, the best presentations are largely visual.
Researcher Michael Alley maintains PowerPoint's default design (short headings followed by a bulleted list) is partly to blame for poor presentations.

He advocates a design which features a sentence heading supported by visual evidence and minimal words. You can view his preferred design at http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/speaking/rethinking_psu.pdf

Gettysburg speech as a PowerPoint presentation
And if, like me, you missed the Gettysburg speech in PowerPoint when it did its viral rounds a few years ago, you can still be entertained at http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Labels: business writing, PowerPoint

The future of the English language

In 2010, language researcher David Graddol predicts there will be 2 billion people on the planet speaking English, of whom only 350 million will be native speakers. So how the English language develops over the next 100 years will largely depend on what non-native speakers do with the language.

When Latin colonised the world centuries ago, it dissolved over time into a number of different languages. Thanks to written texts and the global media, that is unlikely to happen today. But English as we know it is changing.

Already, non-native speakers are stripping out parts of English that cause misunderstandings. In the process, they are making the language more consistent. Some of the changes that are already occurring or seem likely to occur are:

The past tense of irregular verbs — apart from ones we use all the time such as to have and to be — will become more regular (e.g. wed is changing to wedded).
Some mass nouns may become count nouns (informations, furnitures, staffs).
The third person singular is the only verb form to take an –s so this may drop off (she runs will become she run).

Listening and watching the language, I see changes such as:

Brevity is a fading word — young people don't understand what it means.
Less is often used instead of fewer.
Myself is frequently used when me would be more correct (e.g. Please contact myself).
More than and over are used interchangeably.
Whom seems to be vanishing.

Some of these changes I care about and others I think aren't worth worrying about. What do you think? And what changes are you observing? Email mary@themfactor.com.au

Source: Michael Erard, ‘English as she will be spoke’, New Scientist, 29 March 2008 (http://michaelerard.com)

Labels: business writing, Future of English

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Building a relationship with your readers

Writing is often described as building a bridge between you and your readers.

In The Craft of Argument, Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb state that we develop an argument by understanding our relationship with our readers. Business writing is often based on providing answers to conceptual or pragmatic problems.

With conceptual problems, our role as writers is to help our readers understand something better; with pragmatic problems, we aim to solve the problem by asking our readers to do something or support our recommended action.

Both kinds of writing have the same structure: problem + destabilising condition + cost/consequence.

For pragmatic problems, the destabilising condition can be anything that has a cost and for conceptual problems, the destabilising condition is always a gap in knowledge or a lack of understanding.

You can develop your argument for both kinds of problems by asking yourself five types of questions:

What's your point?
Why should the reader agree? (reasons)
What evidence do you have?
What's your logic? (what assumptions have you made?)
But have you considered . . . ?

So next time you're having difficulty structuring your writing, think about your relationship with your reader and it may help you ask and answer the right questions.

Source: Williams, Joseph M., Colomb, Gregory G., The Craft of Argument, Longman, New York, 2003.

Labels: business writing, craft of argument

Text messaging is not destroying language

I often hear managers complain about young people using text message language inappropriately in business writing. There's a concern that texting will debase the English language.

According to a study by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis from the University of Toronto, Canada, this fear is unfounded. They argue that far from ruining the language, text messaging allows teenagers to show off what they can do with the language and is creating 'an expansive new linguistic renaissance'.

The researchers say that text language, which I think of as SMS language, but the researchers called IM (instant messaging), is a 'robust mix' of colloquial and formal language.

They compared more than a million words of IM communication with a quarter of a million spoken words produced by 72 people aged 15–20 and found that while IM shared some of the patterns of speech, the vocab and grammar were quite conservative.

Nor do teenagers use abbreviations such as LOL (laugh out loud) as much as expected. Abbreviations only made up 2.4% of conversations and 'you' was used, not 'u', 9 out of 10 times.

Source: New Scientist, 17 May 2008.

Oft-confused words

I am constantly amazed at how intelligent people confuse familiar words, such as 'their', 'they're' and 'there'. But then I remind myself that I can never work out whether 'bimonthly' means twice a month or every two months and I am never sure whether a note accompanying a document should be a 'compliment' slip or a 'complement' slip? Or even a 'compliments/complements' slip?

So here's a list of a few commonly confused words.

compliment = to praise, a formal expression of civility or respect (e.g. compliments of the season) complement = to complete, go with (e.g. pepper and salt complement each other)

Both 'compliment/s' and 'complement/s' slips exist in Google, but I think, using the second meaning of 'compliment', I'll choose 'compliments' slip in future.

there = in that place
they're = short for 'they are'their = belonging to them

flammable = able to be set aflame
inflammable = able to be set aflame, easily excited or disturbed

According to the Macquarie Dictionary traditionally 'inflammable' meant likely to burn easily, but to avoid a false analogy with other words such as 'inactive' in which the 'in' means 'not', 'flammable' was adopted as the standard warning in labelling goods. The opposite is 'nonflammable'.

affect = influence (verb)
effect = result (noun); occasionally used as a verb meaning 'to bring about a result'.

dependent = relying on
dependant = someone who is reliant on financial or other support (e.g. a child)

bimonthly = occurring every two months or occurring twice a month. How confusing! I suggest you use clearer terms, such as 'fortnightly', 'every two months' or 'twice a month'.

For a fuller, though not complete, list go to: http://www.mailer.com.au/rd?http://www.confusingwords.com/

Labels: affect/effect, confusing words, oft-confused words