Marketing copywriters, mind your modifiers! Take a lesson from the Ottowa furniture store that sent out a Mother’s Day flier advertising “Soft Stools for Mom.” The company was not launching a pharmaceutical division.
Oops, indeed. “They are communicating a message different from the one they intended,” says Simon Hanington, COO of BackDraft (http://www.backdraft.org), a professional writing consultancy based in Ottawa, ONT.
This is only one example of 40 common fumbles that account for 95% of writers’ troubles, as characterized by BackDraft. According to Hanington, the blunder came when the company lost control of how the mailing piece’s recipient perceived the message.
For Hanington, what actually comes across is the company’s sloppiness, making the customer wonder whether the company was even describing its furniture accurately, or how it might handle a shipping error.
American furniture marketers have their share of flawed communication as well. One upstate New York firm noted that it only shipped within the “Untied States,” and went on to apologize for any “incontinence.”
Punctuation mistakes can also raise some unpleasant questions. Take quotation marks, which people often, but mistakenly, use for emphasis. When not applied to a literal quotation, they can cast doubt upon the phrase between the marks.
Take, for instance, a restaurant direct mail piece with the message ‘Try our “Chicken Soup.”‘ This, Hanington said, would make the eater wonder what was actually at the end of his spoon. He also recalled a newspaper article about the war in Iraq which cited the number of people “killed,” suggesting, perhaps, that those deemed casualties might actually be alive and well, and vacationing in Malibu.
BackDraft employs a combination of in-person instructors and online tutorial programs to strengthen professionals’ writing ability. Hanington feels that industry is reaching a tipping point regarding the need for proper communication skills. With the ubiquity of computers and e-mail, people are writing now more than at any point in history. Two-thirds of American professionals must write to do their jobs, he says, yet one-third of these do not do so proficiently.
Reporters are by no means immune to these fumbles: When a Canadian newspaper stated that a traffic accident was caused by high tech writers, Hanington wondered whether these were high-tech writers, (scribes who specialize in creating computer manuals), or merely tech-writers who had smoked one too many maple leafs before getting behind the wheel.
What about those upper-level executives who consider themselves God’s gift to copywriting? While BackDraft employees will ultimately follow any rule they are given, “We pummel them with better knowledge,” says Hanington.
Take the CEO who announced, “You are never allowed to use the verb ‘to be’ in any of my speeches. It makes the writing look weak.” The BackDraft consultant replied, “The verb ‘to be’ is like an equals sign. If you prohibit the verb ‘to be,’ there will be no way you will tell any audience member about what you are, how you think or feel, and you will never establish a relationship between you and the audience. Are you cool with that?”
Before accepting BackDraft’s criticism, many potential clients feel the need to test the firm’s mettle. One client asked Hanington to demonstrate the past pluperfect subjunctive tense, and was rewarded with both an example of it and a discourse on why it passed out of the English language in 1410.
If the two-year-old company doesn’t work out, Hanington has a backup plan to support himself. The department store Zellers used to feature signs in its lobby proclaiming “This store has been equipped with an electronic shoplifting device.”
As Hanington put it, such a machine would relieve him of the need to work for a living, and probably could be programmed not to rat him out to the authorities.
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