Word Wise

Today's read & other stuff - Man Dates and Bacon Sundaes

Ever wonder how newspaper and magazine writers come up with trend stories - you know, those stories that say we're all adding bacon to ice-cream sundaes and banana bread or that tall women are all of a sudden finding the hidden potential in dating shorter men and that straight men are "dating" other straight men? Jump on the bandwagon or you'll be so behind the times. Where do these reporters come up with this stuff? Turns out, some of them - especially some of them who write for The New York Times -  don't look too far afield, as this New York Magazine piece points out. Are reporters "playing dial-a-quote with their personal friends when hammering out a trend story on deadline"? As my friend Biff would respond, "Do you really have to ask?"

BusinessWeek reports on the latest findings of the American Customer Satisfaction Index and finds that newspapers rate worse than airlines. Lordy.

Loud Mouth

Almost no exercise will improve your writing more than reading what you write out loud – not just things meant to be spoken such as speeches and scripts, but press releases, letters to the editor, new business proposals, Web site copy, pitch letters, etc. If it can’t pass the read-out-loud test, it fails.   By reading out loud you’ll recognize when your writing sounds stiff when it should sound loose, where it’s uptight when it should be relaxed, where it’s formal when it should be creative black tie. Just because you’re writing as part of your job doesn’t mean that it has to include the jargon, lingo, and clichés that float around in your industry. Being “conversational” and “serious” aren’t mutually exclusive.   You’ll find that if you read what you write out loud you’ll notice typos more – when you’ve written it’s instead of its and you’re instead of your. You'll naturally pause where a comma should be even when there's no comma there; conversely, you'll keep going when a comma appears if that comma isn't necessary. I'm no scientist, but I think our brains are wired to do that. You’ll also stumble over awkward phrases, ridiculous words (utilize, proactive, plethora) and, often, grammatical mistakes.  Where you stumble, so will your readers. “Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words,” wrote Verlyn Klinkenborg in The New York Times last Saturday. “To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone.”     In fact, there’s a brain-power-boosting theory that reading out loud does double duty because it forces you to process the information twice: first because you have to understand the words for them to make sense and, second, because you have to pronounce the words, forcing you to think about how to do it correctly. By enunciating each word you’ll experience for yourself whether your word choice is working to your document’s advantage and not just acting as proof points of your impressive vocabulary and fine liberal arts education.     Think about contractions, too. Intuitively we use them when we talk, but when we put words to paper all of a sudden we start writing “they will” or “we are” – out loud, in the middle of a sentence, these phrases often sound robotic. As contractions they sound more natural, more like how we speak every day.   By reading out loud you’ll also hear when sentences are meaningless and empty. How many times, after all, have you read a sentence like “We will utilize proprietary methodologies and best practices in order to leverage messaging that breaks through the clutter” and not even noticed it? Eyes gloss over (not to mention glaze over at) sentences like that. Read it out loud and you’ll notice it, all right, and cringe that you were its author.

Today's read & other stuff: All Anna Wintour, All the Time

Seems like just yesterday that we never heard from Vogue editor Anna Wintour, that we only got glimpses of her on The New York Times Sunday Styles party page at the Met's Costume Institute gala or in the front row at the Donna Karan or Marc Jacobs shows. Now she won't go away. Two nights ago she sat for a public Q&A at the 92nd Street Y and this Sunday she's featured on "60 Minutes." Here's a video sneak peek of the segment, compliments of New York Magazine. On her famously wearing dark sunglasses all the time:" "I can sit in a show and if I am bored out of my mind, nobody will notice… At this point, they have become, really, armor."

The New York Observer says The New York Times is getting ready to announce that it will - and how it will - start to charge for some online content. Two options being considered:

• a "meter" system that, after a certain point, starts charging readers by word count (how weird is that?)
• a "membership" system in which "readers pledge money to the site and are invited into a "New York Times community" (double weird, no?)

Today's read & other stuff - Anna Wintour, Fashion Victim?

Last night at a Q&A at the 92nd Street Y in NY, Vogue's editor Anna Wintour spoke in public (that alone is news), but the poor woman was interrupted by PETA members shouting "This woman skins animals alive!" As New York Magazine put it, "the editor's expression was a mix of polite restraint and Is there no security in this place?" Not surprisingly, once the brouhaha died down, her insights into fashion, fashion journalism, and journalism in general had the edge you'd expect. "Our job is to really dig through all that and help our readers make choices and explain what we're seeing," she said. "Right now, there's almost too much information on fashion — I'm confused!" Check out the magazine's tweets from the event here.

Time reports on an internal Wall Street Journal memo regarding staff's use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Most of it, writes Time's James Poniewozik, "boils down to the classic old-media problem with new media: fear of the loss of control." He writes: "The guidelines Dow Jones put out basically instruct their staffers to be the most boring social-networkers online, to be withholding from their readers, and generally, to guarantee themselves a tiny online following. If the editors and managers at the WSJ and other Dow Jones properties have any sense, they will instruct their staff to break these rules as much as possible." Touche. 

Readers Are People, Too

When you write a blog that’s read by both your colleagues and other people who just happen across it on the Internet, it can be hard to walk the balance beam that separates clever and witty from trite or insulting. The bigger and more diverse your audience, the bigger challenge it is to reach your readers in a way that’s relevant, compelling and respectful. One man’s hardee-har-har, after all, is another’s “I’m calling HR to complain.” I'm reminded of this occasionally – Word Wise started as an internal e-mail to a couple dozen colleagues in my office in Chicago and over the years it has evolved into a public-facing blog read by a couple of thousand people every week. Readers can be awfully touchy!   This has gotten me thinking about the risk writers take every day, whether writing a blog, a magazine article, or writing on behalf of our clients.   That blank page on your screen waiting to be filled with words presents you with a chance to tell the world what you think – not because you’re giving your opinion necessarily but because there’s endless choice in how you phrase information; how you express ideas, facts, and numbers; how you tell the story; what words you choose; what asides, references and even jokes you occasionally make that brighten your document; how you use and manipulate the rules of grammar; and how you show respect for your readers’ intelligence. Writing is a constant stream of decision making. And that means in some people’s eyes you’ll make the wrong decision. It happens. It doesn’t mean your readers are jerks – it just means that, like you, they’re individuals with their own expectations and life experiences.   Keep in mind as words flow from your brain to your fingertips to the page that you’re putting yourself out there, so to speak, taking a risk with every word. Think about who your readers are, what your ultimate goal is, and do your best. More often than not you’ll please most of the people most of the time. And that’s about as good as it gets.

Today's read & other stuff - Underpants On Your head

Though not normally known for its sense of humor, Foreign Policy magazine (intentionally?) has a funny piece explaining some recently coined (and serious) acronyms, the kind of words Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, and Hillary Clinton toss around at Georgetown cocktail parties in between bites of mini quiche and bon mots about the goings on in Montenegro and Bhutan, including SOFA, RINGO, BINGO, GONGO, and the best of all, PIIGS (which has nothing to do with swine flu). Okay... PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain - countries literally at the periphery of Europe all suffering from an economic downtown.

Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian thinks the exclamation point is coming back into style! Really! He does! Sure, Jeffries refers to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said "An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke" and Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, in which a character says, "And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head," but Jeffries is no slouch. He also notes an academic paper titled "Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication" in his discussion. Are exclamation marks meant to denote happiness? giddiness? irony? sarcasm? "How lovely it would be," he writes, "if we could recapture that original, pre-ironic wonder that made writers slip the o under the I! "

Spoonerism did you say?

The other day a colleague was bemoaning the quality of writing he’d seen lately and said, “These people don’t even know what a spoonerism is!” And I thought: Oh, dear. I don’t know what a spoonerism is. I’ve seen the word, I like the word (it’s hard not to enjoy saying spoonerism) and I once went on a date with a person whose online name was Like2Spoon (we never got that far), but still, I have no idea what a spoonerism is. That said, I’m almost sure it has nothing to do with flatware.   But it got me thinking that there are a lot of terms related to writing that many of us have heard of, yet we have no idea what they mean. . .    Pun – a play on words, like “Will this computer last five years? Obsoletely!” and “After working for 24 hours straight he called it a day,” that often result in someone else saying, “badda bing, badda boom.”   Malapropism – named after the character Mrs. Malaprop from Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play “The Rivals,” a malapropism is the unintentional confusion of one word with one that sounds similar, such as when Chicago’s Mayor Daley (father of the current mayor) said during the 1968 riots, “The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder!”   Metaphor – a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally related, such as when Truman Capote wrote “"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."   Simile – a statement that one thing is "like" or "as" another, such as a phrase I once saw in a restaurant review that I’ve never forgotten: “Steaks as big as your head!”   Oxymoron – a combination of contradictory words, like jumbo shrimp, controlled chaos, and the living dead   Tmesis – when a word is inserted into another word, like heretofore, whatsoever, and inasmuch.   Onomatopoeia – cha-cha, murmur, buzz, kerplunk: from the Greek for “name-making,” words that sound like the thing they define   Hyperbaton – the reversal of normal word order, as when Yoda said “Sorry I be but go you must.” People who do this uncontrollably suffer from agrammatism (really), or the pathological inability to use words in grammatical sequence, though they might say inability pathological to use sequence in grammatical.   Zeugma – a part of speech describing or referring to two or more words, even though it’s usually applied to only one: “You held your breath and the door for me,” from Alanis Morissette’s "Head over Feet"   Anaphora – the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, such as in “Casablanca," when Rick says, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”   ...and, of course, spoonerism, the transposition of initial consonants in a pair of words, named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), dean of New College, Oxford, who allegedly once toasted Her Majesty as “our queer old dean.”