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The Fog Factor and Winston Churchill

January 28, 2015 //
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That Winston Churchill chap was a bit of a legend. As I write this, it’s the 50th year of his death and the 75th anniversary of his so-called ‘finest hour’ in 1940. As well as the pre-eminent British politician of the 20th century, he was also a very good orator indeed.

But what, I hear you say, does that have to with a blog on sales, marketing and the universe? Well, perhaps not quite the universe, but business and life generally, within the confines of our modest planet. Well, he’s also a very good writer.

When I did my Master’s in Business Admin degree in the US about a hundred years ago, one of the main courses was on business writing. We were taught to write using as few long words as possible, since shorter words are easier to follow, have the tendency to obfuscate less with jargon and increase the overall persuasiveness and conviction.

In order to illustrate this, they used something called the Fog Factor, also known as the Fog Index. The higher the index, the ‘foggier’ the writing. The lower, the clearer. The lower the index, the better. Now, if you read up on this you’ll find the formula can be quite complicated, but I’m all for simplicity so we calculated it as the number of words that were 3 syllables or more per sentence in a passage of writing. Anything under 3 is good, anything over 3 is foggy, not good.

So, in the awful second sentence of the third paragraph of this post, for example, the fog factor is a rather wading-in-treacle score of 6. The sentence before it has no 3-or-more syllables, so much more readable,

Guess who the author was that they held up as an example of how to write clearly and persuasively with the fewest number of long words? Sir Winston Churchill himself. And if you listen to some of his speeches, or read any of his stuff, you’ll know why. The man could write.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing

How to Write Content Productively

January 26, 2015 //
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Writing fresh content is hard work. That’s why it’s great to be able to recycle or rework it to make it go further. I find writing content mentally draining. A solid 5 hours of writing and I’m done for the day, so generally after that I will schedule in a different kind of work.

Mind you, in that 5 hours I’ve generally created a good bit of content.

Sometimes content comes slowly to us. Either we can’t get started and we put it off til the deadline is screaming at us, or perhaps we feel we haven’t got the muse today and everything feels a bit ponderous and laboured, or even we don’t feel we have the confidence, research or knowledge to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

If you have to write content and it doesn’t come easy to you – and let’s face it, it doesn’t really come easy to anyone, but we can still enjoy it – then I offer the following thoughts from what’s worked for me over the years.

Find your most productive writing time in the day and make sure it’s as undisturbed as you can make it. Schedule clls and meetings for other times of the day if you can. I used to do my best writing in the afternoon and evening, but I was younger and a student, so maybe the lifestyle contributed to my choice of time. Now I’m older I do my best work in the morning, so I start as early as I can, but not too early for me to feel shattered and for it to be self-defeating. Then again, I work a lot from home and my kids and good lady are not in the house 9 til 3, so maybe that’s also a function of circumstance rather than preference.

Before you start, get everything ready: your resource material, your computer, your coffee, some conducive music. You want to be prepared for some serious cerebration, and once you get up a head of steam you don’t want to keep getting diverted. Work in a concentrated blast of about half an hour, then get up at a natural breaking point, walk around, make a drink, do something that’s not work-related for 5 minutes. Then get back into it again. As I said, I find 4 or 5 hours like this and you’ll be pretty spent, but you’ll have some good stuff under your belt. By the way, students and revisers: this approach works very well for studying for exams too.

If you’re doing a big piece of work or project that can be divided into sections, re-read and revise the major section you’ve been working on before you start the next major section. You don’t want the old thoughts overlapping into and cluttering the new. Sustained, focused bursts in each of the different areas work really well for me. I don’t find it productive to have a number of different chapters on the go at the same time.

If you can’t figure out how to get started writing, then write anything down, to get into the behavioural posture of it. Title the work, write down when the work is due, put some guiding notes under the title to get the juices flowing in the right direction.

When you get to the point when you’re making loads of mistakes typing, and having to delete and retype, and re-retype, it’s time to stop. You’ll know when this time is, because you’ll be tutting and cursing uncontrollably.

Of course, if you’ve got some additional or even completely contrary approaches that work for you, why not share them too?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing

When I am One

September 1, 2014 //
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First Birthday Card

First Birthday Card

This is my 154th post, dear reader. More importantly, it’s exactly a year ago that I started the Monday, Wednesday, Friday episodes of the Paul Dilger blog.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it from time to time. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing it. I never did it for the viewing figures or the influence, rather for the discipline and enjoyment behind writing. If I’ve imparted anything useful on the way, then that’s a bonus.

As Eric Morecambe used to say: what do you think of it so far? Rubbish!

I know it’s been an eclectic bag of stuff to date, which is why when I very first started writing it, the byeline ‘Musings on stuff I come into contact with’ seemed appropriate. It still does I think.

I will, however, be giving some thought to whether the topics – and therefore the blog itself – should be more focused and consistent, or remain the rag-bag of ramblings that it has come to be.

As always, dear reader, your views are welcomed.

Talk to you in the second year.

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Simplicity Brings Power

August 29, 2014 //
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As human beings, we have a tendency to overcomplicate things. Sometimes it’s not of our own doing, it’s the way things grow organically when time, people and variables conspire to turn things into a mess.

The last thing you want to do in life or work is create your own Gordian Knot. Simplicity is your guide. If you can distill things into the simple, most important thing, then you get clarity, you can make decisions, and you can execute.

Try these things to bring simplicity and create power and forward motion:

– Get people to explain things to you in terms a 10-year-old would understand, with no jargon or fancy words

– When faced with a large problem or project, break it up into smaller pieces and fix those pieces one at a time. Then you can celebrate the small victories towards the large end goal

– Prioritise or rank the factors you’re dealing with. You want to focus on the major priorities. All the other less important factors floating around are a distraction that stops you seeing the wood for the trees

– When unsure of what to do next, break the process down into a series of steps to get you where you need to be. Then take that next step

– Be continuously aware of your own or external complicating forces. They are the enemies of progress and the thieves of time

Simple is strong and powerful. Complicated is sapping and fearful.

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Categories General, Language, Strategy

Self-Mockery is Often the Best Policy

August 20, 2014 //
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My wife – otherwise known as Mrs D, or sometimes Ms H when she’s cross with me, occasionally feeds back on my blog posts. She’s a technical writer and has a laser eye for typos and other inadvertent gotchas. She also lets me know when she has no interest in my posts. These are usually the ones focused on sales and marketing, so pretty well all of them.

This blog post is about how to recover from a mistake and I’m going to cite an example from one of her current addictions, which will hopefully induce her to get to the end of it.

When you’ve made a booboo, the best way to recover is to come clean, and if you can be self-deprecating and humorous too, then all the better. When a worthy third party also benefits from your recovery, then it’s a slam dunk.

Take the recent much-publicised gaffe in a promotional shot on the Instagram account of Downton Abbey.  The BBC gleefully reported on the ‘water-bottle-gate’ affair which affected its commercial broadcasting rival. These things happen and the word gets out very quickly and virally thanks to the times we live in.

What better response than to publish a self-mocking response, together with a link to the charity WaterAid UK who work to provide safe water to those that need it.

Nicely done eh, Mrs D?

 

 

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Categories Communication, Language, Strategy

Blog Post Length

August 1, 2014 //
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Where do you stand, dear reader, on blog post length? I won’t tell you how many online column inches have ben devoted to this. The consensus is that it doesn’t matter, it depends. One thing they all seem to agree on, however, is that longer posts get linked to more often.

The conclusion they draw is that longer posts are therefore better. I take issue with this and offer a different explanation. The reason is tl;dr syndrome. Too long; didn’t read. People are busy, too busy to read long posts, so they just scan them.

This is how it goes: “Boy this is a long post. It’s good though, at least what I’ve read of it sounds good, but I can’t read any more, so I’d better share it anyway.”

So you get this kind of social media message: “Very interesting, important article on blah blah blah, worth a read.” Does this create a kind of social media maelstrom of mediocrity?

Better to create a blog post that people have time to get through properly, no?

 

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Categories Communication, Language

You Seldom Hear Seldom

July 23, 2014 //
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Language change is neither progress or decay; it is simply change and is happening all the time. New words are constantly being coined and come into regular use, while some gradually disappear from favour with equal frequency.

One such example of the latter is ‘seldom’. It’s a handy word, being shorthand for ‘not very often’ and keeping sentences simpler because you don’t need to build a negative in. For example, you could say ‘you seldom hear that’, which is a good bit easier and more economical that ‘you don’t hear that very often.’

One occasionally hears middle-aged or older folk using the word, but never young people. Despite belonging to the former group, I don’t think I’ve ever used the word. It seems old-fashioned and a touch quaint to me, which befits its somewhat ancient and quirky origins.

I put it alongside that other old-fashioned word which also saves you a negative, namely ‘lest’. I give it as another example – lest you forget :-).

 

 

 

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Categories Communication, Language

Latin and Greek clues to prepositions

July 16, 2014 //
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One of the joys of having studied Latin and Greek at school and college is that sometimes you know what a word is even though you’ve never seen or heard it before, even if it’s on its own with no guiding context.

The example I always used to give was ‘autobiography’, composed of 3 Greek words: auto, meaning self; bio, meaning life; and graphy, meaning write. That’s an easy one though! Prepositions can give excellent clues as to what sense to make of compound words. To digress for one moment: the word preposition itself, somewhat deliciously, also contains a preposition. Anyway, take a Latin word like fero, meaning carry. It gives you all manner of compound words like infer, transfer, offer, differ and so on.

There must be a hundred prepositions in use; they’re jolly handy. Most of them give obvious clues, like inter of international – between, trans of translate – across, with the juicy bonus of the ‘late’ part being from the same root word as fero, and tele of television – also across.

I thought I’d share a few others with you that are perhaps less obvious and more obscure.

Epi (Greek for on as in on top of), which helps with the words epitaph, epigram, epidermis.

Peri (Greek for around), giving us the fabulous peripatetic, periphrastic and – unlucky for some usually in this context – peridontal. See how the second half of the word stays with the Greek and uses dontal for tooth, rather than the Latin dental? Cool isn’t it?

Ante (Latin for before, not to be confused with Anti which is against), giving us antediluvian, antecedents and anteater – just kidding about the last one…

Cata (Greek for down), hints at the meaning of catalogue, catastrophe and, somewhat uncomfortably I would imagine, catheter.

Cum (Latin for with), giving us a host of words beginning with co-, like collusion, convention, composition, colloquial and so on.

Ultra (Latin for beyond), leading to ultrasonic and loads of aspirational business product and service names like ultraflex.

The classical scholars among you will have noted that many ancient prepositions have multiple meanings in English. I have, for this post however, tried to stay with the main meanings. You could also make the argument, and be on pretty solid ground, that for every example I’ve given there are as many others where the preposition means something else.

It’s simply a guide. The only way is to immerse yourself in the language(s) and you’ll be the richer for it :-).

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Categories Communication, Language

It Depends…

July 14, 2014 //
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I’m all for clarity of communication. I prefer it to innuendo, nuancing and saying one thing and really meaning another. I guess that would make me a poor business person or negotiator in some parts of the world. I’d have to work harder to make progress in those more inscrutable, deferential and stratified societies.

When I can give a simple answer to a simple question, I will. The trouble is, in much of our working lives – and a lot of our family or private lives – the questions are rarely simple, even though the answers might be.

That’s why my favourite answer  – the one I almost always fall back on – is ‘it depends.’ You’re not fudging your answer. You want to give a good answer so you use it to buy more time and seek qualification to the original question so that you can answer it as well as you can.

Here’s an example:

‘Should we hire this person?’

‘It depends.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, it depends on our plans for the role that this person would be filling. If we are looking for someone who has done the job before and who will hit the ground running, then yes I believe we should. If the role is a stepping stone to a more strategic role where someone is looking for ways to evolve the department and where that someone will need to bring broader and softer skills, then probably not.’

Have a try yourself tomorrow with your customers, partners and colleagues. You’ll be surprised how many times this holding answer allows you to give a better answer later than an inaccurate answer earlier.

I guess it makes me more diplomatic than I thought :-).

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Mixing up prescription and proscription

June 27, 2014 //
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“There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip,” as the saying goes. One small letter can make a world of differences and there are Sunday magazine comic strip writers who have made their livings out of this fact.

Always make sure you don’t mix up prescription and proscription. They’re different prepositions, and different propositions entirely! One will help you feel better whereas the other probably won’t.

Always better to be prescribed that proscribed. 🙂

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Categories Language
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