In a previous post I talked about the Leitmotiv, the guiding theme or concept that can help be the glue for the persuasive story you’re trying to tell.

The one thing you need to guard against with the Leitmotiv is excess. When your theme tries too hard, or is too clever for its own good, it detracts from your message rather than reinforcing it, and you don’t want that.

A good way to tell if you’re stretching things too much is if your reader has to work too hard to see the link between your theme and your message. If the link is lost, your objective is lost too. I saw this recently with some excellent copywriting done on a brochure. The Leitmotiv was a good one, it was a musical one, using the idea of a conductor who coordinates all the different elements of an orchestra into something beautiful.

The tone was good, but the language was too musical, too specialist, and so the link was lost. Toning down the language – if you pardon the pun – reestablished the link and made it more powerful.

As with many things, it was about getting the balance right, the fit right. Make sure your Leitmotif gets it right too.

Rather like French, some very cool German phrases – for which we don’t always have a great translation, hence the term idiomatic – have percolated into and enriched the English language.

Amongst my favourites are Zeitgeist – spirit of the age, and the mighty Weltanschauung – ‘world view’.

When it comes to business writing, something that can really hold your story together is the Leitmotif, the theme that moves through it. A guiding theme can keep your reader focused on what you’re writing about and help them imagine what you’re trying to convey. For example, you could use the Leitmotif of a journey and use lots of journey-related language – steps, destination, travel, milestones – as the vehicle, pun intended, for your story.

Pretty much any Leitmotif will do – a picture, harmony, the sky, planets, the list is endless – as long as it helps you tell your story and guides your reader to where you want to take them.

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.