Classic Advice, “Write Like You Talk,” No Longer Applies

Back when I did business writing workshops at the University of Richmond, I would tell attendees not to worry about remembering all the English rules they learned in school and to just write like they talked. We were educated people, and most of us naturally spoke with passable grammar.

I believe we still do, but conversational speech has become SO loaded with meaningless garbage and nonsensical idioms that I’ve thrown “Write like you talk” on the ash heap of worthless writing advice.

This enlightenment came to me because for the past six years, I’ve been doing transcription as a side gig.

(I recommend transcription if you’re a fast, accurate typist. The content can be varied and fascinating, and if you’re good, the pay’s decent if you hook up with a reputable service.)

Most of the speech I transcribe is so atrocious, if it were ever published, readers would be gouging their eyes out with forks.

I confess I mindlessly pepper my own speech with like and you know too often, and I try to catch myself. But those words aren’t the bulk of my verbal content, like this:

Like, I was trying to like watch this really good movie, you know? And like my dog Barney, you know, he like wouldn’t stop like barking. But like, you know, nothing was like there. It was like so annoying.

Nowhere near as annoying as having to listen to this. And I’m not exaggerating. People do talk like this. You probably know them.

Returning to transcription, there are essentially two ways to do it. To transcribe “Verbatim” means you type EVERY uh, um, like, etc., which can leave you wanting to rip your ears off and put a fist through the wall.

The other protocol is “Standard,” which means you “take out the trash” and transcribe only actual content. It’s possible to raise speakers’ written IQs as much as 50 points simply by omitting their brainless verbal padding.

As a small taste, please have the good sense never to write uh or um unless you’re composing fiction and it’s dialogue for a character who’s an abject moron.

I’ve got a list of pet peeves, and I’m going to discuss them in upcoming posts as a cautionary series on what never to let creep into your writing.Next, I’ll address how the word like oozed into our speech to replace said and why it makes no sense whatsoever.

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The More You Avoid “There,” the Better

Here are two compelling reasons to recheck whenever you write the word there.

First, if you begin a sentence with there and any tense of to be, such as:

• There is
• There was
• There were
• There will be

It’s probably padding that adds little to nothing and makes the sentence sound passive. You can usually fix this by putting the words that do say something first. Here’s an example:

There is a need to raise taxes to pay for road repairs.

You could go in at least two directions with this, depending on what you’re trying to emphasize — taxes or road repairs. Remember, readers get grabbed by what they see first.

If it’s taxes:

Raising taxes will pay for road repairs.

If it’s infrastructure:

To pay for road repairs, we need to raise taxes.

Here’s a minimalist option:

Paying for road repairs means raising taxes.

Are you getting the hang of it? Let’s try another one:

There were a dozen terrorists hiding in a cave with a bomb.

The simplest fix:

A dozen terrorists were hiding in a cave with a bomb.

You saw nary a there in any of these rewrites, and you didn’t miss it a bit, did you?

& & &

Rampant misuse of the contraction there’s (short for there is) is a new a pet peeve of mine. People use it with EVERYTHING, even plurals.

What results is not only a weak sentence, but an ignorant one:

There’s multiple ways to write any sentence.

(Microsoft Word just threw down the blue-double-underscore flag on that example. When Word notices your grammar is foul, you’ve hit rock-bottom.)

If you didn’t use the contraction, would you say, “There is multiple ways to write any sentence?” I certainly hope not.

If the plural ways don’t tip you off, then multiple should get your attention.

The plural subject takes the plural there are. And if you ever dare try to contract that to there’re, I’ll be forced to hunt you down and it won’t be pretty.

Now going back to my first point, to fix this, you could write:

You can write any sentence in multiple ways.

Advice: After you write something, do a Find on There and see how many of them you can eliminate.

Word Order Matters

“The burial site is in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek where the couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried.”

Did you just do a double-take? You should have.

This quote came from an Associated Press story, “G.H.W. Bush greets mourners honoring wife,” about the funeral and final resting place of former first lady Barbara Bush, who died on April 17, 2018.

Because I proofread for a living, I tend to absorb material word for word. When I read here that the Bushes buried Robin in a creek, I backtracked several times.

Nope, that’s exactly what it says.

Then I showed it to someone else, who said, “Well, yeah, but they obviously didn’t mean she’s in the creek.”

Indeed.

It’s an excellent example of why word order and punctuation matter. You shouldn’t make readers back up multiple times to figure out what you meant to say, but didn’t.

We have several options to write this more clearly. We could add punctuation:

“The burial site, in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek, is where the couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried.”

Does that feel like trying to squeeze in too much information?

The simplest solution is to separate the two topics:

“The burial site is in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek. The couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried there.”

Keeping the sentence whole, it could read:

“Mrs. Bush will be buried beside the couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek.”

The fourth and cleanest option places Mrs. Bush and her gravesite together. The fact about her daughter is separate:

“Mrs. Bush will be buried in a gated plot surrounded by trees and near a creek. The couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1953, is buried there.”

In the heat of creation, it’s easy to get the words out of order. The fix is to let the writing cool at least overnight, then reread it slowly as if for the first time. Errors like this should jump out.

How to Keep Deadline Creep from Killing Your Newsletter

Let’s say you publish a monthly newsletter to keep employees or customers informed about your business. Your submission deadline is the first of each month, but whenever it approaches, you realize you’ve got almost nothing for the upcoming issue. So, you email contributors a reminder to shake some articles loose.

And then you listen to the crickets.

That’s deadline creep. It’s crazy, but many newsletter contributors think the word deadline means the date they’re supposed to start thinking about possibly submitting. When you should be finalizing your content, it’s just beginning to trickle in.

It’s a problem because it’s like dominos. Once one newsletter’s schedule goes into the weeds, future issues are affected. You may have to push back submission deadlines or publication.

If the creep becomes extreme, skipping an issue may be the only way to get back on track.

Another mistake often made is assigning newsletter production to an employee with other full-time duties unrelated to publications. This makes the newsletter an oddball chore to be tackled “whenever.”

Every time you miss deadlines, it sends a subtle message that they don’t matter. How well (or long) would your company survive if employees and customers flouted all due dates?

Every newsletter published late, erratically, or not at all hurts your company’s credibility. If you don’t deem the content important enough to publish on time, readers won’t value it.

Fortunately, eliminating deadline creep is straightforward.

First, determine your newsletter’s appropriate frequency. This should be as often as you can reasonably manage while keeping the content fresh.

A quarterly newsletter is two-thirds less work than monthly (4 issues vs. 12), but if the content grows whiskers before anyone sees it, the publication is self-defeating.

Next, create a simple editorial calendar with submission deadline and publication dates. When figuring the editing and layout time you need, don’t be too generous. Newsletters go stale when the production phase drags on.

Now, publish your calendar.

A week or two before each deadline, send a reminder to contributors. If material straggles in after that, reject it or bump it to the next issue until they learn to respect your deadlines.

Once you begin publishing regularly and on schedule, your content’s value automatically increases. Once readers see your newsletter as a viable place to showcase their news, they become more willing contributors.

Killing deadline creep is a win-win because your contributors and production staff now know when to work it into their schedules, and readers begin to anticipate your regular communication with them.

How Antonin Scalia Lost His ASSoL

George Mason University recently coined this embarrassing new acronym for its law school, no doubt in haste and out of gratitude for $30 million in donations that flowed in after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died.

It may be another example of a simple failure to proofread.

When the new name, “Antonin Scalia School of Law,” leaked, people were quick to realize it could form the acronyms ASSoL or ASSLaw. Apt for those who consider the description fitting for Scalia and his profession, but probably not what the deep-pocketed donors had in mind.

I lay some of the blame on academia’s devotion to passive voice, with its ability to add wind to almost anything.

Take, for example, the University of Richmond School of Professional and Continuing Studies. Since it’s understood a university is a school, they could drop “School of” and lose no meaning.

Similarly, GMU couldn’t resist “School of Law.”

The quick fix was to eliminate the passive and create the abbreviation ASLS — Antonin Scalia Law School.

It’s common to call everything an acronym these days, but the subtle difference with abbreviations is that an acronym creates a word you can say, and an abbreviation doesn’t. For example, you must pronounce each letter of these abbreviations: FBI, IBM, CIA, and TSA.

But comedians could still make an acronym of ASLS. It would be pronounced “assless,” which isn’t much of an improvement.

In the end (pun intended), Scalia in death has managed to put George Mason between a $30 million rock and hard place.

 

Since When is “Into” ALWAYS One Word?

After seeing into all my life and thinking nothing of it, over just the past few months, it has caused me an existential crisis.

My only personal run-in was with some high school short story I wrote where a character walked “into the door” somewhere. My English teacher said it meant the character had actual impact with the door.

Yikes! Lesson learned.

(On the other hand, if I’d written that he walked “through the door,” this teacher, who seemed to take everything literally, would have claimed the character reduced the door to splinters.)

Now it seems everybody uses into as one word EVERY TIME.

I consulted Grammar Girl™ Mignon Fogarty’s Quick and Dirty Tips™, and found some comfort and clarification. She explained that into is a preposition generally relating to direction. (He walked into the room.)

I’ll add that it also relates to transformation. (She turned into a witch for Halloween.)

And I’ll add that it may be one word if you mean “to go inside” or “within.” (He jumped into his jeep.)

One more addition: It’s one word if you mean “intense interest.” (He’s really into playing with model trains.)

I’ve seen the following example written as one word, but I would say it should be two, like this:

I’m going to move in to a new house.

That’s because we call it “move-in day,” not “move-into day.” And because the sentence is intended to convey the act of moving rather than that the writer is going inside a new house.

Here’s an example as written that made my eyelid twitch because I think it’s wrong:

I can’t come into work on weekends.

The author meant that he couldn’t go there to do any work, not that he was physically unable get inside the office.

In my book, these next examples are also two words, even though you could make a weak argument that some direction is implied.

The maid came in to tidy up.

I think I’ll turn in to bed for the night.

The suspect turned himself in to police.

Bottom line: In my own writing, I find myself trying to avoid using into altogether. It’s not easy. There has to be a better way.

Can Contractions Go Too Far?

Yes, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.

Contractions exist to help written words sound the way we talk because we do not pronounce every letter in every word as if we are robots.

Instead, we drop letters and slide words together, and contractions depict that. But they can get weird if you try to follow speech too closely.

Such as when positive “would’ve” — would have — becomes negative “would’nt’ve” — would not have.

The same goes for for “could’ve” or “should’ve.” Sometimes you see these three expressions as “coulda, shoulda, woulda,” and they mean the exactly same thing. But in business writing I’d never advise turning a standard “could have” into a slangy “coulda.”

Nonstandard English is best confined to dialogue in creative writing where you’re trying to make a character’s speech distinctive. It’s extremely difficult to do well.

One common, simple contraction is “there’s,” but it’s tricky. It means “there is” and it’s singular. However, it’s often used with plural subjects because the contraction for “there are” would be “there’re,” which looks strange and is even hard to pronounce.

There’s people who aren’t going to agree with me about contractions.

Translation: There is people who are not going to agree with me about contractions.

Would you say that? No, I wouldn’t either. So let’s not write it.

On the other hand, we do have “you’re” for “you are.” Go figure. English is so quirky.

We should avoid some contractions simply because they don’t look good written, even if we often say them. One example is “that’ll” — that will — even though Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison used it with great success in a song: “That’ll Be the Day.”

Then there’s “there’ll” — there will — which sends my eyes and ears over the edge.

Conversely, a contraction sometimes doesn’t go far enough. such as on this license plate:

There’s no such word in English as “dont.” Microsoft Word won’t even let me type it that way without automatically inserting the apostrophe.

When at work, as long as you confine contractions to two words and put an apostrophe where letters are omitted, consider yourself on solid ground.

What’s Wrong with Contractions in Business Writing?

The short answer is, absolutely nothing. But in my workshops, someone almost always asks, “Aren’t contractions forbidden in business writing?”

Recently, a client converted a print newsletter to online-only and banned contractions in all feature articles from the executive team and those by HQ on benefits and personnel matters.

Such pieces are typically dry even on a good day, so making their tone even stiffer and more formal — to be read on the easy, breezy Internet, no less — leaves me shaking my head.

Do you remember Data, the android on Star Trek: Next Generation? One of his biggest regrets was that he hadn’t been programmed for contractions, because he thought they’d make him sound more human.

When you eliminate all contractions from your writing, you sound like Data.

“We are happy to announce a new benefit that is most requested; you will be allowed to work from home on Fridays.”

“We are sorry for issues you have had with our website. It is our pleasure to make sure you receive service that is reliable.”

Simple contractions such as it’s and that’s definitely have a place in business writing. Just “listen” as you write and sprinkle contractions in where you would use them in conversation.

My only caution is to be careful if your readers speak English as a second language. In that case, you would want to keep the wording clean and simple to aid comprehension.

Coming up: Can you take contractions too far?

Does Reese’s Want to be the Official Candy of the Vatican?

This is what you get when copywriters who don’t have a firm grip on spelling and phonetics write your ads:

When I first saw this Reese’s® Minis print ad several months ago, I did a double-take at “popable,” which pinged in my mind’s ear as “pope-able.”

Using this spelling, the past tense would be “poped.” Have you ever seen popcorn poped? Or a balloon poped?

Soon after, I came across another ad with similar wording, for Starburst® candy.

I don’t think the double “p” detracted from the message. Do you?

Then the other night, Reese’s took it to the next level with a TV commercial:

[2015 Update: There was a YouTube video here, but it no longer exists. The ad also used “popable.” I’m thinking Reese’s repented over their misspelling ways.]

Now I wonder if they’re hoping Pope Francis will notice and perhaps cut an endorsement deal.

Words get made up in advertising all the time. But they work only when they’re clever and not spelled so that literate potential customers will be inclined to mispronounce them and miss the point.

Maybe Reese’s thinks dropping letters appeals to the texting set, who don’t put a high premium on spelling. They’ve obviously spent a fortune spreading this error far and wide. And people wonder why Johnny can’t spell.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think Reese’s would have done better to stick with their previous description for Minis, which was “perfectly tiny.”

Now they just look perfectly ignorant.

Wild and Wacky AP Style

I’m developing a new course for the University of Richmond (Va.) School of Continuing Studies I’m calling AP Style for Business Writers because I’ve met many clients who claim to use it as their in-house writing style — except when they don’t.

I’ve never understood why corporate America glommed on to AP. It’s for news journalists. How many office workers need to know proper capitalization of Osama bin Laden (who, by the way, dropped out of the Stylebook somewhere between 2011 and 2013)?

The Stylebook devotes only 10 pages to all punctuation matters, whereas my old 6^th edition of The Gregg Reference Manual (my preferred writing guide, back in the day) devoted 26 pages to commas alone.

The Stylebook is in alphabetical order, which means you must look up every stinking prefix (non-, dis-, un-) to find out which ones need hyphens.

So, preparing this class, I’ve had to read 300+ pages of the current Stylebook and compare them to the 2011 edition (I skipped 2012 — life’s too short) to ferret out any updates because AP willfully REFUSES to flag them.

Here’s one change for you: They dropped the hyphen from moped.

In the process, I have compiled and usefully organized the material that’s pertinent to business writers, and it fits in to 22 pages of handouts. Yup, that fat Stylebook is 99.8% irrelevant.

Here are a few points I uncovered that you might find interesting:

• Never, under any circumstances, abbreviate department as dept.
• Never use abbreviations for state names with five or fewer letters EXCEPT Alaska Hawaii (because they’re unattached to the U.S.) or the District of Columbia.
• Never use italics. For anything. Ever.
• Ditto for asterisks * and brackets [ ].
• Lists of items should begin with dashes, never with any of Word’s bullet characters.
• Every item in a list should end with a period, even if it’s a single word.
• Parentheses used within a sentence are a sign the sentence has a problem. (Do mine?)
• It’s not “Merry Christmas,” but “merry Christmas.”

I’m eager to have my first class because it’s bound to attract AP pros who want a refresher — and are possibly hoping for spirited debate.

I think everyone’s soon going to realize that the denizens of corporate America don’t embrace AP style with the fervor they think they do.

OK, I can’t resist. One more:

You’re not supposed to write, The meeting is on Tuesday, but, The meeting is Tuesday.

Well, two more:

And don’t write, We met last Wednesday. Make it, We met Wednesday.

The past-tense verb is supposed to clue the reader in to which Wednesday you mean.

The same goes for next Wednesday. If you write, We will meet Wednesday, you clearly mean next week (if it’s already Thursday).

I uncovered those relatively obscure nuggets for expressing dates under the entry for “on.”

Oh, this is going to be a fun class.