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.

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?

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.

How to Kill Your Corporate Newsletter

One sure way to make a corporate newsletter thrive is to place its focus on employees. They will read it, they will contribute to it, and they will believe that management cares about communicating with them.

I once had a client with such a newsletter. It was a delight to edit because employees across the country submitted stories about their accomplishments and events, complete with photos. It was a great recruiting tool, truthfully portraying the company as a fun, participative workplace.

But then control of the newsletter shifted from marketing to human resources, where the HR head was a political animal who saw everything as an opportunity for personal career advancement. Under this person’s direction, the newsletter withered.

If you’ve got a pesky publication you’d like to kill, you can follow this company’s recipe for disaster:

• When the submission deadline nears, send a vaguely threatening reminder to potential contributors, with wording like, “This is strictly a friendly reminder that we’re expecting your articles.” (The “or else” may be implied.)
• Keep stories of employees winning awards and hosting successful events off the front page. Instead, lead every issue with a formal essay on some aspect of the company’s finances—a real wall of words with long paragraphs and no subheads to break things up. Attach a highly placed exec’s byline and headshot to give it credibility, whether he/she actually wrote the piece or not.
• Forbid the professional editor you’ve hired to improve the front-page story’s readability or make it consistent with the publication’s more conversational style. The executive authors may come off looking long-winded, grammatically inept, and prone to redundancy, but their every word is golden.
• Decree that any article mentioning the company president must appear no later than page 2, even if the article falls neatly into an established section for such news. The president should never be forced to mingle with the peons, even on paper.
• As employees disengage and submissions dwindle, fill the void with boilerplate about safety, customer service, ethics, whatever top-down lectures you can cobble from the Internet. Nothing livens up a publication more than recycled generic content. And the longer it is, the deadlier.
• If the publication is print, move it online, but maintain the print format so readers may have to scroll and jump around a lot to follow stories. Bonus points if the original format was an oversized page — they’ll have to zoom, too.

Before long, your newsletter will shrink like a contestant on Biggest Loser. But the biggest loser will be YOU. You will have stifled employee engagement and killed one of your most effective channels for communicating with employees in a painlessly entertaining way, while earning their goodwill.