A Plea to
readers and writers
You can throw a brick (or perhaps be gentler and employ a
sandwich) in Piccadilly Circus and you’ll hit someone who calls himself a
writer. And why not? Almost every single one of us can write and we spend an
inordinate amount of time texting and emailing if not actually working on the
old fashioned business of furrowing our brows and putting pen to paper.
But my thought is this: because we can write – in that we
were taught this amazing skill at school – ought we therefore to take
responsibility for the creation of all the many words we pour into promoting
our businesses. Should we write our own brochures, our own websites, put
together our own annual reports and script our own speeches and presentations?
It is my contention after many years of perplexed experience
and plenty of research that the vast majority of proud owners of websites
advertising their services and wares are also the proud writers of those very
websites. And it is for this reason that so much unrepeatable and terrible
prose is published abroad. There are literally trillions of words out there
smashing and grinding nonsensically together, desperately vying for reader’s
attention: lumpen, clanking, duplicating words, a vast medium for the cliché of
the moment and the many clichés of yesteryear, for biz-speke, jargon and
general nonsense written in the egg-laying and strenuous pursuit of making
sales to potential customers.
My plea is for all such writers to stop and for readers to
complain.
Just think how much better informed we would be, how much
more inspired and enthusiastic we could be, if all this fantastic verbiage was
trimmed, shaped and balanced for easy consumption. Wait for it – by a
professional copywriter who has hard-won experience and plenty of skill.
It’s an amazing thing that website designers can create
wonderfully customised sites with both subtle and powerful business branding,
full of flair and invention – and when they’ve been through all the iterative
design stages to achieve this thing of beauty they ask the client for the copy.
They then shoehorn this in somewhere – it is little more than a shape on the
page to them and usually the less of it the better.
This approach is typical and it has carried on, in my
experience, from the ancient days of printed brochures (rather than websites)
to the second and third generation online age. Design comes first and the
quality of the message is left to look after itself. Clients pay a lot of money
‘for a website’ and then they fill in the words – because words are cheap. This
is all so wrong.
The message you are trying to convey is actually your prime
purpose, supported by graphic design and layout considerations rather than the
reverse. A skilled professional will use words boldly and strikingly, create
useful sub-headings and links to signpost people to other layers of information
and, above all, write clearly and simply with the ducks in the right order. In
this way, you will hook readers and make them want to explore.
