In Australia, “diploma” has a precise meaning, one that implies a pretty serious study programme. You wouldn’t embark on an Aussie diploma lightly.

It’s not like that all over the world, however. Internationally, a diploma can be anything from a post-graduate 2-year course of university study to a short, solid professional development qualification, like ours.

Oops, that’s another international terminology trap! “Professional development” in New Zealand applies to all professions, but in some countries is used mostly by the teaching profession.

Our Diploma in Web Content is an integrated bundle of 10 discrete short courses. You can complete the work and pass the tests (hopefully) in about 10 hours; you’re enrolled for 3 months so you can benefit fully.

We use the word “diploma” because:
~ there’s no international agreement on what a diploma should be
~ we need to differentiate between a 10-course diploma and a single 1-hour course.

Get it? Our Diploma is a short, focused, practical study programme that easily fits into the working life of busy professionals. You can do it, starting tomorrow and finishing within 3 months.

Nevertheless, terminology is a real problem, because in Australia the word “diploma” seems like a nonsense for a qualification that takes 3 months. Credibility suffers.

We’re thinking that for Aussie graduates we might provide an alternative version of our hard-copy Diploma, using words that make sense in their work environment. But what phrase should we use?

“Professional Development Diploma”?

We need your advice please!

Photo: (c) Tokyo Institute of Technology in spring.

Plain, yes. Boring, no. Barbarous, never.

2010 is a big George Orwell year: the 60th anniversary of his death occurred in January.

John Rossi summarises Orwell’s life work in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

George Orwell’s advice on writing style is recycled over and over again, year after year, all over the world… for a very good reason: it is timeless.

It’s hard to beat Orwell’s clear, simple, focused tips, expressed in a style both simple and civilised.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word when a short word will do.
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
4. Use the active rather than passive voice.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Whenever possible, use common words. Words that nearly every adult is likely to understand. Words that don’t require a trip to the dictionary.

Your aim in all business and professional writing is to get your message across quickly and clearly. Using common words is a plain language trick that really helps. It’s a simple way to spruce up your writing, making it more concise and more readable.

You’ll find hundreds of examples, once you start looking. Here are a few for starters:

• not in lieu of but instead of
• not subsequent to but after
• not under the provisions of but under.

Experiment. Wouldn’t your writing be clearer if you used:

• not transformation but change
• not outcomes but results
• not prioritized but most important
• not stakeholder but you or —well, stop and think who you really mean!

200 examples of unnecessarily complicated words, and alternatives, were published by the Local Government Association (UK) in March 2009.

This plain language writing tip needs no explanation: the meaning is obvious. The reason is pretty obvious too. And yet it bears constant repetition, because people forget.

In a business or government office, meaningless jargon may become so common that many otherwise normal, healthy, intelligent people think it makes sense. If you work in certain environments, you bathe in gobbledegook as it streams out of memos, reports, policy, procedures, presentations and even press releases. You yourself start writing the same jargon, confident it’s the right way to go.

And you start to participate in a group hallucination. You get this extraordinary illusion that ordinary people can understand what you are saying. (Or care.)

Here’s a classic example, the first two paragraphs on a government web page:

Scion places a high emphasis on developing strategic partnerships to build stronger science capability and ensure the delivery of worthwhile outcomes.

We have developed a diverse range of relationships with other research organisations, industry groups, and commercial businesses, both nationally and internationally, to greatly expand the potential of science-related opportunities.

Flesch-Kincaid readability score: zero. That means virtually no adult reader will be able to understand it easily.

What does the author really mean, in plain language? We can figure that out. But in the end, is it worth saying?

First figure out what you really mean, then say that. If it’s worth saying, say it in plain language. If it’s not worth saying, don’t bother.

Scion: Key Working Relationships

When you make a word plural by adding s, don’t use an apostrophe.

CORRECT: words, apples, peas, the Joneses, CDs, 1950s.

See? It’s wrong to write apple’s, pea’s, CD’s, 1950’s or PC’s.

That apostrophe is just downright wrong. People rudely call it the greengrocer’s apostrophe, because it’s often found in the greengrocer’s shop. It even looks messy.

Knowing this rule will make life easier, won’t it?

Not convinced? Look again at PCs. Big PC in capital letters, and little s in lower case. It’s obvious what this means. Nobody would get confused, reading the word PCs.

Just occasionally, it’s OK to use an apostrophe with some abbreviations. But this is necessary very rarely.

Examples of when an apostrophe is permitted:

Mind your p’s and q’s. (ps resembles P.S. in a letter)
Dot the i’s and cross the t’s. (is would be confusing)

Dominion Post: Gang’s are for idiot’s. The message is clear, never mind the punctuation.

This morning I learned a useful new word.

Maven. So much cooler than guru.

I’m sure it’s not new to you. My belated discovery just shows I don’t live in the world of Open Source Java. And it shouldn’t be new to me as I apparently encountered it in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

According to Wikipedia (sorry) a maven is:

a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from the Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge.

Of course maven, as a lovely and unusual word, has been press-ganged into branding wineries and business consultants and search engines and you name it and good on them. Meanwhile, way back in 1976, a baby was named Maven Huffmann and grew into the name… as a WWE professional wrestler.

Yes indeed, becoming a maven is fine aspiration.

But wait… are mavens really people who answer people who don’t answer people? That was the conclusion Marc Smith reached in a netscan episode four years ago. On social network sites, that might not necessarily be the same thing as an expert.

Image: Maven Huffman

Jim and Mary Barr survey headlines covering a relatively positive art sale at Sothebys. In isolation, the international headlines got me scratching my head. Here’s a sneaky double negative, for instance:
Sotheby’s Sale Fails to Meet Low Expectations – WSJ

Gee that sound bad. But it means people paid higher prices than expected.

Bidders Respond to Lower Prices for Contemporary Art – Reuters

Sooo, they paid lower prices? No, they paid higher prices.

The Barrs see this media distortion of the facts as schadenfreude, or delight in misery of others. The sub-editors perform linguistic contortions to persuade us it’s all bad bad bad and art investors are fools.

Words with negative meanings have a deadly power to infuse readers with their own gloom. Worth remembering, whether you’re aiming to mess with people’s minds or to write plain language. Glance at those headlines and what hits you?
* fail
* lower expectations
* low prices

Grammatically, fail is positive. But its meaning is negative, both literally and psychologically.

Clever use of three punctuation marks can increase the readability of web content and other documents by increasing the space around text:

• the humble full stop
• dot points,also known as bullet points
• the mighty em-dash.

Add white space, add white space. Meaning add white space to your web content. What can the poor web content writer do? Use certain punctuation marks.

Just to confuse you, white doesn’t mean white, in this context. It means empty. With no stuff in it: no words, no pictures, no patterns. If the background of your web site is yellow, white means yellow. If the background colour is black, white means black. Got it?

Some punctuation marks add white space, at least that’s how humans perceive them. Not colons: or semi-colons; they just add to the clutter. Not even commas, because the meaning of a comma requires a teeny tiny bit of subconscious analysis.

We perceive full stops as white space, because one tiny dot is topped by emptiness and followed by emptiness. (Hint: short sentences rule.) It’s all very zen.

Similarly, dot points provide white space. (Short list items heighten the effect.)

Now we come to the em-dash: the big long dash. White space is yet another reason for getting your head around the right uses of the hyphen, the en-dash (a dash as wide as the letter n) and the em-dash (a dash as wide as the letter m).

The em-dash is my friend, says Cathy Curtis:

That little horizontal line is one of the most useful forms of punctuation on the web. Commas, semicolons and colons don’t do a good job of visually breaking up information, and they’re hard to see on the screen. Parentheses have to be used carefully, because the words they enclose are understood to be less important than the rest of the sentence.

But the mighty em-dash is easy to see, and democratic in the way it treats words on either side of it.

Image (c) www.ilovetypography.com

I was amused to read last week that Queen Elizabeth II has commanded (well, contracted, I suppose) Tim Berners Lee to fix her web site. Nothing but the best!

http://www.royal.gov.uk is pretty stuffy at present. Take a peek while you can: the new version will appear on 12 February. Video clips make the site more exciting than it was 10 years ago, but they’re shown in the YouTube context, so you have the delight of seeing QUEEN jostling The Queen.

The current site has been added to… and added to… and added to. Inevitably, navigation is a shambles.

But if I remember correctly, not much else has changed — including the mean little font and the pompous language. Words are emitted into the ether from a great height. One supposes that one would expect one’s monarch — or rather, her communications staff — to err on the side of formality when addressing the hoi polloi. Still, let’s hope the makeover includes a few pronouns, especially “you” and the plebeian “we”.

Here’s a taste of the de haut en bas tone:

The British Monarchy Media Centre is managed by Buckingham Palace Press Office.

It is intended to provide a dedicated resource for members of the print, broadcast and online media in the UK, Commonwealth and worldwide, and to aid members of the public interested in the daily programme of members of the Royal Family, speeches by members of the Royal Family, or seeking information about previous Royal engagements.

How kind. Shame about the grammar. But that’s what you get when you launch into a 55-word sentence. I hope Tim will tell you that.

The Queen herself is said to be driving the revamp:

Now, at an age – she is 82 – when many of her contemporaries are turning their backs on new technology, the Queen is determined to make her website – first launched 12 years ago – more user friendly and relevant to modern-day society.

Barack Obama’s victory speech is a classic example of oratory. Classic? Sure.

Aristotle analysed rhetoric systematically, as a science, and explained it in Rhetoric, written between 367 and 322 BC. Scholars have added a great deal since then, and yet frankly the principles don’t change. A great speech is a great speech is a great speech.

Build up, catch phrases, repetition, personal anecdotes, climax, call to action… the same devices have always been used. Why not? They still work as they always have done. The speech is heard, not read, so the audience needs two or more chances to grasp each point. The argument must build and build, repeating key phrases so that the audience is carried forward on a wave.

A well crafted, passionate speech is a powerful emotional experience. But the full impact can only happen when the audience is willing and primed and hungry to believe. Which was indeed the case in Chicago when President Elect Barak Obama began,

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

And when he ended,

God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

You see, despite the dark confusing years, the United States of America still knows who it is. It is the land of the free, the land of opportunity, it is great, it is the land where anyone can become President. This identity has a dark side as well as a glory, and it has endured.

New Zealand politicians can never reach the heights of rhetoric because our perceived identity keeps shifting. Personally I got sick to the cheekbones long ago with earnest discussion about national identity in literature and art. It’s dormant at present, thank goodness. But I dare say it wouldn’t carry on decade after decade unless we were a bit confused.

Before Europeans hit these islands, Maori did not perceive themselves as a single nation, but had an unshakeable identity based on iwi, hapu and land. Since then, New Zealand has perceived itself as the farthest outpost of the British Empire; the youngest Dominion; the ends of the earth; first in the world with social reforms such as votes for women and old age pensions; God’s own country; a model of racial equality; a great place to bring up children; a partnership between tangata whenua and other residents; and a nation of innovators and inventors.

What a mess! I suppose in my own mind, New Zealand is a funny little country that I love, a small country with ideas above its station. This does not make for inspiring oratory.

Our politicians cannot appeal to our belief in God, either. The leaders of Labour and National openly admit they do not believe in God, and only a minority of Kiwis are active Christians.

Even the refrain Yes we can is anathema to New Zealand politicians since Winston Peters used it in the last campaign, quoting Bob the Builder. It is sullied. Yuk.

One phrase that might inspire New Zealanders is I think I can, I think I can. If we must quote picture books for children, The Little Engine That Could is more our style. We’re doing our best regardless of size. And sometimes it’s necessary and motivating to believe you have some control over such things as a global financial meltdown.

The Little Engine That Could