Here’s an easy rule of thumb when you’re writing at work: never write a sentence longer than 21 words.

OK, it’s extreme. But it will often get you out of trouble.

(Before you explode, let me remind you that phrases containing capital letters can be treated as a single “word” in this situation. Phrases like “Prime Minister of Great Britain” or “Department of Housing and Development”. People read them in one gulp, like a single word.)

The 21-word limit is a natural one. That’s roughly 7 phrases, at which point humans tend to run out of short term memory. Readers can’t remember how your sentence began. Even you can’t remember how your sentence began. What a mess.

The danger point occurs at around 21 words: that’s when your sentence risks spinning out of control.

If you are having trouble writing a particular sentence, it’s probably too long. Just chop it into two or more sentences. Or shorten the sentence by removing unnecessary words.

Last week Rachel had a Significant Birthday, so we’re giving you a birthday present.

All you have to do is enrol yourself (or a group) in our Diploma in Web Content before midnight, 19 March 2010.

With every enrolment before the deadline we’ll send a terrific free e-book worth USD17.00.

“Write Me A Web Page, Elsie!” (abridged, PDF) contains 8 of the 21 chapters in the popular paper version. These chapters are all highly relevant to the 10 courses in our Diploma in Web Content. It’s a mini-textbook, with tons of up-to-date, practical and entertaining advice on how to write web content.

Until now, only a few people have received this ebook, and it certainly wasn’t free.

Act now! Either contact us on sales@contented.com
or purchase a Diploma for one person online

I find writing books easy and fun, but writing a book title terribly painful. (This is Rachel talking, by the way.) And so much depends on the title—sales, for instance! By sheer luck, my latest book has a pretty good title, but it went through the usual hair-raising cycle.

1. While I was writing, the book had a working title: “Mrs Palin Reads a Naughty Story”.
2. I got used to it and came dangerously close to using this misguided title for real.
3. I user-tested the title on friends. Someone asked, “But what’s the sub-title?” Good question.
4. Just in time I got some radical advice: rip out the first chapter. Result: new title: “Scarlet Heels”, sub-title: “26 Stories About Sex”.

Does this remind you of editorial processes in your workplace? I figure since I wrote this book all alone for my own amusement, the sloppy development of a title was all part of the fun. But in the workplace, better not leave such things to chance!

Available from good New Zealand bookstores real-world or online:
ccpress.info/scarletheels.htm

Do we provide in-house training in writing for the web? Not any more.

Recently an email arrived from a large non-profit organisation in Colorado Springs. That’s a long way from Wellington, New Zealand. Could we provide 2 days of in-house training for their staff, on readability and plain language? Hm, let me think about that for about 10 seconds…

Accidentally I wrote rather a long email in reply. Let me share the pertinent bits.

I used to do in-house training in several countries including China, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. However, I came to realise there was a better way. Face-to-face training internationally is very expensive and the administration is also a burden. Getting all the appropriate staff to one venue at a specific time is difficult. These factors mean that fewer staff can be trained, and therefore often the training is wasted.

So Alice and I developed the CONTENTED Diploma in Web Content — a model that isn’t just cheaper for training large numbers of scattered staff: it’s also more effective. This is what we recommend in your situation.

Many large organisations such as the Asian Development Bank have seized the opportunity to train 100 staff for the same price as a one day face-to-face in-house course. Like your organisation, the Bank has employees working all over the world: our online training brings huge advantages when the workforce is scattered.

The Diploma (as you know) includes training both in readability and plain language. This is reinforced by every module, especially the editing module. The standard of general business writing improves — not just web content writing.

If you want training to be more personal, we can suggest some fun, easy ways for you to do this in-house. Then staff can get a buzz from doing something communally (as they do from a conventional in-house course.)

So my answer to your questions: my face-to-face training — if I went to Colorado — would be prohibitively expensive — but we can provide a much better alternative! Alice and I strongly recommend that you enrol a group in the Diploma. This will solve your training problems — time, cost, content, convenience, logistics and results. It’s not just different from face-to-face training: in many circumstances, it can be better.

I hope you take the plunge: we make online training easy, fun and rewarding, and you’ll be in good company.

Alice and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best wishes

Rachel

Photo: Rachel training staff at the Buddhist Institute, Phnom Penh, in 2004. Those days are gone.

It’s tempting to write what you need to say. That’s good, if you’re writing a book or a poem. That’s bad, if you’re writing a web page or any document that is supposed to be helpful or even useful to the public.

Here’s an extreme example from the small web site of Pestoff Animal Control Products.

What 99% of readers want from the home page is, I presume, information about Pestoff products and an easy way to buy them. Reasonable?

Instead, this is what we read on the home page.

Thank you for visiting us.

Our site is dedicated to informing you about our highly successful products, services, distributors and clients. This is the launch page for taking you around our site and providing you with information about our business.

Use the buttons on the left to find out about our company, its products and services, its clients and our collective achievements.

You can also click on the link buttons in text at the bottom of each page or click on the button/bars within the text below to obtain specific information.

We are proud to hold ISO 9001/2000 accreditation. Click on the logo opposite to view our ISO9001/2000 certification details as issued by Bureau Veritas Quality International.

Fascinating? Just what you needed to know? Thought not.

Think what the reader needs to know. Then write what the reader needs to know.

Pestoff.co.nz — Let’s hope this inspires them to upgrade their web site. Don’t let’s be too scornful, either: any of us could fall into the same trap.

How alarming! My blogging rate has slowed down from lively to sluggish. This must change.

Sure, I had excuses. In the last couple of weeks I’ve launched a book which involved a certain amount of effort and publicity (Scarlet Heels: 26 Stories About Sex) and I’ve rehearsed and performed in a dance show (Crows Feet: How to be a Domestic Goddess).

But everyone has excuses when their work slacks off. I’m wondering how to ensure this deadly silence doesn’t happen again — unless on purpose, as when we’re on holiday.

My only strategy is to have a stash of draft blog posts, especially of tips. (In theory, we publish two tips per week.) This strategy fell to bits when we ran out of tips-jpegs. But that is just one more excuse. What right-minded writer has only one strategy to overcome writers blog block?

All I can say to myself and you is Sorry, sorry, sorry!

I enjoy blogging but if you break the habit, suddenly there goes one more week… one more week… one more week.

As my granddaughter observed about breathing, “Once you start, you have to keep going.” Quite right, Elsie.

I will pull up my socks. I will do better.

Image: Fabric cupcakes by Jennifer Holdaway. Compensation prize.
Elsie poem: You want to breathe

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.

Recently I attended a delightful wedding. It was perfect. Admittedly there were flaws, such as a cold and windy day, and the bride’s boat being stranded in Lyttelton Harbour. But the flaws just added to the perfection. (The clouds were aesthetically pleasing. Coastguard came to the rescue so the bride was only fashionably—not worryingly—late.)

The speeches were also perfect. Notes were abandoned and the father of the bride was sincere, funny and fluent. So were all the speakers (sincere etc., not abandoned). They kept to the time limit. And with one exception they told us what we wanted to hear: something personal, amusing, generous, good-hearted, inspiring—and totally relevant to the occasion and the audience.

One person, known and loved as eccentric if not perverse, broke the rules.

He gave a little sermon, not a wedding speech. He reviewed the movie Avatar and advised us all to go and see it. Then he asked us to stand up, hold hands, close our eyes and recite together, “Lord, we are all one.”

The sound of eyeballs rolling thundered around the hall as we obeyed. It was seriously weird, in the context of a wedding breakfast. Me, I was thinking, “He’s acting like a priest. But he’s not a priest or even religious, so who is this Lord we’re addressing? His meditation guru?”

Anyway, no big deal, and at least one of the 86 guests thought it was lovely.

As an analogy for tweeting, the wedding speech model works, don’t you think?

• Be sincere, funny and fluent
• Keep to the word limit.
• Write something personal, amusing, generous, good-hearted, inspiring—and totally relevant to the occasion and the audience.
• Don’t be a marketing priest.
• Break the rules sometimes and see what happens.

On Twitter, we’re still struggling to get the right balance between marketing, personal, responsive, useful and inspiring. It’s not easy.

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.

Many words have optional spellings: several versions are correct. Which one will you use?

Online or on-line? web or Web? realise or realize?

In such cases, consistency rules. Your personal preference is irrelevant.

Somewhere in your (client’s) organisation is an inhouse Style Guide. It’s a publication that nobody reads except the people in Corporate Communications. Most likely you’ll find a copy there, although someone did give you one when you were first engaged.

Listed there (or should be) are the definitive spellings you must use. Otherwise chaos rules as everyone makes it up as they go along.

What’s wrong with chaos? Well, it unsettles your readers, and tortures you, the writer, with numerous fiddly little choices.

Oh dear, what if you can’t find a Style Guide and nobody seems to care anyway? Use the dictionary approved by Corporate Communications… and in extremis, use your own dictionary.