I’m on yr facebk, lolling yr wordz

I’m on Facebook, of course. To my surprise I recently got an out-of-the-blue from one of my old friends:

“yr is multipurpose. get over it”

I’m guessing that was his response to the fact that one of my Facebook groups is ‘If you can’t tell the difference between “your” and “you’re” you deserve to die’.

But then I am also a member of the group ‘im n ur facebk loling ur pix’, ‘I support the campaign to make “James Blunt” cockney rhyming slang’, ‘I’ve licked the end of a battery just to see what it was like’ and ‘I don’t use my Wii-mote’s wrist strap because I live life on the edge’. And I don’t even have a Wii. (Although my ex housemate did, and it’s true I didn’t use the strap when I was feeling particularly reckless).

But I suppose it’s no great surprise that my friend thought I was being too pedantic. After all, on this very blog I’ve seethed with anger over misplaced apostrophes on estate agent boards and mocked spelling mistakes on websites. You’d be forgiven for thinking that I really care about using English correctly.

And I do. But – and it’s a big but – only when it matters. Websites, public signs, adverts, emails to clients: these matter. Bad use of standard English in your job makes you look like a twerp, basically.

But for everything else – personal emails, texts, even post-it notes – I really don’t care. You can fling your apostrophes up your bum if you like; I’ll be cool as cucumber. I’ll only deathwish the ‘your/you’re’ offenders during the hours of 9-5.

And as for ‘yr’ – yes it is multipurpose, and I happen to like it very much. So there, Paul-Simon Geddis. I can be all crazy and unpredictable too. Just ask anyone who’s seen me on the Wii.

If you’re going to write your own damn copy, at least do it right

Bad web writing hurts your readers’ eyes and your website’s credibility.

A website – nay, the entire internet – is nothing without good solid content. And even counting Youtube and iTunes, the vast majority of the content on the net is written. So why is the copy always at the end of the queue when it comes to building a website?

You can have the most beautifully designed website in the world, complete with the fanciest of applications and gizmos, but if it reads like it’s been written by a sugar-stuffed chimp then wave goodbye to your sales, search rankings and bottom line.

You want me to give you a juicy example, right? Try alteredstatesuk.com. The homepage copy is made up of 86 words. This includes two spelling mistakes, five punctuation errors and 10 faults concerning capital letters. And that’s not even counting some really nasty formatting and sentence formation.

At this point I should say that I’m not trying to kick down a small business out of sheer malicious pleasure. Neither am I touting for business. Yes, of course I could polish it up into sparkling, elegant copy, but that’s not the point. (I do, of course, believe that hiring a good web copywriter is the single most useful thing you can do when you need a website, but I’ll leave that particular topic for another day.)

Maybe you think you’re some webby hotshot and have built your own site. Maybe you’ve already spent all your website money on some fancypants designer. Maybe you’re just cheap. Whatever the reason, if you insist on writing your own damn copy, consider these five tips my gift to you. Together we can make the internet a less painful place.

5 tips for writing good web copy

1. Don’t write as you talk. A friendly, chatty tone is surprisingly difficult to get right. Get it wrong and you sound flippant and sarcastic. But don’t be getting all fancy either. Long words when short ones would do fine make you look arrogant, not clever.

2. Keep it short. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Reading web pages is a lot slower than reading printed pages, so your website visitors will get impatient faster.

3. Give us what we want. This is a pretty big point, but it basically boils down to this: people come to your website for info, not waffle. Don’t write what you want to say, write what they want to read. Don’t know what that is? Well ask them, stupid!

4. Spelling, grammar, punctuation. These three guys are your new best buddies who will instantly make you look a whole lot smarter and more professional. If you’re not sure who they are, then maybe it’s time you were reacquainted.

5. Proofread. Print out what you’ve written, and give it to someone else to check. Don’t do it yourself, as your brain will ignore the mistakes it made the first time round. Don’t let your friend check your copy on a screen, as I guarantee they will miss something. Give them a big red pen so they feel all official too.

So there you have it. You too can be a copywriter. Of course, if you really write like a chimp or you just can’t be bothered, I am (ahem) available for hire…

How to write a great press release

Three unis, three press releases, one subject. Oh, the power of good writing: two of the universities produced really fascinating, grabby stories – each with a slightly different emphasis – and one was b-o-r-i-n-g.

Here are the three headlines and first paragraphs of each story, and I’ll let you decide for yourself which is the poorer story:

‘Super-fridge’ to help improve lives in developing countries (Imperial College London)
An all-in-one cooker, energy generator and fridge could soon be improving quality of life in developing countries, thanks to an international project launched this week.

Powered by sound – revolutionary stove could help reduce poverty (Nottingham)
It’s a cooker, a fridge and a generator in one – and it could have a huge impact on the lives of people in the world’s poorest communities.

University to develop three-in-one biomass appliance for the third world (Manchester)
The University of Manchester will play a major role in a £2m project that aims to deliver a wood-powered all-in-one generator, cooker and fridge into third world communities in five years.

It’s pretty obvious that Manchester is the dullard here. So what do the above examples teach us about good press release writing?

• Join-up the dots for us. What is a biomass appliance? Don’t know, don’t care. Stoves and fridges, however – now you’re cookin’.
• Make it news-worthy. Why should we care about this fridge-stove thing? Because it could reduce poverty and improve lives. Just being for the third world is not specific enough.
• Make it exciting. Don’t exaggerate, but if it’s genuinely super or revolutionary then say so.
• We don’t care who you are. Nottingham and Imperial concentrate on what has been developed, Manchester emphasise that they had a hand in the development.
• The first words count most. Nottingham and Imperial go straight in, while Manchester takes 18 words to get to the point of the story.

Anyone got any other tips for writing killer press releases?

Has someone at the BBC just been fired?

A case of too much faith in spellcheck?
(Cheers to KevP for the link)

When signs go bad #3

(Maybe not so much bad, as true)

Thanks to the delightfully-named Floater in the Memepool blog for the pic.

Zopa, zo good

God bless the internet. Matthew Stibbe of Bad Language blog noticed a patch of clumsy copy on the Zopa website, mentioned it on his blog, and within the hour the Zopa copywriter had read the blog and fixed the problem.

It’s so refreshing to see people take such a proactive approach to improving their websites! When I used to work at a web design company sometimes it would take weeks of constant nagging to get something simple fixed – and this to someone who sat mere metres away from me.

I know that the Zopa example is slightly different due to the very public nature of this particular error, but still – an hour is pretty good going.

Huzzah for user-feedback-web2.0-ness and all that gubbins!

Who’s top dog? Read your emails

How emails are addressed say a lot about office politics, according to Norwegian scientists.

Karianne Skovholt studied over 700 work emails over a five-month period, and became very interested in why colleagues ‘cc-ed’ their workmates into emails.

She found that there were three main reasons for cc-ing:

1) To inform and document
2) To invite participation and seek support in conflicts

And, most interestingly,

3) To create visibility and positioning

You might have suspected it, but now you know it’s true: the humble cc field is a way of asserting rank and developing a complex work hierarchy.

“Employees can use an email’s cc function to position themselves in the organisational hierarchy under cover of simply wanting to provide information,” explained Skovholt. Not only this, but by copying in superiors, workers subtly exert pressure on the person the email is primarily addressed to.

Something to think about next time you send an email around the office…

The best Word shortcut you never use

My favourite Word shortcut is shift+F3, aka ‘the journalist’s best friend’.

Humble ol’ shiftF3 simply changes uppercase text to lowercase, and vice versa. Not much, you might think, but a godsend when you’re continuously being sent press releases with the headlines in upper case, when it goes against your publication’s house style. You can’t imagine how tedious life is when you have to re-write dozens of headlines every week.

And in case you’re wondering, the picture is of a Tornado F3 fighter jet…

A quick lesson in advert design, on a train

Rail company GNER put little tags on seats to mark which ones are reserved. On the backs of these tags (ie what you see, when you’re sat behind a seat with a tag on the top) are adverts for GNER.

Lately, they’ve been advertising a 10% discount offer. Curiously, there are 2 different designs for the same advert. One design is far better than the other – it expresses the same message but in a much cleaner and simpler way. I thought this design must be phasing out the other one, but for months both types have been used simultaneously. Very strange.

Despite some of my work being paid by the word I am a big fan of severe snipping. Thanks GNER for demonstrating how to cut out the dead words to create a stronger design!

When signs go bad #1

An estate agents’ window on my street has this sign. It’s a spectacular example of confusing a simple message with too many words.