Copywriting

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s infamous style guide

~ Charlie Hankers

Well, who’d have thought it? One of the first controversies of the Johnson era hasn’t come from some unfortunate gaffe, but from an issue very close to writers’ and editors’ hearts: style guides. To bring you up to speed, ITV News has revealed that the new Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, has instructed the staff in his department to abide by a style guide that has been largely ridiculed in the outside world.

There’s also a list of banned words, which one can only hope are restricted to certain circumstances, as they contain such taboo words as “Equal”, “Unacceptable”, Got”, “Lot” and “Hopefully”.

That style guide in full

Per the ITV’s reporting, the guide states:

  • Organisations are SINGULAR
  • All non-titled males – Esq.
  • There is no . after Miss or Ms
  • M.P.s – no need to write M.P. after their name in body of text
  • Male M.P.s (non-privy councillors) – in the address they should have Esq., before M.P. (e.g. Tobias Ellwood, Esq., M.P.)
  • Double space after fullstops
  • No comma after ‘and’
  • CHECK your work
  • Use imperial measurements

Where to start …

Oxford commas

Social media has focused on the Oxford comma rule, with wags posting the examples of how sentences can go awry if they are left out.

In the UK we don’t tend to separate the last two items in a list with a comma, as is common in the US:

🇬🇧 There was a dog, a camel, a mouse and a cow
🇺🇸 There was a dog, a camel, a mouse, and a cow

Good writers and editors should be able to spot when one is necessary to avoid ambiguity. You can’t simply rule out every instance of commas after “and”. It’s silly.

Esquire

This falls into the silly category, too. The rules of a language, such as they are, are determined by its speakers. That might sound odd coming from an editor, but there are things I let pass today that I wouldn’t have 20 years ago because they are now considered standard. “Esquire” has fallen into virtual disuse, and imposing it is Rees-Mogg being, well, Rees-Mogg.

Singular organisations

We can all live with that (with caveats).

No dot after Miss or Ms

Yes, this is fine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dot after Miss. I suppose I probably have seen one after Ms, but not very often. The rule goes: you don’t need a dot at the end of an abbreviation if its last letter is also the last letter of the word. So:

  • Regent St (Street)
  • Dr Foster (Doctor)
  • Mr Humphries (Mister)
  • etc. (et cetera)

M.P.s

Although the punctuation in M.P. is not actually one of the rules per se, it’s implied by his writing it that way. It’s another oddity really – we’d usually spell it MP. It’s much better as a possessive that way (MP’s is neater than M.P.’s) and also as a plural (M.P.s versus MPs). Those dots age the abbreviation about forty years. You can almost hear the hammering of the typewriter.

Double space after fullstops

Just no.

CHECK your work

Cool.

Use imperial measurements

Yeah, fine.

WAIT, WHAT?

The UK, along with most of the world, adopted metric measurements in the 1970s, and both imperial and metric systems have lived happily alongside each other ever since. Because of our long legacy of imperial use, it makes sense to have road signs in miles and speedometers in miles per hour. We measure TVs, monitors and hard disk drives in inches. It’s all a bit like driving on the left – we may as well keep it because changing over would be a massive headache.

However, imperial measurements aren’t taught in schools any more. The weather report is in °C. We buy foods in grams (apart from quarter pounder burgers and pints of beer). And clothes sizes vary comfortingly from shop to shop.

Bendy bananas

Unfortunately, a narrative has been allowed to develop that says the EU is trying to impose the metric system on the UK against its will, when the truth is nothing of the sort. The UK willingly changed to metric, stopped halfway and everybody’s happy. The idea that we’re being forced to adopt the metric system can be filed in the same drawer as the bendy bananas and not being able to say Christmas. (If anything, it’s the staff of the Leader of the House who will be having rules thrust upon them. Anyone born after the mid-1960s probably has little understanding of Fahrenheit, gallons, feet, yards, fathoms, furlongs and leagues.)

I’m inclined to think Rees-Mogg is trolling us here, but he could be sincere. Who knows? He is essentially a caricature of the upper-class bumbling twit, a staple of the PG Wodehouse universe, and it’s a caricature he cultivates and enforces at every opportunity – he’s even given to making fun of himself about it. Like Johnson’s carefully ruffled-up hair, it’s part of who he is.

Before Brexit came along, anyone who encountered Rees-Mogg saw him as a comedy act, an eccentric Etonian MP who had stepped out of the 1930s. But since he came out strongly in support of leaving the EU, his political influence has grown. Now he has some power, it hasn’t taken him long to exercise his power in the only way he can: by turning back the calendar.

Whether this latest debacle is part of his cultivated image or a passionately held belief is anyone’s guess. Either way, it’s entirely political, and doesn’t exactly chime with the idea of the UK as being a global trading nation. Anyway, a cynic would recognise this whole story as the classic dead cat strategy.

King of the comma splice

By the way, I’ve noticed over the past few months that JRM is perhaps not best qualified to point out other people’s grammatical and punctuational failings, especially when it comes to the comma splice. Check out this rogue’s gallery.

Whether or not you agree with Rees-Mogg’s politics, you do not have to agree with his style guide. Let English be English.

Who needs About Us pages when there’s Wikipedia?

About Us Pages
~ Charlie Hankers

About Us Pages

I often need to find out basic information about companies when I’m researching copywriting jobs – when they were formed, what they do, how they differ from competitors; that sort of thing. Obviously the first place I look is usually the “About us” page. I’d estimate that that proves useful about 20% of the time. It’s usually some guff about being a synergistic B2B fulfilment facilitator that has a customer satisfaction factor 3.5% above the industry average.

If it’s a large organisation, there’s a good chance it’ll have its own Wikipedia page. So that’s usually my next stop. It’s where I’ll get the actual information I’m looking for.

Why not share the basics?

I think there are three reasons for this phenomenon.

  1. Companies like to think they’re big, and therefore assume everyone knows what they do.
  2. They think the person reading the page will be familiar with the jargon
  3. They can’t miss an opportunity to turn a pure information source into a marketing opportunity.

I think the third reason is probably the most relevant. Over the years I’ve read plenty of copywriting advice that says, “Don’t start your ‘About us’ page with the year you were formed.” The theory goes that you should be using the “about us” page not to say who and what you are, but to tell people how great you are. Forget about the fact that customers are clever enough to know when they’re being led by the nose to some call to action – they don’t actually want to know about the organisation; they want to know how amazing you are.

It’s easy to see how this practice took root. From a marketing perspective, it sort of makes sense – people inspired to find out more about your company are already primed with the basics, so now you can guide them into a narrower part of the funnel. Unfortunately it ignores the people who still want to find out more about your company: people just peering into the funnel.

So like me, they look for third-party sources of information. Other people’s opinions on the company. Warts and all.

Tell it like it is

Should the “About us” page be a marketing tool? Of course. Everything you publish is. But your story is part of your marketing push. Why not talk about it?

The simplest thing you can do is imagine the person reading the “About us” page knows nothing about your company. So you tell them what your business does, when it was formed, who its founders are/were and what were their inspirations. It only takes a sentence or two. Then you can move on to the awards you’ve won, contracts you’ve secured, green credentials and plans for the future.

They might even be impressed.

Need help?

If your About Us page is lacking punch, get in touch. Whether in needs a rewrite or just an edit, I can help.

Example

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Something I was writing made reference to ASTM (an international safety body). Can you find what it stands for without much diving?

Photo: Kristina Flour

Readability analysis: accept, consider, ignore?

readability analysis computer
~ Charlie Hankers

Imagine the scene. A graphic designer submits some branding materials to a client. The client’s marketing guy feeds the image into a scanner and takes a sip of coffee as the computer does his its work. Ten seconds later, the progress bar reaches 100 and a bullet list in red, amber and green fills the screen. The visuals have been thoroughly assessed, and it’s not looking good.

⬤ Two of the rectangles have long edges that are 3% below golden ratio 
⬤ The model’s smile has an ecstasy coefficient of 0.73, 0.02 below optimum
⬤ The yellow glow is hex #f6f600, not the more pleasing #f6f300
⬤ 28% of the image is in the passive voice
⬤ “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” is not standard English
⬤ The kitten image satisfies the Schrödinger cuteness pudding by 95%

This isn’t a scene from Black Mirror. It is happening right now to graphic designers from Reykjavik to Wellington. And they’re mad as hell.

Actually, that’d be a lousy episode. But it is starting to happen to copywriters. I’m hearing of writers having their work fed through readability algorithms by clients as a first step to being signed off. I wouldn’t say it’s a common phenomenon just yet, but who knows. As a worker with words, I’ve been here before …

Spell Czech 😂

Back in the day, their was a debate among proofreaders a bout weather there daze whirr numbered thanks to spell chequers on whirred processors, and sentences like this one were commonly scene on many an Internet massage bored. Proofreaders would even discuss whether they themselves would ever consider using one. Naturally, most were offended at the mere suggestion of it (but of course we used them – why wouldn’t you?). Once the limitations and undeniable benefits of the spell checker became obvious, we all calmed down. And anyway, we laughed, there would never be such a thing as

Grammar Check!

Yes, we did know that the sentence was fragmented. We even considered correcting our correlative conjunction mismatches. But the rise of the grammar checker still took the writing and editing community by surprise. Checking grammar was much more difficult than comparing words with a dictionary (and ignoring homophones). It required an understanding of language that is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

Flawed though grammar checkers are, I must admit to finding the technology remarkable, and I occasionally have a Kasparov v. Deep Blue moment when a particularly complex structural flaw gets flagged, even if 99% of the time it’s a flaw I’d have noticed on second reading. (And never forget that Kasparov lost 4-2, not 6-0. Grammar check mate.)

Readability analysis: the final insult

So here we are. We’ve had our spelling and grammar autocorrected, and now we’re having the very fruits of our trade – our sentences – analysed by emotionless digital gatekeepers. In fact, many of us are willingly submitting our work to the machines whenever we blog. We are allowing our sentences to have their essential components – verbs, voice, adjectives, flow, lengths – judged for correctness by computers.

Is there such a thing as good copy and bad copy? I hope so. No, I think so. Let’s just say you know it when you see it. We can probably agree on that.

But can the measure of good or bad copy really be determined by how far it strays from some arbitrary mathematical mean?

This development doesn’t seem to be satisfying demand from grammarians, publishers or website owners. It seems to be more like the spawn of the SEO sector. I’m not going to argue about SEO. I’ve met and worked with enough SEOs to recognise that they know exactly what they are doing. Their actions have tangible, measurable results, and they are lovely people.

It just seems to me that the rise of readability analysis comes from that mindset – from people who are sure that if they can optimise everything until any rough edges are removed, success will follow.

readability analysis computer

The cursed passive voice

I’m yet to be convinced that readability analysis has reached the stage where its results should be taken as gospel, just as spelling and grammar checkers can still make awkwardly clever mistakes.

The passive voice is a particular favourite of the tests. Yes, it’s good to be active and to have all your subjects and objects actively working on the sentence’s behalf. But passivity often carries a subtlety, a quiet confidence, a sense of not having to try too hard, a feeling that not every sentence has to be a call to action. It’s also a useful way of referring to previous statements without having to restate sentence objects or their pronouns. And it can bring the focus of a sentence to the object rather than the subject, because sometimes it’s the subject that’s more important. This guy gets it.

It can’t simply be stated that the passive voice is bad. Indeed, PV is good enough to be allowed in a recommended[by whom?] 10% of sentences, but go over that and all of a sudden your copy is suboptimal. Do you buy that?

Ultimately, it’s quite easy to identify passive voice algorithmically, and that’s where its prominence in tests comes from. If a sentence feels right to you, the human, it’s right. By all means run your copy through a readability checker, but have an open mind about its results – you risk destroying something beautifully imperfect.

Not the same as reading levels

I’m quite interested in reading levels when it comes to copy. Writing copy that a typical 11-year old would understand (even if it’s for an educated adult audience) seems like a sound concept to me. Your speech patterns and, to a large extent, your everyday vocabulary, are pretty much set in stone by that age. Great copywriters don’t necessarily know loads of fancy words – and they certainly don’t use them in their copy. They’ve learnt to use the words everybody understands efficiently, possibly in unexpected ways that carry new meaning.

Copywriters’ clients usually tell them who their target markets are, but frankly, if you can’t work it out for yourself, you probably shouldn’t be in the business. Good writers know their audiences just as well fashion designers, film-makers and comedians do, and accept that there’s certain language you can’t expect a given audience to respond to.

I think there’s probably a place for machine learning and algorithms to determine good reading levels, and the results I’ve seen can be useful; but the ultimate test of the quality of copy is how well it informs, entertains and converts in the wild. Here’s some good analysis from an avowed rival.

We’re not there yet

Anyway, I’ve said my piece. As I mentioned at the start, it’s still uncommon for clients to reject work on the basis of digital readability analyses. People might not all understand the intricacies of grammar or spelling, but they know when something is readable because, well, they can read it. Any danger comes from people using a digital readability test as their first sweep (as they would with a spell checker) and rejecting perfectly good work on the basis of its results.

Like all creatives, copywriters are good at taking criticism on the chin, and frankly we have it easy – rejected graphic design often means starting again from scratch, whereas we might just have to re-jig a few sentences. (I don’t even know how sculptors ever get to the point where they can submit their work.) Criticism from another human is real and valuable.

In terms of SEO, readability also isn’t a ranking factor per se, although an unreadable site will suffer a higher bounce rate, which is a ranking factor. It would have to be quite dire to cause noticeable bounce compared with, say, slow loading times or bad mobile friendliness, though. The best readability test you can do is to read it yourself and let a few other people read it and to act on their comments. They will be correct roughly 100% of the time.

Image: Sean Batty

First impressions and the second chance

~ Charlie Hankers

It’s funny how little sayings stick in your mind. I first heard the phrase “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” about 30 years ago at some careers event, and I’ll be damned if I’ve ever heard it since. But there it is, lodged in my mind, taking up space where the location of my car key is or how to get words to wrap in Excel.

Maybe the phrase remains lodged because it’s recalled so often in my disappointment-strewn life. A few months ago a local shop closed down, and an interesting-looking deli was due to take its place. I knew this because it had “interesting-looking deli to open here soon” lovingly written in mushroom pâté on the sheets that hid the refurb team. Maybe it was tapenade.

The shop did seem to take a while to get fitted out, which only made my excitement grow as I took my daily walks past it, wishing I had somewhere to go on the other side. I pictured the counter with its array of goods from around the globe; samples atop the display cabinet on cocktail sticks and a subtly concealed spittoon for sampling errors; helpful, knowledgeable staff who put the deli in “delighted to help”.

You already know where this is going.

Opening day

arrived. Stepping in, something felt right. The refurbishment was extraordinary. Products on display looked suitably esoteric. The lighting was subtle. Three bistro tables and a few chairs filled the entrance square, which meant you could eat in and drink coffee, something I hadn’t considered before. First impressions exceeded expectations.

Then I stepped forward to talk to the woman behind the counter. Just small-talk, you understand. My queries about the provenance of the Fiore Sardo would wait till I’d been home and googled Fiore Sardo. I got a one-word response. Some snubbing can be excused as daydreaming, absent-mindedness, even excitement. This was a more studied snubbing, like the snubbing Julia Roberts’s character gets when she goes clothes shopping in Pretty Woman. I smiled and raised my eyebrows to offer her the chance to correct her errant ways. She didn’t take it.

Another customer came in and her attempts to start a congratulatory conversation met the same response. Whether we were the wrong type of customer or whether company policy was to avoid eye contact and conversation, I don’t know. And it’s likely I’ll never find out. The lack of excitement about their own enterprise would make any visitor wonder if it’s worth caring about.

Warm words work wonders

So what did I learn that day? As a writer, I’ve always known the importance of making that first impression, whether I’m pitching for a client or writing content for them. With a website, you don’t get that chance to individually greet visitors and take their questions. You have to simply let people know that you’re open for business and you’ll give them your best possible service. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

No doubt we’ve all visited websites where we have felt like the company is snubbing us. It could be the loading time, the design or my bit, the copywriting. Some welcoming, warm words go a long way. Which is what I’ll have to do to get hold of some Fiore Sardo.

Photo: Joanna Boj

Back to Freelancing

~ Charlie Hankers

As far as I was concerned, I was a freelancer. Sure, I’d had 9-to-5s before, mainly in darkrooms. But when the traditional photographic industry started to get some outside pressure in 1998, I turned to my love of reading to become a freelance proofreader. I built a website straight away, and fortunately managed to collect a small number of clients who kept me busy. Within a year or two I was copy editing and writing.

And that was that until 2013 – fifteen years’ worth of making contacts, winning, retaining and losing clients, and writing millions of words of copy. One day I would be working from home; the next I’d be in a briefing in Manchester; then I’d be travelling to London or Edinburgh to be briefed; and overlapping the small jobs, I’d usually have a big project on the go, a big edit or a ghostwriting project. It was definitely who I was.

An opening from a marketing agency

But in 2013, one of my clients, a digital marketing and development agency, tweeted that they were looking for a full-time writer. After cursing them under my breath for their sheer CHEEK, I applied, was interviewed next day and within two weeks I was there full time.

Self-doubt did afflict me before I started. Would I be able to cope with the daily commute? The regular hours? Talking to other humans? And being a relatively new father, I was sure I was going to miss nipping off to Dunham Massey to feed the ducks. Sometimes I’d even take our child. And yes, impostor syndrome, and the accompanying fear of being found out, were there too. But I have to say, I took it in my stride. I worked on a few award-winning campaigns, made some good friends and learnt a lot about digital marketing and SEO. And I got to experience freelance life from the other side of the fence when I had to hire the feckless wastrels for projects we were working on. That was a useful experience.

Freelancing beckons

But in April 2018, it all had to end. Things had changed both in the company and in the industry, and we amicably parted ways.

Over the five years, I had never fully given up freelancing. I still had a few clients that sent me work, and my website remained live and would occasionally spawn a new one-off job. But obviously it was limited. I was ready to throw myself fully into it again. I ditched my old domain, gpuss.co.uk (don’t ask) and relaunched under my own name, with this domain. What happened in the following year I’ll be writing in another post, but things came to a sudden halt and I had to face a new challenge. But for now, I’m back. And ready to write.