On Words and Business

Failure hurts, it’s embarrassing, and in these days of real-time sharing via social media, it can be very public. It’s easy to be afraid of it.

The result of that fear is that it’s easy to play it safe. In content marketing, that means that the closer what you say is to the middle (of your niche) the better your content will be received.

However, sometimes you need to walk to the edge of the cliff, jump into the deep end, or slip and fall flat on your ass in the middle of a room full of people. Maybe you learn a lesson and grow. Maybe you simply fail and learn what not to do the next time.

Do you want to make an impact? Do you want to have some value? Maybe you’ve got to take a few risks. To wit:

• Try writing in a different voice–maybe the funny or sarcastic one you hide in favor of your business voice, or develop a persona and give it a specific point of view that is different from yours.
• Try new kinds of content you’ve never produced before–perhaps a podcast if you usually blog, or something long form like a white paper if you usually tweet.
• Try a new venue–consider guest posting on blogs that are complimentary to yours or to your industry, or planning an event if you don’t usually do in-person networking to your audience.

These are just a very few ideas on the tamer end of the scale.

Could you fail? Yup. But you could also succeed wildly.

What derring-do do you dare do?

To me, the granddaddy of all stylebooks is the Chicago Manual of Style. Nowadays, like the AP Stylebook, it has an online forum for questions and answers. Things not yet covered in the book or online version, or questions from folks who need clarification. (Because it sure can be obtuse sometimes, especially when you don’t know exactly how to define what you’re looking for.)

Not glamorous really. But to those of us who, like me, just really enjoy our language and words, and who enjoy playing around with how to express it in writing, it’s fun to browse (or thumb) through Chicago.

To keep up to date on the official rules of our language. And to better know exactly how and when to break ‘em!

What Pico Iyer recently wrote about travel writing is true of the best writing of any kind, from marketing materials to blogs, from white papers to web pages, from biography to literary fiction:

The…writer’s place is on the threshold, one eye turned toward the reader, one toward the subject.

Read. A lot. Books, magazines, blogs. Anything you can get your hands on. It builds vocabulary and feeds the idea engine.

As my dentist repaired some substandard work done by a previous dentist, we discussed the issue of trust. How one must trust that a dentist knows what he or she is doing. You hate to find out, three years on, that it was done wrong and now you have to pay to have it redone, and go through the annoyance (or agony, depending on how you feel about dental work) all over again.

Many professionals provide services that we, as consumers, can neither do ourselves nor truly judge, unless something goes wrong.  Dentists, doctors, auto mechanics. So we have to trust the person, trust he is honest, trust that she knows what she’s doing.

Writers don’t have exactly the same problem with trust. Trust is still a very important component–writers write for clients, so copy should address the specific need and audience, and the relationship should be open and honest, in both directions. But with writing, clients can judge the work the moment you put it in their hands. They can tell if it’s too formal or not persuasive enough for their audience.  And they can judge the work based on their own opinions, too.

It can be an interesting conversation when a writer and client have different opinions about the final product. But I’d much rather have my clients be able to judge my work immediately, and address the issue immediately, than to have someone find out three years from now that they are really disappointed with my work.

If you are like me, you read everything critically, even if you aren’t trying. Once I read something that doesn’t make sense, the rest of the article or whatever it is I’m reading isn’t worth the paper or bytes it’s printed on. Which is why I get so upset when I make a mistake–even after double and triple-checking.

It isn’t too much to ask that words be spelled correctly, are not their own homonyms, that grammar is basically correct, and that the piece flow logically from start to finish. Unless, it’s obviously a play on words or a deliberate mangling of the grammar.
Do you read things this critically? Does an apparent mistake negate the message?