Tag: blogging

Nicely saying

Nicely Said

When you’re a copywriter at a corporate, some things you pick up overtime. But even after being on the job for four years, there are still some things that you’d pick up only from far more experienced teachers. This I realised halfway through reading Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee.

It’s unlike me to read a book titled as such, because I’ve always nurtured a distrust in “how-to” books. This one, however, was a present. It was a present from a few writer friends I hold in high regard. So I decided to keep my mind open and delve into what Nicole and Kate have to say.

“Whether you’re new to web writing or you’re a professional writer looking to deepen your skills, this book is for you.”

That was the blurb of the book, a simple, typical one-line description for so many guide books that often fall short of their expectations. It seemed far-fetched, as if anyone could tell anyone else how best to write copy for the web when no one—including the web readers—knows what works and what doesn’t.

There’s no one way to write. There’s no right way, perfect way, or a way that makes the most impact. Writing is a variable in every sense. The audience varies, the style does, and so does the purpose. How then, could anyone pinpoint one perfect method?

Many books assert that they’ve figured out the one greatest way of writing. This book doesn’t.

The book doesn’t say what to write, but it says how to go abut thinking about what to write. And that’s where this book stands apart from the rest of the sheep. The authors illustrate the process of writing for the web, using an example throughout the book so that’s easier to follow.

They ask some important questions. Who would write for the web? Possible answers include, bloggers trying to hone their writing, freelancers selling their services, and copywriters employed in business. Though they all have different targets of varying complexity, all categories have one thing in common: the medium they choose to write in. When writing for the web, clarity matters, because no matter who the audience is, they’re always on the verge of closing a tab, impatient to move on to the next tab.
In such a situation, Nicole and Kate say how a writer should focus on delivering their message.

As a copywriter in business, I’ve always followed a similar principle: tell readers who we are, what we do, and how we could help them. Then add a section explaining why they (as buyers) should choose us over our competition. That’s the template—a fool-proof guide to writing About pages and sometimes even landing pages.

But this book made me think further: we tell readers who we are, but we also need to tell them who we are not. That doesn’t come from words, but from tone. For example, we’re professional, but we’re not against good puns. We are consistent, but we don’t spam your inbox with ten emails a day. We’re serious, but we don’t hate contractions. All these come from the way we write our copy, not from what we write in our copy.

Those are the kind of lessons that Nicely Said outlines. The book doesn’t come right out of the dark to illuminate magical truths and best practices, but it narrates the minute things that we often miss when writing for the web. The little things that matter, the finer aspects of helping the reader understand our message a couple of seconds faster, of respecting the reader’s time, of being a good host to website visitors—these are a few of the things that make a good copywriter. And the advice this book contains suits anyone, even those who only write Facebook statuses.

Give this book a shot. Chances are, you’ll cherish it as much as you’d a dictionary. I do.

Points of view

I write a lot of short stories. I even tried writing, what I’m now almost embarrassed to call, a novel. (I was young and determined and I took up the NaNoWriMo challenge.)

But in almost all of the stories I’ve written so far, I’ve gone for the third person narrative. Something about “I” and “me” and “myself” makes me uncomfortable. “She” and “he” and “they” seem easier and natural. Which is fine, I know, except I’m now reading a first-person book, and it’s changed the way I look at the first person narrative.

As I read through the first few chapters of the book, I decided I didn’t like the writing or the flow of the narrative. When I was about to dismiss the author as not my type, I realised that the first person narrative had influenced how I saw the author himself.
That struck me.

I knew nothing about the author and his style of writing. But here I was judging his way of work from just one of his books. I was wrong. A person and a piece of work are two different things.

In the first person for instance, the writer isn’t the author at all. The writer is the narrator, the character. And in the book I am reading, the narrator and the character is a twelve year-old, delusional kid. No wonder I didn’t like the writing—why would a kid, troubled and a smoker, running away from school mind proper grammar and decent vocabulary? What I had considered—for a split second—as a failed writing style soon made me realise that it was indeed brilliant characterisation.

With that revelation, I read on, learning more about the kid and nothing of the author. It’s not the story of a kid as told by an adult, but a story of a kid as told by the kid himself. And that’s where the author struck a chord. He masked himself as a child going into the his mind, abstaining, all the while, from his own adult instincts. That’s hard work. It’s hard, when you’re writing in the first person, to ignore the inner self that nags at you to tell your character to just shut up and grow up.

It’s easier to write in the third person; he called her, she answered him, they fell in love, and then out of love.

But the first person is more effective. I now see how the child’s character develops, what he expects from his life, what the author has in store for him, and how both ‘he’s—the author and the kid—respond to their entwined life.

Some say the third person point of view is the all-knowing, god-like personality. But reading through this particular book, I now think the first person author has more control than the third person author ever will. While the third person author knows what every character is thinking and feeling at the same time, the first person author not only possesses a single character transforming their life from the inside out, but also alters every other character in the story. A first person author is not just the writer, they are the protagonist, the soul of a story, the one person who can change their own life and the storyline as well.

It’s a challenge to write in the first person. A challenge I’d like to take up sometime.

Talk about style

A while ago, I complained that an instruction book I was reading then had no creativity in its narrative. That was a pretty big accusation, considering the author of that book is Seth Godin and it was—needless to say—a bestseller. Although the book had wonderful advice, a pleasing layout with big headings and small, bite-sized paragraphs, even a bunch of clever wordplay strewn across multiple pages, the fact remains that “Tribes, We Need You to Lead Us” was a dull read for me.

I had then dismissed most guide books as dull as Seth Godin’s. I knew they were helpful and worthy in their advice, but I also realised that those aren’t books I’d read for pleasure. They were more like necessary evils you’d have to tolerate because they, in their own weird way, improve your life. And that’s how I had concluded my experience with instructional books that had blurbs saying, “Must read for every marketer” or “best financial advice for the average tax payer.”

It was with almost the same mentality and expectation that I picked up “Style — Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace” by Joseph M. Williams. It was a part of my reading library at work and I picked that particular book because it had big fonts and reasonable spacing in the margins. Oh, and also because it was nice to caress the thick, white paper between my fingers. Aside from its aesthetic appeal, I expected nothing. That’s why the book caught me unawares spreading within me inexplicable joy, leaving me flicking through the pages to read more.

For the first time in a long time, a how-to-like textbook gripped my interest. It was about writing, and the author explains, with examples, why and how some sentences work and some don’t. Throughout the book, the author speaks of clarity and good sentence structure, which is all classroom stuff; to take it a notch further, however, he also speaks about the ethics of writing and how sometimes, you have to sacrifice clarity and concision because there’s more at stake.

Every teacher teaching writing would say clarity and brevity is the soul of a good piece. It’s important to empathise with the reader, giving them what they need to know, being mindful of their time. Williams agrees, and explains how to write for the reader, but in 10 lessons, 2 two epilogues, an appendix, and a glossary, he also admits that he can’t say how to identify the best way to write. There are no absolute rules to writing because it depends on the purpose, on the audience, on the writer themselves. And unlike so many books and articles that advise on writing, this book addresses that reality of writing.

In addition to the juicy meat of the book, Williams introduces quotations throughout. Every lesson, every chapter, begins with at least three famous sayings relating to the subject he’s about to discuss. To my surprise, some of those words were so witty I laughed out loud. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that reading a how-to book.

All these were great things about the book. But the greatest thing was the writing itself. It’s not easy to write about writing in a way that readers, who are writers themselves, understand the writer’s intent—a feat that Williams has managed to achieve in an almost effortless way. That’s the actual lure of the book. Anyone who’s written anything knows that easy reading is damn hard writing, and the fact that this book is super easy to read says a lot about Williams as a writer, his process, and his dedication to revise and rethink every first instinct. For me, perhaps that’s the success this book has garnered.

It’s a glorious read for anyone interested in writing. However, for random readers looking to increase their “read” library in Goodreads, it’s just another instructional book.

Job

She stared for what seemed like hours. Her teammates approached, and stood in silence, watching her battle in rumination. None dared disturb her in mid-contemplation.

They had seen her fierce side before.

And yet, they wondered why she pondered over the line running across her otherwise blank screen. They saw no issues with it; nothing offensive, aggressive, or vague — not boring either. Perhaps she saw something they didn’t?

At last, Shane faced her. “Let it go, Bess” he said with a gentle smile. “It’s just the title of a blog. And just the first draft.”

Curse of the content marketer.