Churchill's guide to writing

Public domain photo of Winston Churchill in 1936

Necessity is not just the mother of invention but of improvement when brevity in writing is demanded by a state of war. 

In Chapter 28 of The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shares Churchill's instructions to improve writing at the War Cabinet in a minute, entitled "BREVITY."

It began with the reason it was particularly necessary for their writing:  

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points. 

Anticipating the style of writing that we have come to expect in short form content online, Churchill offered four specific directions for removing anything extraneous:

1. Using "a series of short, crisp paragraphs" 

2. Removing the statistical analysis or more involved discussion from the main part of the report and offering it in an appendix.

3. Using of "headlines only, which can be expanded orally if needed."

4. Eliminating all "woolly phrases" that add needless words like: "It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations..." 

Churchill acknowledge that while the style "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officalese jargon." However, the higher priority then was "saving time," and, he added that, in fact, such focus offers additional benefits: "the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking."

Related:

Thoughts on WW II Posters

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible

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Make your content as accessible as possible

 

The certificates above show that I have just completed the HubSpot Academy courses on content marketing and SEO. I did pick up a few tips, but the best part of it was the feeling of gratification that my understanding of best practices from years of experience was spot on. Unfortunately, the businesses I sometimes worked for often deviated from such best practices.

Unlock those gates!

For example, I'm generally not in favor of gating good content. You want it to be read, so why create barriers to getting it read? I fully understand that you want to force people to give you their contact information to follow up with potential leads. However, as the course points out, you can encourage some kind of opt-in even without blocking the content.

Semrush, the online visibility platform, agrees that introducing a layer of friction -- even if it is as simple as entering an email address -- will turn away readers. That is not something you want to do in the awareness stage when you wish to attract as many eyeballs as possible.

"You usually wouldn’t start a relationship with gated content. You have to woo your readers first, showing that your content is worth their time and — later on — their personal information." - Semrush

HubSpot's course suggestion was to have the content accessible with an option for the reader to download it as a PDF. People will voluntarily download content they like to have available to read at leisure, particularly longer form content. My guess is that seeing things first the first time on a smartphone likely contributes to that practice even more.

Keep it simple!

I also felt particularly gratified about another explicit guideline it gives that I've clashed with some clients over in the past. That is to use clear, direct language rather than jargon or what you believe is a very impressive vocabulary filled with the types of words students used to memorize for the SATs. It's a mistake to believe that you sound smarter by using big words, as the really confident person will explain even more complex topics as clearly as possible (think "explain it to me like I'm five").

I still remember what my composition instructor said about Winston Churchill, who was a highly capable speaker and writer. As the British Prime Minister during WWII, he didn't say, "The received communication from France is extremely unfavorable." Instead, he said, "The news from Paris is very bad."

The contrast to Churchill's direct and honest approach appears in Emperor Hiroshito's observation after the devastation of two atomic bombs, "The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage."

Consider which statement you would consider more trustworthy as a source, and remember that when crafting your own content.

screenshot from https://app.hubspot.com/academy/21390613/tracks/15/377/2059

I took the liberty of grabbing a screenshot from the HubSpot video as proof of what I tried very tactfully to convey to a few of my recent clients. Unfortunately, they refused to get the point. In one case, they insisted they have to avoid using "layman" terms. In the other, they insisted that really smart people speak that way.

P.S. Semrush also corroborated that point in a tweet that went up just today. Here's the final step in its short thread on how to format your content for search engines & target featured snippets:

✍️ Finally, tighten up your page’s copy. Try to use short, direct sentences with language that isn’t too complicated. Good luck 👋

— Semrush (@semrush) February 9, 2022

Related:

Where HubSpot Messed Up

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

Churchill's Guide to Writing

7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines 

CRO is Like Basketball 

Most Memorable Brand Slogans 

From your ears to your feet, there are more ways to wear wearables

Wearables were one of the main features at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). While many conformed to the traditional mold of plastic bracelets, there were some new options that could make them attractive even to those who prefer something more fashionable, versatile, or less encumbered. Now those in the market for wearables can select the sensors that fit their personal style choices.

Research from market research firm Mintel forecasts that this year’s sale of wearables in the US will nearly double, increasing 186 percent over last year. Women make up more than half that market for fitness trackers. About 14 percent of women possess some form of fitness tracker as opposed to 10 percent of men.

GlamFit Ring

That percentage could be even further boosted by the new wearables designed specifically for women in the form of pendants, rings, and bracelets that look like fashionable jewelry. That is the concept behind the fitness, calorie counters, and sleep tracking wearables fromGlamFit Jewelry by Liberty

Read more in 

Wearable Tech Finds Its Style

Where to begin?

Usually, the answer is: "Begin at the beginning."  But where is that?

A while back, I started a discussion on LinkedIn about useless advice for writing. What topped my list was, "an essay has a beginning, a middle, and an end."  Writers may be told the same for novels, and it is really just as useless there because you don't necessarily start with what happened first in the story. In fact, classical works are famous for beginning in medias res. So, there is very good precedent for the beginning of a piece of writing not to lay out the framework to set the chronology.

The key thing is to begin in a way that draws the reader into wanting to continue reading the story, the essay, or the poem. And, yes, you should think of making it interesting even when your  reader is also your  teacher.

What doesn't work for openers? That question will get different answers. Today someone, no doubt thinking of Bulwer-Lytton  posted the warning not to open a novel with the weather. As some pointed out, though, there are novels that do it quite effectively. I would say that there are no set rules for opening novels, and that's a good thing. The perception that there are rules for opening essays, in my humble opinion, is what leads to very formulaic and boring openers, like the one I just read this morning. It started with "The Oxford dictionary defines... ." Now, that is the sort of thing I  expect students to rely on -- in high school. It's something they should get beyond in college. Certainly, it's not what I'd expect to find in a piece written by someone who gets paid for his work. It's true that you do sometimes want to use a formal definition to clarify how you use a particular term, but it's not exactly an attention-grabber.

Any thoughts on what you find does work well for openers?

A couple of literary devices

A question of literary devices was raised by kid prepping for the English Regents. Looking for a comprehensive list, I found http://literary-devices.com. I like the contrasting terms: polysyndeton and asyndeton. The former is the term for adding in conjunction even where they usually would be absent, like "Tom and Dick and Harry," if you want to stress each one separately rather than presenting them as a collective unit. Asyndeton refers to dropping the conjunction for greater impact as in the expression, "Reduce, reuse, recycle." That could also account for the memorable quality of "We came, we saw, we conquered."