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Not walk on the steep…

Walking past a neighbour’s door the other day, the following wonderfully idiosyncratic note caught my eye:

Not walk, not don’t walk. Steep, not step. A far more characterful and therefore arresting warning than the blandly familiar standard issue at the other end of my road:

Same message; different communication.

Like laughter lines and the odd scar on a face, the stumbles and kinks in a communication can add character. As Valerie Hazan, Professor of speech sciences at University College London puts it: “Certain utterances stick in your mind: contorted use of language not planned in any way is often most memorable.”

It’s the opposite of the super-smooth polish beloved of politicians: “That rebel leader in Benghazi, don’t you think his English is a little too … sublime?” asks Seun Kuti.

So let’s look for ways to not walk on the steep, rather than simply watching out for wet paint.

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This one’s for you…

“Here was vintage Blair, looking healthy and tanned, a familiar, beguiling combination of piety, self-regard and charm. Those seductive verbal mannerisms were on full display: “Look…I mean…I felt it was the right thing to do.” He still uses the third person to bring us all into his world. “Look, I mean, when you’re prime minister…”

As Ben Macintyre notes in his 29th May article in The Times, that little word “you” has a remarkable power to attract and engage us, to draw us in to its world.  Tracey Emin’s “It’s different when you are in love” would have far less impact without it. It regularly tops the lists of the most powerful words in the English language.

A while back the always enlightening Laura Barton touched on its pivotal role in John Lennon’s In My Life: “‘You’ is such an insignificant, pale blue dot of a word. Its significance comes from the love that we place upon it, the way that we deal with it, conserve it, cherish it. In Lennon’s song, that “you” becomes a dot powerful enough to eclipse the past, all that went before; somehow he makes that “you” here, he makes it home.”

So thanks, you. You’re one in a million. This one’s for you.

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Winning English…

“Choose the English that helps you win” runs the headline of Michael Skapinker’s article in the FT, following the launch of the University of Southampton’s Centre for Global Englishes.  “That’s right: Englishes, because as the language spreads, people are speaking and writing it in many different ways.”

With multiple forms and over a million words and counting, we’ve never had so much choice. Our happy challenge is to craft a winning English for every context and occasion. One that’s as fitting as it is characterful – from Compare the Meerkat’s Simples speak to the Queen’s English.

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The positive energy at the heart of character…

From new books to the recently launched Jubilee Centre for Character and Values, it’s good to see that character is increasingly in vogue. But what exactly is character? “It’s personality, it’s energy…at it’s heart, it’s a set of personal values that guide conduct,” says Lord Wilson, Chair of the Centre’s advisory committee, on Radio 4’s PM programme.

Lord Wilson touches on a key characteristic of character – its bias to action. Characters don’t just talk, they do – and in our new age of character the two have to be in synch.

Although characters come in many guises (good and bad), there’s an inherently constructive undercurrent – a positive energy at the heart of character. Strong characters have a clear sense of who they are and of how they contribute, and they have the communication to match. “We’ve become very shy of using very simple, powerful words, like honesty and truth and loyalty,” says Lord Wilson. “Big words like that…to describe values.” Big words or small, it’s worth taking care to use the right ones to communicate our character, so we can bring to life in a clear and compelling way the positive difference we make.

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The value of English…

While over a billion people have Mandarin Chinese as their first language the number for English is less than 400 million. Yet what my mother tongue lacks in volume it more than makes up for in value.

“Measured in billions of pounds, Chinese is ‘worth’ four hundred and forty-eight billion, Russian eight hundred and one, German one thousand and ninety, Japanese one thousand two hundred and seventy billion, English four thousand two hundred and seventy-one. English is the buyers’ and sellers’ language, the stock language of the market,” says Melvyn Bragg in his enlightening study The Adventure of English.

“And English is the first language among equals at the United Nations, at NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. It is the only official language of OPEC, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the only working language of the European Free Trade Association, the Association of Baltic Marine Biologists, the Asian Amateur Athletics Association, the African Hockey Federation…while it is the second language of bodies as diverse as the Andean Commission of Jurists and the Arab Air Carriers Association.” English is in short the world’s language of choice when it comes to sharing ideas and information across countries and cultures. The ultimate international language. The language of connection.

So what’s the source of its power? The value of English lies less in its political, economic or historical associations than in its inherently open and evolving character. English is freely adopted around the world and happily adapted and enriched by all who embrace it, with new words and turns of phrase being added all the time – from bamboozle to bishy barny bee, from wig wag to wiki. In so doing, this eminently lovable language grows in value with the world.

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Royally good advice on clarity…

I recently came across my grandfather George Hanson’s copy of The King’s English, published in 1908 and signed and dated 1917.

A hundred years on, the opening words of Chapter 1 continue to get to the heart of what it takes to achieve the core of all good writing – clarity:

“Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid.

This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows:

  • Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
  • Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.
  • Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
  • Prefer the short word to the long…”

This guidance has echoed through the ages – in William Strunk, Jr . and E. B. White’s seminal The Elements of Style, in George Orwell’s six rules of effective writing, and in The Economist Style Guide as elsewhere. But HRH King George V, courtesy of his compilers H.W. and F.G. Fowler, got there first when it comes to laying the foundations of clear writing. Of course, as The King’s English implies, clarity is a necessary first step but by no means the end of the journey. What my granddad’s book calls “the more showy qualities” I call character – the essential build that at its best turns good writing into great writing.

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A new Age of Character…

In her book QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain identifies a transition in early 20th century America “from the Age of Character to the Age of Personality”. A transition from an age where people are judged by what they do to one where they are judged by what they say (loudly).

A hundred years on, we’re in a new Age of Character. In our multiconnected early 21st century world, simply talking loud and long no longer cuts it. These days we’re rightly judged not just by our words but by our words and our deeds – by how well we marry the two. Which is why, whether introverts or extroverts or a more nuanced mix, it’s in all our interests to employ clear communication that allows our true character to come through.

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Touching the heart not the hard drive…

A while ago while wandering the secondhand book stores on and around Charing Cross Road, I picked up for a pound a copy of the Grand Old Doyen of management thinking Peter Drucker’s Technology, Management and Society. It’s a slim volume packed with clear, compelling Druckerisms that are as true today as they were when he penned them back in 1958. Take, for example, his four fundamentals of communication:

  1. Communciation is perception
  2. Communication is expectations
  3. Communication is involvement
  4. Communication and information are totally different

In exploring these fundamentals, he imparts pearls such as the importance of talking to people in their own terms (“one has to use a carpenter’s metaphors when talking to carpenters”), the pernicious nature of information overload (“it does not enrich, but impoverishes”), and the essential contrast between information and communication – “Information is purely formal and has no meaning. It is impersonal rather than interpersonal.” Communication by contrast is human, emotional, experiential. “Indeed, the most perfect communications may be purely shared experiences, without any logic whatever.” Communication touches the heart; information resides in a hard drive.

All of which put me in mind of the following poetic wisdom from e.e. cummings:

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you

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Zest, grit and other great character traits…

In an article in the FT, champion of all things entrepreneurial Luke Johnson hones in on the essential ingredient for success in school and in business: character.

He points to Paul Tough’s New York Times essay “What if the Secret to Success is Failure”, which identifies the seven character traits that matter most for a child to do well at school: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity. These, he says, are also the defining criteria for entrepreneurs.

They’re certainly a fine selection – who among us wouldn’t like to have zest and grit, optimism and curiosity coursing through our veins.

Whether or not they’re the secret seven for budding pupils and business starters alike, or a rather more universally advantageous septet, one thing’s for sure – as JP Morgan famously put it and L Johnson reminds us, in pretty much all aspects of life  “…the first thing is character.”

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Clearly different…

From low hanging fruit to pushing the envelope, as Rhymer Rigby points out in an article in the FT, there are some pretty tired metaphors out there in the world of business speak.

Yet we shouldn’t write off the form just because many of the examples are poor or past their sell-by date. Painting pictures with your words, through metaphor, simile and the like, can be a great way to make yourself clear in business – as clear as a country creek. And clarity – the characterful clarity of people using everyday words and the occasional brilliant metaphor – is the currency of commercial difference.

As business language trainer Jamie Jauncey puts it in the same article, “Business is ultimately about people and connecting and relationships. It should be using the real language of human exchange, not some Orwellian bizspeak. You can’t take people along with this kind of language. You don’t differentiate yourself and you miss opportunities.”

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Choosing language to reflect character…

“Language signals not education, but character: not what you know, but who you are.” So says Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature and public understanding of the humanities at UEA, in an article sparked by the admission of “innit” and other neologisms to the latest edition of the Collins Scrabble Dictionary.

Language lives through people and changes or dies with them and the readiness of my amazing mother tongue the English language to flex and grow with the times is one of its great strengths.

We might not like all the new words and ways of talking that emerge but we should welcome each and every one to the family. That way, we have a much richer resource with which to cherish and exercise our freedom to choose the language that best reflects our character. When you look at it that way it’s simple, isn’t it.

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On essays and free spirits…

In a world awash with doomy gloomy news, the Guardian’s In praise of… column offers a daily dose of thoughtful sunniness – 200 words or so of positive take on all kinds of more or less topical subjects.

Subjects such as the essay: “…an intensely personal and conversational genre which is the preferred literary mode of free spirits… The best essays, like George Orwell’s, are tough but not fanatical, delight in the commonplace and ambiguous and can see the world as easily in a ham sandwich as a morning rose.” Much like the In praise of… pieces themselves – which to my eyes are in many ways mighty fine essays in miniature.

So here’s to essays, free spirits, and In praise of…

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Hydropathic pudding anyone?…

The summery sunshine reminds me of a seasonal culinary delight: hydropathic pudding. Hydrowhatic pudding? Hydropathic pudding. That’s summer pudding to you and me. Invented in the 19th century as a none-too appetising-sounding but healthy option for spa-residing poorly people, this delicious fruit-filled concoction was renamed summer pudding at the turn of the 20th. Armed with this appealing new name, it never looked back and today is a modern British classic.
Meanwhile over on Wall Street, Big Lots, the discount retailer, enjoyed a market-beating increase in its stock after changing its ticker from BLI to BIG. According to the FT, academic research shows that stocks whose tickers can be pronounced as a word beat stocks with unpronounceable tickers by a statistically significant margin. As the FT suggests, perhaps that’s why an agribusiness exchange traded fund chose the ticker MOO!
Just goes to show, with clear words and a good name you can go a long long way.

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Sunny free range people…

I came across this rather fine job ad on the window of the Flat Planet cafe, Great Marlborough Street, the other day. Ironically on the site of a former AN Other Coffee Chain, it struck me as a refreshingly engaging alternative to the cookie cutter communication of cappuccino corporations.

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Merry English…

According to a review of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the English language has a uniquely cheerful ratio of positive to negative emotional terms: about 60% happy to 40% sad. For German, the ratio is a glum 28% to 72%, while for Chinese it’s an even gloomier 22% to 78%.

Doesn’t that make you feel as merry as a pismire (1643)?

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Dr.? No!…

Awhile ago I was asked whether or not Mr should be followed by a full stop. As you can see by the way I’ve just written it, I reckon not.

When it comes to abbreviations – eg Mr, Dr, ie etc – I adapt The Economist’s less is more rule on capital letters: use lower case unless it looks absurd. Indeed less is more is a pretty good principle to adopt for all punctuation.

Full stops, commas, dashes and so on are there to help rather than hinder understanding. Too many and you’re in danger of obstructing the flow of your communication, like barnacles on a boat.

So as a general rule I’d say that if a piece of punctuation doesn’t aid clarity or add character, leave it out. Dr.? No!

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Ars Amatoria…

I’ve been championing the use of clear engaging language for quite awhile now: 20 years and counting. But not nearly so long as Ovid, who penned these words of wisdom over 2,000 years ago: “Use everyday language, familiar yet flattering words, as though you were there, in her presence.” Taken from his Ars Amatoria, Ovid’s guide to finding and keeping the love of your life, this advice could equally well apply to any company seeking to gain and retain customers. Business is after all to some degree about seduction.

Lorem Ipsum? Ars Amatoria!