I know the second one is controversial. Get over it. Straighten up and fly right.

1. Waffle

Most readers aren’t going to read your article until they can see that it’s useful to them. So tell them, straight away, in the headline, first paragraph or both, what your article is about and why they should read it.

Then deliver.

The longer you waffle about some metaphor for the topic or how you felt getting up today or – look at me, I’m actually writing a blog post – the greater the chance that the next part of the page to receive attention will be the back button.

2. Verb and subject disagreement

The consultant is a singular subject. Therefore he makes phone calls, adds items to his diary and is overjoyed when it’s time for lunch.

My colleagues are a plural subject. Therefore they make fun of my haircut, add amusing accents to their impressions and are thrilled when I throw Victoria sponge around the office.

Everyone is a singular subject. Although it involves more than one person, the focus is on every one, singular. Therefore everyone makes time for SmyWord, adds this blog to his or her favourites, and is happy to leave a comment below.

The same applies to no one and everybody – they are singular. They and them are plural. Never the twain shall meet.

3. Shifting person

Choose what person each of the parties in your article is going to be, and whether they are single or plural, and stick to it for the duration of the article. For example, in most of my blog posts there are three main parties:

1. The writer
2. The reader
3. The people the writer is talking to the reader about (e.g. users)

The writer is me. So I use I, me and my. If I was writing on behalf of a company, it might be we, us and our. Just as long as it is the same all the way through the article.

Steer clear of talking about yourself in the third person – as the author of this blog discovered – that way madness lies.

The reader is you. So that is what you’re called. In modern English you can be either plural (as you all know) or singular (I’ll explain it to you after class). So it’s hard to go wrong, just as long as you avoid the dreaded third person again: folly, as the readers of this blog know.

The people I tell you about are they: clients of mine, your web site users – unless I am talking about just one, in which case or he, she or it is required.

The crucial point is that you are consistent within an article, and establish a pattern for your web site at large. Why? Because switching between singular and plural looks amateur, and shifting person around confuses your readers.

4. Sloppy punctuation

A simple guideline for exclamation marks is that they should only be used in recorded speech and even then, sparingly.

The product manager shouted “eat my shorts!”

As for quotation marks, the clue is in the name. They should only be used to enclose a direct quotation, proven by supplying the reference. If you can’t reference it, don’t quote it.

An even simpler guideline for semicolons is don’t use them – unless you can explain their correct usage to somebody else without bluffing. The same goes for ellipses (…), em dashes (–) and, well, every other punctuation mark. If you don’t understand it don’t use it. Learn to create effects with the words you choose, not with little pictures.

5. Bad spelling

There is simply no excuse for bad spelling and typos. Not when you have spell-check, the ability to proofread your own writing, this guide to apostrophes, and colleagues or friends to check it over for you.

Any comments?

Only an hour! What could I possibly do in that time?

The answer so far is: plan a blog post, write a tag line, critique site pages, critique whole web sites, write front page copy, or meet up in the pub to talk about content strategy as a career (that one especially fun).

Here are 3 highlights from some recent free sample requests:

I love working with fresh, innovative companies offering genuinely good things. Pitchup are leading the charge in getting the people of Britain camping again. They provide a massive directory of campsites and the tools to find what you’re after, be it beach, yurt, or proximity to the pub.

They asked me to write them a blog post about celebrity camping. They took the free hour as a discount off the fee. Having captured the company’s tone of voice (their words), I’m now helping with the content for their site realignment – coming soon.

I’ve just sent Mixcloud some suggestions to make their service clearer to first time visitors (only just – no time to implement yet). Sometimes you get too close to a web site and lose the outside view.

Mixcloud loved the objective feedback: ‘this is really helpful. We knew that it could be a lot better but didn’t really know what to do!’ Mixcloud are another original, energetic service. I defy you to start listening to their shows without wanting to get up groove around the office.

Political Insight put a tremendously useful tool into the hands of local and national political groups to help them to communicate and campaign effectively. I gave a free hour to developing the tag line, now in use on the site. They were chuffed. They came back for further copywriting and editing.

Do these examples give you any ideas? Is there anything I could do for you in a free 60 minutes?

Firstly, they have a genuine passion about Saffron Walden because they’re local and have lived there for years, unlike the corporate agents who open hollow branches everywhere.

Secondly, because of this authenticity and experience – and years of hard work – they are repeatedly the number one home-selling agent in the area. And they deserve it.

Their old web site was an uneven jumble of colours, components, microsites; tens of icons with no explanations, miscellaneous pages buried deep in the navigation. It was hard to know where to start, what to click on. Somehow along the way someone had forgotten to put a picture of a house on the front page. What was it that you do again?

Doing the obvious thing well

People are looking for a home, not an estate agent. In terms of the content, this meant stripping away anything inessential to the single task of searching for houses straight away. No questions, no introductions: simply an easy search box next to a big map of the area showing lots of properties. Underneath we put a scrolling gallery of available homes to communicate activity and choice, and most of all to reinforce the message that Kevin Henry provides homes.

Kevin Henry front page

When it’s that easy for the buyer, the seller wants in too.

Company profile, contact details and the articulation of selling points are still vital, so we made them easy to find on the footer and top menu, but the best thing people can discover about an estate agent is that they have loads of homes, easy to find, with lots of details.

Search engine optimisation

And of course people need to find the site in the first place. We set about boosting search rankings with our clandestine, rune-casting, voodoo process of … writing choice content in all the right places: content that makes sense to readers, appeals to search engines, and, don’t forget, appeals to the person reading the search results too. Even the witty strap line got sacrificed (it’s no good having a witty strap if no one ever finds it).

Kevin Henry are now first on Google for ‘saffron walden estate agents’. And it is gratifying that where other results say things like ‘longest established and best known’, ‘we have offices in Saffron Walden’ and ‘a wide range of property’ – that our client’s description says ‘Kevin Henry sell more houses each year in the Saffron Walden area than any other estate agent’.

Which one would you click on?

Personality

The challenge in the rest of the copy was to convey friendliness, even a little bit of cheek, while keeping the tone professional and the experience straightforward. Not everyone can write a business blog but for this client it is the perfect vehicle to display some personality and knowledge. When they started in the late 80s they used to send out humorous newsletters to a mailing list – the blog was simply starting this up again online.

Actually there is a third thing I love about Kevin Henry. As I got to know them, I discovered just how amazing their service is. I heard it from satisfied customers, and I saw the cupboard with bags of Waitrose goodies prepared as a surprise for moving day.

The joy of keeping a web site simple and focused is that customers will already love you for the ease with which they can find relevant information. You don’t need to blow every note on your trumpet from the start. Then, when all the extras of incredible service appear on top, you’ve not just got customers but excited fans.

What if I added that it was completely free, and that I would share this knowledge with you right now?

Ready to slam the back button?

Because these results have been measured by psychologists as the outcome of just one thing (and no, it’s not a deodorant).

It’s not something difficult or unnatural. It doesn’t involve parting with your sense, your shekels, or your soul.

In fact, it’s something that all good web professionals have been talking about for ages already.

It’s – are you ready for this?

It’s fluency.

It gets even better

Now you might be thinking that ‘fluency’ is going to turn out to be a complicated process involving qualifications, time or mental capacities that you haven’t got.

Far from it. Fluency is simply making tasks easy to accomplish.

New psychological research has found that when people find something easy to accomplish, they are more likely to believe it. In psychology this is called cognitive fluency.

Here’s the science bit: if people find something easy, it’s as though they have done it before. In other words, they find it familiar. To our cave-dwelling ancestors, familiar was a good thing, because in the words of late psychologist Robert Zajonc, ‘if it is familiar, it has not eaten you yet.’ So the familiar – the easy – is experienced by humans as more trustworthy, more believable, more true.

That wasn’t so painful, was it?

Drake Bennett, who reported the research findings for The Boston Globe, says:

… when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process … like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.

Simply writing a statement on your web site in a more legible font, or repeating it or making it rhyme, can make readers not only believe it more, but think that you are smarter and that they are more capable.

That’s incredible. Easy equals true.

And here’s the other side of the coin: ‘disfluency’ (horrible word – fear for what the marketers will do with it) sets up a mental roadblock. When something is hard to read or understand, or information is difficult to find, people feel frustrated, confused and obstructed. They believe less what you have to say and start to question your intelligence.

For example, Bennett says that if you write in a font that is difficult to read, people ‘transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about’.

Your web site – easy or hard?

If it’s hard to accomplish basic tasks on your web site, then I’m going to question your intelligence too. Web sites are all about simple tasks. Visitors arrive with little task lists, conscious and otherwise:

• Find out what this site is about
• Discover if it is useful to me
• Get what I was searching for in the first place
• Gain a piece of information

If you can make accomplishing those tasks easy, you have not only boosted the credibility of your business, you have made yourself seem more intelligent and made them feel good about themselves into the bargain.

But give a payment process twice as many steps as necessary – or crowd the front page with a bit of everything so that your core business gets overlooked – or create a cool design that leaves people uncertain where to click next – or ask unwanted questions of your potential customers in pop-ups – and you have just undermined the whole reason you set up a site in the first place.

‘Easy’ for the customer might mean more work for you in simplifying your web site. It certainly takes discipline to keep a site fluent. But if you want to be believed, esteemed and leave your customers feeling confident about your business – it’s the only way.

There is much more to be said about cognitive fluency, about how to make web sites – and in particular their content – more fluent. Also about when disfluency can be used to our advantage. All to be explored later on SmyWord.

Right now I’m curious about your stories of fluency – how you felt when a site wasn’t easy, or your experience when it was. What have you done to make your own site easier to use? Did you notice a difference?

I’ve put together a 2-hour workshop called ‘How to write great blog posts’.

It’s designed to show non-writers how to turn out fantastic articles for their business blogs, consistently.

It’s not just a presentation (in one ear and out the other). Rather it’s sitting down with an experienced web writer and learning hands-on some of the simple (when you know them) techniques for:

• Sparking off original ideas
• Shaping your blog for your audience
• Grabbing, then keeping, the attention of your readers
• Writing posts that work brilliantly on the web
• Bumping up your readership

During the 2 hours you’ll learn by practising on real content for your blog. So you’ll come away with both new techniques for writing and a load of material on paper that you can use straight away.

And we’ll have fun. The first time I did this it was for a team of financial advisers. They said thay they ‘really enjoyed it – albeit one of our team had to have a lie down.’

‘How to write great blog posts’ workshop costs £180.
Price does not include travel or VAT.

Get in touch if you could use some help and inspiration for your blog.

If you’d like assistance with any other aspects of writing on your web site, drop me a line and we’ll soon get your site singing.

Secondly, language is important. It is important because it is our main tool for communication. Not only to understand, love and conspire with each other but even to be able to think in the first place. It is very, very difficult to think something for which you do not have the words. Our abilities to think and to relate are bound to our grasp of language – and the integrity of the language that is available to us.

So it’s worth keeping an eye on our words.

Why can leverage not be a verb?

Leverage is the advantage gained by the use of a lever. Imagine a big rock. You ram a crowbar underneath it, push down on the bar and the rock begins to rise. You now have leverage.

The word comes by adding the suffix -age to the verb lever. When you lever (verb) the rock, you get this:

lever    +    -age    =    leverage

We are used to this in language:

spill    +    -age    =    spillage

dote    +    -age    =    dotage

advance    +    -age    =    advantage

The suffix –age transforms these verbs into nouns. That’s what it is used for. You advance (verb) your army, to give yourself an advantage (noun).

So if you want to use further the advantage that you have gained, how do you do it? Let me tell you how you don’t do it. You don’t advantage your troops. That’s nonsensical. Because a noun transformed into a verb by adding –age can’t suddenly be a verb as well.

It sounds completely wrong.

And yet bloggers, especially those who would like to be Seth Godin, are doing this all the time.

They say that the way to capitalise on your position – is by leveraging it. In other words, to leverage (verb) your leverage (noun).

It is a crude bastardisation of language. It takes a verb, to lever, that has become a noun, leverage, and twists the word into another verb even though it ends with the noun-defining ending –age. The suffix –age is the linguistic equivalent of streaking across the live final of The X Factor wearing nothing but a banner proclaiming ‘I AM A NOUN’. You can’t get more noun-like than a word made into a noun by the suffix –age.

You can’t spillage me across the floor or dotage me into delirium for suggesting that language does not work this way.

Because if leverage was a verb then we could create leveragage by doing it. And that’s just getting silly.

What do people mean by ‘to leverage’?

In most cases, I think people mean one of two things:

1. They just mean ‘to lever’

‘if you leverage the content that you have already created, you will be able to squeeze out a bit more mileage’

If the writer (it would be unfair to identify him as so many people do it) means capitalising upon the work that you have already done, then the correct word is simply lever:

‘if you lever the content that you have already created…’

And if this sounds dumb, it is because it is. Leverage has become a buzzword, yet there are few situations where it is apt. A much better analogy for capitalising upon previous advantage gained would be advancing your troops further, or investing in new ventures having worked hard to create money in the first place, to name but two.

2. They mean ‘using the leverage you already have to your advantage’

This is how Seth Godin often uses it. I wonder how he can be so convinced that spelling is important yet throw away basic grammar without remorse. He even quotes someone else on his blog:

‘The more you say leverage, the less you’ve probably thought about what you’re saying.’

It’s not just that it stomps all over obvious grammatical integrity. Using leverage as a verb is also confusing, because it means levering your leverage. That is not a simple concept to me.

A confession to finish

Let me confess that there is a recorded use of leverage as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. In finance, leveraging is using borrowed capital to make investments that will provide greater profit than the interest owed. Maybe that’s where some people derive it from.

I hope that the reasons not to emulate the financial world are evident without having to spell them out, particularly when it comes to language. Do we want to shape the world for the better with our ideas, or shut it out?

The writers who imposed the greatest number of new words upon the English language had the greatest grasp of existing words. When you can write like Shakespeare, by all means make up whatever words you like.

Until then, look after the words you’ve inherited. You might need them for something important one day.

Do you use leverage as a verb? Why? What do you mean by it? What metaphors could we use instead? Do you think this might be a British/US English thing?

Imagine it. I want to give you money – by signing up to become a paying member on your web site. So I find your site and look for the quickest, easiest way to get to the sign up page.

But I can’t find it. Sometimes you’re talking about signing up, other times about registering. There are two links: one for becoming a member and the other one for joining. If they are different, I’m not sure which one I need. When I find a page called ‘How to sign up as a member’ it tells me both ‘Click the Apply for Membership tab’ and ‘Click here to proceed’.

Well, which one is it?

I take a risk, click one, and fill in the application form (even though the button says ‘register’, not apply). Then comes the most baffling part of the whole process. Your web site tells me:

You are already a member.

I am not already a member. I have never signed up or given you any money for membership before.

But just to make sure, I go back to your question ‘is your organisation already registered?’ and search for my company’s name. Nothing happens. You tell me neither that I am nor that I am not.

Am I going mad? Perhaps I am already a member? Perhaps your sales rep got me drunk one night and I signed up on the spot and Timothy Taylor erased the memory?

So I try to log in to find out. I get an error page.

Do I still want to give you money?

After the awful experience: a serious point about your brand

The point of this true story (I haven’t the heart to name the company here) is that I nearly posted on Twitter: ‘I am trying to give money to x. They make it very difficult.’ I realised that might seem a little unfair, and posted instead:

Can you spot the  crucial difference? The first equates the web site with the company. They make it difficult to give money. The second gives them the benefit of the doubt. It’s just their web site that is at fault.

But guess which way your average consumer will describe it?

They make it hard to subscribe. They see your web site – as you.

To your customers, you and your web site are one and the same

As a prominent interface between your company and the public, your site represents your company to people so completely that it is you. It is who you are.

If that is true – how do you feel about what is on it? Does it really describe what you are like? Is the experience visitors have on it congruent with what you’d like them to think about you? Do your claims stand up?

Having given up on trying to register on the web site above, I checked out their About Us page. Amid talk of ‘technology-enabled enterprise’ and ‘raising Cambridge’s game’, was the claim that they achieved their commitments using ‘technology’.

Yeah, right. Forgive me for laughing.

If you claim one thing but the experience on your web site suggests another, people don’t think, ‘I’m sure they take a lot more care in the other areas of their business’. They think: liars.

If visitors to your site find broken tools and errors, they don’t assume, ‘never mind, technology gets the better of everyone occasionally.’ They assume: these people are rubbish.

If there is a spelling mistake on your web site, customers don’t say, ‘oh look, an error slipped through the spell check on this page’. They say: this company is stupid.

And maybe they’re right. After all, wouldn’t an honest, competent and smart company take care to have a web site that proved it?

To most consumers, your web site is the same thing as your company.

Is there anything you would like to change?

I have one goal for SmyWord this year: to blog more consistently.

Last year was great – launching SmyWord, having a couple of big content cheeses drop by in the comments, receiving positive feedback from customers. But if I could change one thing, I wish that I had upheld my promise to post a new article once a week.

Increasingly businesses I do content work for want blogs on their web sites. A real, honest blog by someone who loves their work is a wondrous thing (especially if they’re not meta-careerists). And one of the fundamental pieces of advice I give them – one of the make-or-break keys to successful blogging – is to blog consistently.

Why? Because people are more likely to subscribe to, stick with, and read blogs that have a predictable delivery of content. Whether it’s an inspirational thought once a day (like Seth Godin), or a double in-depth post by different authors twice a month ( as on A List Apart), consistency shows reliability to potential followers and convinces them that you are worth following. People want to know what they will be getting.

So 2010 has me looking in the mirror and quoting ‘physician, heal thyself’.

Tips for consistent blogging

There is lots of good advice about for how to post consistently, including:

• Learn where your inspiration comes from and go there
• Read other consistent blogs to learn how they do it
• Make a regular plan and stick to it
• Split your ideas up into several posts – don’t give away too much at once
• Save good ideas for later (build up a buffer)
• Write useful material for you audience – not what floats your boat personally
• Reinterpret older material for new contexts
• Throw in a few lighter posts for variety and ease

But I know that my biggest obstacle is not creating ideas, because I’ve got loads of them. I shouldn’t admit this but right now I’ve got 41 articles for SmyWord on my laptop which are at least half-written. If I just finished those off I’d have nearly a year’s supply of posts.

But it’s not the ideas that are the problem – it’s perfectionism. I want my posts to reflect my education at Trinity College, Cambridge. I want my boss to think they’re great. I want to imbue them with the finest literary qualities of which I am capable. I want them to be above the criticism of other bloggers. I want my Mum to like them (fat chance).

Perfectionism is the biggest enemy to my goal

So here’s how I’m going to write in 2010: imperfectly. I’m going to value reasonable writing that gets published over theoretically astounding writing that does not. I’m going to be Enid Blyton not Gustave Flaubert. I will develop a thicker skin if criticised and acknowledge my mistakes. And I’m not going to show any of it to my mother.

Let’s tackle what stops us blogging consistently head on.

*Clicks publish*

This work is certainly diverse. For example, I’ve just written a guide for a letting agent to help them to take better photographs of their properties. The catch was that their photographers are not professionals, but inexperienced office staff, using basic digital cameras.

Here are some highlights derived from the guide. If you ever shoot interiors – even if only at Christmas with a tree and your Aunty Mildreth in the foreground – these tips will help you raise your game. So put away the costly kit, grab a pocket-sized point-and-shoot, and get clicking.

1. Be trigger happy

The joy of digital. Take thousands of pictures from every conceivable angle, as you can just pick the best ones later and delete the rest. If this is for a property web site make sure that you cover the basics: people expect to see a shot of every room, otherwise they wonder what you’re hiding. Add to that some of the extra features, like a period fireplace or an atractive front door, and you will be starting to satisfy the consumer’s desire for lots and lots and lots and lots of pictures.

2. Avoid ugly

You know what’s ugly? You’re ugly – when reflected in a mirror or window. Clutter and mess is ugly, as are room corners in the middle of the frame. Mould, cracks, and cheap copies of paintings are ugly. Big sofa arms in your face are ugly and ceilings are ugly if you show too much of them.

Also, fine composition is not just removing ugly things but putting a bit of thought into composing the shot. Choose a creative angle, arrange the furniture how you want it, showed lived-in but not messy. If the room is empty stick a prop in, such as a chair, for a sense of scale.

3. Go wide – or not

Using wide angles to capture more of an interior is only partially effective. When Adam Kimmel directed the prison cell photography in Capote he used a wide angle lens. To make the cell look smaller. Seeing three walls of a tiny room emphasises how cramped it is.

In other words, wide angle doesn’t make a room appear bigger – it simply shows more. And you should only show people more if the more is worth seeing. By all means show just how long the elegant lounge is. But the meagre box room?

4. Turn on the lights

One of the biggest challenges in interior photography is the exposure. The light coming in through the window throws the camera off balance, so that the bit of the room that you want to see ends up in darkness. On a good camera this can be solved technically – but not on our budget point-and-shoot with a rubbish flash.

So here’s the tip: turn on the lights.

Reduce incoming light by drawing the curtains, or shooting at dusk. Boost the light inside by flicking every light switch you can, and even bringing some extra lamps for the dark corners. The result will not only be better exposed, but far more warm and inviting.

5. Flash the plastic

There are some things money can’t buy, like knowing how to use a proper flash on a decent camera. For everything else there’s mastercard. If you do need to use your horrible little built-in headlight (or can’t work out how to switch it off), whip your card out and angle it against the flash so that the light goes upwards towards the ceiling. The scene will still be illuminated, but less harshly, and from above. Ezra Stoller eat your heart out.

6. Get on your knees

Taking every photo at eye level is like spending a cruise looking out of one porthole. Stand on a chair or a table, lie on the floor, crouch in the corner or peer through a gap – it’s amazing the difference an altered angle makes. In particular, get down low. Rooms often look more inviting at the reclining-in-lounger level.

Don’t forget to keep the camera level though. Tilting it will distort the straight lines, and people will think the house has got subsidence. Actually, they’ll just think you can’t take photos.

7. Copy good ideas

Have a look at other sites with photography that stands out. What have they done? See if you can recreate the effect. Imitation, flattery, all that. Just start experimenting and it won’t be long for your interior photos are a cut above the rest.

Tiny things can ruin what should be a straightforward experience. Don’t deal with the mosquito, and you’re in for a bad night’s sleep at best. Leave a spelling mistake on your web site because it seems insignificant to you – and it’s your customers who will be complaining and not coming back.

Writing great copy involves not only choosing the right words, but also caring how those words appear. Font choice and size, line length, punctuation, paragraph length – all these are part of the readers’ experience of your message.

Many of these decisions are subjective. How much space to leave between sentences, for example: surely it is up to the author to decide what is most fitting?

Yes, and no.

Where a writer decides that the once-popular double space (so-called English spacing) looks best, then fair enough. But my contention is that most of that time the decision is not based on looks – but because someone once told the typist that this is correct.

And nobody wants to get it wrong.

Let me alleviate the pressure on the double space defenders and point out that, on the web, double spacing makes no sense at all.

Double spaces originate from physical type

In ye olde worlde of typewriters the typefaces were monospaced – that is, characters were exactly the same width as each other (even the m and the i). Every letter, symbol, and even the spaces were the same width. This gave a regimented appearance to the text, in which a space between two sentences could get lost among the identical spaces between words.

Enter the double space – just to make sure no one missed the start of a new sentence.

However, on the web, monospaced fonts are rare. We write in what are called proportionally spaced fonts, where each letter takes up an appropriate amount of space. Add to that the short paragraphs that we write in, and the other design elements that make our typing much easier to read, and there really is no need for double spacing at all.

In other words, on the web, there is no double space rule to break. Unless you are a graphic designer working with a monotype font, there is no need to hark back to the days of the typewriter and get all uppity about the gaps.

A single space looks and reads better

Now we know that there is no rule to break, the main consideration is more subjective: what looks and reads the best?

Of course, it is a matter of opinion, and here is mine: I think double spacing looks wrong. When I am editing, I correct it. It creates little holes all over the copy, and disrupts the flow of sentences that are already adequately spaced.

By all means comment below and defend the English spacing. But I want to know how it looks and reads on a web page, not what your typing tutor said in 1971.

By the way, there is a sin far more heinous than double spacing. It’s called inconsistent spacing, where some sentences are divided by a single space, and some by a double space, on the same page.

That’s like having a whole scourge of mosquitoes in the room.

Won’t somebody think of the children?