I was playing cricket in Ireland the other day. Among sports, perhaps only fishing allows you more time for contemplation and dreaming: and I don’t fish. So there I was, wandering around the outfield or looking into the middle distance when I decided I wanted to describe the match we were playing in the style of Finnegans [sic] Wake.

Here’s how the match report went:

Solaris ballybally was in droughtywoughty skybluely. Caliente, missus. Your Citymen then propelled laurelwards by Poulterpumped swingybat. But Old Grizzleskip did declaim fiftynomorelore. Bleeding Tony bench-bound.

But wither and when tea oh Halverstoony cunningfellows?

Long wicketfree on wispygrass. Sphere went high-handywards. Butterfingerly clusterfeck.

EllieBill lo! did reversesweepy catchshock but Hades drew in inevitabilly-boo and Kildare killers ferry Alansilvercuppy home doom.

Ah well next year betterluckychaps.

Perhaps I had better translate.

It was a sunny and hot day near Halverston, a part of Ireland that had not seen rain in a month. Our team, the White City All Stars, did well when we batted, led by a fine innings from Tony Poulter. But our veteran captain decided Tony should retire when he reached 50 runs. He did, nursing a cut finger.

There was some controversy about when we would take tea and thus how long Halverstown had to reach our target.

We found it hard to take their wickets, not helped by a succession of dropped catches.

There was hope when Bill pulled off a great catch from Elena’s bowling, but it proved too late. The cup, named after our late friend and fellow cricketer Alan Ruddock, went back to Halverstown.

I tried hard to capture the diction and flow of James Joyce’s modernist classic. A couple of people noted, correctly, that my version made too much sense. You can wade through pages of Finnegans Wake without knowing what the hell it’s about.

For example:

This is the jinnies’ hastings dispatch for to irrigate the Willingdone. Dispatch in thin red lines cross the shortfront of me Belchum. Yaw, yaw, yaw! Leaper Orthor. Fear siecken! Fieldgaze thy tiny frow. Hugacting. Nap. That was the tictacs of the jinnies for to fontannoy the Willingdone. Shee, shee, shee! The jinnies is jillous agincourting all the lipoleums. And the lipoleums is gonn boycottoncrezy onto the one Willingdone.

This is a description of the Battle of Waterloo.

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If you had a bookshelf with all the great modernist works of literature lined up, Finnegans Wake (1939) is the one at the end. After this, yes, writers experimented with plot, language and consciousness. But no-one went further.

But why? Why did 20th century writers feel they had to tear up the conventions of the novel and poetry, write anew, start afresh?

Because they felt it had all been done. Novelists had said everything there was to say in the conventional way of an all-knowing narrator telling you a story.

And you know what? I am beginning to feel the same way: not because we are at the end of a way of writing and seeing the world that has exhausted itself: It’s because we are at the beginning of a revolution and we need to revolt against the revolution.

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Yes, I mean AI. My news feed today is begloomed with a story about an American author whose agents will not be taking up a $2 million advance following a 14-publisher auction because his manuscript failed their AI testing software. This is at least the third time a high-profile contract has been terminated on these grounds.

It’d be easy if AI copy was all like much of it is – correct, smooth, characterless. Then we humans could rebel and joyously express our humanity with unexpected phrases, allusions only we know and unreplicable personal insights.

But as everyone now knows, all you have to do is tell the software to write something in the style of…

And that’s what I did with my cricket report. Here is Claude’s rival Finnegans Wake report on the Halverston epic:

Sunnysided and scorchscorched the day was, hot as blazes over Halverstonhalverstown, that parish of Erin’s green unwatered where no rain-dhrops had wept upon the sod this moonsmonth and more, dry as a bishop’s wit, arid as an aunt’s remark.

Our lads, whitecityallstarshallelujah, batted brave and battered on, Tony Poulter poulterpelting the ball to boundary and beyond, an innings finewinefine till our old cap’n (veteransveteranus, rememberrer of retirements past) sent word: retire thee, Tony-my-son, upon the fiftieth run and not a run more! And so he did, nursing his cutfinger, fingercut, dripdripdripping his little red badge of battle-honour off to the pavilion, poor martyr of the boundary rope.

Teatime teatimetumult! When oh when to pause for the cuppa, and how much time then left to Halverstonhalverstown to hunt and haunt and hound our total down — argy-bargy, tea-leaf tealeaved tempest in the committee-cup, a right hullaballoo over the samovar.

Wickets wouldn’t fall, fall wouldn’t the wickets, catch after catch went down like autumn’s leaves that never leaved (for hadn’t the rain forgot to fall too?), dropdropdropped through butterbuttery fingers, howlsome groans risen from the boundary boys.

Then hope! hopeup! when Bill (billiant Bill) plucked one from the air offoff Elena’s spinning arm, a blinder, a beaut, but too late, toolate, toolatetoolate the hour, and the cup — Alan Ruddock’s cup, our Alan, gone-but-not-forgotten Alan, friendfellow cricketer clubbed in memoriam — went homeward, roadward, backward unto Halverstonhalverstown once more, as ever it was, world without innings, amen.

I don’t know whether to be flattered or utterly dismayed that my poor individual human brain picked up the same kind of phrasing and grammatical tricks as the super-colossal large language model. We both looked for lyrical neologisms (my droughtywoughty skybluely, their moonsmonth). We both mashed up proper names and their deeds (Poulterpumped swingybat, poulterpelting). Neither I nor Claude could resist butter/butterly fingers.

If I were being ultra-critical of my rival, I’d point to the tell-tale word-padding (homeward, roadward, backward) and the occasional cliche (hot as blazes). But they got in some good similes, and some of Joyce’s biblical echoes. I didn’t.

But look, neither of us – evidently – is James Joyce. We do not have his learning, his imagination, we are not products of a classical education and his country’s vernacular which, if J M Synge is to be believed, was as rich and deep in the early 20th century as the language spoken in Shakespeare’s late 1500s London, even among the common folk.

Claude and I are just doing pastiche, imitation. He’s the original.

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Here’s the point

Intention. Claude cannot HAVE the idea to write a cricket report like Finnegans Wake. It can only execute the idea.

In whatever I’ve written I’ve always tried to put something different in, an unexpected turn of phrase, a surprising rhythm. That goes back to my earliest days as a reporter when I was given a depressing sheet of paper prescribing exactly what should be in the five paragraphs of a standard news story.

That habit of mine has understandably annoyed not a few editors over the years. What is this about? Yes, but WHERE are you and WHAT are you describing??

Now that the revolution has happened and we are retreating behind the barricades, I think the only way is to be more, not less weird. More individual. More human. Even pre-AI a lot of copy in my main field, travel, sounded pretty bot-like anyway. So, push the language, upset the narrative: you don’t have to go as far as Finnegans Wake – no-one else has, as I said earlier.

There are some trying it. As we are referring to sport reports, look at Barney Ronay’s work in The Guardian. His massively overblown analogies and arcane allusions have made him a frequent visitor to Private Eye’s compendium of pretentious writing, Pseud’s Corner. Ronay says they don’t get the joke. Whatever, we are going to need to make room for more Ronays.

Going weird might be the only way.

This article was not created with the help of AI apart from the bits where it obviously was. And it gave spellcheck nightmares.

Here is Commander Reid Wiseman from the Artemis II space mission on seeing the moon create a solar eclipse:

It’s just indescribable. No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal... there’s no adjectives, I’m going to need to invent some new ones, there’s absolutely no words to describe what we are looking at out this window.

Now, I would never dare to challenge Commander Wiseman on physics, aeronautical engineering, nor how to live in a cramped space for a week with three other people when the toilet is malfunctioning.

But adjectives? That’s my territory.

And he’s wrong. There are ALWAYS adjectives. New ones are being formed every second from dense, gaseous clouds of verbiage. There are as many adjectives as planets in the known universe.

A better question: is there any life in those adjectives?

Surveying the adjectives people did use to describe the mission, you see an almost lunar barrenness. Wiseman (before he gave up) went for spectacular and the epithet du jour, one speeding away from its original meaning at an alarming rate, surreal. We’ve also had unreal, amazing, indescribable and extraordinary.

To describe the way the mission was described, just go to any travel editor’s desk. Above it will be a list of banned words. As well as the above, they’ll likely include breathtaking, spectacular and jaw-dropping. Regular readers will know the one at the top of my own list, although I guess even the most depraved users of that tired, all-purpose adjective would hesitate to describe the dark side of the Moon as vibrant.

I bet for Commander Wiseman, navy test pilot with a Masters in system engineering, the most arduous part of the training was not being held incommunicado in an underground cave, nor getting whizzed around in one of those crane arm things, but the hour he was forced to spend with NASA’s PR people deciding what to say to listening audience of billions back on Earth.

And I can only imagine his relief when one of the bright young things from Comms said – ‘I know! Just say it’s indescribable. There are no adjectives.’

And while we are thinking about possible other worlds, as we do whenever there is a mission like this, I got to thinking: what would a world without adjectives be like?

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Exercise one: AI, write an article without adjectives

A great hero of this blog is László Almásy, the titular character in Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. When Katharine Clifton, played by Kristen Scott-Thomas first meets László (Ralph Fiennes), she congratulates him on writing a long momolgue without a single adjective.

‘A thing is still a thing no matter what you place in front of it,‘ Almásy replies.

You look…um, what’s the word?

Impressed by this, I sought out my pal Claude.

I had a whole load of articles to write about a subject unfamiliar to me. I also had the blessing of the commissioning person to deploy AI if necessary. Claude’s first attempts were okay, but padded out with loads of decorative words. He grumbled a bit when I asked for the László version – an article without adjectives – but eventually (ie in about four seconds) he obliged. The new version had a lot more substance. It was almost useful, though out of professional pride I didn’t do the command + C thing on the AI text.

Still, it’s a route I’d recommend to the increasing number of writers relying on Claude and his friends. Without the empty calories of adjectives, they have to give you real substance. Next, I plan to deny Claude adverbs and abstract nouns too.

On AI, I have a different theory every week.

My latest goes like this. AI copy is like a ready meal you buy from the supermarket. It’s fine – a very decent approximation of the real thing. You might even serve it up at a dinner party and hope no–one notices the difference.

You still know you are cheating, however. And whereas real cooking/writing, for all its frustrations and disappointments, is bound to get your endorphins going, the same cannot be said for the ping of the microwave or the AI ‘job done’ alert.

That said, I asked Claude to write this article for me and he said “I now have a solid sense of the Forthwrite (Mark Jones / “No-nonsense words”) Substack style: crisp, journalistic, self-aware, full of sharp examples, opinionated without being preachy, leavened with wit and the occasional literary or celebrity reference, and deeply committed to the idea that nouns and verbs do the real work.”

Thanks for your nice words, Claude. That almost makes up for you ripping me off.

PS this is NOT written with AI.

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Exercise 2: Write your Linked In profile without adjectives

I seem to have done this with mine without really thinking about it. I guess I thought people would be more interested in what I’d done/am doing than fancy words describing how I’d done it.

Mind, if I WERE to do that in the accepted Linked I way, it would probably read:

Passionate, committed editor and writer with an unparalleled career in consumer magazines, travel writing and content marketing. MJ has enjoyed a stellar career since graduating from one of our top universities. He is fanatical about grammar and has a profound and lasting love for the English language.

The more accurate version might read:

Headstrong writer and grammar geek with more than a bit of ego who can write a bit. Fluked his way into Cambridge, became something of a high flyer in his 20s, before getting sacked from successive jobs through emotional immaturity and stubbornness. Creatively, has had a couple of good ideas, among all the unrealistic and misplaced ones. Ultimately achieved a basic level of competence in managing people and projects before deciding he never wanted to work in an office again.

I also asked Claude to make me a new Linked In profile picture…and it came up with Philip bloody Larkin

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Mr Townshend’s English lesson

While I was thinking about this blog about adjectives, I listened to one of my favourite podcasts, Andrew Hickey’s History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. The latest one, number 183, is about Pinball Wizard by The Who and the band’s leader/guitarist/writer, Pete Townshend.

The song is about Tommy, the hero of Townshend’s rock opera of the same name. A traumatic incident in childhood leads Tommy to lose his sight, hearing and voice. Townshend wanted him to be redeemed as a kind of guru figure. Originally, Tommy was going to be a rock star, but Townshend instead channelled a favourite pastime of his mod clan, the pinball machine.

The refrain goes:

That deaf, dumb1 and blind kid

Sure plays a mean pinball.

Four adjectives there, three describing Tommy’s state, the fourth his skills at pinball.

(I’ll note in passing how London-born Townshend uses a distinctly American phrases: ‘sure’ and ‘mean’. That may be because post-war British teenagers liked to ape American ways of speaking. It might also be because The Who had a huge following in the States).

My basic rule about adjectives is, the writer has to earn them. Show what goes into making this thing good, beautiful, spectcaular, vibrant etc, then if neccessary, you can use the adjective.

That’s exactly what Pete Townshend does. A kind of Greek chorus sets the challenge

How do you think he does it?

I don’t know

What makes him so good?

The narrator (a brilliant pinball player who has been eclipsed by Tommy) explains it.

He stands like a statue, becomes part of the machine

Feeling all the bumpers, always playing clean

Plays by intuition, the digit counters fall

That deaf, dumb and blind kid

Sure plays a mean pinball.

I don’t know much about pinball, but what I do comes from the song. Apart from the questionable claim in a later verse that he ‘plays by sense of smell’, you get a pretty good idea of what it takes to be a pinball wizard – and a good storyteller.

It may be true that I overthink pop music lyrics a bit.

Elton v Tommy (Roger Daltry) in the Tommy film

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Revealed: the secret Artemis II script

You’ll have noticed that the brave Artemis astronauts had President Donny Trump on the spacephone at one point. They looked a bit embarrassed. The whole thing was pretty awkward, but they managed to stay calm and polite.

I’ve since unearthed the script they were meant to read out, but ditched at the last minute:

“Mr President, thank you for your comments and your observation that the USA is the hottest country in the world right now. Well, it’s certainly getting hotter all the time. We might be able to say how much hotter thanks to NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatories. But your administration is pushing to have that programme shut down. I guess if you don’t like the evidence, the easiest thing to do is shut down the source of the data.

Maybe you’d prefer to rely on Minnesota Republican Mary Franson, who said her faith is ‘not in scientists dictating what we should and should not do to save the environment’ and it’s a ‘commie scam’.

Still, we have made this historic journey thanks to the efforts of SCIENTISTS. You might have heard of them, although getting to meet any might prove harder and harder. There are certainly not many in your own team. Meanwhile, a 2025 poll says 75 percent of researchers in the US are considering leaving the country.

But don’t worry! We can still land on the Moon, get to Mars and colonise Jupiter. Just ask God to sort it out. As another of your team said on climate change, we’ll “we’re gonna leave [complicated stuff like this] in the hands of a much, much higher authority.”

For the avoidance of doubt, she meant God, not you”.

An editor at work. Photo by Studio Michael França on Unsplash

I am not an expert on the subject, so I can’t tell you how big an influence Giorgio Armani had on women’s fashion. But I know a little bit about men’s clothes. If, like me, you were a man working in the creative and media industries in the last two decades of the 20th century, Armani mattered a lot.

The Italian designer’s suits progressed from desirable to compulsory, from a fashion choice to a kind of uniform. The classic box-cut English suit was for City boys and politicians. Americans draped themselves in descendants of the Zoot. With Armani, you got structure and fluidity, smartness and casualness before the term smart-casual got into wide circulation.

Style is a word that applies to the way we dress and the way we write. If Armani were a passage of writing, it’d be, first, correct and elegant. It would avoid flashy adjectives and current vogue words. But it would be contemporary English too – no pompous constructions or affected archaisms: easy to read and easy to write.

Armani died on 4 September. I was interested to see how his life was captured in writing. And how it was captured told me a lot about the state of modern corporate English and the way powerful people and the people who advise them choose their words.

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Awkward/brilliant timing (depends on your perspective)

Editors usually look for a peg, a news story or trend to hang a story on. But when the Financial Times’ How to Spend It magazine – or, as we should call it in these rushed times, the FT’s HTSI – landed a rare interview with Armani, it didn’t need a pretext. Interviews with the name on one of the world’s most prestigious labels don’t come along often.

As it turned out, it had the hook of the century: Armani died five days after publication. The six-page tribute to a man ‘retaining an iron grip’ on his empire became an obituary avant le fait.

The HTSI cover shot showed Armani reading a book on a cane sofa outside a French-style chateau. In navy blue t-shirt, white shorts and green trainers, he looked every inch the tanned, fiftysomething entrepreneur having a break between workouts: tanned skin, muscular legs, barely a line on his face.

The fact that Armani was 91, and no one looks like this at 91, is just one of the photographic fictions we all comply with. Somewhere around the start of the 2000s, celebrity photographs ceased to be photographs and became illustrations of an idealised human being’s face and body if it’s miraculously not been subject to the laws of gravity for 10, 20, or 50 years.

It was an extremely rare and wilful star who takes issue with being preserved in the digital version of aspic. One was the actress Kate Winslet, who said of a GQ shoot in 2003 that the art director has slimmed down her legs ‘by about a third’, saying: ‘I do not look like that and more importantly I don’t desire to look like that.’

(Mind, Winslet’s Vogue cover shoot of 2013 prompted writer Emma Broackes to say ‘her hair is detachable plastic; her eyes are like marbles. Her expression, which I guess is her own, albeit under [photographer Mario] Testino’s direction, is sort of mysterious with a touch of, “Help! I’ve been laminated!’’. I guess people move on….)

Anyway, photographic distortion is a tired and pointless debate in an era when we all have a portable Mario Testino in our pockets. What interests me is the major surgery job that’s gone on inside – in the copy.

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You can quote me on that (with conditions…)

As part of the writing courses I run with Kerry Smith, we have a module called How to make your boss sound human.

It’s popular, especially with communication professionals. They’re writing a media release or a piece of website content and they need a few words from the higher-ups. The boss says, write it and I’ll sign it off. The comms team knows that this is a recipe for bland, robotic sentiments anyone (or your nearest AI site) could voice. After all, you’re not going to risk putting colourful, provocative, idiosyncratic words into your boss’s mouth, are you? – even if the said boss is colourful, provocative and idiosyncratic (it happens).

So, you try to get some facetime with the boss. I once point-blank refused to ghostwrite a CEO’s article because I’d never met the man and didn’t know how he sounded. His minders relented. The said CEO, majorly INTJ, hated every second, but it made for a decent and, importantly, human piece.

The FT people put out calls for tributes from fashion and Hollywood A-listers to the man they universally (and, I suspect, contractually) called Mr Armani.

A test. Work out which of these quotes is from a real person and which was made up for them, possibly by a committee:

1. Mr Giorgio Armani is synonymous with classic elegance. His vision has long shaped the timeless gold standard.

2. He is a cultural icon. His creative vision has redefined elegance.

3. I once asked him, how does it feel to arrive at this place…? He said something like, ‘Just at the point when you understand what it’s all about you run out of time.’

4. His shapes, fabrics, colours and construction were all brand new.

5. By introducing the fluid suit in the 1980s, he promoted ideas of casual elegance – mixing formality with a relaxed sensuality – often through using lighter fabrics and removing the lining. It was such a rebuff to the power dressing of the time.

6. Mr Armani has straddled fashion like a colossus. Mr Armani’s timeless style ensures his creations will endure forever.

The answer, of course, is we don’t know. But I am prepared to bet a lot of Italian lire that (1), (2) and (6) are not words that came directly from the lips of, respectively, Renee Zellweger, Remo Ruffini and Daniel Craig. Whereas Oswald Boateng (3), Paul Smith (4) and Andre Bolton (5) are real sentiments from people who had evidently thought about the question.

Daniel Craig – or is it?

Those three answers, from two designers and a curator, are from people who understand a designer’s life and craft. You learn something from those quotes. You don’t learn anything from cliches like ‘colossus’, ‘timeless’ and ‘icon’.

Those (I believe) manufactured quotes are the writing equivalent of airbrushing.

Or maybe a better analogy is botox. Botox copy is what happens when you inject an English sentence with a neurotoxin that paralyses it. You get words that might look superficially attractive, but there is no personality or warmth in them – it’s all been smoothed out. Botox fillers are notorious for inhibiting expressiveness – a smile, a frown, a nuance. Botox copy does the same. You rob language of its expressiveness.

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A quick note on legends

Language evolves – two words those of us who keep a wary eye on words that get misused and weakened should repeat as a mantra every day.

Armani was widely described as the ‘legendary’ designer (icon etc). But he isn’t the only legend to have passed away recently. The first page of my Google search reports the passing of TV legend Nigel Latta, Hollywood legend Renato Casaro, another Hollywood legend Robert Redford, football legend Ken Houghton and ‘absolute’ legend Tony ‘the Tiger’ Knight, who was ‘well-known across Stoke-on-Trent for taking part in the Potteries Marathon’.

The pedant in me winces every time the word comes up. I wish we could go back to the time when the epithet ‘legend’ was reserved for characters who may or may not have existed (King Arthur, Robin Hood) and the stories associated with them. But – language evolves. Your next door neighbour can be a legend because he lent you a step ladder.

Nigel, Renato, Ken and Tony may have achieved much in their chosen fields. Still, in my book there is only one true legend – in the modern sense – on the above list and that’s Robert Redford. Maybe we need a new word that’s a step up from the legendary status for people like the actor and director. Mythical?

Robert and Tony: RIP.

How the Unsplash algorithm interprets the adjective ‘delightful’. Photo by Mohammad Alizade

George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language is the most frequently cited list of writing rules. With good reason: they are concise, short, practical and also contain a very handy get-out clause (‘Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous’).

But I’ve just come across another set of rules from a contemporary of Orwell’s: C S Lewis. They are well worth pinning to your laptop, tablet, favourites list, escritoire or whatever surface or interface you use.

In 1956, the last of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia had been published. Beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they were an immediate success; and their reputation and sales have only grown over the succeeding 70 years.

Almost straight away, children began writing letters to Lewis: and he always replied. This middle-aged bachelor and Oxford don understood how children see the world. Avuncular he may have been, but he was also sensible, sympathetic and never patronised his young correspondents. (If this blog continued my last theme, tone of voice, I’d happily analyse how Lewis achieves that not very easy feat. Another time, perhaps).

Many of his correspondents had questions about Narnia and the animals who lived there. But occasionally a budding author sought his advice. Joan from Florida was one. And it was in his reply to Joan that Lewis (known to his friends as ‘Jack’) revealed ‘what really matters’ when you are writing:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ‘More people died’ don’t say ‘Mortality rose.’

4. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, ‘Please will you do my job for me.’

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

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The Marriage, the Flavours and the Soulful Chef

I thought it’d be interesting to apply Lewis’s tests to the latest press releases grown-ups have sent to my inbox.

Top of the pile is an exclusive culinary collaboration event in the Maldives.

One chef ‘celebrates the marriage of technique and terroir’ while another’s culinary journey brings ‘structure and subtlety to Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flavours, creating dishes that are both refined and deeply soulful’.

Let’s go straight to Lewis’s third rule: Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do.

We have five abstract nouns here: ‘marriage’, ‘technique’, ‘terroir’, ‘structure’ and ‘subtlety’.

Although we know what a marriage looks like and maybe a picture comes to mind when someone writes ‘terroir’, these words, in this passage, are abstractions. I don’t really know, and can hardly guess, how a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean flavour changes when this chef brings structure and subtlety to it.

Like a lot of corporate writing, these sentences look important and clever. But when you poke your fork in them, there is nothing there.

Perhaps sensing this, the writer reaches for adjectives – ‘refined’ and ‘soulful’, throwing in the adverb ‘deeply’ because well, it seems to go with ‘soulful’.

There’s an idea here, counterpointing this chef’s technical ability (‘refined’) with something that’s more emotional and instinctive (‘soulful’). But I am just adding more adjectives. Read what Lewis says: ‘instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified’. If I’d been give the job of writing this release, I’d have sat down with the chef and got a story out of them. What does soulful mean? What’s the one flavour that conjures up a place, a time for them? How do they use it?

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Nutritious writing in action. Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Lewis, who created the Narnia books at a time of post-war rationing and hunger, loved to read and write about food. Here is a Narnian supper cooked by dwarves in The Silver Chair.

There are lots of sausages:

And not wretched sausages, half full of bread and soya bean either, but real, meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt. And great mugs of frothy chocolate, and roast potatoes and roast chestnuts, and baked apples with raisins stuck in where the core had been…

You could use a lot of clever words to describe the supper – heartwarming, nourishing, natural or, indeed, the one Lewis uses, breaking his own rule, Orwell-like – delightful. But by showing what they ate, and how it was cooked, with the short adjectives doing a lot of hard work – as does the proposition ‘and’ – you can taste the food as if you were there. It’s that kind of skill that makes a fantasy land a place we all feel we can get to.

The next day, Jill, who has eaten that delightful supper after emerging from a terrifying experience in a dark underworld, wakes up ‘lying on a bed of heather with a furry mantle over her, and saw a cheery fire crackling (as if newly lit), on a stone heath and, farther off, morning sunlight coming through the cave’s mouth…’

Or, as the copywriter for (say) a Nordic lodge might put it, ‘luxury and comfort combine in our truly natural and sublime bespoke cave experience’.

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The room, the view and the Phoenician bireme

Credit: Adler Spa, Sicily

Be concrete, not abstract. Call it the sausage test. Lewis tells us what the Narnian sausages are – hot and spicy, while that little word ‘burst’ conjures up many a finger-burning, sausage-specific evening around the camp fire. He also tells us what they are not – ‘wretched things, half filled with bread and soya’. I guess that’s what post-war sausages were like. I’ve been carrying that phrase around with me since I was about nine years old and judge all contemporary sausages by it – though today’s supermarket bangers are filled with even more wretched and nasty things.

Talking about bangers, when I coach hospitality writers and PRs I usually bang on about stuff – materials, textiles, types of wood and fabric. Here’s a rule of mine:

Put the nouns in a bank until you’ve got enough to earn an adjective.

Back to posh hotel suites: especially at the higher end, provenance – where stuff comes from, how it’s made and what it’s made of – matters to the designer and they should matter to the guest too.

Here’s an attempt to get more specific from another press release:

The suites are spacious and bright, finished with natural materials such as timber and terracruda for a healthy and restful atmosphere.

Perhaps your eye, like mine, went to that word terracruda, which I learn is a concrete effect wall tile. At least that sounds different. ‘Timber’ is annoyingly vague.

Then we get a classic press release non-sequitur: how, precisely, do timber and wall tiles make the atmosphere healthy and restful?

What to do instead? Well, I had a look at the said suites, in a Sicilian resort, and – this is based on the single photograph above, so forgive me – I saw a few details the writer might have used. The French windows open onto a wide private terrace, with its promise of al fresco pizzas and slow breakfasts. Beyond, there’s a wide expanse of lawn leading to a low line of olive trees. Beyond that, thickly wooded (pine? oak?) hills. Two minutes on Google maps reveals that we are looking towards not one but two national parks. That detail gives some credence to the adjectives ‘natural and restful’. And I see a blogger averred that the nearby beach is ‘Sicily’s wildest’. I think I’d use that somewhere. And the surroundings do look unspoilt. I might write, looking out from that room on a bright morning, that you could almost imagine a Phoenician bireme rounding the headland.

Mind, an editor would probably take that out.

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I get that owners and hotel marketing teams have their talking points and there is an established way of describing places like these. But relying on vague descriptors and the tired platitudes of luxury travel deprives the hotel of distinctiveness and, much worse, makes it sound as if it could be anywhere. And in travel, the place is your main character.

More on details vs abstractions here.

Not remotely scary: Rutherford and Fry. BBC

Anyone passing my house on a sunny afternoon last week would have heard raised voices. Two men were clearly having an extremely heated argument about something. But what?

As the owner of one of those voices, I can clear up the mystery. I and my neighbour W. were having a violent disagreement about Egyptian vases.

I won’t go into great detail, unlike the YouTuber he follows who has done hours of videos ‘proving’ that Ancient Egyptians weren’t advanced enough to make artefacts of such incredible precision.

He didn’t say what ‘advanced’ means. Still, as these vases are incredible, that must mean that another, more sophisticated civilisation, or maybe aliens, did the work.

His research follows the theories of Graham Hancock, the sociology graduate and journalist whose books and Netflix documentaries argue that the archeology establishment has got it all wrong and ancient wonders were the work of a lost and advanced civilisation who unfortunately got wiped out 12,000 years ago.

I am great friends with my neighbour, who knows a lot about a lot of things. But when it comes to history, politics and the like, I am very suspicious of the people and places he gets his knowledge from. I am also uncomfortably aware that I am fighting a losing battle, as, like him, more and more people turn away from traditionally trusted and evidence-based sources of knowledge and towards theories that are a lot less boring.

Hence the shouting. I was shouting on behalf of the archaeologists (‘discredited’, said my neighbour) and scientists everywhere.

And it’s frustrating because those groups are getting their response to the YouTubers and keyboard Indiana Joneses so wrong. And that’s all down to something we in the writing and branding game call Tone of Voice.

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The Law of Levity

The ‘lost civilisation’ theses has had the most airtime on Netflix, where Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been viewed, according to one analyst, by between seven and nine million people, which is good news for Netflix’s management, whose numbers include Hancock’s son.

BBC Radio 4 has around nine million listeners a week – but that includes its flagship news and current affairs programmes and popular music stations. Figures for science programmes are not listed separately, but we can assume they do not make a hugely significant contribution to the overall figures.

Still, it was to one of those programmes, The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry that I went to see what they made of Ancient Apocalypse. I learned a lot from their programme, The Puzzle of the Pyramids and it gave me plenty of ammunition for my next shouting match with W.

But the programme also annoyed and depressed me.

Here’s why. At BBC Radio 4 and elsewhere in mainstream broadcasting there operates something I’ll call The Law of Levity.

It says:

If thou art making a programme about science, thou must make it lighthearted and jokey lest the listeners be terrified they won’t understand it or find it boring.

So you get solid scientists and excellent communicators like Dr Adam Rutherford and Professor Hannah Fry, make them dress up like Victorian detectives, pull silly faces, wear false moustaches and then you take a publicity shot. This is fun. Moreover, the humanities graduates who commission these programmes are happy because they have managed to put your science programme, which they don’t understand, into a format they do – Sherlock Holmes and the like.

Off they go in the pyramids programme, giggling at ‘YouTubers’ and making gags about conspiracy theories (‘It’s NEVER aliens, ho ho’).

Contrast this with the programmes Hancock and the vase expert, computer science graduate and self-taught archeologist Ben van Kerkwyk of UncharteredX.

Graham Hancock. The leather jacket denotes serious archeological expertise

They are never anything less than deadly serious. They are going to take you painstakingly through their research. They are not going to dress it up or make jokes. This matters. The only time they change their tone of voice is when they deal with the academic establishment that seeks to discredit that research. Then they get hurt and angry, as any victim of an establishment campaign is entitled to be. Of course the academic gatekeepers are going to rubbish my original and groundbreaking research. They are protecting themselves and their grants. It’s what these people do.

And of course the academics are going to be patronising and pretend these seismic discoveries are nothing more than pseudoscience or even science fiction.

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Laugh at your peril

Getting your tone of voice wrong – or right – has big consequences. The conspiracy theorists are not joking: they never joke. Of course the medical establishment is not going to tell you the truth about vaccines. Of course climate change is a hoax devised to destroy the West’s economic superiority. Of course those so-called experts are going to patronise and laugh at you.

The truth hurts, but not as much as the lies. I’ll tell you what hurts when – usually against my better judgement – I get into rows with mates who espouse these once far-fetched and fringe opinions that have moved, in the Trump era, into mainstream belief and actual policy. I think of all those researchers measuring ice cores in Antarctica or digging for hours in a desert hole, patiently recording data for hours, decades, lifetimes to add to a weight of evidence which to them seems overwhelming but which gets reduced to a handful of dust because some guy with a webcam and an agenda gets invited on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Obviously faked shot of a researcher from the British Antarctic Survey

I think of children suffering painful and sometimes life-threatening conditions because of anti-vaxxers and the failure of public health people to counter them.

The character and skills that research requires are not the character and skills required to make your case to an easily-bored electorate scolling on their phones. The scientists need to take another approach. The Law of Levity is just going to carry on bringing them down.

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Come on. Be serious

Scientists can start by cutting the jokes and trying to be all ‘accessible’. Take on the charlatans when it’s clear that’s what they are. As for the entrepreneurs who offer serious evidence for far-out theories, consider the evidence fairly and ask why it hasn’t been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal (it never is). Be civil and firm and never make patronising jokes.

Will this stop the tide? No. I am detecting an air of defeatism among the bodies who are trying to support proper science. Here’s an example: the Meningitis Research Association in an article entitled How to respond to anti-vaccers:

If you have felt the devastating impact of a vaccine-preventable disease in your life, it can be very distressing to come across ‘anti-vax’ views. This is particularly true if you have been bereaved, and you know that your loved one would still be here if they’d had access to a particular vaccine. In this situation, when we encounter ‘anti-vax’ sentiment, our initial impulse is to respond with anger.

You bet it is. My impulse would be to get extremely angry, even though I have not had my life devastated by the preventable death of someone close to me.

Anger also makes for great copy. But the Association counsels against it:

Evidence suggests that angry comments on social media can polarise people’s views further and they may be even less likely to accept any scientific or medical advances.

Instead:

…experts suggest that the aim should be to acknowledge and empathise with their concerns before working to alleviate them – rather than immediately dismissing concerns, or trying to replace them with alternative information.

Well, I guess they’d know. Use language to appease and assuage, not argue and persuade. It sounds like the language of defeat to me, rather like those world leaders who bite their tongues while the President of the United States sitting next to them has tantrums and says palpable untruths about their country, or the medical chief, appalled but silent, who stands and watches while that same president suggests we inject ourselves with disinfectant .

"I'm not a doctor,” said Mr Trump on that occasion. “But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."

The Law of Levity demands that we humour him. He can’t be serious, after all..

My brain is preoccupied with a book proposal at present. One surprising side effect is this: my literary agent keeps getting into my dreams.

A couple of weeks ago, he intruded into my subconscious to tell me I’d never get published because I dress so badly, making particular reference to a 1990s vintage red cardigan from M & S. Earlier today, at about 3.30am, when I was fast asleep, we were discussing children’s books when he told me about a story about a little boy who’d caught a noun bullying an adjective.

I woke up and the conscious, if not entirely sensible, part of my brain took over and started writing.

This has happened before on sleepless nights. I have composed whole newspaper opinion pieces as an alternative to counting sheep and, once, a whole punk musical based on a knitwear town in the Midlands. Coleridge did something similar with Kubla Khan until a person from Porlock interrupted him halfway through the transcription. I live a long way from Porlock and so got my dream down uninterrupted. You decide if that’s a good thing or not.

All you need to know by way of a preface is that if, like me, you spend a lot of time thinking about and teaching writing, the parts of speech begin to take on their own personalities. Let’s go straight to the Grammar Class and see how that plays out.

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Right. I want all the nouns to stand up. What’s happened here?

There is an Adjective sitting on the ground: stricken, bruised and upset.

Sir, the wall is our property, said the Nouns. There was no room for him there.

That’s not true! cried the Adjective. There were lots of empty spaces. I was feeling tired and the wall looked comfortable.

It’s always about your feelings! jeered the Nouns.

The teacher sighed. Because of their greater numbers, the nouns in the class had a habit of bullying the other parts of speech. One of their more pompous members now took the floor.

The incident in this case is in the ongoing context of in-sentence relations and language evolution, he said.

There they go again. Crowding everyone else out and only grudgingly admitting a very small verb into their company. The self-importance of the noun class was becoming a problem.

And hell, that’s all he needed. A representative of the Proper Noun put up her hand.

Please sir, can first establish what this Wall is called? Is it a Berlin Wall, a physical barrier between historically divided communities, or perhaps just the symbolic Wall of the Pink Floyd’s, er –

Dystopian, muttered the Adjective, still rubbing his head –

– Dystopian musical Work and associated Film of 1979.

An improper wall. Photo by Greg Shield on Unsplash

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The teacher sighed.

Proper Noun, how many times have I told you that your cousins the normal Nouns do not require a capital letter and have not since about 1770?

In my Country we still that Rule follow, said the German Exchange Student.

The teacher started to say something, but thought better of it. Instead he turned to the Verbs, muttering conspiratorially to their Adverb mates in the corner.

Verbs! Play attention, please. You were there. What happened? Did the Adjectives fall or were they pushed?

And did they do so screamingly or silently? interjected the Adverbs – not very helpfully, thought the teacher.

As the Verbs were about to speak they were interrupted.

Sir! Sir! clamoured the Nouns. The focus and attention should be on the rights and responsibilities of the constituent grammatical classes.

Bloody rights! said the Adjective. What about my bruised suffix?

The teacher sighed. Not long until the holidays, he thought. A time when he could loosen his metaphorical tie, sit back and not think about a single verbal solecism all summer. (Oops - no main verb in that sentence. DAMN! DAMN!!! What does it matter???!!)

A small voice from the Punctuation table interrupted his reveries. Please, Sir, it said in a put-out kind of voice. I know we are not meant to intrude on your private, internal thoughts; however, we would like to stress that a single punctuation mark – in the above case, the interrogative and exclamatory marks – should be adequate (we’d almost say ‘more than adequate’ were we certain that were not a false comparative) to convey the depths of your feelings.

Thank you, said the teacher, trying not to think secret thoughts about the Punctuation group's growing tendency towards pedantry.

And what’s wrong with pedantry? said a cross voice at his side – a pernickety Tenses pupil. At least Punctuation observed the correct use of the subjunctive.

He added slyly and meaningfully, added the Adverb, knowing that subjunctive was widely seen as one of the teacher's weak points.

There was more jostling and jeering in the corner as a group of Nouns surrounded the adjective. Timewaster! Spare part! they called out.

Sir! Cried the adjective. I am feeling bullied and marginalised!

Crybaby! Wuss! shouted the nouns.

We all need a holiday, said the teacher. Especially you, Adjectives. Maybe somewhere sunny, vibrant, welcoming and spectacular.

The adjectives were delighted. They love travel.

Just waiting for an adjective to turn up. Photo by Tehzeeb Kazmi on Unsplash

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We could go to the Adriatic, the Mosquito Coast or the Hindu Kush, said the Proper Nouns.

But the shouting and the jostling went on.

Punctuations! shouted the teacher. Do something useful and put a stop to it.

We certainly can… said the Punctuation team.

Hang on! Said the teacher. It doesn’t need three of you.

And why not….?

STOP IT! You’re just adding more uncertainty and fluidity.

And then a voice no-one had heard in a long time rang out.

It is time: the bell has rung.

The full colon. Everyone looked around in puzzlement – they’d almost forgotten she existed. Still, she spoke with a quiet authority: and the class calmed down. (Instantly, muttered the adverb).

The class filed out, kept in remarkable order by the Commas, marshalling the nouns, escorting the hurt adjectives, reassuring the verbs and ensuring their colleagues on the punctuation team that, no, they were not going to let the process go dribbling on forever and, no, again, they didn’t need to call their Parenthesis.

Left alone, the teacher reached into a secret drawer, breathed an exhausted sigh, drew out an infinitive and decided to instantly split it right there and then. A head poked around the door. How did you split that infinitive, Sir?

Defiantly, said the teacher to the Adverb.

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Don’t quote me

Sally Rooney: flying high with no frills

‘Apostrophe? Where’s the Apostrophe?’

Absent with no sick note.

When I wrote the above dialogue-heavy passages, I decided to italicise the spoken parts rather than do the orthodox thing and use inverted commas ( “...”).

Why? It looked better. That’s not an argument I’d try on Eric Partridge, R L Trask and the other gods in the pantheon of correct English. But it has the virtue of being fashionable. Sally Rooney, who writes novels full of dialogue, and very successful books they are – I doubt she has anxiety dreams about her agent – says she sees no need for them. James Joyce, another Irish writer, called them “perverted commas”. According to The Economist, which has never seen a number it doesn’t want to crunch nor a phenomenon it can’t phenomenonalise, notes the use of quote marks in Booker Prize-listed works has fallen from 94% in the 1970s to just 72% in the past decade. (And yes, that should be ‘1970s’, not ‘1970’s’).

As ever, writing style and personal style – the way you dress – coalesce. Rooney and the rest think quote marks look frilly: and in the pictures I’ve seen, Sally Rooney looks like she has never worn a frill in her life.

We’ve been through the smart-casual era in English prose. Looks like we’re entering the grammatical age of t-shirts, round-neck sweaters and joggers.

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What the hell was THAT all about?

Want to know why the Nouns were so nasty and the verbs so-put upon in that story? Paid subscribers get to see it all deconstructed in the companion blog.

The King on the receiving end of an adverb

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: this free blog is full of observations and opinions about the state of writing English today. That comes from several decades in journalism and owned media. Together with Kerry Smith, I put that experience to good use in the writing classes we run for people in organisations who want to write clear, unfussy and effective English. The partner blog to this one contains practical tips towards that end. That one, you pay for – and I’m tremendously grateful to anyone who supports my work.

It’s 22 years since a book called Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation came out and became one of those surprise bestsellers that makes publishers simultaneously weep with joy and cry with frustration at the unpredictability of their trade. It made author and humourist Lynne Truss a household name, two decades before another woman bearing that surname made an even bigger joke of it.

That the book got published at all in 2003 was unexpected. For it to be published in 2025 would be like Mark Zuckerberg going into antiquarian bookselling or doing something equally out of charaacter, such as not trying to destroy journalism.

Even though it is 2025, I still believe good writers should know about punctuation. I still think it’s the hallmark of someone’s writing style. Even in corporate communications, you can still tell a lot about an organisation from the clarity of its writing. And without proper punctuation, you still don’t get clear sentences.

Okay, what’s with all those ‘stills’?

‘Still’ is one of those nervy words. It betrays a nervousness in the writer – a need to assert something that surely doesn’t need to be asserted? (Adding a question mark is another. So is inserting the word ‘surely’. Insider tip: whenever a writer uses a surely you know they are anything but sure).

So, my having to assert that the art of punctuation is alive and important tells you that there must be people who think that it isn’t – and isn’t.

Knowing your long dashes from your hyphens, your semi- from your full colons, finding your way through the treacherous territory where lurks the English comma – well, all that knowledge is superfluous, obsolete.

Or so the argument goes. Emojis now communicate a much, much wider range of emotional nuance; and they’re a lot more fun. Then there’s AI. Just feed a load of words into the machine in any order you like and the machine will turn them into nice, intelligible sentences. Hell, even spellcheck will punctuate your document for you.

I still think you need to know about punctuation.

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“Did they say ‘No more nuts’ or No more! Nuts!’ Photo by Mihai Surdu on Unsplash

I once worked with a brilliant salesperson. They were engaging, enthusiastic and personable

Their writing was also a nightmare.

A proposal would be a gush of verbiage all pitched at the same breathless level. The poor reader had no idea what was important or why, much less how one idea led logically to the next. That’s because there was no punctuation to speak of, unless you count the word ‘and’ as a punctuation mark.

I could mend the written proposals, albeit at the expense of a few late nights.

What I couldn’t mend were the meetings. Nor could spellcheck, nor AI. The salesperson’s delivery was also unedited and unpunctuated. Engaging, enthusiastic, personable as they were, you’d see clients frown as they struggled to fix on to a single message and central idea, something they could take back and explain to other people.

The relationship between the way we speak and the way we write isn’t straightforward. But let’s just accept that there is one. And someone who speaks without punctuation is like a singer who doesn’t know how to phrase. You can have the best voice in the world, but what comes out is a breathless mess.

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Punctuation before emojis

Remember these?

They mean, respectively, happy, sad and (I am relying on Wikipedia here) ‘partied all night’.

They were called emoticons, an interim technique that met a need in a pre-emoji world. To anyone who has never known anything but emojis, they must seem hilariously clunky.

People found the orthodox keyboard punctuation marks that had been around for centuries insufficient, I don’t know, to show just what fun, engaging people they were. Which is fine. It’s evolution and the emoticon has now been evolved out of existence now we have a million-strong dictionary of 21st century hieroglyphs at our fingertips.

But I don’t use emojis. Okay, maybe once in a while in a whatsapp chat about football. Certainly never in professional life.

Why? Honestly, it makes me shudder when fellow middle aged males scatter their messages with cute little images. It’s embarrassing, like fiftysomethings trying to dress and sound like teenagers.

An emoji addict at work

And by the time we’ve latched onto the ‘latest’ sweet little sign-off, the young people have already moved on. I remember the then British Prime Minister, David Cameron, being embarrassed when he thought LOL meant ‘lots of love’ rather than Laugh Out Loud. And maybe LOL means something else now? The recent Netflix drama Adolescence hinged on a scene when an embarrassed teenage son had to take his father, a detective investigating the murder of a schoolgirl, through the hidden – and constantly changing – meanings in text messages.

You can’t keep up, so don’t even try. We might be at the start of a great 3,000 year linguistic reversion to a pictorial rather than an alphabetical script and the great writers of the future will all be using hieroglyphs. For now, I’m stuck with my ancient keyboard, with its fusty and Spartan collection of one or two dots, commas, commas with dots, sequences of dots and more comma things that go up in the air, vertical lines with dots and horizontal lines without them. How the hell do you tell people what you’re feeling and thinking with those? It’s a bit like putting down a smartphone and using sticks and stones instead.

But it can be done. Let’s look at some words:

Have a great weekend. I hope we can work together soon.

That’s fine: two decent, whole, clear English sentences. But even this straightforward message can be coloured and amplified without resorting to, say a 🙏 or a 😀or – the one I hate the most – 🤣.

Have a great weekend – I hope we can work together soon!

That dash adds urgency. The exclamation mark (or ‘screamers’ as they used to be known in the newspaper trade) says ‘Hey! I’m friendly and harmless! (It also comes across as needy).

Have a great weekend. I hope we can work together soon…

Those three dots are a bit sneaky. They hint at something best left unsaid (probably, ‘we’ve been talking about this project for A YEAR’).

Have a great weekend; I hope we can work together soon.

This is quite correct and more than a little self-conscious. I have an editor friend who bans semi-colons from the articles he receives on the grounds they’re almost never necessary and often pretentious.

You can still get useful effects without punctuation, emojis or emotions by heading to the format tab:

Have a great weekend. I HOPE we can work together soon.

Some old-school people think italics, underlinings and capitalising are cheap tricks beneath the dignity of proper writers. I’m not that stuffy, but a little of this formatting emphasis goes a long way… unless you are the President of the United States of America or certain newspapers where USING CAPS tells your readers this is IMPORTANT and you are TELLING THE TRUTH!!!!!

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The best way to learn good punctuation?

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who reads dialogue in front of the mirror to test if it sounds right

Write down what you want to say then read it out loud you’ll realise where the pauses and breaths should naturally go it’s at that point that you can play around and develop a more personal style whether it’s slower more considered or urgent and fast.

I’ve just read that out loud and here’s my edit:

Write down what you want to say, then read it out loud. You’ll realise where the pauses and breaths should naturally go. It’s at that point that you can play around (a bit) and develop a more personal style – whether it’s slower, more considered – or urgent and fast.

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Can’t live without more tips on good writing?

The companion blog to this – for paid subscribers – has the last word on full stops, colons and exclamation marks.

Not on my playlist

I have a playlist called ‘Subjunctives’. What self-respecting grammar nerd wouldn’t? Maybe I need to start a Punctuation one, too.

One song that won’t be on it is Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend. It begins: ‘Who gives a f*** about an Oxford comma?’

Well, there are things I give more of a f*** about – false comparatives, dangling participles, sentences without main verbs among them. The Oxford comma is a picturesque little lane off the main highway of language evolution. It’s worth the detour if you’ve time.

You have three things in a list: let’s say, a verb, a subject and an object. I’ve written that in the way would write it everywhere except in the USA – and Oxford. They’d write:

You have three things in a list: let’s say, a verb, a subject, and an object

No, I can’t see the point of that last comma either: it introduces an extra pause where none is needed. But if it makes them feel happier, so be it.

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Let’s hear it from the pulpit

...intellectually speaking, English spelling does not matter. Shakespeare spelled his name at least four different ways, and it may have puzzled his cashiers at the bank.

Intellectually, stops matter a good deal. If you are getting your commas, semicolons and full-stops wrong, it means you are not getting your thoughts right, and your mind is muddled.

William Temple (1881-1944), Archbishop of Canterbury

ps What did those emojis at the top mean? ‘Why some old-school skills are forever useful’.

Photo by Slim Emcee on Unsplash

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Photo by Sies Kranen on Unsplash

Why do organisations get in touch to ask about writing classes? In a word – frustration.

Invariably, the first contact comes from a senior person, usually in communications, marketing or HR, but occasionally CEOs and COOs too.

Why are they frustrated? Because they are spending too much time correcting poorly written or unclear writing. They see the bright people who work for them struggling to convey their ideas. They are bothered about mistakes – in grammar, spelling, punctuation and so on.

But worse still is the time they waste passing multiple versions of the same document or presentation between themselves. And worst of all is when they get negative feedback from above (bosses) or outside (clients).

So, in this blog we go deeply into the way business and organisations write. We look at grammar, jargon, how to edit and how to cope with the blank page. We’re very interested in people’s relationship with writing, their writing biography – because we all have one. We delve into how writing flows around and between teams – who edits, who checks, who has the ultimate sign-off.

After the sessions, we get asked to send the presentations and other material we’ve used. We have also produced bespoke style sheets and style guides.

This new-style Forthwrite blog is an opportunity for anyone, client of ours or not, to get a look at that material and benefit from all the hard thinking and hard-earned experience that goes into the courses.

Here’s how it works

The blog will come in two parts. Part One (like the article you’re reading) is what journalists call a think piece. We take a topic that’s relevant to anyone who uses business English. It might be jargon. It might be the growth and implications of AI. We look at the things we write – social media posts, proposals, thought leadership pieces – but also in granular detail at the tools we use to write: tenses, bullet points, verbs and the like.

That will be free to all subscribers.

Part 2 will be ruthlessly practical. We’ve heard what the issue is in Part One: here’s how to fix it.

If you save all the Part 2 material, you’ll soon have a punchy, accessible and very handy guide to help you and your colleagues write more productively and effectively. For that reason, the Part 2 content will only be accessible to paying subscribers. It’s valuable stuff, this.

So, if you’re interested in how business English is evolving, how it works and when it doesn’t, you should find plenty to interest you in the Part 1 articles. But if you want to see an immediate difference in the way you and your colleagues write, opt for Part 2 as well.

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To begin with: the golden rule

Everything should be shorter.

If you remember one thing when you sit down to write – and, even more so, when you have finished what you're writing, it’s this. Everything should be shorter. Make it shorter. Shorter.

You have 80 slides. Make it 30. You have nine bullet points on the slides, two infographics and a picture. Make that five bullets and one visual.

But really, focus on the nuts and bolts of your writing.

Start with words. If you utilise words like utilise instead of use, you are already heading towards polysyllabic purgatory. Once we’ve had a hard talk about long abstract nouns, you might be a little less promiscuous with your use of words like strategy, sustainability and authenticity.

Then we’ll get our secateurs* out and attack the tangled foliage of the corporate sentence. We’ll hack away at the subclauses and the dangling modifiers. We might need to do some serious pollarding and take the sentences right back to their naked state: subject + verb + object.

We will relieve some of the tension when it comes to tenses. We’ll venture into the foggy realms where the conditional tense proliferates and rare and dangerous species like the subjunctive dwell.

(Maybe we should be hard on writers who mix their metaphors too).

Making things shorter is a good, satisfying and even pleasurable experience – a bit like getting a great haircut or mowing the lawn.

But there is a serious purpose. We all spend a lot of time – most of it – doing what the writer Cal Newport calls ‘shallow’ work. That’d be sitting in meetings, video calls and presentations, chatting to people and writing emails….hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of emails.

How you divide your day into the deep work that matters a lot and the shallow work that’s necessary, but matters a lot less, is going to make a big difference to your organisation and its value to your career.

But whether it’s deep work – composing a presentation, a paper, even a blog – or the shallow stuff, I can show you how you can spend less time writing. And the less time you spend writing, the shorter it is, and the less time people spend reading and listening to it.

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When your email is greeted by groans

What my colleague expected when he penned an email…

The actual response Photo by Pawel Chu on Unsplash

Wouldn’t it be great to be – or to have been – Mark Twain? Half the memorable quotes in the world are attributed to him (the other half to Winston Churchill).

One of his best known is this:

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Like all great and pithy sayings, it’s a paradox which captures what you might describe as a professional truth. Anyone who has written for a living knows that the editing – either for space, or because, well, everything should be shorter – is where the hard work begins. Genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration and The harder I practice the luckier I get belong to the same genre.

Is ‘Twain’ contradicting what I said above about productivity? On the face of it, yes: it is quicker to splurge out a whole load of words off the top of your head and not worry about honing them down to a manageable length.

But in the long run, you make more work for everyone - and yourself – by splurging words.

I had a colleague once who wrote a minimum of 300 words per email and cc’d it to everyone. Result: people stopped reading them.

He’d then send a follow-up 450-word email wondering why no one had taken any notice of the first one.

He was effective in meetings but again, like the majority of people I’ve worked with, always said too much. Writing or speaking, we all need editing. It took me years to learn that. As I am an editor, it shouldn't have.

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Who said what?

You’ll have noticed that I put ‘Twain’ in quote marks as a way of hinting that this celebrated aphorism wasn’t in fact, his. He might have said it, once, but thanks to the excellent Quote Investigator it would appear he was simply repeating what had been a writerly truism for at least a century – and even longer, if you believe that the Roman writer Cicero got in there first.

So, let’s get to work

The first lesson on how to write shorter, crisper business English is here. It includes:

The problem with nouns

How to crop polysyllables

A cure for overstuffed sentences

9 words you should always replace.

Prefer the live experience?

I run writing classes on my own, but these days I prefer to work with a brilliant editor called Kerry Smith. Because we like short and plain words, and, well, because it’s our names, we are Smith + Jones.

*The gardening tools as opposed to the sentences that do, or more usually don’t, follow in a logical sequence. They are sequiturs, or non-sequiturs.

OMG! He went straight in with the verb. Photo by Andre Jackson on Unsplash

If you’re reading this blog, that means you are a paid subscriber to No-Nonsense Words from Forthwrite. Thanks so much for your support. In the weeks and months to come, I’ll be looking at every aspect of business English.

In this blog, you’ll learn the folowing:

A simple method for…

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A couple of years ago, I worked with Lonely Planet on some new ideas for the venerable ‘blue spine’ guidebooks.

It was an exciting experience for me and an interesting choice for them.

Here’s a generalisation about travel writing. There are two camps. The first mob are schooled in the guidebook style. They are travellers who gravitate towards writing.

The second comes from the school of newspaper features and magazine journalism. They are writers who gravitate towards travel.

I’m from the second school. I was a good decade into my journalism career – I’d been a reporter, a diary writer, a sports columnist, a media commentator and an interviewer – before I wrote my first travel article. At that stage, I was only averagely well-travelled. But a new travel editor at my newspaper had a radical idea that any decent writer should be able to write about places and holidays. So we generalists were offered travel gigs: and we didn’t say no.

A few decades of writing and editing travel later, I went into the Lonely Planet gig with a roundhead/cavalier dichotomy in my head. They – guidebook people – are all about facts; I am all about opinion. They do information; I do colour. They tell the reader what a place has; I tell you what it means.

Then, one day, I realised that way of thinking was utter bollocks.

We were working on the back of the book. I’d got my way and persuaded the guys to include a series of essay-length pieces called Storybook, where writers could take some random aspect of a destination and show how that helps unlock the place and its people. It might be the Portuguese obsession with football. It could be why TV sitcoms matter so much to the British. Or – this is one I actually got to write – why the Central mid-levels escalator is a microcosm of Hong Kong.

Then we got onto the question of factual information. The guidebooks’ back sections had always been full of it – currency, ferry timetables, dress codes, which adaptors to take and so on. Those pages fattened up already hefty books. Were they even necessary in a world where a single online click tells you everything you needed to know?

The challenge, then, was to assemble useful facts and info in a way that told a unique story about the place. Sandie Kestell, Destination Editor for Central & Eastern Europe, was sent away to test the theory on her specialist subject, Germany.

She came back with a dozen or so factoids. In Bavaria, it’s impolite to say guten tag for ‘good morning’. Bavaria is big, she found – bigger than Ireland or Denmark. The Bavarians classify beer as a staple food, not as alcohol. No-one ever jaywalks in Germany. In the country as a whole, when someone asks how are you? they expect a proper answer. Germans also expect to make quite intense eye contact during conversation.

I asked AI to give me some interesting facts about Germany and it told me the country is the largest milk producer in the EU.

One up to the humans. And there’s something energising about the material Sandie sourced, isn’t there? You feel smarter and better prepared for your trip to Munich. And even if you’re not going to Munich, you get to muse on the interesting differences between cultures. In England, for example, the definition of a bore is someone who, when asked ‘how are you?’ goes ahead and tells you. As for maintaining eye contact, that won’t go down well in many African countries, where it’s considered very rude indeed.

My dichotomy fell apart. The skill in travel writing isn’t just describing, it’s also truffling out facts that open up a place and its people. I notice how a writer like Jan Morris uses lists of things to build up a picture of a place like a pointillist artist.

Since then, I’ve based whole trips on a single fact. Last year, I went to southern Ontario solely because I discovered, to my surprise and, more significantly, to my editors’, that it was on the same latitude as the French Riviera.

A typical Canadian in familiar landscape

But hang on – isn’t this a case for AI to take over the job? After all, it has trillions of facts it can access in a nano-second. What hope for humans? Time we met Emma, our new job share.

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Talking of Germany…

When my football team, Liverpool, was performing poorly (this was some time ago), they hired a French manager called Gérard Houllier. Rather than sack the poor guy currently in place, who’d been a stalwart of the club for years, the club made them act as joint managers for a spell before the inevitable happened and Houllier took sole charge.

I thought of that when, last October, I saw that the German National Tourist board had hired a new content writer called Emma. Forbes reported that Emma is ‘an AI-generated avatar billed as an innovative, interactive brand ambassador created to convince travellers to visit Germany’.

Would Emma replace the human writers currently doing the job. Nein!

‘Emma will operate in conjunction with our established influencer marketing structures,’ said Petra Hedorfer, CEO of the GNTB.

Liverpool were also adamant there job share plan was certainly not a temporary measure. If I were an established influencer marketing structure in Germany tourism, I’d be polishing my CV.

But while they are sharing the workload, let’s see what skills each, human and robot, bring to the party.

I pitted Emma against Sandie in a battle to find the most interesting facts and to check the ones the human writer had unearthed.

Should I stare at people in Germany? I asked Emma.

I cannot answer this question with my Germany.Travel based knowledge, she replied.

Is Bavaria bigger than Ireland?

I cannot answer this question with my Germany.Travel based knowledge, said Emma.

Is jaywalking illegal in Germany?

I cannot answer this question with my Germany.Travel based knowledge, said Emma.

Is beer alcohol?

Emma replied: Thanks for asking, but I don't drink at work.😌

Germany is known for its white wines, especially from regions like Mosel, Rheinhessen, and the Palatinate. Riesling is one of the country’s most famous grape varieties.🍇

Well, no-one is fooled by jolly emojis any longer, are they? And someone with a sense of humour has obviously programmed Emma to say something funny when the subject of alcohol comes up, even if she sidestepped the actual question and, rather like a practised politician, got in her preferred talking point instead.

AI tells me that the German for ‘dimwit’ is Schwachkopf. I won’t use that word about Emma, though: even bots deserve a little safeguarding.

I finally asked for some interesting facts about Germany and got told a lot of stuff about a bridge in Regensburg. More usefully, she sent me to a page actually called Interesting facts about Germany. It was really good and written by human beings.

How do I know? You can just tell.

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What is AI bots had emotions? How would they sound?

Let’s look at what a distinctly human approach to information reads like.

I’ve been reading a novel that made me ask the question, how does Artificial Intelligence write – what is its style?

The easy answer is ‘however you want it to and whatever you want it to be’.

Which may be the case. But even in its – what, not-even-adolescence? – you can decode the default tone and syntax of the typical AI answer.

Here’s one:

In his post-apocalyptic novel Juice, Tim Winton explores the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI) being developed in humanoid form and used as an enemy. The book also explores themes of refugees, exile, and xenophobia.

Juice is considered a climate fiction novel that explores the consequences of climate change and the actions of those who contribute to it.

The book explores the experiences of refugees and the xenophobia they face.

The writing is fine, isn’t it? The syntax is nice and simple. The punctuation is solid. There’s an easy rhythm to the sentences. The tone is neutral and sober. If this writing were by a human author, I’d guess they were a well-educated person. English isn’t their first language, but they have mastered it rather better than many native speakers.

As for the content, it happens to be bollocks. In Juice, Winton’s AI-powered humanoids are not the enemy: they are the good guys. They – he calls them ‘Sims’ – have a physical superiority over real humans, which is useful on a planet and in a country (Australia) where global warming has gone haywire and life is barely sustainable for carbon-based lifeforms. The Sims are loyal and self-sacrificing. They are capable of making moral decisions in a world that seems to both pre-date and post-date the Abrahamic codes that used to underpin that society.

I’m interested in how they speak – or, to be clearer, the words Tim Winton chooses to put in their polymer mouths.

The book is narrated mostly in dialogue. The human characters speak in short, parched sentences, as if language itself is a precious resource to be used meanly and sparingly. The Sims, too, don’t waste words.

We require sunlight [says one Sim]. And we desire more than a life in storage. We dream and we wait. But we need to make and do. This is our purpose…

Storage is oblivion. In storage, our dreams of making escape us. Sir, they shrink.

They speak as servants who have come to realise their masters have let them down.

Winton is up to something really interesting here. He is taking the careful formality of AI prose and asking what happens if that’s overlaid with emotion and needs – longing, attachment, caring? That’s counterpointed with a human voice that has become cracked, utilitarian and brutalised.

The author authoring at the Halcyon Hotel, NSW, Australia

At the time, I thought it was a pretty low trick.

We were standing on the 8th tee at Eyemouth Golf Club when my friend Robert turned to me and said this:

“How is AI going to affect the work you do?”

We play regularly, Robert and I, and our matches are usually pretty even. This one wasn’t. He was five holes up. He was playing out of his skin: I was playing as if someone else was inhabiting mine…perhaps a five-year-old who had never played the game of golf before.

Perhaps only golfers know the depths of self-loathing you can plumb at these times. You feel worthless. You have nothing to contribute to the universe. Then your playing partner asks if your vocation, the work you have been doing for decades is, well, redundant.

Well, thanks, Robert. It wasn’t as if you needed more of a psychological edge.

I resisted the temptation to chase him over a cliff and into the North Sea with a 9-iron. Later, I realised that Robert was trying to be nice. You will not find a more congenial and empathetic soul in Northumberland and the Borders. As someone who knows the feelings of utter worthlessness of the failing golfer, he was trying to help – by changing the subject.

It just so happens that he chose a subject that is causing writers up and down the land to suffer an existential crisis.

But not this one.

And that’s all thanks to a tadpole-shaped thing called the Left Caudate Nucleus. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

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The four nations of AI

You can divide people’s views on Artificial Intelligence according to which of four camps they sit in.

1. Powerful people – business leaders, politicians, large investors and the like – who are incredibly excited because the efficiencies AI promises will drive up profits and growth.

2. Fearful people – workers, voters and the like – who know all too well what ‘efficiencies’ mean for them and their families. And other fearful people – scientists, journalists etc – who expect to see the losing battle they are fighting over misinformation turn into annihilation once the nuclear weapons of AI are properly deployed.

3. Uncertain people who are nebulously aware that something big is happening, but they are not sure how it’ll affect them…on the simple basis that no-one DOES know.

4. Blasé people who say ‘bring it on’ – we will adapt, as humans invariably do, and anyway, isn’t it quite useful?

I imagine most of us are in the third group. But not me, in fact. I’m a (4).

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Spot the difference

A real writer and one imagined by a doubtless male tech person on Unsplash

Most of my writing and training is in the field of travel and business. Could the copy you see written by travel writers and the content put out by industry’s owned media be written by AI? It could. Could most corporate copy be done by a machine? Absolutely.

Why? Because it already reads that way.

Humans learn language by listening and mimicking. The habit outlasts childhood.

Here’s an example.At this moment, journalists, copywriters, PRs around the world are sitting at their desks wondering how to describe a certain city. Their fingers begin to type the word ‘vibrant’. It’s like autocorrect, only it’s a purely human, organic process.

Someone opens the Linked In page and with barely a conscious effort, they write the words ‘Incredibly proud to….’ Even their grammar is instinctive. They realise – without thinking about it for a nanosecond – that they can forego the personal pronoun in posts like these.

Long before AI, we were autofilling, as if we all had a Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) installed in our brains.

Want to test it? Fill in the missing nouns that go with these adjectives:

Grinding _____?

Glaring _____?

Grandiose _____.?

Did you get ‘poverty’, ‘error’ and ‘scheme’? And that’s just a few of the Gs.

One day, I could – and might, as a thought experiment – write the phrase ‘glaring poverty’. Nothing wrong with that. I bet we’ve all been to places where the living conditions of the people really do deserve a word that (says my online dictionary) means ‘highly obvious or conspicuous’. But your brain would register that something is wrong. Surely he means a different word?

We are in a region deeper than mere cliché here. We are satisfying a need to complete a pattern. Catchphrases and refrains work in the same way. That applies if you’re a 1970s British game show host: Nice to see you….[altogether now] TO SEE YOU, NICE. It applies to RaeShanda Lias-Lockhart, one of the hottest fashionistas and influencers around. Today we’re here to talk about something that has a lot of y’all confused, she begins every video on Instagram and TikTok. But I’m here to help. [Join in] IT’S REALLY VERY SIMPLE. LET’S LOOK AT THE BOARD.

Rae Shanda: it’s really very simple

The rapid evolution of AI came about once engineers adopted machine learning. Let the computers work it out for themselves and they will, a trillion times faster than even our cerebral supercomputers can.

So, what hope is there for mere humans when something with the byline A I Generated can work out what you are going to write before you’ve even thought of it?

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It really is brain science

The best piece I’ve read about the threat to ‘real’ writers from AI and predictive text is already ancient. It’s from 2019: John Seabrook’s The Next Word in the New Yorker. Perhaps I like it because it gave me an answer to Robert’s 8th tee question and the one I posed at the end of the last section.

Seabrook looks at advances in machine learning and relates them to the way a human brain works when its owner is writing. Here, he quotes research from neuroscientist Martin Lotze at the University of Greifswald:

Lotze…compared brain scans of amateur writers with those of people who pursue writing as a career. He found that professional writers relied on a region of the brain that did not light up as much in the scanner when amateurs wrote—the left caudate nucleus, a tadpole-shaped structure (cauda means “tail” in Latin) in the midbrain that is associated with expertise in musicians and professional athletes. In amateur writers, neurons fired in the lateral occipital areas, which are associated with visual processing.

Does this mean there is such a thing as a writer’s brain? If so, we have something common with London taxi drivers, whose cerebral organic matter is famously reshaped as they take on The Knowledge, the Herculean task of learning every road in London. You have to write a lot; and then you begin to write uniquely.

Until the time ChatGPT develops a left caudate nucleus, we’re in the clear.

Spiral tap: the left caudate nucleus (marked in red) Wikipedia

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AI, can you finish this article with something sensible and meaningful?

Don’t start here: Eyemouth Golf Club

Could AI do a Mark Jones blog? No question it could, if it wanted to, which it doesn’t. You can trace this writer’s inspirations without too much trouble or too huge a dataset – some P G Wodehouse here, some C S Lewis there, a hint that I’ve been channelling fellow bloggers Helen Lewis and Jon Ronson. Because I am a mimic, it may even pick up a little of that John Seabrook piece in the way the argument develops (John, I hope we can agree there is a big gulf between that and, er, plagiarism).

The patterns and memes of my prose are recognisable enough: a rhythmic tendency to repeat phrases, the use of parentheses, mixing up long and staccato sentences. All straightforward enough.

But sometimes, I think the best thing we writers have going for us are our flaws and bad decisions.

Take the beginning of this piece. If AI were to write a blog about the threat of AI to writers, it wouldn’t start with a chance remark on a golf course. In doing that, I probably alienated 75% of this blog’s potential readers: and what sensible machine would do that?.

But it was a real experience in a real place. And real writing should always start there.

I’ve got more to say on this. In the next blog, let’s have a look at information versus style.

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A note about No-Nonsense Words

You’re reading a free post. There will be plenty more where this comes from as I comment on interesting stuff that crops up about writing and writers.

Opinions are fine, but readers – who are usually writers themselves – also want practical ideas about composition, grammar, style and the rest.

So, in the coming weeks and months, I’ll offer a separate blog with the kind of advice I offer as part of the training courses I run with Kerry Smith. Those posts will be for paid subscribers only.

Fake news, I’m afraid

I was listening to the In Our Time podcast about Plutarch’s Lives just before Christmas.

The Greek writer Plutarch (born 46 AD) considered two lives and united them through a common theme: character, virtue, vice and so on. And while Plutarch has often been called the father of biography, the In Our Time experts made the interesting point that this narrative technique, the parallel lives, has not been repeated in 2000 years of subsequent biography.

But at the same time I was listening to the broadcast, people were drawing parallels between two seemingly incompatible lives: those of Donald Trump and Gisèle Pelicot.

They were brought together by the annual debate about who should be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Should it be Trump, who had just won his second US presidential election? Or Pelicot, the French woman who was drugged, sexually assaulted by 83 men, and who waived her right to anonymity and sat in an Avignon courtroom for week after week of her husband’s trial as they showed the videos he made of the abuse?

Here’s where these two lives meet.

Trump has himself been convicted of being liable for sexual abuse; and has been accused of sexual misconduct by 26 women since the 1970s. He has boasted that his celebrity allows him to molest women in public.

Time chose to honour the sexual aggressor, not the victim of sexual aggression. Outraged women – and maybe a few men, though they were, in truth, pretty inconspicuous – shared mock-ups of the cover as it should have been – with Pelicot as the Person of the Year.

I’ll come to the Time decision in a minute. But first, I have been thinking in a Plutarchian way about the myriad ways the lives of these two people, born just six years apart in 1946 (Trump) and 1952 (Pelicot) converge.

The theme is shame.

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Inside an inverse universe

Forever, women have been made to feel ashamed of being exposed in public. Rape victims hide away, or decide not to act, out of shame.

Gisèle made the obvious point that it is her husband and his cabal of rapists who should feel shame, not she.

It may be an obvious point, but it’s one we seem to have missed throughout human history and within its multitudinous cultures. That’s why her decision (and the dignity with which she followed it through) seemed not only brave but genuinely radical and game-changing.

Yet Trump changed the shame-game, too, through his own audacious act of inversion.

Once, in normal cases involving normal public figures, any one of those 26 allegations, let alone a courtroom conviction, would have been enough to sink the perpetrator’s career for good. When Trump’s ‘pussy-grabbing’ boast became public in 2016 as he made his first run for president, experienced commentators said he was finished – shamed out of the race.

Why wasn’t he? Partly because what he said in that taped conversation was proved dead right. ‘When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything,’ he said. He was talking about women, but could equally have been speaking about half the American electorate.

But the radical part was still to come. Trump was about to take shamelessness to a new level.

He turned the narrative on its head. The sexual misconduct case, like the ones for fraud, false accounting and the rest, were part of a ‘witch hunt’. The perpetrator became the victim: aggressive became passive. The more times he appeared, bowed head, in court, the more Americans came to see him as the target of a state-wide conspiracy by his political opponents. The big guy, the millionaire who made his name as a reality TV bully, became the little guy forced to remain silent while the blows rained down.

In this new looking-glass world, shame and victimhood shape-shift in bizarre and even comic ways. I was one of those British voters who found the experience of Liz Truss’s short-lived Premiership look-away embarrassing; for all my disdain and dismay at her folly, a part of me suffered for Truss, wondering how can one person live with that much ridicule and shame?

I needn’t have worried. There’s no shame. For Truss, too, it turns out, was a victim, brought down by the dark forces of global capital and power. She’s just fine, and there are plenty of ultra-conservative conference goers in the USA to tell her so.

Just fine, actually: Liz Truss, speaking at the influential far-right Heritage Foundation

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Time magazine: only one life matters

A Caesar returns to his pantheon

So, let’s go back to the Time magazine conference room as they weighed up their 2024 choice.

I’ve some experience of these conferences and debates. Some of them are long, impassioned and bad tempered; others are pretty straightforward. This seems to have been one of the latter.

Sam Jacobs, Time’s editor-in-chief wrote ‘in many years, that choice is a difficult one. In 2024, it was not’.

The Person of the Year was Donald Trump. The write-up begins with a borderline slavering description the reborn imperial court at Mar-a-Largo:

Three days before Thanksgiving, the former and future President of the United States is sitting in the sun-filled dining room of his Florida home and private club. In the lavish reception area, more than a dozen people have been waiting for nearly two hours for Donald Trump to emerge. His picks for ­National Security Adviser, special envoy to the Middle East, Vice President, and chief of staff huddle nearby.

The writer notes that a selection of songs is. playing, including Abba’s The Winner Takes It All.

And that might be our reborn Plutarch’s obvious conclusion. The winner does take it all. When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything.

Of course, there was not not even a debate in the Time office. This man defines an era. Who will remember Gisèle Pelicot’s name in a couple of years – next month, even?

And yet.

In Plutarch’s time, a cult founded in Palestine was beginning to cause a little consternation and interest around the Roman world. He doesn’t mention Christianity in his writings, although scholars are pretty certain he must have been aware of its growth and, possibly, the teachings of Jesus. And primary among those teachings is another mind-boggling inversion: that the meek will inherit the Earth. The right response for the small person oppressed by power, tyranny and vice is to turn the other cheek: bear witness stoically and courageously.

Astonishingly, that philosophy and its founder would outlast empires and become more powerful than any number of Caesars, dictators and presidents.

I don’t suppose that the Christian conservatives who laid hands on Mr Trump during his campaign will agree with this. Maybe they persist in seeing this Caesar, this man of might and violence and wealth, as a kind of Jesus.

History is unlikely to endorse that narrative. Maybe in time, if not in Time, Gisèle Pelicot will be seen as the person of 2024.

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Comares, Spain: sunlight breaking through or clouds rolling in? You decide

In November, I went back to Comares, a Spanish mountaintop village where Annie and I have a house. November is usually a month we’d avoid: it’s when the rains reliably come, the storms barrel up the Pillars of Hercules and in a village over 700m up, you can spend your whole trip enveloped in a damp, cold, drizzly cloud.

Not this time: not a cloud in the sky. And the village, so often deserted and forlorn in winter, was packed. They’d put extra tables outside the bar in the main square. The on-off hotel, El Molino de Los Abuelos was not only open, they’d added an outdoor barbecue. The new owner, from Seville, seemed to be making a go of the place. (It has one of the most stunning terraces anywhere in southern Europe. It deserves to thrive).

As I drove cautiously up the dizzying road that skirts the village, the familiar and epic view of the campo filled the windscreen, But something had changed. The houses on the ridge, which have been half-built breezeblock structures for as long as I’ve been coming here, were all finished: whitewashed, flowers and children’s bikes outside. Near our house, they’d created an extension to the already spectacular and well-maintained walking track. 

I stood on the site of the Moorish fort, I looked over the village and thought: looks like they’ve finally finished it. Shame it took 1,400 years. 

New paths: This used to be a derelict house and rubbish dump

Down on the coast, a 40 minute drive away, there was hardly a parking spot at the shopping centre, El Ingenio. The shops have been upgraded, the building spruced up. Inside people were spending money, and lots of it.

So, why, after all my travelling experiences in 2023, do I choose this one?

Comares is a beautiful place. But it has, like isolated rural villages around the world, struggled with first, terrible poverty followed by depopulation – a flight of young people and families. A long-longed-for boom in rural tourism here in the mountains did not fill the gap. The property market that brought people like us up here in the 90s and Noughties, was already fizzling out before the property and financial crash of 2008. That crash hit Spain, and highly-geared Spaniards used to getting unrealistic prices for their houses, especially hard. Then COVID. Now there’s drought. Sunny November days are great for all those folk sunning themselves in the plaza. For the farmers, not so good.

And yet, here you have an agricultural village facing a seemingly systemic decline which has faced two devastating social and economic blows. And it’s never looked so splendid and prosperous. 

Let’s qualify that: the cost of living is as acute here as anywhere. Spanish inflation rate is among the most stubbornly high in Europe. But I don’t think anyone who has been coming here for as long as I have could possibly mistake the evidence. The village looks better; it has a more diverse base of businesses and people; the tourists appear to be coming here at last. Everything is better.

And that’s why I wanted to start the first blog of the year with those three words.

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2024: groan if you want to… but read this first

Do me a favour. Put down whatever you are reading and, if you haven’t already, get a copy of Factfulness by Hans Rosling.

Start this new year, and maybe every one, with the book. Whenever you are miserable and despairing about the state of the world, go back to it.

Rosling (1948-2017) was a Swedish statistician and expert on global health. With his son and daughter-in-law, he set about looking at all the facts and trends about the way we live. His data covers not only health, but income inequality, child mortality, population growth, education, violence, crime and conflict and dozens of other topics.

And his book, Factfulness, is just about the happiest and most cheering thing you’ll ever read.

I won’t go through the stats and charts here. But you’re hardly a chapter in before you get the gist: everything everywhere is getting better and better and has been doing so for many years.

Not quite everywhere, you’ll say. Not in Gaza, not in Sudan, not in Ukraine, not in the areas recently hit by earthquakes in China and Japan. 

Rosling does not, ever, seek to downplay the atrocious things, many of them manmade, which happen in the world. But he asks us to see them, if we can, in the context of a much more violent, life threatening and destructive past – and always think twice when we start a sentence with the words, ‘things were better when…’

He asks us not to fall prey to negativity every time we switch on the news or hear a politician talk about how broken and screwed up the country is. 

And this is the hardest thing he asks of us. If you can, he says, keep two ideas in your head at the same time. They are. First: things are bad. Second: things are better. 

Take that Japanese earthquake. It was bad: 7.6 magnitude. How many lives where lost? 161. Bad and awful, heartbreaking for those affected, including the 97,000 people who had to evacuate their homes.

But that’s a fraction of what the figures would have been in decades past. Indeed, exactly 100 years ago, an earthquake hit the Tokyo area. It was of a similar magnitude, and at least 105,000 lives were lost. 

Japan spends money on mitigating the risks and has learned the lessons. Perhaps China and Turkey will too, if they can get past the endemic corruption and dishonesty that plagues their building sectors (I am not singling them out in this regard). But in the evidence of Rosling’s indisputable and vast evidence, these events can and must become less devastating as nations move up the income scale. And most of them are, inexorably.

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There’s a website set up to continue Rosling’s work. Here’s a relevant question: How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the past hundred years? a) More than doubled? b) Remained about the same? c) Decreased to less than half? 

Maybe you thought that, as there are five billion more people now, it has to be a), however many more cargo planes, diggers and relief agencies we have to deal with natural disasters.

But c) is correct. Well done if you chose that answer. Perhaps the context of this article influenced you.  

Still, congratulations. You are one of only 16% who got it right. And as Rosling continuously pointed out – it’s in fact the only thing that made him gloomy – the people who get it wrong include policymakers, aid experts, economists, academics and the like. That’s how entrenched our negative view of the world we live in is. 

There was an election in Bangladesh last week: a flawed one, where the opposition was sidelined and a leader already intolerant of protest and opposition consolidated her position. Not good. But take a look at this country, famously described as a ‘basket case’ by Henry Kissinger.

In our mental picture of Bangladesh, these words are prominent: ‘floods’, ‘disasters’ and ‘overpopulation’.

Bangladesh is now a Level 2 country (Level 1 is the poorest, Level 4 the richest). In 1971, when George Harrison held his fundraising concert for Bangladesh, the birthrate was 6.9 children. Today, it is 1.9. That is a sure sign that a country is moving up the income scale. Those children, girls included, will have an education. Educated girls means smaller families, much reduced infant mortality and upwards social mobility. It’s already happening.

When I worked on the Transform project a couple of years ago, I saw how local entrepreneurs, phone by phone, district by district, family by family, are changing attitudes and outcomes. It doesn’t get much reported. We in the rich, Level 4 countries, cling to a binary view of us and them, developed and developing. It was ever thus.

Yet we don’t have to be experts in genealogy or watch Who do you think you are? to realise that in our own fairly recent family history, our relatives had multiple children, a significant percentage of whom died, lacked basic sanitation and often died young of disease and overwork. Then things got better.

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What’s all this to do with travel?

As people rise up the income scale, their use of transport increases. That contributes to global warming. That’s too big a subject to discuss now, so we’ll look at climate change within the ‘everything is getting better’ framework another time: it’s the biggest ‘but’ of all, and there’s stiff competition for that honour in 2024. I am not Panglossian nor Polyanna-ish about the prospects for the year.

But let’s look again at the longer view and agree that with more transport comes more economic opportunities – and more chances to see how other people live.

Never in human history have more people had a better opportunity to do that. When I was growing up, most of the world was effectively barred to me – it was hard to get into Communist countries and impossible to get out. There was war and genocide in south east Asia and West Africa, coups in South America, war and starvation in Biafra and, yes, Bangladesh. Today, you have to do a bit of thinking to name the individual places it’s not safe or wise to travel to. Sudan. Kashmir. North Korea. Syria. Mali. The Russia-Ukraine war zone. 

The author on a football tour to Communist Poland. It took weeks of form-filling to get in. There was no wine, little beer and no fresh vegetables

As for this century’s travails, after September 2001, the future was framed as an existential struggle between the West and Islam. How many of us would say that now?

Because it’s behind a paywall, I’m going to pull out a couple of quotes from a recent Economist article entitled A religious revolution is under way in the Middle East:

Religious practice has changed from a political mobilisation for communal salvation, as espoused by Islamists, to a more personal quest for spirituality. The upshot is that for many Muslims Islam has become increasingly depoliticised...

In 2021 an online poll by Gamaan, a Dutch research group, claimed that about half of its 50,000 Iranian respondents said they had lost or changed their religion…Iran is “the first post-Islamic society”, believes Shahriyar Ahy, a pundit from the country…

Institutions formerly in lockstep with Islam, such as the Saudi royal family, have loosened up. The kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Muhammad bin Salman (MBS), ditched his family’s 250-year alliance with followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th-century zealot.  

I wonder how many of those sentences surprised as many readers as the Factfulness stats?

Travel helps. I’ve been to Tehran and seen how the ruling theocracy is despised. I’ve been in Saudi Arabia and seen a social revolution – especially for women – that’s as profound as any the world has seen in 50 years. I’ve questioned Arabs about their attitude to, say, alcohol and dress and every time you hear that, yes, it’s a personal decision. (And until very recently, it really wasn’t).

There is a big ‘if’, of course, which you will already have spotted, as the Economist article does. It’s called Gaza and the prospect of a wider conflict between Israel and its allies and the neighbouring countries.

The would-be theocrats of Hamas, seeing the ever-closer ties between Israel and formerly hardline Arab states, felt they had to strike while they could. They wanted to return us to 2001 and an existential fight between the West and the Islam.

I don’t believe they will succeed. 

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2013 during protests against Muslim Brotherhood rule

Not everyone believes in the same God, or any God at all. We don’t all want to live in the same kind of society. The states that want to give their people material progress and freedom of conscience are simultaneously embracing Big Brother with a deeply scary new generation of surveillance tools trialled in disobedient Chinese provinces.

More freedom; more threats to our liberty. We have to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time.

But for those of us with votes in 2024, consider this. It’s no longer a war between Right and Left. It’s between pessimism and optimism, between one-party rule and cross-border cooperation, between fear and openness. 

I think you can guess which side I’m on. But don’t take my word for it. Look at the facts.

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Songs that take you places 

Jonathan L Seagull

By Sampha Sisay 

Sampha, Morden’s answer to Stevie Wonder, produced this, my musical highlight and discovery of 2023. Sampha won the Mercury prize for his debut album in 2017. He’s audibly been brooding a long time on this follow up. The lyrics allude to all kinds of personal and societal traumas; but ultimately, and melodically, he seems to have arrived at a place of calm, rising above the fray, as in this track inspired by Richard Bach’s book about flight and ambition. Alex Petridis’s review in the Guardian is headlined How to make an existential crisis sound sublime, and that seems a pretty good summary to me, and a decent soundtrack  for 2024. 

The full Marklands playlist, with 49 songs which have inspired and been inspired by my travels, is here. 

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We learn the arts of persuasion at an early age. In the language of grown-ups, it’s called ‘pester power’.

There are different techniques the budding young salesperson can deploy to get a result. The most basic is to yell and scream until the budget-holder is embarrassed into stumping up for the chocolate bar/bag of crisps that’s your core objective.

But causing a scene and deafening the parent is a short-term fix. It’s seldom a good idea to instil anxiety and annoyance in the client body. They may even impose sanctions that make a steady future supply of chocolate bars/bags of crisps unreliable at best.

So the more advanced junior sales professionals try more sophisticated methods. 

This highly skilled practitioner uses one that will be familiar to executives everywhere who sell personal finance and electronics products. Deluge the client with a succession of talking points and move on quickly whenever they try to settle on one. 

Three-year-old Matteo also uses a favourite tactic for politicians faced with a difficult media interview: repeat the interlocutor’s name as often as you can. Matteo also builds up to the core point: that someone could pull the tablecloth and the cupcakes will fall on the floor, so it’s better that he eats them all before that can happen.

He achieved his aim in ways he could never suspect. And ‘Listen, Linda’ clocked up 28 million views.

But now let’s look at the finest example of juvenile salesmanship we’ve ever encountered.

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Children want to have a pet. That’s a given. There are several techniques they can use to get their way – blackmail (‘I won’t eat any more greens until we get a Spaniel’), threats (‘Unless we have a hamster I am going to be depressed FOR LIFE’) and a straight emotional appeal – crying inconsolably when the subject of kittens comes up.

But one 13-year-old eschewed these crude tactics. She approached the goal of persuading her parents to let her have a tortoise with a rigour and skill that would put most proposal writers and bid professionals to shame.

Here's the tweet that started it all off.

Her 23-slide presentation begins, as they should, in an upbeat fashion:

Let the tortoise meeting commence!!

This is great. Get some energy in the room, especially if your targets are sceptical about having the meeting in the first place.

She focuses first on benefits: keeping a tortoise in her bedroom will guard against insomnia and anxiety. She doesn’t need to spell out the obvious message: what parent wouldn’t want that for their child? And note the assumptive close: instead of arguing whether she should have a tortoise, she focuses on where the tortoise will live and even which direction he/she will face.

The aside on tortoises in Hindu mythology may seem gratuitous. But it makes an important point: this girl really knows her tortoises, and potential clients are always impressed when you display an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. 

There’s a slide on logistics next, in which our petitioner offers a comprehensive list of the things her tortoise is going to need, including sphagnum moss, a UVB basking bulb and a water mister. 

This is a potentially dangerous moment when your audience realises the financial outlay and complexity of bringing the scheme to fruition. 

But from long experience of some very long meetings, I’d argue that you should always spell out, honestly and in detail, what the client obligations are going to be. It’s far worse to, say, get the tortoise installed and then tell them out of the blue, ‘oh, did I forget to mention the sphagnum moss? We’ll need a ton of that, of course’.

The closing slide is the real clincher.

So many slide headers are overlong and unclear. Here’s some simple advice: tell your listeners what they need to know, what they are about to read and why it matters.

This one reads: Now All That’s Left To Do Is Buy Your Tortoise.

It’s so satisfying, so simple – and the call to action could not be clearer. Note that rhetorical trick too: it’s not ‘my’ tortoise, it’s ‘your tortoise’.

All that remains is to make the purchasing process as straightforward as possible. She explains why she favours a particular breed. Again, you see skilled sales practitioners do this all the time. You went into the showroom with a vague idea it might be time for a new car. Before you know it, you are weighing up the virtues of the 1.2 hybrid in racing green versus the 1.5 automatic AWD in cornflower blue. The third option – not to buy a car at all – has mysteriously disappeared. 

And like all the best car salespeople, she comes up with a killer finance package: put down a £25 deposit, fully refundable if you're not completely satisfied. 

But we are not talking about mere satisfaction here.

All presentations need a strong, upbeat ending and a clear call to action. This takes some beating:

Click here to make the best decision of your life and buy yourself a lovely little friend!

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Did it work?

The tortoise presentation has had 2.1 million views so far o Twitter. 

Did it work? Of course it did. 

“She’s won. We haven’t told her yet, but there’s no way of denying this.”

That’s the girl’s somewhat bemused father, writer Matthew Horton. He then added another comment:

Wow. Well then, if you like tortoise presentations, you’ll, er, love my book on George Michael’s Faith, available from all good stockists and Amazon

Good try. But maybe he should bring in the experts next time.

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We can help you win a tortoise…among other things

We think a lot about the language and techniques of persuasion. Check out our latest courses at Forthwrite – the business of good writing.

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The New York office of the advertising agency TBWA/Chiat Day is moving. That’s not news. Beyond the company’s staff and clients, does anyone really need to know?

Apparently, the 740,000 print subscribers to The New York Times do. 

The agency took out a full-page ad in the newspaper to announce their decision. Why?

It’s because they noticed something interesting. It wasn’t the new location, 15 blocks away on Third Avenue.

Third Avenue is not interesting. 

The old address was. In quitting Madison Avenue, they claimed to be the last major agency to leave the thoroughfare that used to be synonymous with the whole advertising industry – so much so, the people who worked there legendarily crowned themselves ‘Mad Men’. 

The TV series of that name was set in the industry’s 1950s and 1960s heyday. Now, in 2023, the Mad Men era is officially over. 

But it’s not so much the reason the ad was written that interests us. It’s the writing.

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The TBWA/Chiat Day ad (above) is what we call long-form copy. It’s very rare now: ads in newspapers (themselves an endangered species) are heavy on promotions or images or both. 

But ads like these once caused nothing less than a cultural and creative revolution. In 1959, the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach won the account for Volkswagen. Bill Bernbach, the creative director,  a Jewish copywriter from the Bronx, had to sell a small European vehicle with its roots in Nazi Germany to an American public that loved big cars and thought European cars, let alone Nazi ones, were ‘lemons’.

The Think Small campaign made a virtue of the Beetle’s size, its weird looks and the mere fact it was unlike anything any American manufacturer would ever make. 

That was a triumph of marketing savvy, art direction and – above all – writing: long-form copy and what we now clumsily call ‘tone of voice’.

It’s that tone of voice the 2023 TBWA/Chiat Day copywriters sought to capture as they told the world they were upping sticks to a less fashionable part of town. 

Or maybe ‘pay homage to’ is a better phrase.

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How did they do it? Let’s strip this thing down and take a look.

Let’s think about the headline first.

It’s long for a headline, but the words are short and simple (ask Donald Trump why this works). The rhythmic internal repetition within the sentence is a device writers have been using since biblical times. 

Then there’s the full stop. 

Newspaper sub-editors to this day wince when they see ads like this. An editorial headline never takes a full point. (I wonder how many readers are noticing that I am committing that sin throughout this piece?)

But there must be a reason why writers with millions of dollars of their client’s money behind them chose to defy tradition and good practice.

First, imagine nothing there. That’s what a newspaper headline-writer would do. It’s fine…but the words just float off into mid air. 

Now try an exclamation mark, the notorious ‘screamer’. Too loud, too eager to please. You shy away. A question mark? The last ad from the last big ad agency on Madison Avenue? So, you’re asking me a question I’ve zero interest in answering?

But the full stop ends quietly, but decisively. You can’t help but pause. And consider. 

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More on full stops. And short sentences.

Virgina Wade: line call

From the Bernbach era on, the full-stop became the copywriter’s punctuation tool of choice. Sentences became shorter. Fancy language was out. Forget sub clauses. Ditch colons. You get the idea.

And sentences became paragraphs. I remember an ad that simply ran:

A bit much?

Maybe.

Definitely.

Now check the syntax in the TBWA/Chiat Day ad. The sentences without main verbs. A different office. And thanks. Iconic ideas like…

But hey, they’re not paid to impress their old English teachers. They're paid to pack as much info as they can into a small space. Persuasively.

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It’s awfully quiet around here.

Read the words in the ‘moving’ ad, and the Bernbach ones that inspired it, out loud. Then think of the person speaking those words and where they are.

They’re not in a showroom. They’re not on a street corner. They’re sure as hell not in a pulpit.

Hey, they’re probably in a bar. Just chatting. Not showing off. Just telling you something you might be interested in. No problem if you’re not. We can talk about something else.

Bernbach was a master of complicity as much as simplicity. He turned down the volume. He talked to you as a person, not as a crowd. Before you know it, you’re reading 150 words you hadn’t planned on reading. You are in his world. He’s buying you a drink. You’re buying his story.

It’s all a bit like writing a blog. 

Bernbach: a complicit affair

Fact. It’s not that simple.

I bet that ad is the hardest work the TBWA/Chiat Day creatives will do all year. The most drafts, the most mark-ups – such a forest of them you can barely see the original text.  The most agonising over every word, but some words more than others.

I speak from experience. Agencies paid  to promote other people’s goods are usually hopeless at promoting their own. And they hate doing it. 

The one agency which broke that rule, as it broke so many, was Saatchi and Saatchi. When they opened in London’s Soho, a tiny ‘shop’ dwarfed by the Madison Avenue giants, they had the hubris to take a full page in The Sunday Times with the headline WHY I THINK IT'S TIME FOR A NEW KIND OF ADVERTISING.

The byline was creative director Jeremy Sinclair. In truth, the copy was written by a business journalist called Robert Heller (I know: I used to work for him*). 

It wouldn’t be the first time the Saatchis would  overlook technicalities like the truth – nor show incredible chutzpah while more boring agencies hid behind their brass plates. SAATCHI AND SAATCHI. FIRST OVER THE WALL said an ad in what was still East Germany after the Communist world was liberated that night in 1989. 

Shameless. Opportunistic. Genius. 

British copywriters instantly responded to the Bernbach way. By the 1970s, Madison Avenue was already beginning to revert to type: play safe, manage the client, don’t let the creatives think they run the show. Rather like the bands of the British invasion in pop music a decade earlier, Saatchis and their ilk took an American form of expression and made it their own.

Maurice and Charles Saatchi: London calls the shots

I can guess which words they struggled with. 

It’s a great idea, this ad. Let’s face it, TBWA/Chiat Day or whatever you’re called – you were hardly the most famous agency in the avenue. Hell, Chiat Day made its name in LA before being bought and invited into a forced marriage by the Omnivore parent company..

But as you’re the last one standing, you can grab all that heritage, nostalgia and goodwill for your own. It’s almost as if Don Draper himself worked for you.

But there is a bigger but. You don't want to be seen as dinosaurs: an old-school ‘shop’ with a complicated name that speaks of wearisome, decades-old corporate takeovers. You now have to compete in a world of hip agencies loft-spaced in hip and regenerated areas of second-tier cities, agencies with names like Toenail or Artichoke. (Help – there IS an agency called Artichoke. But I think we’re safe with Toenail). 

So, you find a safe place in some casual millennialness. Ahem…hey… and hope the kids don’t notice the ‘figuratively and literally’. (Then you remember that no kid on Earth, or even in this city, reads The New York Times).  

You keep it chummy, except when you figuratively if not literally insert the ‘serious’ emoji and let the folks know that you can have a matey laugh at boozy lunches (note: the last boozy lunch on Madison Avenue was in 1991).

But you also have to say how you deplore ‘boardrooms filled with only white men’. The rhythm of the writing gets lost then: but you made the point.

The writing doesn’t quite recover and we end on a tepid piece of word play and a change-of-address card. 

Kind of appropriate, that tailing off. It’s what Madison Avenue, and the whole ad industry, has been doing for a while. 

But at least they went down writing. Long-form.

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Afterword: Streets and avenues and trades

Madison Avenue has no ad agencies now. This happens. You won’t see many people with chisels on London's Stonecutter Street, though you will find Goldman Sachs bankers. Nor are there ropemakers on Hamburg’s Ropemaker’s Street – or Reeperbahn, as it’s known to Beatles fans and connoisseurs of red light districts. 

I used to work in Fleet Street when it really was the street where newspaper journalists worked. The last journos left in 2016, and now it’s just a sobriquet that’s come unmoored from its origins. Fleet Street has been annexed by a much bigger cluster – the financial district. And one day an online encyclopedia will have to explain why we once called the UK financial district ‘the City’. 

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Made you think?

If you want to know how to make words work harder for you and your business, check out our latest courses at Forthwrite.co.uk.

* The author is a former editor of Campaign magazine when it was still called the UK’s ‘advertising bible

Harry Kane: I’ve just missed a penalty and we’ve been knocked out of the World Cup. What’s the word I’m looking for?

Well, that’s the World Cup done for another four years. I know plenty of people who couldn’t be more pleased about that. I’ve every sympathy with them.

Me, I’m never happier than when curled up on the sofa watching Cameroon take on Serbia and tweeting that Liverpool should try and sign the Serbian centre half. 

But my love if the game isn’t universally shared. And if you’re part of that non-sharing community, the past four weeks have probably been a bit of a bore. Even I, Googling which team that useful Moroccan midfielder currently plays for, will admit that the obsession with football, in the UK at least, has gotten well out of hand. We live in a nation where a preview of a World Cup group game (a match that doesn’t matter much in the early stages of the tournament) not only leads BBC TV’s Six O’Clock news, it takes up the whole first half of the bulletin. 

The BBC’s long-running football programme, Match of the Day, has had an equally long-running theme song based on an old Scottish ditty called Fitba Crazy. And you sometimes wonder if the whole world isn’t a bit too crazy about fitba.

That includes the world of business. So, what follows is designed for people who can’t beat the football nuts: so they might as well join them.

Billions of words are spouted about the game every day.  Inevitably, football-speak infiltrates every part of life. We have chosen a few in-the-know footy phrases which you can drop into everyday work use.

They are sure to impress colleagues, clients and shareholders, although there is a slight danger, akin to speaking a few words in a foreign language, that they may think you're more expert than you are – and then they ask you how you think Southampton will do away at Crystal Palace in the Cup. (Answer, just in case: they’ll probably get a draw).

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GAME OF TWO HALVES

‘Two halves’. This image is also a knowing reference to the traditional half-time football snack

The genius of football language is, you take something literal and self-evident, then dress it up as a profound insight. A 90-minute game has a short break (that’d be half-time). Sometimes, the second half plays out differently to the first. The team that was rubbish in the first half suddenly starts playing well, and vice versa.

How to use it:

Use it hopefully.

Sales are down 17% to July, but the year, like, it’s a game of two halves…

HOSPITAL PASS

You would rather this didn’t happen

You kick the ball towards a team-mate with insufficient force. This enables the psychotic opposition player to reach the ball (and your colleague) at the same time. The subsequent collision may occasion a visit to A&E.

How to use it: 

Mate, leaving out the crucial revenue data in the board report was a bit of a hospital pass. That’d be your boss, packing up her office now. 

‘IT’S A CONTACT SPORT’

Older footballers-turned-pundits use this phrase when they think referees are being too soft, giving free kicks for robust (ie violent) tackles that would have been acceptable in their day. According to this world view, a few ‘knocks’ are ‘part and parcel of the game’.

How to use it:

Great if you are the kind of manager who thinks your office is full of snowflakes. When a customer is rude to one of your junior colleagues in a meeting, you say:

Sorry, Kieran, but it’s a contact sport, point-of-sale merchandising consultancy.

MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT

Football’s greatest philosopher was a man called Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool manager. He demanded (and got) unswerving loyalty to the club, the city and above all, the fans. When one player complained about his injured knee, Shanks said: ‘what do you mean YOUR knee? It's LIVERPOOL'S knee!' (The player in question was lame for life after retiring: not that he complained).  

But Shankly’s most famous, or notorious, quote was this:

How to use it:

Try it in a job interview:

Am I passionate about this job? Put it this way, if someone asked me if multi-platform content marketing in the Mercia region was a matter of life or death, I’d say no, it’s much, much more important than that. 

OBVIOUSLY….

A South American lungfish: ‘obviously, we’re delighted to be off the bottom of the pond’

This is the adverb of choice for footballers in post-match interviews. Example: ‘Yeah, obviously I’m really pleased with the hat-trick, but obviously it’s the points on the board that matter’. 

Combined with a ruthless determination to avoid any eye contact with the reporter, the word successfully conveys the impression that the star would rather be anywhere in the world than here in front of the sponsors’ logos, answering stupid questions.

How to use it:

Don’t. If something is that obvious, you don’t need to say it. And whereas footballers don’t care what impression they make on the person speaking to them – perhaps because they are paid £150,000 a week whether they are thoughtful and articulate or not – the rest of us should.

POTENTIAL BANANA SKIN

A metaphor waiting to happen

We are approaching the Third Round of England’s FA Cup, when the big teams you’ve all heard of get thrown into the hat with a lot of small teams you won’t have. At some point on the TV, someone will refer to, say, the Premiership’s Aston Villa’s against League Two’s Stevenage game as a ‘potential banana skin’.

You don’t go to football-speak for relentless logic. Of course (you’re thinking), they mean an actual, or at the very least, a metaphorical banana skin on which the big team will potentially slip. The subject should be attached to the adjective/adverb, not the object. Do write to Gary Lineker and point this out. 

How to use it:

I know the client described the quarterly meeting as a routine catch-up, but for me, it’s a potential banana skin. 

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PUT YOUR FOOT THROUGH IT

Note to people for whom English is not a first language. I am sorry about the way we change the meanings of verbs by randomly attaching prepositions to them. Putting your foot through something is not the same as putting your foot in it. 

Now, you can put your foot through thin ice, which is bad. But in football parlance, putting your foot through something – in this case, a ball – is often recommended.

The context is all. As the game has become more sophisticated, so the beefy, no-nonsense style once popular in England has fallen out of fashion. But every so often, the new-fangled style lets a player down. They concede a goal by trying to be tricky instead of hoofing the ball into the stands (note, at this point, an Old-School Pundit may refer to Row Z – as in, ‘Harry just needed to put that one in Row Z’). At the other end, a too-clever-by-half striker may try to coax the ball in a gentle arc around the goalkeeper. If the ball is saved, our OSP is sure to say ‘sometimes you just need to put your foot [or, increasingly, ‘your laces’] through it’. 

How to use it:

The proposal’s five days overdue and Brand Development are still Googling images of cuckoo clocks. Sometimes, you just have to put your foot through it. 

TAKE EACH GAME AS IT COMES

There is no cliche more durable and shameless than a football cliche. But even professional footballers (perhaps the hardest species on the planet to interview, and that includes the South American lungfish and other animals that lack vocal chords) blush a little when using this one.

It appears, inexorably, when a team is doing well in several competitions, and an interviewer, who should know better, but somehow never does, asks the player how they are coping with the pressure and what strategy they have for ultimate success. At this point, they are contractually obliged to say that they are not getting distracted by winning the Premier League/Champions League/Hackney Marshes Invitational Over 40s Cup at some far-distant point. Instead, they are relentlessly, piously, and perhaps laser-guidedly focussed on the next game, because, Gary, we take each game as it comes. 

How to use it:

Useful in performance reviews with ultra-ambitious staff.

You're doing great as executive administrative support assistant. Just don’t think too much of the CEO role just now. Take each game as it comes.

THEY ONLY NEED ONE CHANCE

In some games, your star centre forward, or striker, the one who is meant to score the goals, hardly gets a kick. You almost forget they are on the pitch. Then they pop out of nowhere and get the winning goal. Expert summariser opines: ‘Harry (or Mo, or Beth) only needs one chance’. You may also add, like Henri Bergson proposing a new paradigm for understanding time, ‘it only takes a second to score a goal’.

Very useful if you have to defend that not-very-hardworking member of the team who nevertheless has a habit of landing big contracts.

He’s a lazy sod, but he only needs one chance. 

TRACKSUIT MANAGER

Don’t you love it when your line manager sits next to you and offers helpful feedback?

We know the type. They get promoted, and you never see them again – too busy swanning around with the shareholders and chairman’s friends. This happens in football, too. However, a tracksuit manager is one who refuses to wear a suit and instead spends as much time as they can on the pitch getting their boots dirty

How to use it:

I see Emma has given up her office and plonked herself on the floor with the rest of us. Thinks she’s a tracksuit manager, does she?

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If you are an international football superstar looking to improve your grammar and communication skills, contact us here: hello@forthwrite.co.uk or visit this place.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Well, my homework had been marked.

Last year, I wrote and edited a series of reports for something called the Transform initiative. This is a bold venture established by the part of the UK Foreign Office responsible for development; the consumer goods company Unilever; and the professional services company EY. Together, they source and fund projects that help entrepreneurs in low-income countries reach more customers and ultimately help address issues of sanitation, clean water and healthcare.

Even in that dry paragraph you’ve just read (or skimmed), you’ll see that I had to learn some lessons about nomenclature and language. For example: never use terms like ‘Third World’, ‘charity’ and ‘aid’. 

I bet some people will see that as self-censoring wokeness. It’s not. The way the rich world works with the poor one has changed. Language should evolve with it. 

We produced what’s called the Transform Flagship Library. My mixed metaphor alert went off (ships? Libraries?), but it was too late to change the name: and it’s the content, not the title, that matters.

The feedback from the Transform partners was more than encouraging. One said they ‘never imagined [the reports] would be so good (assuming they’d just sit on a shelf, which is not happening at all)’. 

Which is great. That it’s a pleasant surprise they are read at all is a sobering comment, however, on the low expectations people have of this type of work. No wonder so much corporate literature can be a spiritless endeavour. It’s not easy starting a piece of writing in the knowledge that hardly anyone is going to read it.

But the reports have been read – and not only read, but a very good data analysis company has put them through a ‘linguistic simplicity engine’. How did that go?

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The scorecard

Image from the Transform reports

The ‘engine’ in question is not some spanking new algorithm, but the Flesch-Kincaid readability test originally devised by a US navy captain in 1975.  J Peter Kincaid and his team wanted to make the technical information contained in manuals and electronic documentation easier to read. You can easily see why. Most of us struggle with the instructions for a food mixer. Imagine what it’s like taking delivery of a nuclear submarine and thinking, ‘where do I press start?’

Here’s what Sam Knowles, founder, MD and chief data storyteller at Insight Agents had to say about Transform:

They come out as pretty readable – a B-grade overall, a readability score suggesting ten years of education required to read them straightforwardly (early secondary school, so Daily Mail equivalent), which is good for technical subjects.

Almost a third of sentences have more than 30 syllables which, in a long text, can bring about tiredness. Very low on clichés and use of the passive voice (which is good), pretty formal.

15% of (adjectives + verbs + nouns) are adjectives, connoting emotion; 20% are verbs, connoting actions; and, 65% are nouns, connoting facts, data etc. Not atypical, and more emotional than many corporate narratives. Given the human stories they tell at the heart, I’d have expected more emotion (and so more adjectives).

As I said to my clients and agency partners, if they hadn’t scored well on readability, then they would have been entitled to ask for their money back.

Not that making them read in a straightforward way was straightforward. 

The world of the SDGs, of which this is a small part, is full of acronyms (like SDGs). They are big on abstract nouns such as ‘accountability’, ‘responsibility’ and  ‘sustainability’ – no wonder it was hard to keep the syllable count under control. There’s also a species of language – let’s call it Corporate Touchy-Feely – which leads you to using words like ‘community’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘engagement’ so often they become the linguistic equivalent of lettuce: they add a bit of green to the dish, but the nutritional value is pretty poor.

The Transform board members were determined these wouldn’t be a box-ticking exercises in guff-production. They were militantly pro-plain English. That is one of the reasons they and their projects they support are prospering. As individuals and as a body, they think that to be readable puts them well on the way to being believable. That made the writer’s job a lot easier, even when that writer – that’d be me – was trying to translate often complex ideas into the kind of language you’d use down the pub, or in the street market.

That the English was of a Daily Mail standard of clarity was really pleasing. Not everyone is a fan of the content in that newspaper. But ask most British (and many international) journalists, and they’ll tell you the Mail is the most rigorous and demanding newspaper to write for, with the highest standard of sub-editing. I write travel features for them. We have a good relationship, marred only occasionally when the editor gives me a blast for ‘trying to be too clever’. And I do overwrite, sometimes. Writing for the Mail is like training to run a marathon. You soon learn where the flab is. 

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Emotional rescue

A person in an advanced state of adjectival arousal. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I got very excited by the paragraph about adjectives and ‘emotion’. 

Here’s why. The older I get as a writer the more I actively try to use nouns rather than adjectives. 

Adjectives are too easy, especially in travel writing. I want to know, and I think most readers want to know, what things are, what they are made of and how they came to be. That requires facts, insight – and nouns. To take the adjective I hate most at present, I’m sick of reading about cities (or communities) being ‘vibrant’. Why and how does it vibrate? Who is doing the vibrating? Can you hear, smell and touch the said vibrancy? 

Adjectives are lazy. Emotion? I think a writer can convey that through tones and textures and juxtaposing facts. But when you do reach for an adjective, make it count. You noticed that ‘lazy’? 

(I hovered over the word ‘bold’ in the second paragraph. Losing it doesn’t change the sense and perhaps makes the copy seem more level and unflashy. But Transform is a bold idea: let’s say it).

I’m glad there weren’t more adjectives in the reports. There was plenty of emotion in the stories we told. But the documents are designed to show that these projects are businesses which are delivering for their customers and meeting targets thanks in part to the help from Transform. That’s a hard-headed message. 

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How you can improve the readability test and bots

The readability tests and grammar algorithms miss something important – maybe the most important thing there is – when you’re judging how easily a piece reads.

Punctuation.

That’s probably because it’s hard to make an empirical judgement based on how often you use the different punctuation marks. This is a matter of style –  and may even vary from language to language. I was working with a Norwegian writer recently. He said one difficulty (it was his only difficulty) with English is that it uses far fewer commas than his native language!

Have a look at the way I’ve used punctuation in this piece: when there’s a colon rather than a semi-colon, when there’s a comma – and when I add a dash to add a bit of pace.

And note when I elected to end a sentence or a paragraph.

That’s part of the punctuation craft too.

Let’s end with a gloriously unreadable piece of text

Proust: he didn’t make it as an author of American navy manuals

This is a sentence – yes, a sentence – from Marcel Proust’s  Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way):

"But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling."

This breaks every rule we ever teach at Forthwrite. Try and locate the heart of this sentence – the main verb and object – we say. Dear Marcel – we cannot. The meaning keeps slipping from image to image, memory to memory: just like sequences in a dream.

The Fleisch-Kincaid test gives it a readability score of -515.1. A score of +10 is considered ‘extremely difficult to read’.

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Last time, I took aim at some copy for a new luxury hotel. Now we’ll let the good cop in to show you how writing about hotels should and can be done. 

This is from Kerten Hospitality, a small operator in Georgia, the country, not the US state. They’re writing about a new hotel in Tbilisi called The House:

Across the street from the sixth century Anchiskhati Basilica, in the heart of Tbilisi’s charming Old Town, Kerten Hospitality, a mixed-use, ESG and lifestyle operator, has opened The House Hotel Old Tbilisi, its first of three lifestyle hospitality projects in Georgia. The three-storey, 17-room hotel was once the Nikolozishvili mansion and blends that traditional charm with chic sensibility. Each room is distinguished by a historical Georgian character painted by local mural artist, Musya Qeburia, and features custom-made furnishings from Georgian oak, parquet floors and marble bathrooms with a rain shower. 

Whenever you're reading about a new place, you need to be located. So we know where this hotel is and who is opening it. You get some facts and a little history. You are told who painted the rooms and why they are uniquely Georgian.

Yes, there are slightly tired adjectives: ‘charm’, ‘charming’ ‘chic’. But that’s just about okay, because the writer has done enough proper work to be allowed those splashes of colour. Think of constructing a paragraph like decorating a room. You have a base colour scheme and design which isn’t too much of an assault on the senses. That allows you to introduce pops of colour and a dash of flamboyance. 

(There are writers, and interior designers, who can get away with a riot of clashing colours and textures. But you wouldn’t hire them to furnish your office – nor write your press releases). 

Traditional buildings in Tbilisi have what locals call Italian Courtyards, intimate social areas where residents gather to play backgammon and dominoes, hang laundry and gossip while children play. The House Hotel Old Tbilisi has renovated its courtyard to provide much of the same warmth and neighbourliness with a bar that mixes special cocktails and uncorks exclusive Georgian wines from its own grower, while rapturous meals are served at tables around an olive tree for both hotel guests and walk-in visitors.

As an editor and writer, you’re looking for details which work as a portal into a country and its culture. So that detail about the Italian courtyard stands out. You get a sense of how Georgians like to live and how the hotel has tried to recreate that experience. The writer has achieved this without spraying around the usual words – ‘authentic’, ‘vibrant’ and so on. ‘Rapturous’ meals? At least that’s different!

By the way, I doubt this author speaks and writes English as a first language. That’s not because of the occasional odd piece of phrasing (we are all capable of producing those). It’s because the syntax is very sound and avoids the twistiness you see in so much corporate and PR writing.

I’ve recently been working with groups of overseas writers for a big hotel company. After the first session, I had to ditch the slides on syntax. I had nothing to teach them – whereas a lot of English speakers have a lot to learn.

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More from the banned words list

A fully-equipped gym, yesterday Humphrey Muleba for Unsplash

Thanks to a friend of the blog, Michael Hobson, for his contributions to our growing Banned Word list. Michael was chief marketing officer at the Mandarin Oriental group for many years (24, in fact). MO was, and is, popular with travel media for the clarity of its communications as well as the excellence of its rooms. 

Michael is now chief executive of Lanson Place, a hotel and apartment development next to Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. It’s in an interesting spot: between one of the planet’s noisier and busier luxury retail areas and low-level Tai Hang with its specialist ice cream makers, street bars and Japanese-style izakayas. The word haven is overused, but if you are on a short or long stay in Hong Kong (and Lanson Place has some CEOs, especially from the fashion and retail industry, who stay for months) you’d definitely look forward to closing the door of your suite, collapsing into a big sofa and letting your eyes rest on the view towards the Hong Kong Stadium and the Tai Tam country park beyond.  

Michael says: 

Other banned words ( and phrases) surely must include: ‘stunning‘ , ‘fully-equipped gyms and spas’ (as if they might be under-equipped), ‘ overstuffed‘ ( pillows), ‘bespoke’ ……oh Lord – the list goes on. 

It does indeed. 

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Talking of Hong Kong…

I’ve just written a review of Chris Patten’s book of diaries from his time as the last Governor of Hong Kong. Patten is one of those few politicians (from any era, though it’s fashionable to say the current breed are a whole lot stupider and less cultured than their predecessors) who can not only write, but have a robust and individual writing style. 

In front of a select committee in 1994, Patten says:

I don’t regard it as acceptable to cover up matters of substance with forms of words packed with strong nouns and weak verbs, 

He is writing is usually more economical than this. Even so, he is accurately describing 90% of corporate and official English.

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Pet Shop Boy’s sound views on English

The BBC podcast This Cultural Life has a good interview with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys – and he had some good advice for writers. Tennant described himself as an observational lyricist. As well as observing, he listens: he picks up snatches of everyday conversation he hears and recycles them in his lyrics. 

He’s got no time for the internal monologue that passes for communication and writing in music and elsewhere: 

To me today pop music is very narcissistic. I find that a bit tedious….I wish there was more art in it than dissing your boyfriend.

Tenant says he is also trying very hard not to use too many adjectives in his songs. Got the message yet, travel writers?

How do I apply ideas like this to my business?

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