This might seem like a catch-all category. In a way, it is. I mean, here, to paddle for a moment out of the shallows into the open sea to consider forms of writing that aren’t constrained by the formal properties of, say, a memo or an email. Think of it as the big-chunk-of-prose section. Some of what I say here will apply to things such as letters and emails too.
An essay is, as its name suggests, an attempt. It can – when you write it at school – be an attempt to answer a question or marshal a set of ideas. But there’s something tentatively implicit in the premise. It’s a piece of writing that will want to find its own form, or whose form will be dictated by its material and by the movement of thought. But form of some sort, it will need to have. A piece of prose is not just a collection of sentences. It needs to arrest the reader’s attention, draw them through the argument, and end with a sense of resolution that, ideally, throws the reader forward towards action or conviction.*
First: don’t panic. If you can’t write down a perfectly lucid abstract of what you intend to say, and in what order, that’s normal. Most writers learn what they mean in the process of writing it; they come to feel how points and ideas flock together. Transitions will suggest themselves. That’s what I mean by the material suggesting its form. Further clarity will come in the process of revising.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t plan at all. If you’re arguing from a set of premises to a particular set of conclusions, order your thoughts. Get clear, not just in your head but on a piece of paper, what those premises and those conclusions are. Try putting them in order of importance. You might find that two or more of them belong together – or that one is a subcategory of another.
You can afford to free-associate a little bit on the page. What you’re looking for at this stage is a set of units of thought. My notes often look like a collection of spider-plants viewed from the air: a theme in block capitals will be linked to relevant quotations or sub-themes by a set of lines; and these clusters in turn will be linked by longer lines to other clusters. Don’t think of these as essay plans so much as preliminary maps of your ideas.
These clusters might end up as groups of paragraphs, as subsections, as chapters or as bullet points, depending on the genre you’re working in. When you set about assembling your piece you’ll consider how to fit them together in the linear order that continuous prose demands. You can’t say two things at once, so when you have two or more things to say you’ll need to prioritise. You may find that the logic of the argument leads you one way and that the impact it needs to make leads you another.
How you prioritise will depend on what sort of thing you’re trying to do. In most situations you’re caught between wanting to end strongly (because readers will remember the end best, according to the so-called ‘recency effect’), and wanting to begin strongly, because if you don’t they won’t reach the end anyway. The compromise is usually either to deliver the material in decreasing order of importance, as per the inverted pyramid below, and then deliver a recapped essence of it as the payoff; or to build steadily up to a high-energy conclusion.
Think of a graph shape. In terms of energy and importance, your composition will either start strong then drop to a low level, and build back up; or start strong, dwindle down and then spike back up at the end. That shark’s-tooth shape may structure your broad argument, but it will also be seen section by section and paragraph by paragraph. Something more academic or meditative – where you’re arguing up from premises to conclusions – might take the first model; something more object-oriented and practical – where you’re putting a case and then offering the supporting evidence – the latter.
Say you’re making the case for your company buying the old toothpaste factory on the edge of town. You’ll probably start by saying (headline news) that you need to buy the old toothpaste factory. Then you might say that there are four reasons: the attractive price; the need to diversify into toothpaste; the tax write-downs available; the knowledge that your competitor is planning a toothpaste operation. Each of these reasons will command a little section. You’ll put those sections into order of importance, probably with the most important first. Each one will begin with the reason you’re giving, and then the evidence in support of those reasons.
So a plan might look like this:
We need to diversify into toothpaste
The bottom is falling out of the spot cream market
Our chemists already know how to make toothpaste
Toothpaste is performing strongly because of the world mouthwash shortage
If we don’t make toothpaste our rivals will steal a march on us
Our spy at EvilPharm says they are planning on making toothpaste
They can outcompete us if they have a wider range of products
The price is good
The factory went bust and creditors are disposing of its assets in a hurry
A similar site sold earlier this year for £150,000 more than the asking price
We can claim the cost against tax
At this point in the tax year a big capital expenditure will help
So to recap: we need to buy the factory
That’s a great big shark’s-tooth zed-shape, with a series of smaller shark’s-tooth shapes embedded in it.
As I said above, every situation will ask for a different structural solution. But enough of them map onto each other that there are general remarks you can make, and – indeed – ideas that have endured through history. A few are to be found below. Think of them as a non-exclusive selection of techniques, rather than using any one of them as a rigid template.
The classic, and the simplest, piece of advice is: tell people what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them that you’ve said it. First, you cue your audience up to receive your message. Then you deliver it in detail. Then you recap in brief.
There are various classical schemes for the arrangement of a piece of persuasion, but most of them are simplifications or elaborations on this one, from the first century Ad Herennium:
Exordium – Your introduction, where you grab the attention
Narration – You set out the facts of the case as generally agreed
Division – You make clear where the areas of disagreement are
Proof – You make your own argument
Refutation – You offer your case against any counterarguments or objections
Peroration – Sum up: forcefully state your conclusion or recommendations
An orthodoxy in modern marketing is that customers can be herded down a ‘purchase funnel’ towards buying a product. If you think of your argument as that product, you can see how the purchase funnel maps onto communications in general.
The notion of AIDA describes a movement through different stages:
Awareness or Attention – Make the consumer aware of what you’re selling
Interest or Information – Make the consumer want to find out more
Desire or Direct Benefit – Make clear why this personally affects the consumer
Action – Close the deal
So, for instance:
A: ‘Have you heard about our revolutionary new cornplasters?’
I: ‘They use patented nanotechnology to clear up corns 60 per cent faster than our rivals.’
D: ‘If YOU have corns, they will remove them in ten days flat – or your money back.’
A: ‘Call 0800-CORNPLASTERCON now to take advantage of our limited-time discount offer!’
More soberly and at greater length, this rough structure does service for an intellectual selling situation too. It has audience-awareness baked into it. It asks you to grab the attention, to set out the facts, to explain the relevance to the audience at hand, and then to make a call-to-action at the end. Not so different, when you consider it, to the classical structure.
Such is the popularity of this sort of acronymic scheme that you’ll come across many others. The Oxford Guide to Plain English, for instance, offers SCRAP (Situation, Complication, Resolution, Action and Politeness) and SOAP (Situation, Objective, Appraisal, Proposal).
The former is good for apologising for a snarl-up:
Situation: It’s Chinese New Year
Complication: Your Chinese-built window-shutters will be delivered a week later than advertised
Resolution: We’ll knock 10 per cent off the price by way of apology
Action: Do let us know if this is acceptable or if you’d prefer to cancel the order
Politeness: Sorry again for the inconvenience. We look forward to hearing from you.
The latter, which again echoes the classical scheme, is good for making a case for action:
Situation: Our pension fund is in a failing bank
Objective: We need to ensure the safety of our capital
Appraisal: If we diversify our portfolio it’s less vulnerable to market crises
Proposal: Let’s seek permission from the trustees to withdraw it from Failbank and place it in a DiverseFinance fund.
What these and schemes like them have in common is that they follow the movement of thought. You start by setting out a situation, move on to an analysis, and end with a call to action.
This is the classic structure of a news report. It’s useful in all sorts of situations and contexts, particularly when the material is urgent and the attention of your readership is not guaranteed. Essentially, you deliver the vital information and then unpack it.
The very first paragraph of a news report tells you the who, the what, the where and the when. American hacks call this the ‘nut graph’: it’s the core of the story.
The vital information is at the top, and the further down the news story the less informationally rich the story is. You can skim the paper, read the first few paragraphs and get the essentials; but the longer the reader invests in the story, the more information he or she will be supplied.
It should be obvious that headlines as often as not function as a pre-nut-graph nut graph. The headline is a crunched-down version of the first sentence, which itself is a crunched-down version of the second sentence, and so on.
So, that’s the inverted pyramid. Read down and you’ll get – in the average news story – background information about the events in the nut graph, then quotes (often extensive quotes, if the story’s importance is deemed high enough that it runs prominently and at length) from the participants and so on.
A company report or an email to a colleague may use just the same structure. You’ll announce the headline news about this year’s profits, or the impending takeover, or what Gloria heard Fred say at the coffee machine – and with the attention engaged you then expand on the detail.
Indeed, this is usually how we deliver news in conversation. ‘I’m having a baby!’ comes first; the due date, circumstances of conception and how you met the father wait till afterwards. That means that, as ever, talking it out can help you get a sense of what comes first. If you have something complicated to say, and you’re struggling to plan a piece of writing on the subject, try – without much premeditation – telling a friend (or an imaginary friend) what you’re writing about. What comes out first will probably be your way in.
A variation of the inverted pyramid can be seen in the slightly more leisurely style known in my trade as the ‘drop intro’. Here the first paragraph or even two whimsically walks you into the story. My old mentor Peter McKay, who learned his trade in local papers in Scotland, used to delight in recalling the formulaic drop intro that he had occasion to use every Tuesday morning: ‘What began as a quiet Friday night drink with friends yesterday had its sequel in the Aberdeen district magistrate’s court …’
Knock the drop intro off, and paragraphs two or three will usually supply the traditional who what where when sentence. If you do decide to use a drop intro, it needs to have, as with McKay’s wan humour, something to grab the attention. The main thing with an inverted pyramid is to get the vital information up top.
In a more expansive context, you can afford to be less telegraphic. Think about camera-shots. Let’s say you’re writing a long speech, a blog, an essay or a report on a civil war in a far-away country. You may be needing to capture both the feel of the action on the ground and the geographic or historical overview. Is there a way of navigating easily from one to the other?
Starting with a close-up seldom lets you down. Perhaps you have an anecdote, a bit of personal reportage or a quote that will give the material a human face or, better, exemplify your bigger theme. Whack it in first. That will immediately engage the attention and it will boost the ethos of your writing: it brings to it the authority of first-hand material.
Mohammed leaned his motorcycle on its kickstand and pulled his keffiyeh up against the rising dust. The AK jounced on his back. He spat.* Tomorrow, he told me, he would rescue his wife from the raiders or die trying.
Then you can afford to pull back and take the bigger view.
The civil war in Otherstan has been going on for nearly ten years now. Fighters like Mohammed are typical of the young men whose lives have been caught up in it. After the collapse of the government in 2004, fighters spilled across the border from the neighbouring state of Interferia, and this 300-square-mile area, once farmland, is now a lawless zone of kidnapping, banditry and sectarian warfare. Since its founding after the civil war of 1964, Otherstan has been a troubled republic. Three quarters of its people are Otherish, like Mohammed, but it has been governed for 30 years by the minority Samians.
And so on. Here is the prose equivalent of a now much-parodied movie trope: we start in medias res with, say, a teenager in his underpants carrying a huge bowl of popcorn and running for his life from a skateboarding grizzly bear; then there’s the sound of a record scratch; freeze-frame on the boy’s face; and the voiceover comes in. ‘Yup, that’s me. And you’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation …’
Playing with camera-angles is a vital tool of the fiction writer’s craft. It makes a huge difference whether something is written in the first, second or third person, or in the shouldercam-like free indirect style (where a third person narrator inhabits the thoughts or feelings of the character: ‘It was agony. How could she just stand there and look at him that way?’). You have a more restricted palette as a writer of most sorts of nonfiction, but if you can control how you move between the wide arc of an argument and the detail, and how you address your audience, you control how that audience receives your writing.
In stand-up comedy, you’ll often see sets structured with ‘call-backs’. As the comedian makes his or her way through their monologue, they start to refer back to jokes they made early on, weaving a reference to the initial joke back into a new one. Done skilfully, this builds rapport with the audience and, delighted by the familiarity, that audience will give a bigger laugh each time the material reappears. It’s a primal feature, too, of narrative: motifs, images and ideas reappear in different forms. In political communications, a message is strengthened by repetition: catchwords that encapsulate a message recur. Remember Gordon Brown banging on about ‘prudence’.
A writer is not a stand-up comic. But you can give a piece of writing thematic coherence by using an approximation of this technique. If there’s a central theme or set of themes to what you’re writing about, it does to keep them front and centre. Show how each new development of the argument bears on them. To take a very obvious example, if you’re writing an A-Level essay titled ‘Religion is the Opiate of the People: Discuss’, you will likely want to thread what you understand by ‘religion’, ‘opiate’ and ‘people’ through the argument that follows.
Writing gets messy when it turns small circles: point A, then point B, then – oops – a bit more of point A, then point C and so on. Fiddly or uncontrolled little eddies of thought damage structure. So your callbacks need to be under control: echoes rather than clumsy full-scale reprisals of your earlier sections of argument. Each one moves the whole thing on. Think of the leitmotif in music.
A grand version of the callback is what I call ‘loop the loop’, below.
One of the most useful tricks in journalism – and it works just as well in other essayistic situations – is to tie things up with a bow. That is, find a way in your closing paragraph to refer back to the beginning. So, for instance, you might start with a particular quotation, an anecdote or an image. And at the end you circle back to close on the same thing; not, ideally, an exact repetition, but a twist on it. You might answer a question that you asked in the opening; you might return to a scene from a different angle; you might tease out a new meaning in a quotation.
Giving a speech in the White House at the turn of the Millennium, for instance, the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel opened by describing how ‘fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald’. That boy was, of course, Wiesel himself, and he used that image as a launch-pad for a speech about the history of the twentieth century. In his conclusion, he said: ‘Once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle.’
That’s a particularly elegant instance of the circling structure, and it draws its emotional force from a shift in camera angles. The boy in the opening of the speech is, as it were, over there – separated from us by a continent and fifty-four years. When we re-encounter him he’s in the room with us. The speech has made the journey from Buchenwald in the mid-1940s to Washington at the tail-end of 1999.
You don’t have to be Elie Wiesel to use this technique. I once wrote a column about Christmas carols, for instance, after the newspaper I worked on had done a poll to find the readers’ favourites. I started out by pouring scorn on the winner (insult the readers: always a good attention-getter), which was ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’. My argument for the purposes of the piece was that the best Christmas song of all time was not a carol but ‘Fairytale of New York’ by Kirsty MacColl and The Pogues. I banged on about the emotional content of the song for a few hundred words – the love, the loss, the anguish, the affirmation, the nostalgia – and ended by asking: ‘What’s that if not the hopes and fears of all the years?’ By quoting ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ like that I brought the whole thing back to Christmas carols. It was the cheapest of tricks, but it made a piece that would otherwise have been a rather clunky two-part cut-and-shut job (‘Hark!’ is bad; ‘Fairytale’ is good) look more elegant than it was.
Closing where you opened doesn’t cost much mental energy, in other words, and the payoff can be considerable. Even if what’s in between is a bit of a ramble, the sense of closure it brings will leave your readers with the impression of something neat and well-made.
Old-fashioned old things, letters. Who now sends them – other, of course, than credit card companies and the Inland Revenue? In a paperless age, this section of the book in your hand may well seem like the most nearly redundant. Nevertheless, the essential rules and courtesies that apply to snail mail letters apply, in large part, to those you send electronically. The email is a development of the letter, not a wholly new thing entirely.
Also, there are many circumstances, still, in which the dead-tree letter is the best or the only thing to send. Certain business situations demand them – particularly legal ones. And when it comes to condolence, congratulation or giving your lover the old heave-ho there’s nothing like handwritten script on paper.
The rules around these are pretty straightforward. The ethos you are seeking to project is one of professionalism. And a lot of the work of projecting that ethos – particularly in terms of first impressions – will be done not by what you write but by how it’s set out.
In American Psycho Patrick Bateman, who as well as being a serial killer is an excellent judge of professional ethos, agonises over the tastefulness of his business cards. ‘That’s bone,’ he boasts to his colleagues, ‘and the lettering is something called Silian Rail.’ He’s mortified when he’s oneupped by someone whose cards have ‘raised lettering’ and a ‘pale Nimbus white’ tint.
We can’t all be Patrick Bateman, but weight of paper, style of letterhead, font choice and layout will make an instant impact on your reader. Be anal. If a wonky printer means that your letterhead is at a slight angle to the body of your text, it’ll be noticed. Likewise, better no letterhead than a badly home-made one.* If you have forgotten – or not bothered – to sign your name in pen between the sign-off and your printed name, again, it’ll make a small but significant impression. That is, if anything, even more important when the letter is a mass mail-out. Don’t underestimate the value of making clear that you have paid personal attention to each one.
Also, start from the assumption that it’s better to sound a bit stiff than to sound presumptuous. Addressing someone you’ve never met by their first name will strike the more old-fashioned of them – and there are still a few of those – as rude and unprofessional. If you’re involved in a correspondence and they start signing off with their first name, you might take that as an invitation to begin doing so – but don’t presume on familiarity.
In terms of register, that goes for the whole thing. Be formal without being pompous. Be brisk and clear – businesslike, in fact – and set your points out in order, one to a paragraph. The quicker your letter is to read and digest, the greater the courtesy to your reader. Show them that you value their time.
The most common style nowadays – and the one that to my eye looks most professional or official – is block-form. That is, each paragraph begins flush with the left-hand margin, and paragraphs are separated by a line-break. In that case most often everything – address, date, reference number if applicable and sign-off at the bottom – will be left-justified.
You put your address at the top (a letterhead will often cover this); then their name and address; then the date. The date usually looks best written out in full. It can also be handy to give a letter a heading – the equivalent of a subject-line for an email. This would usually go between the salutation and the body of the letter.
So, for instance:
Ping-Pong Paddles Ltd,
Ping-Pong House,
24 Table Tennis Way,
London E14 5DT
Frank Johnson,
Services Manager,
Finchley Youth Club,
East Finchley N2 9EL
20 November 2016
Dear Mr Johnson,
Ping-Pong Paddle Catalogue
I enclose as requested an up-to-date list of all the ping-pong paddles our company currently supplies, with prices and details of availability.
Should you wish to order more than two boxes, I’m happy to advise you that a 10 per cent discount is available for bulk orders. You can also find details on our website, www.ping-pong-paddles.com, where an online order form is available for download.
Yours sincerely,
P. Pong
Customer Service Director
An indented style might be appropriate for a slightly less formal letter. Perhaps you’re writing personally to offer someone a job, thanking them for a piece of work or congratulating them on 40 years of service. Stylistically, it moves slightly in the direction of a personal letter and the format may reflect that. In this case you’d indent the first line of each successive paragraph.
When you get to the text, as I shouldn’t have to say, make damn sure that you have checked the grammar and punctuation. That care is a courtesy to the reader, and one that will be noticed if it isn’t there.
It is equally important to get forms of address right. Traditionally, a letter addressed to ‘Dear Sir/Madam’ should be signed ‘Yours faithfully’; one addressed to a named recipient ‘Yours sincerely’. If you’re dealing with lords and ladies, doctors, knights of the realm and what have you, you need to get their form of address right, too. Don’t ‘Miss’ a Mrs or ‘Mr’ a Professor. It just looks sloppy.*
And for goodness sake, above all other things spell the person’s name, and get their job title, right. Fouling that up is the one-on-one equivalent of sending a mass-mailing headed ‘Dear [Insert Name Here]’. As a journalist, I get endless press releases where it’s clear the sender has lifted my name off some database and is spamming me (and a million others like me) at random. The sender has no idea, or doesn’t care, that I don’t and have never written about knitwear, that I’m not a section editor on Country Life, or what have you. Those releases are very easy to bin.
Here, as with a business letter, the absolute priority is to look professional. Proofread that sucker into the ground. If at all possible address it to a named person – you’ll get Brownie points for having troubled to find out who to apply to. Dear Sir/Madam, in the age of LinkedIn and Google, looks lazy.
The other thing to remember is that, in most cases, the recipient is going to be looking for a reason – any reason – to cut down the pile on his or her desk and file your application in the wastepaper basket. You’ll no doubt remember the old gag about the CEO who randomly binned half of all the job applications he was sent on the grounds that he only wanted to recruit candidates who were lucky.
Brevity and clarity are more than usually vital. I’d hesitate to send a cover letter that strayed onto a second side of A4. The same for a CV. So: one side for the cover letter; one side for the CV.
And as ever, apply the baiting-the-hook principle: you need to think not of what the company can do for you, but what you can do for the company. Find as much out about the job as you can in advance, and highlight those aspects of your experience that best answer its specific needs. Identify keywords in the job notice you’re responding to, and find a way of using them appropriately in the letter of application.
Avoid cliché. Describing yourself as a ‘team player’ or a ‘highly motivated self-starter’ simply signifies that you’ve absorbed a certain amount of business cant. Nobody’s interested in your ‘passion’ for this or your ‘vision’ for that. Sorry. And as a rule your hobbies and interests will be of very little interest to a recruiter.
There are many different schools of thought on how you design a CV. But as with the letter it accompanies, it needs to be waffle-free and it needs to be tailored in each case to the specific job you’re applying for. If you were a ‘senior facilities executive at Tent Solutions Ltd’ make plain – crisply – what that involved: job titles often don’t speak for themselves.
Again, you’re looking to give someone with limited patience as much useful information as possible as quickly as you can. Professional headhunters, when surveyed, claim to spend four or five minutes reading each CV that crosses their desk. But when a jobs site called TheLadders put the claim to the test – using eye-tracking software – they found that the real figure was six seconds.* Yup. Six.
This means that the most sensible way to arrange a CV is according to the inverted pyramid structure of a newspaper article. The important stuff goes up top: your name and contact details first of all. Then put your recent career history in reverse order.
The eye-tracking study I mentioned above also discovered that recruiters spend 80 per cent of their time focusing on six data points: name, current job title and employer, previous job title and employer, the start and end dates for the last job, the start and end dates for the job before, and the candidate’s education.
So think about how far you want to go back. The CV at this stage is a marketing tool rather than a life history. It gets you (with a bit of luck) through the first stage of the recruitment process. If the company then wants more detail, you can give it to them further down the line.
They’ll want to know what you did most recently before they want to hear about your GCSE results or your glittering collection of school sports trophies. In fact, once you have one or more real-world jobs under your belt you can probably dispense with any academic history beyond (if applicable) your university degree.
I’d suggest job title, company and dates (in brackets) in bold followed by no more than a sentence or two of explanation in ordinary type. For instance:
Senior Facilities Executive, Tent Solutions Ltd (2014–2016)
I managed a team of five workers, and was responsible for running the invoicing system, dispatching orders to customers and maintaining stock levels in the warehouse. I’m familiar with Tentware and Tentcel as well as standard financial and accounting software.
Use a clean, well-sized font (I’d recommend 12-point) and use white space plentifully. A CV that makes you squint and strain your eyes isn’t one that’s going to be attractive. Whether you centre or left-justify the text is up to you, but experiment with what looks cleanest, easiest to read and least gimmicky. Wacky fonts, multicoloured text and random capitals will make your CV stand out – but not in a good way.
Unless you’re applying for a job as a model, you can do without attaching a photograph of yourself. That goes even if you’re super-hot; in fact, it goes especially if you’re super-hot. That eye-tracking software I mentioned earlier discovered that recruiters would spend fully a fifth of those all-important six seconds looking at the pretty photographs rather than reading the CV.
The most important thing to remember when writing a letter of complaint is that you want its recipient to be on your side. You may be utterly enraged, but if you want to achieve something without recourse to the law you vastly help yourself by being courteous and reasonable.
Particularly with large corporations, the person who gets your letter of complaint will not, usually, be the one who has wronged you. At least to start with, they have no skin in the game. They may even be sympathetic to your situation. That sympathy evaporates when you start slinging around words like ‘incompetent’ and ‘farcical’, demanding people be sacked or making empty threats of legal action. It makes you feel good to bluster and rage: but it’s how the recipient of the letter feels that will actually matter. As ever, the trick is to go to where your audience is.
Try to picture how the first draft of your letter might go over if Dave in Customer Relations reads it out to Jane at the next-door desk. The thing to remember is that Dave almost certainly doesn’t give a monkey’s. The more blood-curdling the letter, the more likely that he and Jane will have a good giggle over it and start thinking up ways to raise your blood temperature further. Start from the assumption that you are entertainment. And then work to countermand that assumption by being reasonable. In an ideal world, if Dave reads your letter to Jane, Jane will go: ‘Yeah. You have to admit that person has a point …’
Your task is to make irresistibly plain how you’ve been inconvenienced, and then propose what will seem to your correspondent a reasonable and proportionate redress – and one that is within their power to make. In an ideal world, they will come away feeling good about themselves and you’ll come away having obtained satisfaction.
So a letter of complaint needs to be forensically clear. First, get your ducks in a row. What are you complaining about? What do you want to happen? Let’s say you got your dry-cleaning home only to discover a giant iron-shaped burn mark in the lining of your favourite suit. The guy in the dry-cleaning shop claimed it was nothing to do with him. Now you’re writing to head office.
Enclose the evidence you have. Include relevant photographs or receipts. Be precise about what happened when, and in what sequence. If you had an argument in person with the man in the shop, you might want to mention it – but keep your eyes on the prize: your concern is with getting your suit mended. Don’t get diverted into he-said-she-said. Rudeness is seldom subject to concrete redress, and your correspondent might well assume that you gave as good as you got.
If your previous five letters have gone unanswered, patiently enumerate the dates on which you sent them. If this is the latest in a long correspondence, again, make sure you identify the date of the last one they sent you for their ease of reference. If there’s something relevant in a contract or the terms on the dry-cleaning ticket, point it out clearly.
And when you’re proposing redress, ‘I demand’ is – oddly – a lot easier to ignore than, for instance, ‘In the circumstances it seems reasonable to expect …’ Remember the exchange between Harry Hotspur and the bombastic Owen Glendower in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One? ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ Glendower brags. ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man,’ laughs Hotspur. ‘But will they come when you do call for them?’
You’re trying to take your correspondent gently but firmly by the elbow, rather than bashing heads with them. Once an exchange gets to be oppositional or abusive, it will tend to stay that way. I’ve been let off parking tickets by writing politely and apologetically to the council to explain the circumstances. I’ve never got anywhere by calling someone a jobsworth.
The tweet of complaint – which is rapidly taking over as a means of complaining to large organisations – is a special case. I’ll discuss that in the section on writing for electronic media.
Here we are in more or less uncharted territory, and I don’t propose to try charting it. A letter to a friend is an unbridled exercise in voice. And almost nobody – now we have emails and Facebook messages and DMs on Twitter – writes them these days. It’s a shame. They should. There are no rules. You can be as informal as you like. You can include sketches and doodles. And your letters will be a lifelong conversation. One day a trove of them will spill out of a box and give you unimaginable happiness.
One of the saddest things for me as a literary journalist is the realisation that the Collected Letters, as a genre of published book, is almost certainly dying out. But if you read the great epistolary friendships – Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, say, or Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin – you will see what we have lost. In our letters we are doing what Hazlitt called ‘writing to the moment’: the quick of life is in them, and all its absurdity.
That sense of a lifelong conversation comes poignantly through in the last letter from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis. Dictating from his deathbed, Larkin ended his last letter to his friend: ‘You will excuse the absence of the usual valediction, Yours ever, Philip.’ Every letter that he’d sent Amis for decades had ended in the word ‘bum’. But out of consideration for the sensibilities of the woman who’d be transcribing his tape, Larkin omitted it. Eleven days later he was dead.
Always remember that your job, writing to a friend, is to entertain. That can mean revelling in the odd pratfall. In London Fields, Martin Amis offered the best postcard-writing advice I’ve ever read: ‘The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation,’ he warned, ‘isn’t nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery and drizzle. Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?’
If someone has treated you to lunch, sent you a card on your anniversary or – in an instance that occurs about as often as Higgs’s Boson presents itself spontaneously to a physicist – remembered their godchild’s birthday, you cannot but cover yourself in glory by writing a proper thank you with a pen on a piece of paper.
Sitting down with pen and paper to write and thank them, in the manner of a Dickensian scribe, and then locating a first-class stamp,* and an envelope, and their postal address, and a postcode, will seem like an extraordinary pain in the neck. That’s exactly why it’s worth doing. You’re demonstrating your appreciation by exactly that effort – and you increase considerably thereby the chance that they’ll treat you again.
There’s little that paralyses the average person more than writing a letter of condolence to a friend who has lost a loved one. You feel awkward and embarrassed. That’s fine. But the act of writing is in itself what will be valued: however awkward, someone grieving will want to hear from you rather than not. You are extending respect and friendship. Write quickly, and write – I’d strongly suggest – by hand.
You’ll want to calibrate what you write to your relationship both with the recipient and with the deceased. The whole point of this letter is that it’s personal. If you knew the deceased well, sharing a couple of warm memories – even funny ones – will let the recipient of your letter feel that there’s a shared bond. If you didn’t know the deceased, you will very likely be able to make some respectful reference to what you knew of them.
And take care. Julian Barnes’s 2013 book Levels of Life – which includes a memoir of his loss of his wife to an aggressive form of cancer – describes with unusual candour how the grieving can feel anger towards friends ‘for their inability to say or do the right things, for their unwanted pressingness or seeming froideur. And since the grief-struck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.’*
Use tact. Don’t be bossy. Don’t tell the recipient how they should be feeling. If you’re finding it hard to know what to say, you can acknowledge that; but don’t harp on it. ‘I’m finding this a hard letter to write, but I want you to know that all my thoughts are with you’, or something like it, is fine. Absolutely to be avoided are operatic, or competitive, expressions of grief. Don’t focus on how the person died. Acknowledge, but don’t belabour, the dreadful grief and pain that the person must be feeling. You’re trying to focus on the individual excellence of the person they’ve lost rather than the consequences of the loss itself.
And everything I’ve read by or heard from people who’ve experienced serious bereavement is that bland, open-ended offers of help are as little use as no offers at all. ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do’ may make you feel better, but it puts the burden of thinking of something for you to do on someone who has enough of a burden already. A letter of condolence shouldn’t demand a reply – though it may get one.
Also, a respectful tact with regards to matters of religion is advisable. If you write to the widow of a die-hard atheist – even if you yourself are a believing Christian – saying that you’re certain he’s in heaven right now crosses the line from condolence to trolling. It’s not about you.
It is not my place here to dabble my inky fingers in the stuff of people’s souls. There are as many potential love letters as there are lovers. The fact that you can’t propose a boilerplate way of doing it is exactly the point. This needs to be particular to the addressee, and particular to you.
On the other hand, I can’t quite resist. As Cyrano de Bergerac showed us (which most of us will know via the Steve Martin movie Roxanne), the right words can win the girl even when the boy’s nose is disfiguringly enormous and she would totally swipe left on Tinder.
What makes a love letter work? Above all, the lover wants to be seen. The letter is about attention. I’ve sometimes heard it said that what makes a relationship work is not how you feel about the other person, but how they make you feel about yourself. Here is the essence of the performance: you are making clear how you feel about the other – how enveloping and alive your attention to them is – and at the same time you’re demonstrating a particular quality of attention. That is, you’re being your best self – most alive to the world, most engaged with the other – so that the attention you’re paying to them becomes a fantastic compliment: they are the prime focus of a consciousness that flares and sparks.
So moaning on about how miserable you are and how they’re the only one who can save you from the awfulness of your solitude – true though it may be – makes you a burden, not a catch. Likewise lifting a lot of Fotherington-Thomas boilerplate about moonlight and roses and whiskers on kittens is unlikely to work, except on a dullard: you’re supposed to be intoxicated with your lover in his or her particularity, not intoxicated with your own prose style or with a collection of hackneyed literary gestures.
When William Godwin was courting his future wife Mary Wollstonecraft, he made just this mistake. He sent her a stilted love-poem. She responded sharply. She said she didn’t want an artificial composition but a ‘bird’s-eye view of your heart’. She told him not to write to her again ‘unless you honestly acknowledge yourself bewitched’.
And there’s no harm in a bit of filth. Sex is intimate communication, and so is intimate communication about sex. Here is Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath during an enforced separation early in their marriage:
Above all, save every whisper until Saturday, save every little bit of you. I can hardly remember you without feeling almost sick and getting aching erections. I shall pour all this into you on Saturday and fill you and fill myself with you and kill myself on you. …
I love you
Your husband, Ted.
One essence of the love letter is risk. It is a form at once self-concealing – in that you are shaping your self-depiction through words – and self-exposing. As countless works of literature from Clarissa forwards bear witness, a letter can fall into the wrong hands.* It cannot be ‘taken back’ or spun in quite the same way that a moment of drunken sincerity can. So the further you can go into intimacy the more directly you expose yourself to the attention of the other, the more you place yourself in his or her power, the greater the trust you imply and the greater the confidence you instil.
Dorothy Parker wrote a short poem we could all do with taking note of:
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this –
One of you is lying.
Sooner or later, if it’s not for keeps, you’re either going to be a dumper or a dumpee. There are, again, no rules for this. But there is an elementary consideration you can pay. That is, have the conversation face to face. And if the written word does enter into it, write personally and try not to do so in anger. Dumping people by text message or email, or abruptly changing your Facebook status to single, are ways of adding insult to injury. Why would you not want even an ex to feel okay about themselves – or as okay about themselves as it’s possible to be? As Kurt Vonnegut, whom I regard as an infallible moral authority, said: ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’
Plus, self-interest enters in. Acting ungallantly when your relationship breaks up – particularly now that we live so much of our lives in public – will mark your card with others. The Genesis drummer Phil Collins was reported to have dumped his second wife by fax after 12 years of marriage. That was so much of a dickmove that nearly a quarter of a century later it’s still one of the main things people remember about him.
I don’t mean screenwriting. I mean writing for digital technologies: from websites to social media. Much of what I say here will have to be tentative – because the rules and conventions governing online interaction are still being set.
Linguistic change, as I’ve said before, is brought about by social relationships. Language encodes those social relationships. We learn language in the context of families, schoolyards and communities, and we tend to stigmatise usages – be they regional or class variations – that are seen to belong to an out-group.
From the contact pidgins that are formed when two linguistic communities rub up against one another to the ‘creoles’ that emerge from them as the first generations grow up who speak those pidgins as a native tongue, from the jargons of academic specialism to the vernaculars of different youth subcultures: all of these are artefacts of communities and identities. They are social.
Any number of linguistic and ideological tribes mix and clash in cyberspace. So it is no surprise that the internet in general and social media in particular (the clue, as the cliché goes, is in the name) are great laboratories of language change.
Imagine, if you like, the difference between patiently studying human evolution back through the fossil record, and then moving laboratories to start work on Drosophila melanogaster. A fruit-fly generation is not much more than ten days long. Suddenly, you can study evolution in real time. So it is with something like Twitter. Usages will pass in and out of fashion in a matter of a few months.
Similarly, orthodoxies in website design come and go – and each will be, as per the baiting-the-hook principle, specific to an audience and its style of engagement. To take an example from my world, that of newspapers, it tended to be conventional wisdom about ten years ago that a paper’s website should be primarily navigable by clicking through. You’d be presented with a landing or home page that would (usually) take no more than a single screen. Arranged on it would be an array of headlines and standfirsts and photographs that you’d click on to read the stories. Menus would also lead you to different sections, each of which would have its own landing page and its own sub-menus. Everything would be stacked like a Russian doll. You could call it a form of visual hypotaxis. You might click on the Guardian home-page; click through to its Review section; click through from that to its Books section; and click through from that to the particular book review or feature you were attracted by.
Then the mid-market tabloid Daily Mail went online, and it more or less dispensed with all that. Instead of stacking everything behind a neat and well-organised landing page, it simply offered a seemingly endless torrent of stories stacked up on top of each other according to no obvious logic. Hard news, internet memes, gossip, paparazzi shots of actresses on beaches … you could scroll down indefinitely through this potpourri. And it’s now one of the most viewed and most ‘sticky’ news sites on the World Wide Web.
Its purpose isn’t to dispense news in an orderly way. It’s to provide a more-ish experience in which – much like the way we browse the rest of the internet – the curious reader will click between the absurd, the dismaying, the titillating and the trivial in no particular order.
That mashing up of genres and categories seems to go through the way we read online now. We are frequently distracted. Even when we’re concentrating on reading a serious essay online, we might well have several other windows open. We’ll be checking our phones, alt-tabbing over to Twitter, idling through someone’s party photographs on Instagram … The experience of continual attention to a particular genre of thing and a particular tone (what, for the sake of argument, you might get while reading a book in a quiet library) is rare in the networked world.
So digital writing is above all about getting and retaining the attention. You want your reader to click in the first place, and you want them to stay there once they have. You’re aiming for clickiness and stickiness.
And we do know – roughly – what travels online. Pictures go further than text alone. And emotional content, or content that has a social logic, is particularly effective. Anger and outrage, humour, curiosity, astonishment and tribal ‘virtue-signalling’: all of these will cause a posting to go further and faster online. That is why set-phrases like ‘will astound you’ and ‘you won’t BELIEVE what X looks like now’ have demonstrated their crude effectiveness in ads and promoted content; likewise why ‘secrets’ so often feature in that content; and why ‘listicles’ – ‘24 Continuity Errors in Star Wars’ or what have you – so effectively gain our sense of curiosity.
When a few years ago I interviewed Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, he argued that memes and web culture in general are ‘organised by a sort of social logic. What kind of things do people like to do together? What kinds of things do people relate to? We organise our site by these emotional responses.’ Sure enough, shock or curiosity, sentimentality, amusement and anger are the staples of viral content, and if you go onto BuzzFeed you’ll find ‘sections’ marked not ‘News’, ‘Arts’, ‘Comment’, ‘Gossip’ and so forth but ‘LOL’, ‘win’, ‘omg’, ‘cute’, ‘fail’ and ‘wtf’.
Hyperbole and emotive language come to the fore. The landing page for BuzzFeed at the time of writing was long on items that promised to be ‘hilarious’ or ‘insanely clever’, on lists of things that ‘sum up’ a particular phenomenon or mistakes that ‘everybody makes’. Headlines challenge the reader directly to engage. ‘Can You Pass This Basic German Test?’ it wonders. ‘Can You Guess The Disney Princess?’
Here’s a language that is informal, amped-up, compressed and maximalist. That is the default, though not the only, language of online engagement.
Email is a slippery form of communication. It runs the gamut from a digital version of ordinary letter-writing to something much more like a text message or an instant message, so getting a sense of the correct register requires a moment of thought. If you’re sitting at your desk all day firing off emails – one to your husband one moment and your boss the next – it can be easy to let the registers blur. That fretwork of kisses with which you sign off is fine to a friend; probably inappropriate with a colleague unless you know them well; and (in certain contexts) can stray into the realm of the ditzy, flirtatious or even creepy if used with your manager or a subordinate. Remember, as Hillary Clinton didn’t, that copyright in emails you write in the office will almost certainly belong to your company, and that the company (and its ISP) will archive those emails indefinitely. Before you hit send, think about the worst-case scenario: how would this email chain look if printed out and left on the CEO’s desk; or raised in evidence at an employment tribunal. Better safe than sorry.
Emailing strangers, particularly in a professional context, asks for the same level of formality as a paper-and-ink letter. You won’t need to supply a date or a return postal address, but the greeting and sign-off ought to be in place as usual; and even if you have an automatic digital signature, you look more courteous if you take the trouble to type your name at the end. As your exchange of letters turns into a conversation, the register might well move towards more informality. But, at least to start with, treat it as a formal exchange. You wouldn’t open a written letter to a stranger with ‘Hi Bob!’, and some if not a majority of Bobs will receive an email that opens that way with irritation. Friendly is fine; presumptuous runs a risk.
Flagging emails ‘urgent’ – which many clients give you the option of doing – may well make sense within a company if it’s part of your corporate practice. For emails to outside contacts and strangers, though, it looks as if you’re presuming to jump a queue. There’ll be exceptions to that, but out-of-the-blue offers, press releases, business pitches and so forth are not usually among them. The great pleasure of email is that it combines immediacy of communication with the courtesy of letting people respond in their own time. When the telephone was first invented, many people were horrified at the idea that complete strangers would be able to make a bell ring in the privacy of their living rooms. We got used to telephones; but that instinct is worth bearing in mind. If someone feels you’re forcing yourself on their attention, they won’t like it.
Requesting a read-receipt will also almost always play badly. Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes. Before they’ve even considered what you have to say, you’re demanding something of them. A read-receipt is a jabbed finger in the chest. I straw-polled Twitter on the subject and – though my Twitter followers obviously don’t count as a scientific sample – the responses were pretty unequivocal: ‘I always, in every situation, make a point to decline to send a read-receipt.’; ‘Blind rage’; ‘def. not fine by me’; ‘REVOLTING’. If even 10 per cent of your recipients respond that way, it’s something to avoid.* If you absolutely need a response in a specific time-frame, make it courteously clear in the email itself.
There are a number of practical, as well as tonal concerns, when it comes to email.
The first is spam filters. An all-caps subject line, as well as looking ugly and shouty, can be a one-way ticket to the junkmail folder. Likewise, obvious trigger-words such as ‘free’, ‘win’, ‘sex’, ‘Viagra’, ‘cash’, ‘gold’ and excitable punctuation marks along the lines of ‘!!!!!!’. Most of us, it’s true, won’t have much occasion to send a professional or even a personal email with the subject line ‘FREE VIAGRA!!!!’ But spam filters are dumb. You could imagine some of the words ‘cash’, ‘gold’, ‘free’ and ‘win’ appearing in a careless commodity-trader’s subject line, and it would go the worse for that email if they did. Other spam flags include unusually big or small font sizes, a high proportion of hyperlinks to ordinary text, and lots of big images rather than text (spammers sometimes try to get round filters by sending their messages as image files). If you’re sending a legitimate attachment make sure that your email makes reference to it in the text. A link or attachment in an email with no body text, even if it navigates the algorithmic filters, often signifies to the recipient that the sender has been hacked.
The second is our old friend the attention span. The many studies that have been done on how people read email agree on one thing: they don’t read it very carefully. At least half of them won’t bother scrolling down an email, and a very large number will only read emails in the preview pane, meaning that (depending on the configuration of their email client) they’ll see only the first few paragraphs of the content, if that.
So the subject line and greeting are important. Make them easy to understand, personal to the recipient, representative of the email’s actual content, and interesting enough to hold the attention.
And, as ever, put the most important material in the first couple of paragraphs of the email. Don’t spend your first four paragraphs summarising the situation as it stands, and only then get round to offering your proposals for changing it. That may be logically impeccable, but it’s badly geared to the human attention span.
For several weeks now the staff have been complaining about the stodgy meals in the staff canteen. Yesterday the cauliflower curry was sent back uneaten by 40 per cent of the workers. Takings are down 20 per cent, and morale is, at least anecdotally, low. Did you taste that fish the other day? It was like soggy toilet paper! Not only that, but we only just scraped through the last hygiene inspection. In light of all this …
Ed might enjoy your grousing, but if he’s in a hurry he’s going to put this in the TL;DR file and leave it for later.
Rather, begin with: ‘I think we should sack the caterers. Here’s why …’
Keep it brief. If the internet had a catchphrase it would almost certainly be the four letters TL;DR: ‘Too long; didn’t read.’ We are, in the words of T. S. Eliot, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. So if you want anyone other than your mum to read your website or your blog, it pays to bear that in mind. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a specialised discipline, and beyond the scope of this book, but businesses building websites do well to be aware of it. SEO professionals recommend keeping page titles short so they will appear in full on search engine results. Depending on the search engine and the format of the title, you’ll get a limit of between 40 and 70 characters. Err on the safe side.
An eye-tracking study conducted in 2006* by a web-design consultant, Jakob Nielsen, suggested that people don’t just read distractedly when they read online: they read differently. He discovered that, typically, people scan a page of online text in a sort of rough F-shape. (‘F is for fast,’ he warns.) First their eyes track horizontally across the top area of the text. Then they again track horizontally – reading a bit less far across – a little further down the page. Then they move their eyes vertically down the left-hand margin.
Nielsen drew three sensible conclusions from his study:
1. ‘Users won’t read your text thoroughly.’ That means that you can’t rely on word-for-word digestion. Punch up the stuff you really need them to notice.
2. ‘The first two paragraphs must state the most important information.’ We’re back in inverted-pyramid territory. Get across what you need to get across in the crossbars of the F.
3. ‘Start subheads, paragraphs and bullet points with information-carrying words.’ What this means, crudely, is that the left-hand side of the page is where the action is. So, particularly in a business document or website, concentrate the important stuff there. And make use of design features such as bullet points and subheads to capture the reader’s attention as his or her eye wanders down the left-hand margin.
The bad news, too, is that the average web page attracts ten seconds or less of attention; fewer than one website in ten gets two minutes or more of attention. You might be able to bank on a bit more, of course, depending on what sort of page it is: if the user has navigated there deliberately, he or she is expecting to invest some time. But don’t take attention for granted. The more words there are on a given page the more time a reader will spend on it – but that’s subject to the law of diminishing returns. Nielsen used a different, large dataset to consider this problem and concluded that for every extra 100 words on a site, it attracted only 4.4 seconds more of attention. That’s less than 20 words at average reading speed.
A blog isn’t a single sort of thing. Some blogs are essays; some are diaries; some – if you include in the blogging category profiles on platforms such as Pinterest or Tumblr – might be more like a curated collection of artefacts. Each will have its own special qualities and formal structure: an essayistic blog will want to advance well-set-out arguments; a diaristic one will tend to major on tone of voice, a feeling of intimacy, and/or an eye for the evolving event or the deft namedrop.
The thing that can be said about all of them in general is that knowing your audience is the key to their success. There’s no shame in deciding that the audience is you, or you and a small handful of friends: by all means write about what you ate for dinner or how fed up you are with your homework. But if you hope for a wider audience (and you presumably do, if you’re posting it online), you need to give that audience a reason to read.
Blogs are personal. What’s your selling-point? Is it your particular expertise or authority? Or is it your taste and style and tone of voice? A blog, one way or another, needs a USP. It’s notable that, within reason, a successful blog will tend to specialise in one particular thing. If someone comes to your blog expecting to read about food, and for two weeks solid you write only about knitting patterns, you probably won’t take those readers with you. Readers will come back for that one particular thing. That thing might be you yourself; but more often it will be something you know or something you do.
Take a couple of examples. Eliot Higgins began as a web-savvy amateur who in 2012 became interested in the weapons that were being used in the Syrian civil war. He started blogging under the pseudonym Brown Moses and, using sources available on the internet and social media, became very good at identifying which weapons were being used where. His growing expertise and ingenuity started to furnish him with scoops – he busted the Syrian regime’s use of barrel-bombs against civilians and went on to establish the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine in the 2014–15 conflict there. He got good at a particular thing – and his ‘citizen journalism’ has had considerable political impact. If you want to know what’s going on in Syria, Higgins – who founded the citizen journalism collective Bellingcat – is an indispensable source.
Another blogger who has used expertise to draw a following is the lawyer David Allen Green. Originally blogging as Jack of Kent, he uses a drily forensic style to analyse the legal issues involved in major political news stories. His attractiveness to his readers, including me, is his precision and his narrow specialism: you can get ideology here, there and everywhere online. But someone who knows the difference between a tort and a Sachertorte, and can explain it with clarity to non-lawyers, commands attention. He’s able to bring something particular to the analysis of the news.
Brooke Magnanti, who blogged as Belle de Jour, had a different sort of selling-point. She was a professional sex-worker. Readers went to her blog because it gave them a window into a world which they would not otherwise have had access to. It helped that she wrote stylishly and that she had a wide and intelligent range of interests outside her job. People came out of curiosity or in the hope of titillation – they stayed for her voice and personality.
Then, of course, there are the tone-of-voice blogs. Neil Gaiman is well known for his work as a writer of novels, children’s books and comics. He was early to the blogging world, and built up a large following because he wrote well, had interesting things to say – and because people really wanted to know about Neil Gaiman. He had some good, if wryly admonitory, advice to those who hope to emulate him. ‘People come to me and they ask, how do I get 1.5m people reading my blog?’ he said. ‘And it’s like, you need to start it in 2001 and try not to miss a day for the first eight years …’
Social media presents particular perils and opportunities to the persuasive writer. The opportunities are that it has a potentially limitless reach. You really can, with a well-crafted Facebook post or a lucky tweet, reach around the world from your back bedroom.
On the other hand, it also provides for things to go viral in the wrong way. You need to bear three things in mind.
1. Tone often fails to travel online.
This is the killer. Irony, self-mockery or dark humour can easily be parsed as bigotry. A question can be parsed as a sneer or an act of aggression – hence the rise of the defensive formula ‘genuine question’. You only have to look at the so-called ‘Twitterstorms’ that descend on quite innocent individuals to see the hazards. In his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed the writer Jon Ronson used the example of a PR executive, Justine Sacco, who tweeted a bad-taste joke just before climbing on a plane: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!’ A tweet designed to mock a racist attitude was taken to be endorsing it, and by the time Miss Sacco’s plane had landed it had been retweeted more than 2,000 times and picked up by mainstream outlets. In less than 24 hours Miss Sacco had become a public hate figure, and she lost her job as a result.
2. You have multiple potential audiences.
Your potential overhearers may not be as sympathetic to you as your friends or followers. This point is closely allied to the first. But it means thinking about what certain behaviours might look like if spread more widely. The safest assumption to make is that even ostensibly closed social media sites such as Facebook or a locked Twitter account are essentially public forums. In 2016 the writer Nick Lezard joked in his private Facebook feed about wanting to crowd-fund a political assassination. Those hostile to his politics affected to have taken this as an incitement to violence. He was widely pilloried online and the newspaper for which he worked came under pressure to sack him. No joke for him at the time.
3. Stuff never, ever disappears from the internet.
It really doesn’t. You can delete a tweet or take down a Facebook page or edit an Instagram post, but some bastard will have it screencapped. Drunk-texting can be a mistake; posting on social media drunk – and/or in anger or self-pity – can be a catastrophe. Post in haste; repent at leisure.
There are certain other lesser principles to bear in mind. None is an infallible rule, but all are worth thinking about before you put thumb to smartphone.
• Don’t always be on transmit: social media is set up for conversation. If all you do is post links to your own self-published books, or invite people to ‘like’ the Facebook page you’ve set up in tribute to yourself, people will see you as an advertising bot. Ask questions. Respond to people. This goes just as strongly for corporate accounts as it does for personal ones.
• The tone of voice you use will set the tone of the conversation. Fury tends to invite fury. Reasonableness tends to invite reasonableness. On the whole social media communication is far more informal than offline communication, and it has its norms of style. Labour to get the hang of them; but feel free to investigate the comic potential of the odd violation of decorum. The writer Saul Wordsworth has a spoof Twitter account @nazihunteralan, purporting to be the thoughts of a Bedfordshire retiree called Alan Stoob who searches the English home counties for Nazis. Being old, Alan doesn’t quite get Twitter so he frequently signs his tweets ‘Regards, Alan’. I mention it because it shows how most of us have so internalised the norms of social media that when someone writes a tweet like an old-fashioned letter it sounds comically odd.
• Be funny, if you can: if you make somebody laugh, you have them for life. A few years back the not-especially-well-known novelist David Whitehouse* tweeted: ‘Lance Armstrong should be applauded for riding a bike so well on drugs. I tried it once. Hit a dog and fell into the canal.’ It earned him nearly 10,000 retweets. What worked so well there? In the first place it was topical. Also the way it was worded. The detail of the dog – the fact that two accidents befell him rather than one – gave an awful extra vividness to the image. Plus people falling into canals on their bicycles is funny. His publisher replied to his tweet to congratulate him: ‘Your Lance joke retweeted 9249 times. Good going. If only Bed [Whitehouse’s first novel] had sold that many!!’
• Reposting praise for yourself will turn people off. My advice would be only to repost insults and abuse. People enjoy reading those more in any case.
• Use hashtags judiciously. As I mentioned briefly in my chapter on punctuation, the hashtag does more than one thing. It is primarily an organisational tool. Where it indicates the subject matter of a social media post, or the debate to which it is a contribution, it makes it possible to follow a particular thread of conversation through the tapestry. It also gets used to mark something as a comment. Face-book, Instagram or Twitter posts that end in a thicket of hashtags tend to look naff. #fail #lol #dadadvice #whodoyouthinkyouarekiddingmisterhitler
• Think about who you’re including in the conversation, and whether you’re doing so with their consent or not. Facebook users will be familiar with those friends who add them to groups without asking them. That’s bad manners. It’s especially irksome if you aren’t a regular Facebook user and struggle to figure out how to remove yourself from the lively ‘Bring Back Birching’ or ‘Send Them All Home’ communities. Likewise, if you respond to someone’s tweet and then get into a 600-tweet dust-up with some third party, @-ing the original tweeter into every single one of your replies is a colossal pain in the mentions. If someone isn’t actively participating in a discussion, untag them. Also there’s a world of difference between @-replying to someone you disagree with – so that only people who follow you both will see the tweet – and either quoting their tweet below your response or putting a little full stop at the beginning so that your reply is visible to the world. The latter is the equivalent of writing an open letter. It’s often an act of aggression, inviting a potential pile-on from your followers. It more often than not looks pompous and high-handed in any case.
• The two points above – about hashtags, and about who you include in the conversation – mesh when it comes to the interaction between individuals and corporations in the public spaces of social media. Corporations like to ‘engage’ with their public. That’s a good thing. But you make yourself vulnerable. The Face-book pages of unpopular companies can get swarmed with negative comments. And when you set up a hashtag you need to think hard about whether and how it might be used against you. In October 2016, the train company Southern Rail was frustrated by a forthcoming strike by the RMT Union. So @southernrailuk tweeted: ‘Time to get back on track. Tweet @RMTunion & tell them how rail strikes make you feel. #SouthernBackOnTrack’. It was a huge mistake. They got thousands of replies and hashtagged posts supporting RMT workers, ridiculing their service (‘When people waited three hours at Brighton last night, was that because of strikes?’) and objecting to the company apparently encouraging its followers to monster its own employees. The onslaught forced the company to ditch a planned poster campaign – the memos about which were, of course, immediately leaked onto social media.
A similar dynamic can be seen when individuals complain to companies in public in an effort to apply public pressure to alter their behaviour. You might tweet: ‘Hey @GenericFriedChicken, I found this rat tail in my Cluck-O-Burger. What you going to do about it?’ In the best-case scenario, your tweet will go viral (especially if you include a photograph of the offending food) and your apology and compensation will be faster and more grovelling than had you written a polite private email. This works, naturally, especially well for celebrities with millions of followers or Face-book friends. Corporations hate bad PR. The worst-case scenario is that you’ll look whining and entitled and someone will point out that your ‘rat tail’ is actually a piece of fried onion. Choose your battles.
• Think before subtweeting. The practice of bitching about people behind their backs – ‘subtweeting’ is the name given to saying rude things about someone on social media (not just Twitter) without mentioning their name – long predates the internet. But it has especially toxic potential online. They may not notice. They may notice, recognise themselves and be hurt or angry (sometimes the intended effect). And onlookers may judge you more harshly than the subject of your subtweet. Done elegantly, subtweeting can be a witty joke or a scalding rebuke. Done clumsily, it … which takes me onto my next point.
• Remember that – whether you live in a country blessed by the First Amendment or not – the laws of libel apply to you, and that repeating a libel is itself a libel. If someone posts a juicy-sounding rumour about a celebrity threesome, a government cover-up or some appalling corporate malfeasance – especially if they name names and make concrete allegations – to share the post or link to it is effectively to adopt the allegation. ‘Interesting if true’ or ‘I wonder what X has to say about this’, or ‘*innocent face*’ do not make you immune to being sued. If you don’t know whether something is true, and you post it anyway, the consequences are on you. Being ‘in the know’ makes you feel good. Being ‘liable for exemplary damages and the other side’s legal costs’, not so much.
• Remember that there are as many different ways of ‘doing’ social media as there are people doing it. Social media has tribes. People talk about ‘Weird Twitter’ or ‘Black Twitter’. Know the tribe you’re tweeting to; get the hang of its private languages and conventions.
• Above all, respect the first rule of the internet: ‘Don’t be a dick.’ Unless that’s your express purpose, in which case knock yourself out. But be prepared to take the consequences.
Linguistically, as I’ve hinted above, the smart social media poster will be aware of the speed with which a popular usage hardens into cliché and then is discarded. If you don’t want to look like your dad dancing at a wedding disco, you’d be wise to use caution when it comes to repeating a style of post you see being used by others on the site. Internet language changes fast.
President Trump was much mocked in 2017 for signalling sarcasm by adding the exclamation ‘Not!’ to the end of a tweet: the movie Wayne’s World, which briefly popularised the usage, came out 25 years before. Likewise, the former UK Prime Minister David Cameron was teased rotten for thinking, apparently, that LOL stood for ‘Lots of Love’ (rather than ‘Laughing Out Loud’). LOL itself has since changed its meaning in any case: now it’s more often deployed lower-case, either as an all-purpose unit of punctuation or semi-sarcastically, as if to say: ‘Yeah, sure. Funny.’ And do people still say ‘roflcopter’ or ‘roflmao’? You’d have to doubt it.
Consider such usages, too, as:
• ‘Wow. Just wow.’ [glossing something you appear to think is remarkable]
• ‘I can’t even.’ [preceding something in response to which words, apparently, fail you]
• ‘This.’ [preceding a quoted tweet you agree with]
• ‘When you …’ or ‘tfw’* [preceding a reaction gif]
• ‘You’re welcome.’ [preceding a post in which, by posting a picture of a hot celebrity or an unusual-looking cat, you deem yourself to have done the world a favour]
• ‘brb†, just …’ [usually preceding a piece of news or a quoted tweet to which you are responding humorously, as in ‘brb, just killing myself’ in front of news of, say, the novelty boy band Hanson reforming]
• ‘[Town name], I am in you.’ [slightly smutty-sounding announcement of your movements that caught on briefly about five years ago but now seems mercifully to have withered]
• ‘Burn!’ [indicating that someone has said something withering to someone else]
• ‘DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT’ [usually preceding a quoted tweet deemed to be so outrageous that death from shame seems like a sensible way forward]
• YOLO [a general-purpose injunction to seize the day (‘You Only Live Once’), apparently used as punctuation by millennials]
• WTF or WTAF [meaning ‘what the fuck’, or ‘what the actual fuck’]
These are particular to their platform or platforms. They don’t have much of a place in conventional prose but they (or whatever supersedes them) have a vigorous half-life on social media. What they have in common, I’d suggest, is a certain (albeit formulaic) informality and playfulness. Most of them indicate an emotional response.
I am not a graphic designer or a newspaper sub-editor. My concern here – and such expertise as I have to offer – is primarily to do with putting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into letters, emails, essays, reports, blogposts, chapters and books. The question of typesetting and layout is one that admits a whole library of books from people with far more expertise in it than me.
But if for no other reason than to put down a marker that these things matter, I wanted to include a brief discussion on the design features of text. Some of the things we’ve already touched on – such as paragraphing and punctuation – have visual as well as semantic implications. These aren’t trivial. A paragraph gives the reader a breather, as does a full stop. They allow the brain to catch up, consolidate what has gone before and prepare to take in what follows.
Most design features, used properly, will do the same thing. Headings and subheadings in bold or a larger font size, bullet points and indentations all help the reader orient him or herself in the text. Generous spaces between paragraphs help too: your word-processing package will tend to add an extra line or half-line in between paragraphs, and it does that for a reason. White space is the reader’s – and therefore your – friend.
Think, too, about what your eyes do when you read. They don’t track continuously across a line of text, then return to the beginning of the next line and repeat. They move in what are known as saccades – little jumps of around ten characters every quarter of a second – between points of fixation. They haul a batch of letters into the brain, sometimes jump back to something they’ve already looked at, then on again.
When a line breaks, the reader is momentarily more energised and focused. Each new line is itself a sort of breather. Attention wanes progressively as the eye travels further towards the right-hand margin. You could think of the reader’s eye as like a swimmer breast-stroking across a pool: little spurts of energy carry it from the left margin to the right, and each time it hits the side of the pool, it gets a little boost as it kicks off the edge.
Things that make it hard for readers to concentrate on a text include the following:
Very close line-spacing. The spaces between lines of type – sometimes known as leading,* from the days when print compositors used strips of lead to increase the vertical separation between lines of text – have a strong effect on its legibility.
When authors submit manuscripts to publishers, or students send essays to their tutors, they are often encouraged to do so double-spaced. This is a hangover from the days of the manual typewriter, when the only way of increasing the line-spacing was to whack the carriage return lever twice. This is especially useful if the reader is expecting to make comments, or proofreading corrections, in between the lines.
Most printed text won’t need double-spacing, and leading – in a sensible proportion to font size – will be taken care of by your word-processing program automatically. But you do have the option to change these, and latitude to do so much more precisely than with a manual typewriter.
These defaults will mostly do the trick for a letter, memo, article or what have you printed on a side of white A4. But they’re not a universal rule. Web pages and blogs often use more generous leading – making it easier to skim down them quickly.
Small type size. It’s not only those with poor eyesight who find tiny letters tricky to read. It makes reading harder work even for those with perfect vision. Also, it has implications for leading – because as I mentioned above, there’s a natural relationship of proportion between the size of the letters and the spaces between the lines. That means that if your font size is tiny, your lines will also appear squished up.
The other relationship of proportion to consider is the size of your page. Typographers tend to agree that the optimal number of characters per line is between 50 and 80, spaces included. This takes maximum advantage of the refreshing effect of the eye returning to the left margin, without that happening so often that the reader’s rhythm is broken.
On a page of A4, the average font in 12-point type will give you something around the right line-length. Set in 8-point you have 100 or 150 characters per line. Not only will the readers’ concentration tend to flag, but by the time they reach the right-hand margin, they may struggle to find the beginning of the next line on the left-hand side.
Overlong paragraphs. Here, again, is the principle of paragraph as mental breathing space. A paragraph is a sort of super-line-break. The reader benefits from it. So though you can get away with only one paragraph or two per page, you will make your text less attractive.
The same goes with long sections. If you can break up a body of text into coherent sense-units (assuming they are appropriate to the genre of what you’re doing) you do the reader a favour. Bait the hook.
Tiny margins. One of the instant turn-offs for a reader is a block of text that’s so large and dense it’s forbidding. Generous margins (though not so generous that the text is stranded like a postage stamp on a pool table) give a much more appealing visual appearance. And, again, they help to keep the number of characters per line within the 50–80 ballpark.
Justification. This is the term used for when the text is spaced so that it’s flush with both left and right margins. It gives you a sort of oblong of text on the page. Its advantage is that it looks neat. Its disadvantage is that it leads to some words being hyphenated as they ‘turn’ over line-breaks. The usual alternative is what’s called flush-left or ragged-right, where the spaces between letters are regular, and where a word won’t fit entire on the line it simply moves over to the next.
Most printed books, such as the one you’re reading, are justified. A4 documents, on the other hand, often look better with body text ragged-right. Again, consider proportion on the page: a book’s page is much smaller, and the eye travels vertically much more quickly. It gets to the edge of the pool more easily. Therefore it’s worth trading off the soothing white spaces that ragged-right gives you for the neatness of justified text. For the same reason, there’s seldom an extra line-space between paragraphs in a book, but your word processor will default to putting one in when you’re preparing an A4 document.
Most word-processing programs will also offer ‘flush-right’ (where the text is flush to the right-hand margin) and ‘centred’ (where the middle of each line of text is exactly aligned with the middle of the page). Neither is any use at all for body text: imagine the reader’s poor eye seeking the anchoring safety of a regular left-hand margin, and finding none to fix on. But titles and chapter heads will be set centre, and some special text – photo captions, or the sender’s address on a letter – may be set flush-right.
Typographical Porridge. It should be obvious that mixing up type sizes and font too much makes a document look zany and amateurish. As a rule, stick to one font for body text. If you use a different font for titles, captions and what have you, make sure it’s close in style to the body text. Try not to have any given page contain four different fonts in three different sizes. Where you use italics or bold – say, in section headings – try to have a consistent scheme. You don’t want to look like Five Go Mad with the Formatting Bar.
Fonts stir strong feelings in a small minority of the population. Zealots have set up an extensive website – bancomicsans.com – dedicated to expunging a single typeface, Comic Sans, from public life. A whole documentary was made about Helvetica. My publishing stablemate Simon Garfield dedicated an excellent book* to the pleasures and sorrows of different typefaces.
The point I want to make here is that fonts may stir strong feelings in some, but they also stir weak feelings in the very many people who may not think of themselves as having a view on fonts at all. The feelings they stir may be subliminal, but they are there.
Typefaces are like lighting design in the theatre, the soundtrack to a film or the wallpaper of a hotel room. They shape the experience, though they may not be consciously noticed at all. That makes them important. Mr Garfield goes so far as to argue that Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was helped along by the fact that all its posters were set in Gotham: ‘There are some types that read as if everything written in them is honest, or at least fair.’
A font, therefore, feeds into the question of register and decorum: it shapes your ethos appeal. Are you a go-ahead advertising firm using a lot of sans-serif* italics? A coffee shop full of people with man-buns whose short toast menu of artisanal sourdoughs calls out for typewriter-like Courier? Or a solicitor of long standing who communicates in sober Times New Roman?
Truth told, if you’re not in the business of designing a logo or an advertisement, you’re best advised to stick to a font that doesn’t scream and draw attention to itself, but that is light, legible, sober and well-spaced. Still, it doesn’t hurt to play around a little and see how the feel of your document is changed by putting it into a different typeface.
There are a number of rules in standard formal English for how you should address and identify people, both in the second person and the third. The rules on all this are far too baroque for me to reproduce here in full – so I sketch out only a couple of the basic ones.
It pays to get them right, though: if you ever do find yourself writing about or to a senior academic, an archbishop, a hereditary earl or a Warden of the Cinque Ports, check you are doing so correctly. Here’s an instance in which there are right and wrong ways to do things: these are specific and fixed conventions rather than random mutations of language, and it doesn’t compromise your egalitarian principles to get it right.
But it will take you a moment or two of Googling: what you write on an envelope, how you begin a letter,* what you’ll say when introduced face-to-face and how you’d describe them when writing about them will all be slightly different things. Both Wikipedia and Debrett’s have extensive material on the ins-and-outs.
Ordinary civilians – whether you’re shaking them by the hand or addressing an envelope – will take Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms. Unless you’re both sure of the marital status of a female correspondent and certain that she has no objections to that being brought into her form of address, good manners these days is to use Ms.†
If you’re feeling old-fashioned and/or a little affected, and you’re writing to a man, you can put ‘Dave Smith Esq’ on the envelope. Don’t for Pete’s sake put ‘Mr Dave Smith Esq’: it’s either/or. In any case the letter inside should begin ‘Dear Mr Smith’.
‘Master’ and ‘Miss’ for children, these days, also sounds affected. I might address a letter to my goddaughter ‘Miss Mila Arbuthnott’, but when I do so I’m being arch. Old-fashioned usage stipulates that when you write thanking a married heterosexual couple for a weekend at their house you write to the wife rather than the husband; or that if, in other circumstances, you are writing to both of them you’ll say: ‘Mr and Mrs Dave Smith.’ All that is on the way out.
Transgender people often choose their own pronouns and titles. There’s nothing approaching uniformity on this, so it’s easiest just to ask. If in doubt the gender-neutral, stickler-horrifying ‘they/them/their’ – as in ‘Not long after I met them, Dave Smith asked me if I would like to read their thesis’ – does inoffensive service as a gender-neutral pronoun. If addressing a letter, just go Firstname Surname; if saying hello, jump in and use the first name until enlightened otherwise.* Good manners, here, probably trumps any fixed ideas you might have about traditional grammar or correct form. As I’ve said many times in these pages, language is a social instrument.
The Queen is a whole basket of trouble if you’re meeting or writing to her. Debrett’s will give you the detailed skinny on dropping her a line if you need it.† What you do need to know is that if you’re referring to her in print she’s HM (Her Majesty) the Queen rather than HRH (Her Royal Highness). HRH is used for royal princes or princesses.
The English aristocracy alone is a form-of-address mine-field, even before you get to all those European counts. As a rule of thumb, reserve ‘Your Majesty’ for the Queen, ‘Your Highness’ for members of her close family, ‘Your Grace’ for engaging dukes and duchesses in conversation – and hazard ‘My Lord’ or ‘Madam’ if unexpectedly introduced to a more minor member of the aristocracy on the bus.
One thing that people very often get wrong, up to and including the BBC, is the style for members of the House of Lords. Some peers get it wrong themselves; there was a lot of snobbish scoffing when the Labour peer Lord Bassam of Brighton called himself ‘Lord Steve Bassam’ on his notepaper. The basic rule is that Baron (or Baroness) X of Y is Lord (or Lady) Surname of Placegazetted. So: Lord Smith of East Finchley. Thereafter just Lord Smith; not Lord Dave Smith.* His wife is Lady Smith. A baroness’s husband is just plain Mr Surname, because of sexism.
A knight or a baronet (a hereditary knight) gets Sir First-name Surname, and Sir Firstname after that. So: Sir Dave Smith; thereafter Sir Dave. His wife, again, is Lady Smith. A Lady or a Dame – the closest things to a female knight – is Lady Firstname Surname or Dame Firstname Surname, and thereafter Dame Firstname.
Some people have professional titles. Academic and medical doctors (though not, by tradition, surgeons) get Dr Firstname Surname, and thereafter Dr Surname. Likewise, Professor Firstname Surname becomes Professor Surname at second mention.
Military titles apply in a professional context – and the list is long and daunting – but it’s considered slightly off to use them in civilian life. An exception seems to be made for ranks above Major, and who can begrudge them that? I’ve had some dealings with a former First Sea Lord who signs himself off, cheerfully, ‘Admiral Alan’.
Religious titles are a whole different mare’s nest – varying not only according to religion but rank and denomination. There is no substitute for looking these things up.
Overall, what I hope to impress on you is that to get someone’s form of address right is an important courtesy. It shows, quite literally, that you know your audience. And finicky though it may be, you have nothing to lose by it and – especially if your correspondent is someone who does mind about these things – everything to gain. Thank heavens most of us, most of the time, are only dealing with Misters and Mizzes.
* * *
It’s worth keeping a particular eye out for a journalistic usage that seems to have bled into the wider culture. News reporters like to identify people in a compressed way, with a job description before a name.
Apprentice yoga instructor Carol Smith was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off.
Here you’re treating the subject of the sentence – ‘apprentice yoga instructor Carol Smith’ – as one unit, as if it were a compound word.*
That’s why it doesn’t work if you attempt to separate the parts of it with a comma:
Apprentice yoga instructor, Carol Smith, was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off
This makes ‘Apprentice yoga instructor’ the subject of the sentence, and nobody would write ‘Apprentice yoga instructor was shopping’.
So you need an article: ‘An apprentice yoga instructor’ or ‘The apprentice yoga instructor’. The former introduces her from scratch. The latter presupposes that we’ve already been told that an apprentice yoga instructor was on the scene, in which case her name is a fresh tidbit of information thrown in parenthetically.
And you will need to punctuate differently depending on whether you’re using a definite or indefinite article. Unpacking this apparently simple phrase is a little complex. Consider the following variations.
i. |
The apprentice yoga instructor Carol Smith was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off: grammatical but odd – it implies that she is a well-known apprentice yoga instructor. (‘The pop star David Bowie was shopping …’ poses no problems.) |
ii. |
The apprentice yoga instructor, Carol Smith, was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off: this is grammatically fine, but its shade of meaning is peculiar. It implies, as I say, that we’ve already been introduced to an apprentice yoga instructor. It would read naturally only if, for example, the previous sentence had been: ‘Yesterday’s explosion was witnessed by an apprentice yoga instructor.’ |
iii. |
An apprentice yoga instructor Carol Smith was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off: not grammatical. Carol Smith needs to be lodged between a pair of commas if she’s being introduced with an indefinite article.* |
iv. |
An apprentice yoga instructor, Carol Smith, was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off: this is faultlessly grammatical but a little weird. Why emphasise her (irrelevant) profession? Had she been a bomb disposal expert or an emergency triage nurse on her day off, it might be a different story: you might be wanting make the point that a professional was on the scene. Perhaps your next sentence will be, ‘She immediately helped several survivors into the “Downward Dog” pose’, but I doubt it. |
v. |
An apprentice yoga instructor, Carol Smith was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off: this, grammatically, just about works. Effectively you’re putting her profession in parentheses – Carol Smith is the subject of the sentence – but putting it before the main clause. It’s grammatically cognate with my preferred version vii, below. But it seems to imply that her profession has something to do with her presence on the street. ‘A shoe-collector in possession of a platinum credit-card, Carol Smith was shopping on the high street …’ might support that single-comma construction. |
vi. |
The apprentice yoga instructor, Carol Smith was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off: This doesn’t work. It not only falls into the trap of the previous one-comma version, v, but it has the problem of other definite-article variants such as ii, of implying that we’ve already been introduced to an apprentice yoga instructor. |
vii. |
Carol Smith, an apprentice yoga instructor, was shopping on the high street when the bomb went off: This is more natural. Carol Smith was the witness to the event, and the reader gets her profession as a secondary detail. |
It also bears saying that anywhere but in the pages of a newspaper, the original article-free usage looks very awkward. It’s journalese. Hence the grating opening of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code:
Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway …
This may be the first novel in which the ineptitude of the writing declares itself not from the first sentence or even the first word, but before it. There’s a word missing before the book even begins. Golf claps for Dan Brown.
* One of the more withering critiques of a piece of writing I’ve had is that it ‘doesn’t so much end as stop’. For good examples of the pitfalls of this see p. 271.
* On rereading this, I’d have him spit before pulling his keffiyeh up rather than afterwards. A good advertisement for paying attention.
* I used to see pitches to newspaper feature desks from people gazetting themselves as professional writers that – I kid you not – came accompanied by a clipart image of a quill pen dipped in an inkwell.
* See “Forms of Address”, below.
* http://cdn.theladders.net/static/images/basicSite/pdfs/TheLaddersEyeTracking-StudyC2.pdf
* Do make sure it’s a first-class stamp. You risk looking cheap otherwise.
* Barnes includes a positively scalding anecdote about how not to do it: ‘Someone suggested I rent a flat in Paris for six months or, failing that, “a beach cabin in Guadeloupe”. She and her husband would look after my house while I was away. This would be convenient for them, and “we’d have a garden for Freddie”. The proposal came by email during the last day of my wife’s life. And Freddie was their dog.’
* The same goes for sexts, as Anthony Weiner knows to his cost.
* Actually it’s likely to be a lot more than 10 per cent. The Twitter poll I ran got 654 votes, of which fully 95 per cent considered asking for a read-receipt a ‘bloody cheek’.
* https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content
* I describe him thus not to be rude, but to make the point that he doesn’t get thousands of retweets just for being him. You can’t draw that many conclusions about social media success from a J. K. Rowling tweet that has done well.
* “The feeling when”.
† Be right back.
* Pronounced ‘ledding’.
* Just My Type: A Book About Fonts.
* Without the twiddly bits.
* I slightly love the (correct) abruptness of ‘Dear Duke’.
† An analogue of this is the tendency to replace gendered terms such as ‘chairman’ with ‘chair’. Whatever the letters page of the Daily Telegraph thinks about it, this mild and courteous eruption of political correctness hasn’t yet brought about the end of Western civilisation.
* Or there’s always that old fallback, beloved of those of us who forget people’s names at parties, ‘hey you’.
† http://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/addressing-the-royal-family
* If you’re the younger son of a Duke or Marquess you’ll be Lord Dave Smith, but not otherwise. For the avoidance of form-of-address migraines, in other words, steer clear of the offspring of Dukes and Marquesses.
* The usage is cheerfully sent up in the pages of Viz comic, where I once saw reference to ‘Shouty crackers multiple Everest climb-failure actor Brian Blessed’.
* This applies to the article-free version, too. As I was writing this I received an email that opened: ‘The Ethical Carnivore: My Year Killing to Eat by former environmental journalist, Louise Gray publishes September 22nd’. Without that comma, the sentence is ill-made but grammatically tolerable. As it stands it’s just wrong.