Give us verbs

I'm getting acquainted with a new client, and they give me a book about the company. The first words I see on the dust jacket are:

INNOVATION & INTEGRITY

They do nothing for me at all. First of all, they're nouns. Secondly, they're the worst kind of nouns. I want verbs. As it turns out, there's a beeline of great verbs about a hundred pages in, where they're describing how you test intermodal containers to meet railroad specifications:

You load the container to twice its weight-bearing capacity, lift it up, and measure the deflection of things. ... What you try to do is break it, and you try to twist it corner to corner. Then you push the top. ... Then you set it down and make sure it goes back to the way it was. Then you put big airbags in it and try to blow the nose and back doors and sides out of it. Then you load it with an irregularly placed load, very heavy in the middle, and lift that up. You test the roof for strength. You test it for watertightness. You simulate 3,000 forklifts' movements in and out of it, and you simulate lifting it and setting it down 1,500 times. 

That's what I love about this business: finding sentences like these. So specific to a narrow slice of industry, and so full of action. 

To write like this

The writer I love to read is Ernie Pyle. Here are the first two sentences of his post from Northern Tunisia, April 27, 1943:

We moved one afternoon to a new position just a few miles behind the invisible line of armor that separates us from the Germans in Northern Tunisia. Nothing happened that first night that was spectacular, yet somehow the whole night became obsessed with a spookiness that leaves it standing like a landmark in my memory.

There are 54 sentences yet to come, and every one of them will be an expansion of these first two. Every word will take us deeper into the newness of the position, the absence of anything spectacular and, especially, the spookiness.

We pick him up again for the final third of the post...

Another plane throbbed in the sky, and we lay listening with an awful anticipation. One of the dogs suddenly broke into a frenzied barking and went tearing through our little camp as though chasing a demon. 

My mind seemed to lose all sense of proportion, and I was jumpy and mad at myself.

Concussion ghosts, traveling in waves, touched our tent walls and made them quiver. Ghosts were shaking the ground ever so lightly. Ghosts were stirring the dogs to hysteria. Ghosts were wandering in the sky peering for us in our cringing hideout. Ghosts were everywhere, and their hordes were multiplying as every hour added its production of new battlefield dead. 

You lie and think of the graveyards and the dirty men and the shocking blast of the big guns, and you can't sleep.

"What time is it?" comes out of the darkness from the next cot. I snap on the flashlight.

"Half past four, and for God's sake go to sleep!"

Finally just before dawn you do sleep, in spite of everything.

An Ernie Pyle post is a monument to Aristotle's unities of time, place and action. In this one, however, he self-consciously breaks the unity of time to carry over into the next morning, confessing this misdemeanor by placing a single centered asterisk between the bulk of the post and these last five sentences:

Next morning we spoke around among ourselves and found one by one that all of us had tossed away all night. It was an unexplainable thing. For all of us had been through dangers greater than this. On another night the roll of the guns would have lulled us to sleep. 

It's just that on some nights the air becomes sick and there is an unspoken contagion of spiritual dread, and you are little boys again, lost in the dark.

If I were teaching a class on writing, I would draw 10 lessons from this single piece. And I would dance a minuet in honor of the five "ghost" sentences. 

Cadence: from rolling to percussive

Sticking with Francine Prose for a second day, we notice how she marvels at a change of cadence in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. She quotes a passage that starts with a rolling, 52-word sentence fragment and then switches to a salvo of "brief, percussive declarative sentences and fragments."

Ah yes, how we love to do that in corporate work. Like in this speech:

By Saturday the 15th, from every franchise east of the Mississippi, with their families back home still fearful of what might happen next and their loyal customers put on hold for however long it might take for them to return, we had hundreds of disaster recovery specialists inside the Pentagon, cleaning. Scrubbing walls. Scouring the louvers of every air vent. Unscrewing fluorescent lights and wiping them all down. Removing the residue of burnt jet fuel. They got it out of Donald Rumsfeld's office. They got it out of the Joint Chiefs' offices. They swabbed it off the walls of 17 miles of corridors. More than 300 of the best in the world at what they do, living in hotels hundreds of miles from home for seven weeks, putting in 70, 80 hours a week, wiping up soot. This is not glorified work. This is basic, repetitive, down-on your-hands-and-knees work. 

This is how Mr. Roth did it (remember: the cadence of the sentences, not the content):

The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary Swede. ... A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a charm. ... This is how successful people live. They're good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy -- that is every man's tragedy.

To make rhythmical

Francine Prose delves into "cadenced sentences" in her book Reading Like a Writer. She says James Joyce gave us "some of the most well known cadenced sentences" at the end of The Dead. Like these:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. 

In corporate work, cadenced sentences read like this:

We institutionalized the concept of listening by building it into 50 million customer touchpoints. The voice on the phone listens. The face at the door listens. The website reflects good listening, and invites more dialogue. The value proposition is a result of having listened, and heard, and responded. The delivery comes on time. The installation goes as planned. The service is reliable. The bill is accurate and easy to understand. None of which would have happened without active listening in the right places. The promise is kept. The commitment is met. The question is answered. The intention is honored. Every interaction at every point of contact -- bent and shaped, for the better, by listeners at their posts. 

One sentence

The story in today's New York Times is about the bursting of the housing bubble. But I only have eyes for the opening quote:

We are team-oriented, highly ethical, extremely competitive, profit-oriented, risk-averse, consumer-focused, and we try as much as possible to squeeze out any ego.

Forget who said it, or whether they were Typhoid Marys of the financial crisis. The sentence is a thing of consummate beauty. In 26 words, it's who they are, how they work, what they care about, what they promise to do for you, how they feel about you, and what makes them different. The structure lays out cleanly: subject-linking verb-six predicate adjectives-independent clause. The cadence is bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-hmmmmmmmm. You read it straight through without stopping to think. Kudos to the sentence-makers, whatever financial havoc they may have visited upon us.   

You got a story about that?

A friend is reminiscing about the reading he did years ago to forge his leadership style.

"And I read a lot of Greenleaf," he says.

With a jolt of recognition, it takes me back seven years to my own reading of the late Robert K. Greenleaf, founder of The Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership. For me, it was essential preparation for five years of speechwriting for the CEO of ServiceMaster Inc. I bring it up now because I can't remember a single thing from Mr. Greenleaf's books and lectures. But I can tell you a story about servant-leadership exactly the way it was told to me at the beginning of this decade. Here's how I wrote it in a speech:

Many years ago, one of my colleagues at ServiceMaster was sitting in a room much like this. He was attending one of his first big company meetings. Dinner was almost over. Plates were being cleared and dessert was on the way. 

Near the front of the room an elderly gentleman sat, waiting for his time to walk to the podium and speak. His name was Ken Hansen. He had been a legendary CEO of ServiceMaster. Now, not in the best of health, recently retired from the everyday job of leading the company, he was still a powerful symbol of everything ServiceMaster stood for.

He might have been thinking about what he was going to say when he got to the podium. Instead, he was open to everything that was happening in front of him. And what he saw was a single server coming toward him with a tray of desserts. The tray was heavy and hard to balance, but the woman under it knew what she was doing. She was walking fast toward the front of the room, where she knew she would find a stand to set the tray on.

Ken glances ahead of her and sees that the stand is not empty. There's a tray of dinner dishes on it. In a flash, Ken is up and on his way. He snatches the dinner dishes just in time. The server sets down the new tray and begins to hand out the desserts.

There were several hundred people in that ballroom. And probably only one of them caught the significance of what had just happened. His name was Mike Isakson, and he was impressed. He decided that must be the way leaders did things at ServiceMaster. Today Mike is president of one of our businesses, and the spirit of servant-leadership lives on in him.

When you ask him what servant-leadership means in practice, he tells you that story. And he goes out of his way to point out that as he took in this act of service to the servant, he was convinced that it wasn't done for show. It was almost like a reflex action -- but the reflex action of a conditioned mind. Ken had a great awareness of the service that was being performed in the room. And he had a great empathy for the servant. It was from that background that he saw, and he acted. Not just so the servant could do her job, but so she could do it with the dignity that was her due. 

It's stories like this that stick with us. That's why we put them in our speeches. 

A typical December 18th

Up yesterday at 5 a.m. to prep for a 6 a.m. phone interview with an executive who is traveling in Bulgaria. 

At 7:30 I wake up Adam, feed him breakfast, get him dressed, and deliver him to his pre-kindergarten class.

At 10 I'm on the phone to Europe again, this time with a division director in the U.K. 

Now, at 11 o'clock, shift gears to the annual report concept that's been waiting for my attention. The designer wants to present it for approval before everyone leaves for the holidays, and he'd like for me to write some real headlines and sample copy to show how the design would work. I have to get my head around the global energy and communications infrastructure business -- a world I visit only once a year, for this annual report project. By 1 o'clock I'm feeling it, and writing things that I think fit both the industry and the design concept. I take what I have at 2:30 and send it to my designer friend. 

Phone rings. It's my producer friend. She has just recorded the voice talent for our podcast and says my script worked well. There could be more of this kind of work.

A client calls to reschedule an appointment that we're trying to cram in next week before everyone heads for the hills. This is a brainstorming session for a national sales meeting speech, and time will be short when we come back to work in January. We settle on a Monday morning slot. 

Time to shift over to the social aspect of the season. I get cleaned up and dressed and out the door to Adam's "Winter Holidays Celebration." We -- May and I -- admire the candy houses that the kids have made and I eat half the crackers and cheese at the adult table. I think of it as a late lunch. At 5:15, May, Adam and I head into Chicago for a production company's holiday party. Luckily, Adam's dad is editing videos about five blocks from where we're going to be, so we drop him off there. We listen to the weather reports on the radio, tracking the progress of the 6 to 14 inches of snow heading our way. 

Between cocktails and dinner, I check my Blackberry and discover that a client needs to record a holiday message tomorrow, and she's hoping I can write it. I email her back and say I'll get up early and have a script waiting for her at 8 o'clock. 

I intended to leave at 9:30 to beat the snow home, but there are windows, and I can see the streets are still clear. We excuse ourselves at 10:30 and make good time on the expressway; the voice on the radio says to beware of black ice on the Edens at Cicero. I'm on the Edens. There's the Cicero exit. I slow down. Now the voice says the snow has arrived in the western suburbs. Still clear where we are on the North Shore. Five minutes from home, we have snow. 

To bed by 11:30. Wake up before the alarm goes off at 5. Decide to blog first, then write that audio script. 

Some people think about skiing this time of year. I think about meeting the next deadline. I'm okay with that.    

Somewhere, in a ballroom set for 3,000, with a thermostat set at about 50...

If it's mid-December, there must be National Sales Meetings to write for. So I'm just thinking about the roles that should be played by the various players on an NSM stage. Let's look at it from the perspective of the sales rep in the audience. What feeling should a rep get about each speaker, after all is said and done? I'm pretty sure I'm right about these: 

As a sales rep in the audience of the pluperfect national sales meeting, here's what I'm feeling about the people who just spoke to me:

Product Managers...

CONFIDENCE. We can count on them to do what they say they will do; where sales force cynicism goes to die 

VP-Marketing...

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. Thanks to him, we're a touchdown-and-a-half better than anyone we play before we even take the field

VP-Sales...

OWNERSHIP. She owns the sales program for this year and everything that goes with it -- including this meeting, stem to stern

CFO...

SMARTEST ONE IN THE ROOM. With him it's not just numbers; it's how the numbers breathe and sweat -- and where their sphincter is

CEO...

WAY AHEAD OF US. She goes places we'll never go, talks to people we'll never have access to, and is thinking about things today that won't be on our radar screen for years to come  

On writing to be read...and read again

Maya Angelou tells us that in Ghana... 

"There's a saying, 'The trouble for the thief is not how to steal the chief's bugle, but where to blow it.' Now, on the face of it, one understands that. But when you really think about it, it takes you deeper in. In West Africa they call that 'deep talk.' I'd like to think I write pretty. That's lovely. That's nice. Maybe there's something else? Better read it again."

To feel the wind in your hair

A friend sends you an email with the subject line: you gotta read this. 

You open it to find nothing but a web address: 

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=2839005&type=story

Which you enter and start reading...

Drive out there. Get off the interstate, put Palm Beach, Orlando or Miami in your rearview and keep going until the road ends at the horizon and the telephone poles sag like old Cypress trees. Roll down the windows. Listen to the eerie silence of the Everglades, a seemingly endless run of fields landmarked only by the railroad tracks, the dike along Lake Okeechobee and the state penitentiary. Race past sugarcane field after sugarcane field until it feels like you're not moving at all. Then stop at the gas station with no gas by the convenience store with no name. Don't worry, you can't miss it -- there at the crossroads of the place they call Muck City. 

A box of corn husks sits next to a box of mangoes on the cement island where the pumps used to be. Men sit all around, in sweat-soaked T-shirts, jeans and greasy caps. Is it true, you ask, what they say about this place? They laugh. You must be lost. And who are you anyway? When you ask again, the old men stop laughing and look you straight in the eye. Yes, they say, it's true. 

See what he's doing, the writer? The first paragraph is all imperative sentences -- commands, where "you" are the understood actor. In the second paragraph, he switches to the more customary declarative sentence -- but "you" are still in the story; and so, you must keep reading. Nice. Really, really nice. 

We do it in corporate work, you know. We write: Make sure you understand the role of outsourcing in your vision for what F&A is and does. Create a roadmap toward achieving that vision. Establish guiding principles. And always look ahead to upcoming renewals and renegotiations. And we feel the wind in our hair when we do it. 

One good word beats a babble of bad ones

Adam and I in the food court. Up ahead, a seasonal salesman hawking a remote control car. Only this one is racing along the wall, like a spider. Never seen that before. I ask how the car sticks to the wall. The salesman turns to me, as a seven-year-old prospective customer, only a couple of minutes ahead of us on this learning curve, talks his way into a turn at the controls. 

The salesman says, "It's ... uh, air. See, air. There's these holes, and uh, air ... well it's just air..." The seven-year-old, hands on the wheel and eyes on the wall, leans back toward me and speaks with cool authority:

 "Suction." 

The salesman nods. I nod. Nothing more to be said. 

Writer's dashboard

Go to "Preferences" in Microsoft Word, select "Spelling and Grammar," and check the box for "Show Readability Statistics." Now, every time you spellcheck a document, you will also get a report showing your words per sentence, characters per word and percentage of passive sentences, plus your Flesch Reading Ease score and your Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. 

What we're going for is fewer words per sentence, fewer characters per word, and more active verbs. We want to be in the 70-to-79 band of the Flesch Reading Ease score. On the Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level, 6th grade is great.  

Painting a word picture

General Russell Honore, who headed up the recovery effort after Hurricane Katrina, painting a word picture last night on NPR:

Right now you've got FEMA sitting at the table, if I may use the analogy, as the great big want-to-be-helpful St. Bernard. But that St. Bernard is sitting there trying to get assets and resources with the German Shepherd, the Rottweiler, and the Pit Bull whose mission is to prevent terrorist attacks and protect our borders, land, air and sea...

I can see that St. Bernard. His name is Neil. He has a keg of brandy around his neck. And I hate to think of him competing for assets and resources with Spike, Nuke and Wofgang. He's just not going to come away with much, and he might get hurt. 

Never saw it coming

You can be going along just fine in this writing business, feeling good, words flowing, clicking through your to-do list. And then, just like that, it's gone. It's like your car quits on you in the fast lane and you get out, put your hands on your hips and just stare at it. What? Why? I never saw this coming...

That's how it was with me yesterday. About 3 o'clock I even thought, this is how every day should go. I want every day to be just like this. By 4 o'clock I was having avoidance issues with the keyboard. And when I decided I could write my way out of it, I was wrong. I knew something had happened, but what? This all seemed to start when...

Oh yeah. I realized I was getting really attached to this "wordpaths" name I made up. And I could see it becoming pretty much a brand. And it dawned on me that just because it had been available on Blogger, that didn't mean it was available as a URL on the Web. Which is not a problem now, but could be later. I checked it out, and sure enough.

So I started thinking about a new name, and that's when the sky clouded over and the owls started hooting. I don't want a new name; I want the name I have. This morning I woke up thinking of Phil Knight, in the early days of Nike, when they realized they needed some kind of logo to put on the sides of these shoes they were making. He wanted the Adidas stripes, but the reason they were the Adidas stripes was that Adidas already had them. Nothing would satisfy him. He turned down one design after another. His people told him he was going to have to move on, that maybe for the first time in his life, he could not have what he wanted. Eventually they brought him the swoosh, designed by a student at Portland State University. It's not like that was a winning design; it was just the moment that Knight gave up on what he wanted and took what he had. They paid her $35 and the swoosh was off and running. 

Or what about Steve Jobs, who stormed out of the office one day exclaiming, "If no one thinks of a better name by tomorrow, it's going to be Apple."

Maybe I'll feel better, having written about it. Maybe I can get back in the fast lane. But let this be a warning: don't get attached to wordpaths. It's going to change. Anybody out there with a half-decent suggestion, there might be $35 in it for you.  

Going for comfort

Finishing up a night here at the writing factory, putting some of the grace back into a piece that has now been re-touched by probably six different subject matter experts. Humming along with Joni Mitchell's Amelia in a way that you can't do when working on a first draft. And I suddenly remember Daniel J. Levitin in his book The World in Six Songs, where he says:

While researching this book, Sting and I discussed the relationship between poetry and lyrics. Both of us being Joni Mitchell fans, we discussed her song "Amelia" as an example of a lyric we admire:

I was driving across the burning desert

When I spotted six jet planes

Leaving six white vapor trails

Across the bleak terrain

It was the hexagram of the heavens

It was the strings of my guitar

Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm

Note the repetition of the long i sound in I and driving in the first line; the repetition of the d sound in driving and desert in that same line; the repetition of the s sound in spotted and six in the second line. Of course there is also the alliteration in hexagram of the heavens. The song features a prominent guitar, connecting the music to the lyric. I love that she mentions her six-string guitar in the sixth line of the song, just one subtle element among many that create an internal consistency in this lyric. There is the symantic connection between a desert and a plain, both flat expanses of terrain, a connection implied by her choice of the homonym planes in the second line.  

Professor Levitin goes on to say that Joni probably wasn't aware of all this when she was writing the song. Funny, he seems unaware that he has singled out this song with all the "sixes" in it to introduce his idea that there are six songs that have created human nature. By the way, he's talking about songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love. I think our corporate writing works best when we nudge some of those themes. I was going for comfort in the piece I was working on tonight. 

We've all been there...

Speaking of the hugely powerful force...

I'm on this conference call where about six of us are talking CEO-level communication strategy when one of the participants says, "It's like when you're on Facebook and you get this message, 'would you like to talk to other overweight 47-year-olds?'..." And one of the clients starts laughing so genuinely that no one tries to talk over it. We wait, and the laughter goes on longer than one might expect. Finally she catches her breath and says, "I'm sorry. It's just so funny ... because we've all been there."

We've all been there? 

I suddenly get a picture of my grandmother, a lioness who lived through parts of three centuries and has a library named after her. Technology began to outpace her at a point where my brother was writing letters and faxing them to my parents. As my father was reading one of these letters aloud at the kitchen table, my grandmother asked, "Where did this come from?" My mother answered, "Mike faxed it to us."

"He what?" my grandmother said. 

That was the tipping point for this great woman. My mom and dad didn't try to explain it to her. 

What's it going to be for us? Where do we fall hopelessly behind? When someone says "we've all been there," and you haven't, exactly...  

Facebook, eh.

    

A hugely powerful force (is)

This was written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, of Forrester Research, in the next-to-the-last paragraph of their book, Groundswell:

People connecting together are a hugely powerful force. You work for a company, which is not quite as powerful. 

You can debate the accuracy of that statement. You can question the use of "are" instead of "is" in that first sentence. Or you can treat it as an assertion by two researchers who have immersed themselves in the study of "winning in a world transformed by social technologies," just let it slosh around in the back of your brain, and see where it takes you. It's still sloshing around with me, more than three-quarters of a year after I read it. It probably played a part in my starting this blog, among other things.  

Don't let the plural verb distract you. Let it go. It doesn't matter.

Much.  

Clear water over granite

Paris Review asks Joan Didion who she reads and she answers:

I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. ... A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.  

Wordpaths--junior edition

I went to pick up my grandson at his pre-kindergarten class the other day. When I got there, his teacher took me aside and said, "Bill, we were naming things to be thankful for today. The list is over there on the wall. I want you to read it and see if you can tell me which word was Adam's." Here's what I saw:

Things we're thankful for:

Mom and Dad
Food
My house
Toys
Gravity

I stopped reading and looked over at Ms. Lynne. "Uh, how about gravity," I asked. "That's it," she said. She told me she thought maybe they had heard him wrong, or he didn't understand what he was saying. So she asked him to explain gravity to the class and tell why he was thankful for it. When he was finished, she said, all the kids and the teachers too were thankful for gravity, as am I, now. You? 

Podcast emergency response

I've been staring at these notes on the whiteboard across from my desk. I scribbled them down in preparation for a call about a podcast script emergency. Having been called on a few times recently to rescue podcasts-in-distress, I had asked myself, "How do podcast scripts get in trouble, and what have I done to save them?" The answers were clear: they get in trouble by taking content written for the eye, and just making it shorter. I save them by recasting the same content for the ear. And looking back at some rescued scripts, I could see it was an issue of Orientation, Organization and Voice. 

• The Orientation needs to be centered on you, the listener -- not us, the all-knowing podcaster. It's not "here's everything we know about X." It's "something has changed in your world, and now X is more important to you than you may have thought." 
• The Organization that's worked for me is "here's something you need, here's what we've done for others who needed the same thing, and here's how we can do it for you."
• And the Voice has to be how people really talk. Seriously. All first responders to podcast trauma should be trained to clear "voice" as a probable cause. Code blue...we've got acute separation of verbs from their subjects, abnormally high counts of dependent clauses and a Flesch Reading Ease score that barely registers.   

Diane and David at 65 mph

Driving on I55 north toward Chicago on the day after Thanksgiving, I found a public radio station where Diane Rehm was interviewing David Wroblewski about his first novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. He quickly said three things that made me smile.

First was the way he honored his story, which was apparent in this remark: 

I had the one advantage that unpublished writers have, which is, I had time. I promised myself that I would take as long as it needed.

That led Diane to ask him how he supported himself for the 10 years it took to get the book written. He said he had "a 30-year career in making software." And then, before we could leap to the standard story-line of dumping-the-dreary-day-job, he set us straight:

I was pulling a paycheck doing that. But I really don't think of it as pulling a paycheck, because I love the work and I expect I'll be making software my whole life. 

I think that took Diane out of her game plan for the interview too, because she asked a question that, if you read between the lines, came across as "well, at least maybe you could work at home and slip in a little work on the novel while you were getting paid to make software." To which David replied:

I did work from home a couple of days every week. But I was really working from home on the software. And usually it was evenings and weekends when I was working on the book. I wanted to be at home because I wanted to be with my dog. That was my real motivation for working from home. 

I bought his book -- because here's a guy who's willing to take ten years to tell a story if that's what the story requires, who writes not as an escape from something but as another way to be happy, and who has found a way to work from home not because the office is such a bad place -- but because home is where his dog is.    

Grammar and lexicon

Yesterday I talked about the work we're doing with the upcoming projects -- as good an excuse as any to quote Annie Dillard again, this time from Total Eclipse:

The mind -- the culture -- has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. 

The race is on

Thanksgiving is over. Now we start the Iditarod of corporate communication; it's mush you huskies, from now until about mid-February, and I'm one of the huskies. I was curious how the load would compare this year and what the market mix would be. And here's the news as of today: 

The load is a 9 on a scale of 1-to-10, with 10 being the highest. The mix includes the usual suspects (annual reports, kickoff meetings) with a new influx of web work and podcasts. 

For projects already on the books for the next two months:

• There are five clients (two pharmaceutical, two professional services, one energy and communications infrastructure; three are global, one is international, and one is the North American subsidiary of a global enterprise). 

• With multiple projects for some clients, six assignments are leadership-oriented, seven are marketing-related and one is investor-based. Slicing them along media lines, three are face-to-face (meetings or conferences), six are print, four are web and one is a podcast. 

What actual work are we doing with these projects? We're repositioning a multi-billion-dollar business, assimilating an acquisition, launching a new product, aligning a leadership team and reporting to shareholders on what is shaping up as a year of record sales and profits and about an 80 percent decline from a 52-week high in the price of a share of common stock.  

One sentence

I wrote this sentence as part of a rebranding of a product line:

Imagine starting from scratch, getting everyone involved, trying every combination of softwoods, hardwoods and post-consumer fiber and you don't stop until you can go to the customer and say, here's a beautifully formed paper that invites you to hold it a little closer, a little longer, and with a little extra fondness.

Structurally, there's a lot going on here. You start by advising unknown numbers of readers-in-waiting to dust off their shriveled imaginations, and then you swerve dangerously and possibly illegally out of the imperative sentence you started and into the declarative clause that begins with "and you don't stop until you can go to the customer," only to brake hard and skid sideways across the lawns of beauty and intimacy before coming to rest with a heave and a sigh in front of a word that you have never in all these years invited to the corporate dance: fondness. It's a sentence I like to revisit from time to time.

I know what you're thinking...

How can we go on about "sentences" like this without invoking Hemingway in A Moveable Feast? Where he said, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." And as long as we're in A Moveable Feast, we really must go another hundred pages or so and get, "Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do."  

Some sentences I'm happy to have written

Not going global...

You can find bigger paper companies. You can work with people who are less available, less flexible, and less committed to your needs and timelines. Or you can work with Finch, here at our Hudson River Valley home, where we're not trying to go global or become part of someone else's worldwide empire. 

Gone global...

We have an organizational model designed for action across essential markets throughout the world. We have action-oriented leaders in key operational positions. We have assets deployed behind actionable opportunities wherever we find them. We have investment capital primed to turn big actions into bigger ones. We demand action. We support action. We reward action. And action rewards us.

And global-schmobal, it's all about digital ...

But in a Web 2.0 world, commerce is also what happens on the way to somewhere else. It's the in-game offer, the ad on the IM client, the personalized recommendation on the My Yahoo! home page. For every intentional visit to a digital commerce storefront, there are multiple impromptu touch points in the general flow of life. So look for an architecture that allows you to hook up to your web storefront, to your mobile storefront, to your IPTV storefront, to your in-game storefront, to some small portal box on a home page, to a two-line ad on an IM client, to a physical kiosk in a shopping mall, to anywhere people are buying things on their way to somewhere else. 

Do you like sentences?

Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know ... do you like sentences?"

Like them? I love them.  One really good sentence a week is enough to keep me sitting through the conference calls. Here's Don DeLillo:  

But the basic work is built around the sentence. This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. There's a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look.... I'm completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentence -- these are sensuous pleasures. 

The sentences I wrote last week were load-bearing. They got the job done. Which is fine; it's what the world needs right now. 

One sentence

I wrote this sentence as part of a positioning statement in a total rebranding of a firm:

Our clients come to us for the passion of the first time, the savvy of the umpteenth time, the boldness of the right time, the originality of the only time, the anticipation of the next time ... and the enjoyment of a great time.

Through a lengthy review process, one word was changed. Yeah, umpteenth. Changed to hundredth. The sentence was plucked from the positioning statement and used in the flash announcement of the brand relaunch. It makes me happy to have written this.