Words of January

January writing covered six industries, nine writing categories, and eight communication media, spanning print, electronic and face-to-face channels.  

January Industries: Business Process Outsourcing, Energy & Communications Infrastructure, Information Technology, Shipping, Pharmaceuticals, Politics

January Categories: Change Communication, Communication Strategy, Employee Communication, Investor Communication, Management Conference, Political Campaign, Product Launch, Rebranding Initiative, Sales Meeting

January Media: Annual Report to Shareowners, Earnings Script, Keynote Address, Panel Discussion, Poster Copy, Public Statement, Restructuring Announcement, Video Script

Doing all the world's work with grammar and lexicon (the working words of January):

"We are not looking to you for a quick fix or a miracle cure. We are asking you to join us in a time of 'less,' not 'more,' and work with us to figure out our thoughtful shared sacrifice."

***

"You're beating every milestone. Protocols are getting written faster. Sign-offs are happening faster. You're moving quicker into the clinic for execution, and recruitment is ahead of schedule."

***

"You hustled to keep your systems running while you enhanced them or developed new applications. You fought off inconsistencies and redundancies creeping into your operations. You spread your limited resources across a swarm of critical requirements. Meanwhile, the requests for more analysis and reporting of critical business information were multiplying." 

***

"And this management team is not exactly untested when it comes to meeting challenges brought to our doorstep by external forces."

***

"Across the company today, there's a cultural movement and a common vocabulary, spreading outward from something that happened in the Colombia affiliate more than ten years ago."

***

"They went to patients' homes to observe how long it takes for them to get ready in the morning. They went with them to shop for clothes. They interviewed their spouses. They mapped out the complete patient journey. And with that awareness they were able to identify times and places to intervene and bring patients back to centers of excellence for treatment."

***

"Our challenges have come in many shapes and sizes -- customer-driven, competitor-driven, technology-driven, and luck-of-the-draw-driven. We do not back down. We know we're going to be challenged; we just don't know what form it will take. Well this time it's a Category Five recession."

Form follows function

You can't write for President Obama as if he were still Candidate Obama. No longer is he giving a variation on a stump speech that he knows by heart. He's reading something that has just been handed to him, written about something that just happened. There is no time to familiarize himself with it. He has to dive in and trust that the sentence he's reading will come out in a good place. It is a time for simple forms--which is not what he got today. Try reading this cold with the cameras rolling:

The businesses that are shedding jobs to stay afloat -- they can't afford inaction or delay. The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job, and all those who live in fear that their job will be next on the cutting blocks -- they need help now. 

If you saw the President delivering those lines, you saw fear and anxiety. The first sentence gave him pause when it started over in the middle. But in the second one, he considered taking matters into his own hands and then decided to ride it to the end and hope there was a predicate somewhere over the horizon. "The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job"...give me the verb, give me the verb -- no verb, not yet..."and all those who live in fear"...should I bail now, 31 words into this sentence with no end in sight--uh, no, in for a dime, in for a dollar..."that their job will be the next on the cutting blocks -- they"...whew, a predicate at last..."NEED HELP NOW." 

Forty words into the sentence, he finds out where it's going. That might work in a speech he had time to rehearse; it serves him poorly when he's delivering it on the fly. 

One sentence

I've been thinking about loosely coupled systems (for insights into why most panel discussions don't work, but some do). I recommend, from the conclusion of Chapter 17 in Karl Weick's Making Sense of the Organization, the meditation beads in this sentence:

Actors in a loosely coupled system rely on trust and presumptions, persist, are often isolated, find social comparison difficult, have no one to borrow from, seldom imitate, suffer pluralistic ignorance, maintain discretion, improvise, and have less hubris because they know they cannot change the universe because it is not sufficiently connected to make this possible. 

Obama & Favreau

Stanley Fish says "Barack Obama's inaugural address is proving to be more powerful in the reading than it was in the hearing." Professor Fish tells us that commentators on radio and television are now eagerly discussing the implications of an isolated sentence, clause, phrase or word. He says:

Obama doesn't deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate. 

The technical term for this kind of writing is parataxis, as opposed to hypotaxis. Again, Professor Fish:

One kind of prose is additive--here's this and now here's that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you're looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you. 

I wrote a speech like that once. I entitled it Ground Truths -- a phrase I got from Laurence Prusak when he was at IBM. He got it from the U.S. Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned, where it was used to describe "the rich truths of real situations experienced close up: on the ground, rather than from the heights of theory or generalization." In this speech, I took a CEO's observations about his industry and offered them up as a list of industry-wide ground truths. The remarks were delivered at an association meeting that no one else from his company attended. Within the company, the speech was never heard; it was only read, as it got passed around through the management ranks. Years later a member of the CEO's executive staff told me "we felt differently about our company when we read that speech." 

That's the power of words written as one meditative bead after another: an unknown number of readers over an unlimited period of time accepts the invitation to contemplate each independent thought, and then they change the way they feel about something. It can be a company -- or a country.

What's that? I didn't say anything about Favreau? Neither have the commentators. But we know he's back there, where he should be, helping an Obama speech be as Obama-esque as it can be.  

Bush & Gerson

Two days after winning a second term, George W. Bush told Michael Gerson that "I want this to be the freedom speech." And boy, was it ever. The word "freedom" appeared 27 times in the final draft. The word "liberty" appeared 15 times. 

Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column that the speech left her "yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance." 

If you want to read a speech that requires no imagination to understand what it is talking about, or at whom it is aimed, this is the one to read.  

Clinton et al

The work on Bill Clinton's first inaugural began in Little Rock with ideas from his campaign staff as well as the likes of Ted Sorensen, Richard Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. A draft was produced by Michael Waldman and David Kusnet. Four days before the inauguration, the Clinton team arrived in Washington, where more people, including Clinton's college roommate, joined the writing process. There was a final rehearsal after an inaugural eve gala. Revisions continued until 4:30 in the morning of inauguration day. 

"Clinton never knew exactly what he wanted to say until he heard himself say the words," George Stephanopoulos wrote in All Too Human. There's a key word in that statement. Know what it is? 

The key, and easiest to overlook, word is "exactly." As a speechwriter, let me say this about speakers  who don't know exactly what they want to say until they hear themselves saying the words: they are the more highly evolved speakers. And those who don't exactly know until they see themselves saying the words are the most evolved of all. 

***Special Wordpaths Alert***

Go to nytimes.com and read From Books, New President Found Voice. Or don't -- just sit quietly and think about these two excerpts: 

Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power "to transform": "with the right words everything could change...

And...

As Fred Kaplan's illuminating new biography ("Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer") makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading... Both men...use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln's case, Mr. Kaplan notes, "The tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him."