When Lilacs Last on the Roadside Bloom’d

One afternoon a few years back, I learned to see lilac bushes. My father-in-law, a world-class talker, pointed to a bush and said, “That’s a lilac.” It was the first time I’d ever really looked at one, so I listened as he said that it was a favorite, that it was the most spring-ish of spring-time flowers, that it bloomed in white, red, purple, and—naturally—lilac. And that was all. It was a discourse of about one minute, and I planned on forgetting it.

But then a miracle happened. Overnight, across the state of Michigan, along highways, driveways, back roads, and backyards lilac bushes sprang as from the forehead of Zeus, full grown and in bloom. For days after, I could hardly turn my eyes to any familiar stretch of countryside without seeing a lilac bush where there had certainly not been one before.

The miracle, of course, was in my own brain. That the new information about a flowering tree should so quickly change the way I saw the landscape was to me, and still is, miraculous. And it’s an every-day miracle. Scientists believe—and good ones, I presume—that a baby can’t see things until her brain learns that such things really are. So a newborn may see the shape of a face, but not the nose. She can’t (or doesn’t) see nose because there’s no corresponding knowledge, no nose file to refer to. As she has more and more experience of nose, her ability to see it fills in, slowly, like a lens bringing an image into focus.

Maybe you’ve heard the eye described as being an extension of the brain; it’s a helpful notion for seeing how closely the two work together to bring our world into focus, to make of it something solid and navigable. Until there’s enough input, we simply don’t see whatever it is our brain is making sense of. You can test this yourself. Look at a page of text written in an unfamiliar language—say, German. You see nothing but letters broken up into what seem to be word-sized chunks. But there’s no recognition beyond that. You see no patterns, nothing familiar. Now glance at a page of English text, and it’s all familiarity, like the faces of friends. The content is the same: German and English use the same alphabet. But it’s the patterns of letters and their correspondence to known words that make up the seeing as we read. Knowledge here literally gives sight.

So what was there before? there in the lilac-bush place of my mind’s eye? I don’t remember it being a blank or a gray smudge in the picture, but maybe it was. There’s no way to know now because the lilac bush is one place in the scene to which I, apparently, paid no attention. It was probably filled with some stock photo from my head called “bush” or “nondescript shrub”. And here’s fascination for you: that our vision is always filled with something. Our page of German, indecipherable as language, is still filled with clear black and stark white, with letters and punctuation. It’s filled but waiting for more.

My brother-in-law can see deer in the woods. That may not seem like a feat unless you’re with him, unless he’s pointing at a curved piece of gray-brown lump pressing out from a thick tree trunk. And no amount of squinting and straining, no trick of the imagination will allow you to see what he sees, not until the lump moves and either disappears behind the tree or materializes into a deer. His brain has been long trained to see forest patterns and therefore breaks in the patterns. And those breaks, at certain heights off the ground, in certain un-tree-like curves and colors are often deer. But, like learning a new language, it takes years to see that way. And yet always, at all points in the education of our eyes, the forest is full.

I’m only now learning to see the trees that hide the deer. Two years ago, I bought a house that has a woodstove, so I’ve spent some time in woods, felling, splitting, and hauling a variety of hardwood and not-so-hardwood trees. I’ve learned to see maple and cherry and oak and beach and poplar and elm. They look different, these trees. Their bark, leaves, limbs, and shapes are different. And I’ve learned this so gradually that I can’t remember what woods looked like when they were filled only with tree. So how do I know that I’m seeing more now that I once did? Because I narrate. I walk the woods and practice the vernacular. “That’s dogwood…old beech…maple there…nice cherry tree…beautiful sycamore.” I didn’t do that just a few years ago because I wasn’t really seeing different trees. I had not the vocabulary for it. And now, as my tree vocabulary grows, so does the complexity of what I see.

And I’m just a neophyte. If I leaned in close to a biologist in the woods, would I hear the synapses pop and crackle as his eyes sweep across a field of vision packed with pattern and familiarity? No, I don’t think so. The brain seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for more and finer detail—I doubt that a biologists head makes any more noise than mine does. But in the woods he does see more than I do, I’m sure of it.

This idea that seeing is powered by knowledge brings me to more questions: what am I missing right now? What parts of my nascent vision are comprised of stock footage? And am I even able to detect such blindness? It gets very tricky here. To be able to see a blur, a lack of pattern, requires first a recognition of pattern. So no, I can’t detect the blindness. I can’t look around at the landscape and say now there’s a lack of clarity and detail just waiting to be filled in with knowledge. I can’t because there’s too much detail already filled in around it, the detail exactly matching the knowledge beneath. I can’t see potential patterns anymore than a child can see the inches he has yet to grow or read the language he has yet to learn.

That’s the nature of this world and our experience in it. The visual detail keeps up perfectly with its growing, corresponding knowledge. I learn that the difference between the black maple and the silver maple right next to it are its smoother bark and fewer leaf lobes. And then vision! From that point on, I see them differently. I watch a rugby match, and it’s all chaos and confusion. But a friendly hand points out the patterns in strategy, and the game becomes something new. Knowledge comes and makes vision possible. It differentiates and brings order.

So where there was once at the side of the road a passing blur of white or red or purple, there is now a lilac bush, syringia in all of its deciduous detail. And it is still—to this child still learning to see—miraculous.

A Word on Words

The words you use, better than any other indicator, reflect the quality of the thoughts behind them. That’s not to say good thinking can’t happen without corresponding good expression—intellectual genius often goes hand in hand with an inability to express it. But good expression rarely happens without good thinking to drive it. That is, a complicated idea, clearly expressed, indicates that complicated thinking really did happen.

A woman playing chopsticks on the piano might be a virtuoso, but she’s probably not since most people can play chopsticks and few are virtuosos. The expression of chopsticks can convey only that level of proficiency and nothing higher. And if she plays a Rogers and Hammerstein tune, we know she’s at least that good. But is that the extent of her skill? We don’t know, and we wouldn’t assume a level higher than that until we’ve heard an expression that would indicate it.

But if she does move on to playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #3, our estimation of her abilities will rise, and—now this is the important part—we will never again put her skill level at chopsticks or show tunes, even if we never hear Rachmaninoff again!

Your use of language conveys quality of thought in a similar way. Expression will convey that level of thinking, but nothing beyond. If it’s simple, you convey simplicity, which is not necessarily bad—you might just be fooling around with chopsticks. If your words are muddled, you will convey muddled thinking. And if all your expression is mundane, prosaic, plain…well, then that’s the only tune we’re hearing.

But doesn’t this contradict simplicity as doctrine for writing web copy? you ask. Doesn’t what we know about usability suggest we pound out nothing but chopsticks?

Not exactly. Even if our virtuoso prefers to play chopsticks, and even if we never hear a concerto again, her credibility at the piano is established. We know she’s good. Business writing for the web is not about entertainment—it’s about utility and credibility.

So it’s not imperative that every sentence should knock it out of the park (in fact, if you try to accomplish that, you’ll convolute your text) but that your sum-total expression does. If you give your readers a taste of Rachmaninoff early on to establish credibility, they’ll listen closely to the rest.

Don’t Don’t

Several posts ago, I dealt with the passive voice, its problems, its uses. One of the reasons that passive-voice construction (The ball was thrown by me, as opposed to the active I threw the ball) is a hindrance to clarity is that it requires an extra cognitive step to get to the meaning. It asks the synapses to fire a few more times than would be necessary with the active voice.

But there are other language habits that do the same thing. Using a negative to indicate its positive opposite, for example. Take this sentence: “Don’t be short.” It’s a caddie talking to his player. Now, this may be good advice. The caddie may know this particular spot on this green and understand that, given the grain, grass type, and the nearby water, there’s a tendency for golfers leave it short. He might very well know exactly what he’s talking about, but he may also be putting his job at risk.

Just like with the passive voice, an imperative framed in the negative, like our caddie’s piece of advice, requires an additional cognitive step. The golfer must first understand what the statement means in the negative and then translate it into the positive opposite. Compare these two cognitive sequences:

A. With “Don’t be short”, the golfer’s brain would do something like this:

short means the ball stops before the hole
don’t means this is bad and the opposite is good
the opposite of short is long
therefore, I should try to hit it just past the hole

B. With “You can be long” the brain only needs to do this:

1. long means past the hole
2. therefore, I should try to it just past the hole.

If it sounds like I’m making an issue out of nothing, like I’m inventing for blog material, just hang on. Yes, the brain works so fast that we don’t perceive a difference between “don’t leave it short” and “you can be long.” It’s not as if the golfer now says,”Darn you, caddie! Now I’ve had to unnecessarily expend mental energy transposing your negative imperative into the positive. Two extra cognitive steps! You’re fired!” But something else is going on, something very important to both golfers and anyone trying to compel or persuade with words.

When the caddie says “don’t be short”, the player will visualize short—he can’t help it; it’s a language/brain thing. Here, I’ll illustrate: don’t think of green grass.

See? Your brain can’t help it. Just like our golfer can’t help but see short.

Now he needs to re-visualize the opposite of short since the caddie said “don’t”. Once again, it’s not the extra cognitive steps that irk the golfer, it’s that first image in his head of hitting the ball short. The golfer now has to superimpose with added effort the opposite image of hitting the ball past the cup. And in high-pressure situations, that can be next to impossible. The caddie has just spoiled his employer’s sports psyche by introducing negative thinking. And he may also have just spoiled his own livelihood.

This will be very useful—you’re thinking—when I become a professional golfer, but how does this affect me now as a writer?

The implications for us as writers are the same as the consequences were for the caddie. Your readers, your players, will visualize what you put before them. So, when it’s possible and appropriate, when it doesn’t jeopardize the overall purpose of the copy, when it doesn’t handcuff you into veering away from clearest meaning, frame your imperatives in the positive.

Here’s an easy way to make a determination as to whether you should avoid a not: Ask yourself this: when casting words in the negative, are you ok with your reader having in mind (and holding it, we have to presume) the opposite of what you’re saying. Is it ok for your player to visualize short when you want him hitting it long? If not, present it in the positive. If it doesn’t hurt, don’t sweat it.

And you can always use these same principles in reverse. Reverse psychology, that is. Don’t open this box. Don’t ring this bell. And whatever you do, DON’T read my next blog.

Please, Ink Responsibly

A few weeks ago, I stumped hard for the active voice. And for good reason: it’s the better choice, the safer choice for responsible writers. However, the passive voice, in moderation and in the right hands, can be useful for getting you out of some awkward spots.

The weakness of the passive voice—that the actor is stated indirectly, or not at all—occasionally turns out to be a strength. Let’s say, for example, that you don’t know (or want to hide) who the actor in the sentence is. Just call in the passive voice:

Sexual harassment charges against Mr. Jones were filed yesterday. (We’re protecting the person who filed them.)

Forty acres of orange trees have been planted. (We don’t know—and no one would care—who planted them.)

Our house was vandalized. (We’d love to know who did it, but the police have no promising leads.)

To force an active-voice construction would make matters worse:

Someone—we’re not at liberty to say who—filed sexual harassment charges against Mr. Jones yesterday.

Migrant workers, presumably, planted forty acres of orange trees.

Representatives of the local criminal element vandalized our house.

Notice that in these examples the active voice shifts emphasis to the actor. Not only does this make for awkward reading, it also changes the intent of the sentences. The original sentences are about the charges against Mr. Jones, the forty acres of orange trees, and our house, not about an unknown plaintiff, migrant workers, or criminals. Now it may be that if we had the information about the actor or the desire to divulge it, our emphasis and intent would be different. But we have neither.

There are also times when we want to emphasize the receiver not because we’re hiding or we’re ignorant of the actor, but because it’s our purpose, and because some things don’t fit neatly into active voice. This is the second use of the passive: intentionally emphasizing the receiver.

In a piece about the Academy Awards, it would be right and good and proper to write a passive-voice sentence like this: This year’s Oscar for best supporting actor was awarded to George Clooney. But in a bio on George Clooney, he should have the rightful place at the front of an active sentence. George Clooney won the Oscar.

And if you think about it, Oscar, as the subject of a sentence, will almost always be in passive voice. Besides sitting on a shelf, there’s little else for an Oscar to do but be given, be awarded, be handed out, be toted, be brandished, be coveted, be sold on ebay. A statue, by its nature, is passive. It will never make a good actor, even if it is an Oscar.

Finally, you might employ the passive voice when your text calls for sentence variety. I say might, because there are many ways to vary sentences without resorting to the passive. However, the rare, adeptly spun passive to break up a long, wooden passage, one that casts no shadow on your subject would be acceptable. But use in moderation.

So while active voice is clearer, stronger, and more concise, it can’t do everything. If the actor is unknown or needs to be hidden, or if the receiver of the action is your focus, cast it in the passive voice. And for the sake of variety, advanced users may employ the passive—but please…write responsibly. Don’t put interested readers at risk.

The Right Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures

I recently heard this narrow slice of our modern era—the late 20th, early 21st century—described as the age of image. The notion behind it being that our use of information is primarily image based rather than word based.

It’s not hard to see how this is true. Consider that in the last century we’ve seen not only the advent of digital media, but—going waaay back—of picture books for kids and pop-culture magazines that have had their verbiage squeezed out, a little each decade, by images. Our children today, and for the last couple of generations, really, have been raised, educated, pacified, and entertained with images.

This would seem to speak to the old proverb that a picture is worth a thousand words. But is it? The answer, of course, depends on the words. For example, one picture cannot express…

• a mission statement
• your epitath
• a website’s terms of service
• a knock-knock joke
• what Emily Dickinson can with 10 words
• the simplest legal document

I understand what the maxim means to say. That some pictures—pieces of photo journalism come to mind—communicate ideas, truths, impressions that could not be captured in the same way with words. I don’t dispute that. But there’s a kind of job that images can’t do. They can’t argue. Not really. Images can’t present claims. They can’t reason syllogistically. They can’t sequence premises, conditions, and conclusions. For communication that compels a reader to action—whether the action is a change in thought or a purchase—we need words.

I am not proposing that words are better than visual images. That would be like saying trees are better than clouds; each has value within a particular context. And the context in which words have greater value is that of human thought and expression.

So we can call this the slice of history whatever we want, but one thing’s for sure, we’ll use words to do it. And unless our brains start working differently, words are here to stay.

Writer, Proof Thyself

Proofing your own copy is like tickling yourself—you’d think it would work, but it doesn’t. Just ask Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Here’s the complete title of her book:

Eats, Shoots and Leaves:

A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation 

And in the subtitle we find, of all things, an error in punctuation. The compound modifier zero tolerance, because it modifies a noun immediately following, needs to be hypenated, as in zero-tolerance approach.

(It’s a great object lesson for copy folk, but don’t let the slip-up prejudice you against Truss’s book—it’s a great read, and no, I’m not forgetting that it’s about punctuation.)

The more time a writer spends with a piece of copy, the more familiar it becomes. If errors aren’t caught early, the writer’s eye and brain (they’re the same organ, really) will begin superimposing correct form onto the copy. You’ll read it correctly because the sentence’s content and syntax encourage you to anticipate and assume the correct form. It’s nothing new; we see what we want to see.

Some remedies:

• spell check is a start, but it will miss distinctions between words like wear and where
• reading aloud is helpful for broader form concerns like sentence fragments, misplaced or dangling modifiers, and style, but it won’t catch spelling and typo problems
• reading copy word for word in reverse—this eliminates the brain’s assumptions about form since there’s no syntax to hypnotize you. This is a good complement to reading aloud as it will only catch spelling and typo errors.
• farming the copy out to a proofreader for one last pass

But your best bet is to be doing all four. That’s the true zero-tolerance approach to proofing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need my wife to read this before I post.

Zero Content Blah Blah

Odds are you have copy on your website that can—with no diminished value in usability—be replaced with the words blah, blah, and blah. Jakob Nielsen refers to such copy as zero-content word count. These are words, phrases, and sentences that contribute nothing because our brains have stopped recognizing them as meaningful. And it’s the language that comprises most website text.

As web users, we have qualifier assumptions, a host of words in our heads that we’re ready to see—professional, progressive, state-of-the-art, efficient, any positive modifier, and a lot of vague action verbs such as integrate, facilitate, develop, excel. Nothing constructive happens with these words because nothing is added to the user’s perceptions. “High-quality” is already there in our assumptions; every business thinks it’s high quality, so we’re inoculated to it. It’s become a nonsense word. And there are nouns too: integration, process, cutting-edge, synergy. They add nothing substantive. The words we present must construct something new in the user’s thinking or they’re empty and without value. They have zero content.

So what does zero-content word count look like? One way to identify it is to ask would anyone advertise for the opposite of what I’m writing? For example, “we provide unique opportunities” says nothing because there’s no one out there saying “we provide common opportunities.” And if there’s no one saying the opposite, or at least something very different, then you’ve got no room for differentiation. Unique is an assumed qualifier, so the word adds no value to a user’s experience. You may as well use the term blah, or maybe yada, because your reader will scan over unique in just the same way.

So how do you add value through words? There are many ways, but the remedy for zero-content is simple: say what you do. If you’re a plumber, don’t tell me how your service is professional or state-of-the-art. Say instead, “We clear drains up to 200 feet.” Those seven words add value by building in the user’s perception something as opposed to nothing. Otherwise, save yourself some time and paste in blah blah blah, or leave it blank. It won’t matter either way—your user can’t see it.

It Ain’t Grammar, It’s Usage

There’s a difference between good grammar and standard usage. Anyone who communicates clearly using a native language has good grammar. Standard usage is another matter.

Consider this sentence from my four-year-old: “I bringed you a book, Daddy.” Bringed is not standard usage. Bring is an irregular verb so its conjugation doesn’t follow the “add an ed to the end to make it past tense” rule of usage. But the grammar template in my daughter’s head is just fine. She knew, and without my ever teaching it to her, that the past tense of verbs is formed by adding ed to the end. That’s good grammar; the grammar part of her brain is working. But as she hears the construction a few hundred or a few thousand times, she’ll add that little exception to the grammar in the form of a standard usage rule.

Her grammar is good, but her usage is not yet standard.

I talk about this with my students all the time.

“I ain’t got good grammar,” says Billy.

“Billy,” I say, “your grammar’s just fine. For example, in that sentence you just put a nominative case subject before your verb, you contracted an informal version of an auxiliary verb and added it correctly to a past participle to form the past perfect tense. And I understood you perfectly. Nice grammar, son.”

Billy then looks at me sideways and I explain how his brain’s grammar was formed and pretty much fixed by the time he was 13 (You can test this yourself: find an adult international who still has an accent, then ask when they arrived here. It was probably after the age of 12. Before that, when the grammar template in the brain is still forming, the new accent–American English–will replace the old one. It’s a general rule, so you’ll find exceptions.). What Billy’s learning in my class now is the standard usage of American English.

So the next time you think to yourself, “My grammar sucks.” Take heart. If you can make yourself understood in English then your grammar’s just fine. It’s your usage that sucks.

Ain’t that cool?

Actives Speak Louder

The last time you thought of active and passive voice was probably high school. Let’s dust it off and see how it applies to writing copy for the web.

First, a refresher… 

By the time we’re 12 or so, the grammar/language template in our heads is fixed. This explains why anyone moving to the US before that age will probably lose the accent while anyone older will keep it. For the English speaker this fixed structure also means that in the normal course of language use, subject precedes verb and verb precedes complement. How this or any word order conveys meaning is called syntax. In the sentence The dog chased the ball our subject is dog, the verb is chased, and the complement is ball. But if we’re given the two nouns in different order—ball, dog—our brains, by default, will have the first doing an action to the second. Ball hits dog. That’s our natural syntax making sense of the two nouns.

But our brains are good at language, and if we know that chasing is involved we can straighten it out by recasting it in the passive—The ball was chased by the dog. The meaning is the same as our first sentence, but to get there we’ve asked our brain to stop in its normal track and to take a slight turn in syntax. Likewise, when we read a passive construction, the syntax requires us to add a step in order to comprehend it. It’s like walking through a room with furniture in it. We do it all the time but not usually on a straight line, and always at the risk of stubbing a toe.

So how do we apply that to web-page copy? First, active voice helps us take advantage of web-user scanning habits. It’s a truism that web users don’t read, they scan. When we scan a page, we unconsciously assume—among other things—a standard syntax, so passive constructions aren’t picked up as easily. Ball before dog, therefore, is a bump that the scanning eye wants to skip since our brains have to perform an extra function to fill in the meaning. A scanning eye is unforgiving toward copy, so bumps get jumped, and meaning is lost.

Secondly, active voice is shorter. In terms of home-page copy, shorter is better. A page full of text is a barrier off which your user is likely to bounce. Active voice can help. Compare our sentences: The dog chased the ball. Five words. The ball was chased by the dog. Seven words. Two added words may not seem like much, but that’s an increase in copy of 29%. A passive-prone writer is a fluffy writer, and web users are unmerciful with fluff.

Finally, active voice is clearer. You can’t help but appreciate the blunt-spoken. You always know exactly where they’re coming from. And blunt people don’t speak in the passive voice. Their subjects are right out front for all to see, not hidden at the end behind verb and prep phrases. For the sake of clarity, web copywriters might take a cue from such straight shooters. Subject does verb—it’s very simple, really.

The active voice is simply more effective for the web and other forms of business copy. Our scanning eyes demand it, a clearly conveyed message requires it, and your users are more likely to actually read it. So it turns out your high school English teacher was right about something.