Language Is Mental Health In Action

Language is thought in action. What does that mean, Tom? I'm glad you asked.

I don't want to crawl too far down a rabbit hole, but almost all of us subvocalise our thoughts. Subvocalisation is that inner monologue we hear when we read or think - you're likely subvocalising right now, reading this sentence. Yes, it's all very meta.

One of the ways we confuse ourselves is to skip the thought bit and think language is action. It isn't. It's just a thought, an idea. Communism the idea didn't kill 100 million people directly, those acting in its name did. (That said, it's still a bad idea.)

When we humans confuse thought with action, we do silly things like compose text messages in our head and forget to actually send them or have arguments against our colleagues in the shower (which we inevitably win.)

The problem with this is our nervous system often doesn't know the difference between what's perceived and what's real. We can think our way into anxiety and depression, aided by complex and repetitive trauma that's located in our viscera - our gut feelings, as it turns out, play a big role in our moods and emotional wellbeing.

This poses a problem for the "talking cure." According to trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk, responding to trauma through medication and talking alone doesn't always work in isolation. I've been on mild anti-depressants/anxiety medication since high school. I can definitely attest to Dr. van der Kolk's assessment. In everyday situations, especially when we're feeling low, it can be attributed to the narrative we spin about ourselves.

Your brain will believe what you tell it is true. The root of depression, as put in a meme, is the result of nasty rumours you tell about yourself. So how can you flip the script, or at least try to?

What I Do

The first act is to open up and own what you say. If something doesn't feel right, ask someone you trust and talk it out. No, they might not understand. But at least you will get it off your chest. Join a support group, see a counsellor, do whatever suits you best. Always use the "I" statement. Not "you know" or "you know when..." No, I don't know. Own what you say and often the solution will become clear.

Second, journal. Keep a daily (or near enough) journal. Opening up by writing things down is not only good for tracking your own progress but getting clarity on your thoughts.

Truth isn't a convenience, it's a winner's mindset.

Third, tell the truth. Tell it to yourself, tell it to your loved ones, tell it to everyone around you, as hard as it seems. If you say "Oh, I tell the truth 90% of the time..." Well, how do I know I'm getting the 90% or the 10% that's BS? Truth is the currency of business. Hiding things, being dishonest, pretending everything's alright...reality always kicks down the door of fantasy. Always. Truth isn't a convenience, it's a winner's mindset.

All three elements are explained much better in the following books, which I recommend every businessperson read:

A Rational Guide To Living by Drs. Albert Ellis & Robert Harper, Ph.D
The Situation Is Hopeless, But Not Serious by Dr. Paul Wazlawick, Ph.D.
The Obstacle is The Way by Ryan Holiday
Daring Greatly by Dr. Brene Brown, PhD.

It doesn't always work, but it works much better than the alternative.

Three Tips To Improve Your Writing

As a copywriter, I have clients and friends ask me, "How do I improve my writing?" I always say that clarity and concision are the key to making communicatio...

Clients and friends come to me asking about how they can improve their writing? I say that clarity and concision is the best way to communicate. To start with, concentrate on these three things:

1. Read examples
2. Edit yourself
3. Swimmers swim, writers write.

Here is a short video discussing these tips. Got tips of your own? Comment below!

Camera by Dave Kenyon

The Reality of Discovery

"We are blind
to the worlds within us
Waiting to be born"

- Swedish poet and philosopher Tomas Lindberg (also the vocalist for death metal band At the Gates)

This may come as a shock to many of you, but I was never very good at maths.

I took up more time of my maths classes wondering why in British English we pluralise "maths" but not "tax" while in American English they do the opposite. I should probably look that up.

I never saw the point in mathematics as a subject. "We already know the answer to this," I said to my good friend and tutor Shai (RIP 1986-2017). "It's in the back of the book." He smiled and said, "The answer is always there, but it's important we discover it." Mathematics is sort of like time, insofar that a clock isn't "keeping" or "measuring" time but giving us a practical representation of it for our consumption. Numbers, algebra, calculus, etc. is the same. It's giving our brains an opportunity to discover the answer. Because the answer is "always" there.

Not so with the humanities.

When I was in high school, my now favourite book series The Expanse by James S. A. Corey did not exist. At all. There was no process of "finding the answer" to The Expanse and all my imagining or trying to (in maths class most likely) would not produce the same result. It is as individual to the authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham as the mole on my head is to me. However it strikes me that the humanities and the sciences is bound by one tether, and that is discovery.

As Lindberg says (before screaming the house down), there are entire worlds within us waiting to be born. This could be the world of Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry, the world of Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, the world of portable digital music by Steve Jobs and his iPod; there are entire alternate realities in our heads that we can project out into the world and make real.

When it comes to almost anything in life, nothing is "real" unless we "discover" it first. When businesses approach me to write their copy, I am giving others an opportunity to make their world real to other people. It sounds a bit grandiose, but the process of using words as a vehicle to help one's discovery is the way our value becomes "real" to the world at large.

Building something and hoping people will come is not discovery. Telling and sharing the world within us with others makes discovery happen.

Everybody's Doing It, Why Not You?

If you've stepped outside since October, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

What that actually means to you is as various as people in general. It could mean dragging plastic trees around the house; spending up big and forgetting it until your statement arrives; or you could be of a faith that only observes this bizarre ritual at a distance.

The language of Christmas - and likewise the language of anti-consumerist sentiments in opposition to it - are quite similar. They both try to persuade people into adopting a tradition that only dates back a couple of generations. Christmas as the gift-swapping, Turkey-engorged ritual we observe every 25th of December is as "made up" as Halloween; though detractors of the former will happily embrace the latter.

Many "traditions" are what we'd refer to today as "viral marketing campaigns"; the DeBeers diamond cartel insisting men save up at least 'three months salary' to buy their fiance an engagement ring with a diamond encrusted on top. That was dreamed up by the N.W. Ayer ad agency in the 1900s, to prop up what was once an abundant and intrinsically worthless gemstone.

We as humans (seem to) need ritual, repetition. It feels safe, and it feels predictable. If we arrived home after work each night and our keys worked one time in ten, we'd feel pretty out of sorts. Marketing and advertising around Christmas often depicts the familiar and cozy - even though a snow-driven Christmas is largely a product of the American imagination. Our drink containers, wrapping paper - even Christmas crackers - all show us images of Snowmen, candy canes, and hot cups of cocoa. All this in the middle of blazing summer, on a continent far removed from the frosted-over driveways of Europe or the United States.

Even as absurd as it sounds, this holiday has near universal support. Is that a good thing? Like most decisions we make in life, that's up to us and us alone. It's a weird one, when you think about it!

Thinkpiece Marketing – is it a thing?

I went to university. I studied what would be termed a “liberal arts” degree by the American definition. When I graduated, I had exactly zero marketable skills. Until the internet thinkpiece revolution happened.

Back in the early 2000s when apps, video, and “content” in general got a “New Media” tag, thinkpieces were the exclusive province of the magazine. They soon found their way to the internet. We’ve dedicated entire platforms to the thinkpiece: Medium, Vox, and Australia’s own Junkee comes to mind.

When I began my own journalism career, the thinkpiece was the easiest piece of copy I could pitch and write. It required no research, little in the way of fieldwork, and I could knock it out over coffee and an afternoon. A thinkpiece requires a thesis, a vigorous defence of said thesis, a bit of pre-emptive rebuttal, and a (hopefully) thought-provoking conclusion. 99% of such pieces are pretentious, self-unaware, and full of cultural markers demonstrating the author’s position as a “cultural interlocutor.” My biggest criticism of self-declared “pop culture critics” is they call it a real job with a straight face. But they do have a function. They are the unacknowledged marketing conduit through which “highbrow” culture circulates.

The quest for organic, i.e., unpaid reach and engagement among marketers is endless. How does one market to a well off demographic, trained in the black arts of advertising and marketing, and emerge on the other side as a squeaky-clean, “authentic” expression for little to no outlay? You market to the thinkpiece crowd, of course.

As of writing, the thinkpieces on American rapper Childish Gambino (aka actor Donald Glover) new video for This Is America, number in the dozens; and that’s just page one of Google search results. The Atlantic, TIME, High Snobiety, AdAge, Rolling Stone, Vulture, and even the conservative National Review have all penned pieces in response to the violent, symbol-laden video. Their interpretations don’t even have to be correct, thanks to a liberal arts theory called “Death of The Author.” That is, a creator’s intentions should have no bearing on its final meaning. Even if Glover gives a definitive explanation, it won’t invalidate these competing viewpoints. Pretty neat, huh?

I KNOW WHAT YOU MIGHT ALREADY KNOW

Even still, do we need these people to tell us what it all means? Of course we don’t. But savvy marketers are in silent league with these haughty writers; give them fodder to write about, and they justify their own existence. Academia confers “high art” upon “pop art” through intense critical study; the thinkpiece does the same, in a compressed way.

McLuhan said that the medium is the message, and the message is buy this record, or at least consume this content. After the honeyed glow of the late 60s and early 70s “counterculture” wore off, sociologists Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their 2004 book The Rebel Sell declared it a “pseudo-rebellion.” The gospel of sexual liberation and generational identity became a “smug ritual.” This is what we’d now term “virtue signalling”; expressing a generic viewpoint to gain acceptance with a certain crowd.

It makes sense to produce “thinkpiece” inspiring content. It has to appear to have some deep underlying message which these “cultural interlocutors” can ferret out with their critical theory skills. Whether it has a message or not is beside the point.  When it comes to creating content, there is no non-commercial part of it, especially for rappers riding on big investments in their craft.

The least cynical but most ironic part of marketing in the 21st century, seems to me the “thinkpiece”. What’s your interpretation?

How To Make Your Writing Out Of This World

Originally posted under the title "How To Make Your Writing Effective" at SavvySME

The iconic space station, Deep Space Nine.

One of my favourite TV shows is Star Trek. My favourite spin-off is Deep Space Nine. My least favourite is Voyager. Let me tell you a story about both of these shows. (Be prepared for a journey through time and space until we land back on Planet Earth!)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was a bold effort in television at the time. (Not as bold as its rival Babylon 5, but that’s another story.) This was a science fiction show using their abundant technology to stay still. Star Trek was, and is, about exploring strange new worlds. Deep Space Nine was set on a space station. Things interacted with it, not the other way around.

Star Trek: Voyager put a twist on what had come before, however. The premise of “exploring strange new worlds” was still the pillar of the show. However, this time the crew of the titular USS Voyager finds themselves stranded in the Delta Quadrant, 70.000 light years from Earth. Even with the futuristic faster-than-light tech that Star Trek relies on for storytelling, this means a 75-year journey back.

During season two of their epic seven-season run, Deep Space Nine began serialising their stories. They introduced a chilling antagonist in the Dominion, bent on destroying the peaceful Federation and her allies. For a show that was set on a space station, their adventures and conflicts took place between people and tough moral situations. This was an age where binge watching and catch-ups weren’t an option (1993-1999). If you missed a week, you missed a vital part. The final season wrapped up narrative threads artfully set up in the preceding five seasons.

Voyager was the opposite. In comparison, Voyager was a cartoon. Anything that blew up the ship, imperilled the crew, or caused mischief in the Holodeck reset the next week. Voyager was indestructible, from a narrative point of view.

Deep Space Nine was created with no endgame in mind. Voyager had an endgame – get back to Earth. In fact, production staff titled the last episode Endgame. As predicted, they returned to Earth. They had to, right?

So what does this have to do with writing and communication?

Back To Earth - Communication with Purpose

Screenwriting is a form of communication – to directors, actors, prop masters, designers, costumers and so on. So is your writing – to managers, customers, distributors, suppliers, and so on.

Every piece of writing you set to create must have an endgame. There has to be a reason for it, and a set of outcomes you want to achieve. If you lose sight of that endgame, people will tell. It’s why fans pilloried Voyager at the time (and still do to this day.)

Some pieces of writing such as an annual report or a request for comment have an endgame baked into it. A request for comment is defined by its title - it’s asking for requests for comment! But the endgame is not enough. It has to reach out and touch someone. This is the basis for all types of writing. Sharing our wants, needs, and experience using the medium of words.

Connecting With Humanity - Communication with Passion

Once you’ve established an endgame, Deep Space Nine, unlike Voyager, had vulnerability. This vulnerability served a purpose. If your message has no heart, it is pushing uphill to connect with people. If you write without exposing yourself as a vulnerable individual with conflicts and feelings of your own, it falls flat.

Vulnerability is how we connect with readers - the Ancient Greeks called it “pathos”, a critical part of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. You can connect with readers in a book, an essay, or even a simple email. Vulnerability expert, author, and TED sensation Dr. Brene Brown says vulnerability is the beginning of courage, and courage helps us belong in the world. She says:

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

Perennial business cliche (and he’s a cliche for 74.8 billion reasons) and Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett always has an endgame and a vulnerability. As he says himself:

“Whenever I sit down to write the annual report, I pretend I am writing it to one of my sisters. Though highly intelligent, they are not experts on accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions are reversed. To succeed, I don’t need to be Shakespeare; I must have a sincere desire to inform.”

When you reveal yourself as a real person through your writing, you make every instalment an unmissable piece of your story. It must have passion, and it must have purpose.

So in your writing, what will you be? Deep Space Nine, or Voyager?

---

Want copywriting that's out this world for your business?

Turning Phrases, Turning Heads - Seminar Part 1

Part 1 of my 'Turning Phrases, Turning Heads' Seminar delivered at Sandringham Yacht Club on 9 May, 2016 for the Bayside Business Network. Part 1 of 3 focuses on recognising bad writing, identifying common mistakes that lead to bloated, vague or impenetrable prose and more.

Part 1 of my Bayside Business Network seminar, Turning Phrases, Turning Heads is now available on YouTube! I will make Parts 2 and 3 available to seminar attendees next month (October.)

The first part of the seminar covers bad writing, how to make bad writing good, and improving business relationships by looking at how you write and to whom.

I'm also conducting a pared-down workshop-style seminar at NAB Village on 14 November, 2016. Strictly limited spots! If you want to attend, sign up now!

Spare Me The Details

“Tell me all the details!” is a well-worn piece of dialogue from romcoms and sitcoms – usually as two women in pyjamas hold wine and sit down on a couch. Being the word nerd that I am, I often wonder – what if the storyteller took what she said literally?

The sometimes physicist, sometimes wizard Robert Anton Wilson once wrote that creating a map of a territory – let’s say my hometown of Melbourne – with perfect detail would require a map so large it would be identical to Melbourne itself. It would contain trillions of moving parts, right down to those fast food wrappers blowing about Flinders Street Station.  “Perfect detail” is impossible, for our brains cannot comprehend it.

An incomplete, but still useful, map.

So, communication is imperfect and subject to distortion on the way from sender to receiver. Many businesses bog themselves down in the detail, believing that more detail is better. Heaping more “detail” on with words about your product or service increases the chance of distortion. So the model you present to the world is now:

• Not representative of the whole, and;

• Possibly incorrect once it reaches the person you’re showing it to.

Politics wonks bury themselves in the detail, sometimes reams and reams of it. Apathetic types may bemoan the “soundbite” culture of politics, but politicians are savvy enough to realise detail is unimportant, because detail is incomprehensible. Elections are won and lost on getting the amount of detail wrong. Just look at former Liberal opposition leader Dr. John Hewson lose the 1993 “unlosable” Federal Election getting bogged down in – you guessed it, detail.

The days when the 6.30 shows actually meant something. Not the crap that is on now.

How much detail is enough?

So how much detail is enough? Why is detail a bad thing? Of course, it’s neither good nor bad, but most effective when applied with forethought. For a business, too much detail can end up dead on arrival to your intended audience (which is another amorphous blob that contains too much individual elements to get right.) So whatever you end up communicating is incomplete, but useful.

Take my 1:1 map example. A 1:1 map doesn’t help me navigate around Melbourne. However remove most of the detail, shrink it down into a two-dimensional representation, and I can still make my way from Flinders St. to the Town Hall up Swanston in the form of a map. The connection between map and territory is more useful, even with many details left out.

For some, the more you look the less you see. Do you ever feel frustrated by detail?

Are You Too Far Away to Persuade?

First off, thanks to all who attended my BBN Seminar at Sandringham Yacht Club on Monday, 9 May. I very much appreciated it! One of the more resonant pieces from my talk was about distance and wordiness. Wordiness - adding too many words for the sake of adding words - creates more distance between yourself and your audience.

The thing about wordiness is this: it creates more flaming hoops to jump through for your reader. If your reader has to sit there, his or her eyes scanning the page waiting for crucial information to leap out at them, they will eventually give up. If people can’t understand the value of your product or service, it may as well have no value.

I had a client that was all into arts and crafts – her business was making custom greeting cards, candles, gifts, that sort of thing. She knew her website content wasn’t working, so I looked through it. Her writing seemed stilted and impenetrable. I didn’t understand what she was selling or why she was selling it. As part of my usual process, I conduct an interview with my clients to get information on the business. It allows me to get to know who they are as people, so I can better express their unique point of view. The person I talked to was such a departure from the “person” on the website, I was almost beside myself. Jamie, or Freckles as her friends call her, was colourful, bubbly, friendly and her website was grey, static, lifeless. It didn’t make sense!

Freckles didn’t play to Freckle’s strengths. Freckles made a craft corner in her bedroom into a hobby business, which is now her full time business. She had that playful, youthful energy about her, and it wasn’t anywhere on the website. That’s because her copy didn’t cut to the core of what Freckles was about – making custom candles and gifts for you is your gift to her. It didn’t come through because there were just too many wrong words on the page for people to get a sense of her.

A lot of writing is cutting. Stephen King said it best – writing (or any creative endeavour) is all about “murdering your darlings” – cutting the unneeded words, sentences, paragraphs. However, the process of writing as writing isn’t thought about as talking onto a page. That’s kind of what it is – we’re substituting our ears for our eyes. What we can't hear we see, and what we're told to see, we imagine. We want to lead our reader down a path toward understanding, familiarity and above all, trust.

It works with business, it works with dating, it works with any human interaction - if you're writing, just be yourself first! It closes your "credibility gap" from page to person.

What do you think? Does wordiness turn you off?

A Word Sparking Star Wars and Real Wars

Star Wars: The Force Awakens drowned us this summer, with merchandising ranging from mascara to oranges on store shelves. Once I saw the new film, I wanted to see the original theatrical versions, undiluted by George Lucas’ meddling. Lucasfilm insists they no longer exist. Of course, legions of fans took it upon themselves to reconstruct the films using a variety of sources. The most controversial change in the first film takes place in the Mos Eisley cantina scene. (spoiler alert – but really, you should’ve seen Star Wars by now!) Green gilled and bug-eyed Greedo corners smuggler Han Solo. Han’s a marked man and Greedo’s itching to collect. In the original version, (after stalling and Han drawing his blaster) Han shoots Greedo “in cold blood.” Here’s what the shooting script says:

“Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light.  Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement.”

Later revisions show Greedo shooting first, then Han and Greedo shooting at the same time. “So what?” you might think. This visually insignificant change is one that contains multitudes.

It’s supposed to inform viewers that Solo isn’t so trustworthy. Ben and Luke have put in their lot with this low-life braggart. We’re supposed to feel uneasy about this hasty alliance. It changes the tenor of the film. Han could have sold Ben and Luke if captured by the Imperials, left them for dead at any time, etc.

Another far more tragic example of subtle changes having long reaching effects was during the last gasp of World War II. Japan, threatened by invasion from the United States and fast running out of resources, was determined to fight until the last man. The “Big Three” (United Kingdom, Soviet Union and the US) issued an ultimatum for surrender to the Japanese. The Japanese responded in the negative, but suffered from mistranslation. A word – mokusatsu – has two meanings in Japanese. The first being “ignore” and the other, “refrain from comment.” It was the difference between “let us think about it” and “We refuse!” If the message was translated as “no comment,” the Japanese and US may have arrived at a surrender deal, preventing the twin atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This misinterpretation struck consequences far beyond the imaginations of its writers and readers.

It’s a chilling lesson for clarity and precision in communication. We may think that subtle differences make no difference, although we're proven wrong time and time again. If you believe that words are your ally, do – keep in mind words might turn on you without provocation. Remember always: "Expect to misunderstand and expect to be misunderstood."

Brevity: The soul of what (where, why, who, how...)

I've a confession to make. I have an addiction. I'm not at all ashamed, despite the dramatic opening. I'm finding myself engrossed by brain training apps.

Many of them are heinously expensive. Paying three figures for glorified Tetris isn't quite worth it. Though I make do with what I have. One app that's made the grade (once I'd exhausted all others) was Elevate. Simple and stimulating. That's not to say they're completely effective, as science suggests.

What struck me immediately was the breadth and depth of the "writing" portion of the "course." One of the portions fortifying the mind was brevity, or omitting needless words. Old Strunk and White may recommended judicious grammatical choices in their masterwork The Elements of Style. Were they actually improving our brainpower?

Perhaps not. The inverse may be true. They could be conserving others' brainpower. In my view, half the battle's won if you're aiming for clear, concise and effective communication.

One side-effect of the academic experience is contracting superfluis verbis; using too many words.

Those privy to the humanities may (fondly?) remember writing essays of pre-determined length. 2,000w, 4,000w, and so on. Why these arbitrary limits? Moreover, why must students learn habits of ineffective communication in preparation for the wider world?

In my view, the academy seeks to conflate "intelligence" with length. If one's professor has trouble navigating Byzantine sentences and concepts, then surely the student has promise. Peppering one's speech with $10 words must indicate a person of higher learning. What nonsense!

Once the student approaches the marketplace, they soon find their unruly and overgrown sentences are in dire need of pruning. It takes many years to unlearn what our student has imbibed.  Co-workers, clients and people in general needn't exert mental effort deciphering your prose. It should flow into them as a river does the ocean. Books I find too clumsy or unwieldy seldom go read. Perhaps you do, too.

My best way to counteract bloated prose? Keep writing. If people have trouble understanding your writing, keeping it simple is best. It's one of my (many) philosophies on copywriting.

Enter the Internet to keep one honest - Hemingway App is a free app to help achieve brevity and clarity in your writing. You can mess around with your settings in Microsoft Word, but Hemingway app is so austere and novel I feel our dear Earnest could settle for it over his old Corona No. 4.

What's your take? Is brevity the soul of good writing?

The Belly of the Whale

Over the holidays, copywriting and other work at I Sell Words slowed down. Partly due to my wading into waters unknown, I hadn't fully grasped what it meant to go on "holiday" as a freelancer.

"Holiday" from work in the past meant getting paid without having to do anything. "Holiday" takes on an entirely different turn.

Without money coming in, I panicked. Did I make the right decision? Was this freelancing thing bunk? I began updating my CV just in case. I doubted every turn. I would mourn my beloved business, lost in its infancy.

Over December and January, I re-read The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. It explores the "hero's journey," a mythological "story of us" found in nearly all ancient cultures.

To me, the business journey is a personal journey. I personally think it's linked with that hero's journey or the "monomyth."

The Call to Adventure is the freelancing life itself. You arm yourself with allies and mentors. Challenges and temptations await. Then - the belly of the whale. Times are lean. Doors slam shut. Money runs low. It breaks you - or it makes you.

Yesterday, in a phone call with a dear friend, he too said he was in the "belly of the whale." We committed to the "transformation" of building our businesses and lives to be the best they can be.

2015 will be my transformation and my "return with the ultimate boon." I'll be documenting my progress on this blog. Please comment with your own thoughts!