Count the words – then the cash
Words are a business asset, just like buildings, customers and machinery. They should be valued in the same way.
In business, as in life, every word counts and every badly chosen word costs.
Words are assets, every bit as valuable as customers, technology, buildings, talent and a strong balance sheet. But we don’t measure them in the same way: how many we waste, how many of them make a decisive contribution to the bottom line.
Let’s try. Call it a thought experiment, if you like.
Count the total number of written words your organisation churns out in an average week. Then divide that sum into the number of words which actually earned or saved you money.
Start with emails, often the number one suspect when you’re trying to work out who or what is frittering away your time and money.
Check your own inbox. How many of those emails required any action on your part? Set those aside.
What about the CCs and the FYIs? Be brutal. Are you seriously going to refer to that group note (you’re one of 24 people in the cc box) in the future? Yes? Put it in a file. If you haven’t looked at it in 12 months’ time – delete.
Bin the rest. Use the Junk folder or Filters if necessary.
The next part is a bit tedious, but I promise the result will be very interesting.
Cut and paste all the inbox emails into a Word document. Press Word Count. Now do the same for your edited inbox. How many words have you saved? Then ask yourself: how much time – and, hence, money – is wrapped up in those words?
Intuitively, we all know that there are an awful lot of wasted written words in business – in badly phrased emails, poor presentation decks and unpersuasive documents. And with social media, written incontinence is even worse.
In this economic climate, no business can afford to waste assets on this scale: which means that every employee needs to know how to use words more effectively.
Our suggestion? Give all your people a blue pencil – the editor’s traditional tool – on their first day at work. Tell them that in your organisation, you protect the company’s assets – you do not squander them. Tell them: our words matter. Every employee must treat the company’s word assets as they’d treats customers – considerately and with respect.
Advertising and branding agencies, the media, public relations firms, strategy consultancies, copywriters, speech writers and corporate communications experts all sell words. These are the people who, to borrow from Ed Murrow of CBS News, ‘mobilise the English language and send it into battle’. Their skill is highly prized and they make good money from sending the right kind of words to the frontline.
In the agency world, the companies who earn their money by writing and crafting the right words measure one crucial metric: the impact on profitability of selling their words first time to their clients. If their clients buy the solution they are recommending – the neatly phrased advertisement or the new brand strapline – they make a good margin. But if the client rejects their words, every rework costs scores of hours and thousands of pounds. Getting the words wrong is expensive: both the opportunity cost of not being able to use their writers on other client projects and in over servicing this particular client, which reduces margin. It’s a double whammy.
If you want to create a culture in your company which values the written word, number every single draft and redraft of every document, presentation, press release, blog, proposal, tender, submission, board paper, note, report and project update that emanates from your organisation.
You will soon notice the WUR (Word Utilisation Rate). When you start to notice that there is a pattern, that every piece of written communication seems to slog through versions seven, eight, nine and so on through 11, 12 and 13, you will know what wasted words are costing you. And by insisting everyone numbers their drafts, you will start to make people notice what they are writing. This will prompt them to put more effort upfront to create a better written communique. And it will point out to overly officious bosses the amount of wasted time they spend asking for silly, minor changes to otherwise competently written work. Wins all round.
Today, more than ever before, we all need to sweat those assets harder. And that includes the verbal ones.
Did I just read the word ‘utilisation’?
You did. My partners did too, and they’re not happy. Journalists hate the word ‘utilise’. What’s wrong with plain old use? they want to know.
Answer: nothing. But ‘utilise’ has a specific – and useful – meaning. It means to use something to the maximum. Not to waste a drop. So Orwell was right in saying you should never use a long word when a short one will do just as well. And I was right to use it in the previous piece.
But nine times out of 10, ‘utilise’ is two syllables more than you need.
Forthwrite’s Grammatically Unacceptable and Undeniably Great Hit Songs
The Supremes
This Holland-Dozier-Holland hit from 1965 is an extended metaphor where the erring lover fills the place of a fleeing criminal.
We prefer to see it as a heartfelt defence of the humble full stop, or ‘period’.
There are definitely more glamorous figures in the punctuation gang. But the full stop is loyal and dependable. It is always there to get you out of a mess when your sentences threaten to become a tangle of clauses, sub-clauses and dangling participles. You should always give the full stop a second chance.
Flowing, rhythmically ornate as they may be, packed with nuance and shade, postponing the subject for a seemingly infinite span of time, your sentences may end up, should they ever end – take a note at the back, Proust Jnr. – bewildering and taxing the patience of a reader until they give up reading (and you can hardly blame them) altogether.
Stop. In the name of love, STOP.
The Forthwrite playlist is here.
An extract from our Writer’s Guide
C is for commas, wrongly used
Didn’t you hear Diana right the first time? STOP!
If you read the following out loud in your head, you’ll notice that something isn’t quite right:
I come from a flying-orientated family, my father was a pilot, and my mother a stewardess, both with BOAC.
Once again, the humble full stop [see above] comes to the rescue:
I come from a flying-orientated family. My father was a pilot and my mother a stewardess, both with BOAC.
The sentence is much closer to the pattern of normal speech now. The best rule to observe is this: if in doubt, make another sentence. There is no tax on sentences. You can have as many as you like.
Writers on writing
Zadie Smith
“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet”
We’ll be writing more about the discipline of disconnecting in the future – it’s something all writers (not just novelists) need to have.
Write! To us…
Our new writing consultancy, Forthwrite UK, is open for business. We offer courses – online for now, in person later – that promise to improve your clarity, productivity, persuasiveness and originality. You can follow us on LinkedIn and sign up to this blog.
Here are some nice things people have said about us already:
With such phenomenal writing and presentation skills this business will be an outstanding success, I am sure.
Agency CEO & Ambassador of the Marketing Society
Such an exciting new venture for a gifted group of passionate writers! May the road rise to meet you...
TV Presenter & Independent Communications Consultant
[Forthwrite has] a unique ability to cut through the noise, help pinpoint and focus on a winning narrative and produce great results. A pleasure to work with and I highly recommend Forthwrite for anyone looking to sharpen their story.
CEO International Media Network