Of editing and haircuts
What we owe to hairdressing, Sesame Street – and why we at Forthwrite will never be ‘word surgeons’
We were discussing, David, Kerry and I, how we position our new company, Forthwrite. To help us, we had a longlist of 34 straplines on our shared screen.
At this point, we made Professional Services Company Branding Error #7.
It’s the one where you appropriate (as in, steal, nick, filch) another discipline in order to describe what you do.
Our version was: Forthwrite – word surgeons.
You can see what we were up to. Surgery connotes precision, expertise, finesse and, above all, curing a serious or long-standing condition. Isn’t that JUST like taking a piece of writing and making it better through skilled intervention? Yes: you can definitely see why we’d like our customers to see us as surgeons.
Then someone said, ‘but it’s not as if we’re saving lives’.
So that one got a cross.
What’s going on here? In our modern, diversified, dynamic services economy, there are lots of companies doing lots of strange and arcane things. Saying what they actually [see below] do is not always straightforward.
I call it the Sesame Street Test. I sometimes have to explain to my wife what a friend does for a living (‘oh, you know, he’s a senior strategist in a purpose-led communications consultancy’). She (a science teacher) says ‘a what?? You don’t get them on Sesame Street’.
She is referring to the classic Sesame Street song People in Your Neighbourhood. Here, we run through the people the average small person is likely To meet/As you’re walking down the street/They’re the peo-ple you meet!’
You meet grocers, policemen and doctors. You don’t meet senior strategists in purpose-led communications consultancies.
No wonder the multi-hyphenated 21st century worker, not walking down the street but sipping Flat Whites in their co-worker accelerator-incubator community space (or, these days, in their laundry-office-dining room) reaches for older and more familiar professions as an analogy for what they do.
Fireman, chef, police officer. Not pictured: creative marketing services consultant
The most appropriated-from profession is, unquestionably, Architecture. ‘Hey – we design clever and cool-looking things AND we wear weird glasses. We must be architects!’ Brand architects. Content architects. Purpose architects.
Google them. They’re everywhere.
Well, Forthwrite does okay on the Sesame Street test. We’re teachers and trainers. We work with words. You know what they are? Good.
But these analogies are very hard to resist. As we were staring at our Zoomfaces, another analogy slipstreamed into my neural pathways.
It’s lockdown and David, Kerry and I are not looking at our most neat and kempt, hairstyle-wise.
I looked at my hair and thought, you know what? This is EXACTLY like writing.
I kind of like that my hair is going its own way sprouting in unexpected directions taking on different guises it’s a bit romantic poet a bit mad scientist man hey just let it grow let it express itself without needing those bourgeois conformist ‘rules’ about how you know like you are MEANT to look….
But then I remembered the feeling you get when you get to the barbers.
The tingle of the razor as the ragged locks around your ears are culled. The quiet thrill you get as your head gets shaped and defined anew. The moment you go outside: there’s a cool breeze on your hairless neck – and you feel altogether cleaner, sharper and bolder.
And that is precisely what happens when you get a thorough editing.
Of course, it’s great to let the words flow, to express yourself and not worry about structure, punctuation, form and rules.
But at some point, you’ll have to hand over yourself and your work to another person. With their expert eye they will instantly see what’s going on under that luxuriant growth of verbiage. With their expert scissoring skills, they’ll work with the good bits and get rid of the stuff that’s untidy, unnecessary or just too bloody long.
I’m just going to thin out the adjectives and trim some of the excess verbiage - okay?
A final point. Here’s something I notice about this professional appropriation lark: agencies never choose what they deem a lower-status profession. So architects and surgeons yes; hairdressers, no.
Well, we’re different.
Forthwrite: communications hairdressers – and proud of it.
TIPS: Love actually?
If you’re short of time and space, attack the adverbs first. Few add very much. In fact, I should go back and remove that precisely in the last story.
You can make a case for ‘precisely’, but some adverbs are just the verbal equivalent of the sound ‘um’. Try substituting ‘um’ for ‘basically’. See what I mean?
The most cuttable is ‘actually’. If you are actually having to emphasise a point that much, do you actually know what point you’re actually making?
But I’ll defend ‘actually’ in one specific circumstance.
At my old newspaper, we had an executive on the features desk who was called Actually Bernice.
That wasn’t Bernice’s actual name. She acquired it from the long sessions we had brainstorming ideas for articles. She took very little part in the brainstorming proper. But at some point she’d be guaranteed to interject: ‘yes, but what are we actually doing here?’
Cue awkward silence.
We all need a Ms Actually sometimes.
Works quite well as an album name, actually
Forthwrite’s Grammatically Acceptable Hit Songs
By Eileen Barton
We love a good subjunctive: would that they hadn’t more or less disappeared from correct English.
So here’s a Spotify playlist with a difference. We pay tribute to those songwriters who pay due respect to good, proper English. We especially love songs where at some point – wait for it – you’re going to get a good, properly employed subjunctive clause. To begin this tribute to careful lyricists, we have a rollicking song from 1950 sung by Eileen Barton. You get two conditional tenses for the piece of one in the title. But in the second verse the subjunctive kicks in properly: had you dropped me a letter I’d have hired a band…
We’ve got our ears open for more contemporary subjunctive-inclusive hits. Do let us know if you’ve spotted one.
The full playlist is here.
An extract from our Writer’s Guide
A is for ‘Actionable’
actionable (adjective). People use this term to mean something that can be put into effect ("this commercial strategy is now actionable"). Unfortunately for them, actionable also, and properly, means something that is liable to a legal action. E.g. ‘My solicitors have advised me that your allegation about me and the Archbishop of Canterbury is actionable’.
The verb 'to action' has come into business language in recent years too, and we wish it hadn't. Phrases like ‘let's action this strategy’ are ugly. Verbs like pursue, implement, do and, indeed, act are much kinder on the ear.
Writers on writing
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
C S Lewis
My fellow Forthwriters: who are they and why are they here?
David Kean, adman, author, co-founder
David Kean worked at some of the UK’s most successful advertising agencies. He was mainly in business development. It was in some ways an easy sell: agencies like BMP, CDP and TBWA were strong on creativity and strong on effectiveness. But in that era of advertising, there were still a lot of agencies: press the CAPS LOCK key and type in three or four letters randomly and you could probably start your own. So the fact his agencies constantly topped the new business tables tells you something about his persuasive powers.
I wanted to work with David because he worked some of his magic on me. Before a vital presentation to British Airways, our team was in that state of fractious panic you get into a week before a pitch. He gave us tough love: more toughness than love, as I remember it. But when he did love something, you knew you had nailed it.
In one rehearsal, I was trying very hard to do what I thought business people ought to do in presentations: stand in front of a slide and read it through, word for word. Kean put up with two minutes of this and told me to stop. Ignore the f***** screen, he said. Look at your audience. Talk about the work. You’re good when you talk about the work. You get animated. I like that. It’s really boring when you don’t.
He then set up a new business consultancy called Caffeine, which had a brilliant, instantly understandable name and a crisp proposition: stimulating business. Somewhere along the way he found time to produce books on persuasion and writing. His new one will be out next year.
Kerry Smith, editor, mentor, co-founder
Our second founder, Kerry Smith, is someone I ought to hate. She took over a magazine I used to edit and did it better. Unforgivable. But she’s someone it's easy to forgive and impossible to hate. I became a mere writer and contributor to Kerry’s magazine and I felt like royalty – except on those odd occasions where she had to make one of those ‘but…’ calls. ‘I love the piece, Mark, but…change the intro/that joke in the last paragraph doesn’t work/I’m not clear who x is and how you got to y’. She was always right. That’s barely forgivable too.
Kerry has been a mentor to many young writers who are now tearing it up in the fields of travel and lifestyle journalism. When I was urging David to bring her into our little team, he asked ‘what’s she like?’ I said, ‘kind, generous... but always, always forthright’.
Hang on. Forthright. Forthwrite?
Mark Jones, writer, editor, co-founder
Me? Batted to and fro between the advertising magazine Campaign and the London Evening Standard. At the latter, I learned the easy way to write: get into the office at 7.30am and be told you have to deliver a 1000-word article about something that has only just happened by 10am. Seriously: that’s easy. It’s having a month or, even worse, no deadline at all that’s tough.
Then I went into an industry which was then called customer publishing and now calls itself content marketing. Still editing and writing; but now I found myself in the proposals and bids business too. I was the poor sop who got given a 12,000 word document the afternoon before it was due to be sent to the client with the instruction, ‘just tidy it up a bit’.
That experience led me to do three things. 1) Swear a lot. 2) Collect all the examples of bad, sloppy and annoying English from the presentations AND all the copy I was editing from journalists and create a Writer’s Guide. It is now 12,000 words long and counting. 3) Start running writing classes. They started with my fellow publishing company execs; I later ran them for British Airways, IHG, Canon, Aviva and others.
That’s us: a writer, an editor and an adman. We’ve trained and been trained; we’ve written and been edited; we’ve learned the hard way so you can learn an easier way.
Contact us at hello@forthwrite.co.uk.
www.forthwrite.co.uk