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'Golden Bulls' winners 2003: users of baffling English Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. Yesterday was Plain English Day here in the UK. Organised by the Plain English Campaign, the day also saw the Campaign's presentation of its awards for clear - and baffling - use of English. The awards for clear English are given for categories including general Plain English, for internal government documents and for the media. It's worth looking at the winners on the campaign's web site, www.plainenglish.co.uk. But it's much more fun to look at the winners in their 'Golden Bulls' category, awarded for extreme gobbledygook. Among the Golden Bulls winners are my two favourites: * Lloyds Pharmacy for a letter that apologised for the fact that an assistant had dispensed the wrong strength of tablet. A 181-word passage included this text: "The cognitive process that staff will go through when interpreting prescriptions and selecting drugs is almost intuitive in that the prescription will be read, a decision is then made in the mind of the individual concerned, they will then make a selection based on what they have decided. When an error is made either mentally or in the physical selection because in their own mind they have made the correct selection." * Warburtons Bakers for an advertisement in 'The Grocer' magazine that included this sentence: "With a launch burst of 550 TVRs - and £34m in 'premiumisation' opportunities - we're confident you'll rise to the challenge." It's all good fun, and browsing through past Golden Bulls winners on the Campaign's web site is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon. I can add an example along similar lines from the mail I've recently received: * My telephone company tell me about how they are raising my 'call allowance' but don't say what the call allowance is, why I even have one and whether I am going to save or spend more money as a result. So what can you and I do to make sure our marketing materials NEVER win a Golden Bulls award? How can we guarantee that we never confuse our customers? I honestly believe that it's mostly common sense. Here are five common sense tips (all of which I have used): 1. Test your writing on a varied audience. Get people with different levels of knowledge about the subject to read draft texts of your marketing materials. 2. Benchmark the competition. If you are writing a leaflet inviting people to apply for a product, see what others have done and learn from the best. 3. Become a jargon buster. As a separate exercise, go through the document and highlight every word or phrase that might be confusing to readers. Then build explanations into the text. 4. Blitz the long sentences. Look out for every sentence over, say, 15 words and see if the text would benefit from some editing. Often you can quite easily turn a long and confusing sentence into two simpler ones. 5. Tell it like it is. If you find yourself taking 100 words to explain something simple, why not just tell it straight? Don't you think your customers will respect your honesty? There's nothing ground-breaking in the five tips above. But I believe that sometimes, in an effort to be 'professional' and 'corporate' it's often the case that common sense gets forgotten by even the best writers. Copyright 2003 Richard Groom |