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It’s been a busy summer at Wordsworks Towers. We’ve been working on a graduate recruitment brochure for one of the largest law firms in the world, some branding and messaging for a major global advisory firm, a prospectus for a leading further education college and an interactive learning tool for a regional development agency.We’ve also been joined by a new full-time copywriter, Catherine, which brings our numbers up to four. Catherine is a former freelance copywriter and has spent the last four months helping the NUS get the content of its new website up to scratch.

So with more mouths to feed, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any projects on the go that need copywriting support.

One of the key purposes of good business writing is to write in a way that reinforces your brand. It’s also one of the main areas where much business writing often fails.If your brand is about dynamism, energy and modern thinking, your writing needs to support that. So that means using appropriate language, tone and structure.

We were recently working on a recruitment brochure for a major professional services firm. Being a recruitment brochure, the firm wanted to suggest energy, innovation, friendliness and approachability. But one of the main contributors insisted on using words like hence, thus and amongst. Fine words in themselves, but ones that jarred with the firm’s branding message.

Words like hence, thus, amongst and whilst, have a whiff of old-fashioned formality, of stuffiness and of, well, naffness. It’s one of the reasons why most newspapers rarely use them, preferring while to whilst, among to amongst, and just avoiding hence and thus altogether.

You should do the same. Unless, of course, you’re deliberately looking to suggest old-fashioned fustiness and 1950s propriety. In which case, good luck.

We recently advertised for a job here at Wordsworks Towers. One of the candidates sent us an interesting snippet of word trivia which intrigued us: she claimed that the plural for rhinoceros was actually rhinocerotes, and not the more commonly-used rhinoceroses (or indeed, rhinos).

Well, a quick check of the Oxford English Dictionary shows she was right. Apparently, rhinocerotes, which comes from the Latin, was the original plural for rhinoceros, but for one reason or other, fell out of common use in the 18th century, in favour of rhinoceroses.

Hard to see why,  given that it is easier to get your tongue around ‘rhinocerotes’ than it is ‘rhinoceroses’. No wonder we’ve all but ditched the latter and gone for ‘rhinos’ instead.

Next time we’re in conversation with somebody about rhinos (which, to our mind, doesn’t happen as often as it should, we’ll take great pleasure in dropping it into the conversation.

So Cindy, if you’re reading, thanks!

They say three’s company (don’t they? It might be two, but for our sakes, let’s say three), and when it comes to fluid, high impact writing, three is certainly the magic number.

The rule of three is simple. It says that when you’re describing something - the features of a new service or the benefits of a new product - a list of three characteristics is always the most effective.

Two isn’t quite enough, and leaves readers thinking, is that it? While four is too many, and sounds ungainly, if not desperate. Three, in contrast, is powerfully modest.

Something that’s described as innovative, cost effective and simple to use, sounds more alluring than something which is just innovative and cost effective, and less desperate than something which is innovative, cost effective, simple to use and reliable.

Three strikes the right balance of comprehensiveness, clarity and conciseness. And as a result, the sentence sounds stronger, more memorable and far more hard-hitting. (Do you see what we did there?)

This month’s word was chosen purely because we love its feel of old fashioned, fusty bookishness:

Betwixt (adverb or proposition) - meaning ‘between’

“Betwixt” and “between” have similar origins: they both come from a combination of the prefix ‘be-’ and an Old English root meaning ‘two’. Both words appeared before the 12th century, but the use of betwixt dropped off considerably toward the end of the 1600s.

It survived in the phrase “betwixt and between” (neither one thing nor the other), but nowadays betwixt is uncommon. It’s still widely understood, though, and this writer, for one, will be making a conscious effort to reintroduce it into common parlance. Until next month’s word, at least.

Isn’t the web great? There’s all sorts of great writing tips out there. I came across this excellent - and funny - article about writing for the web. It cocks a bit of a snoop at some of the web-writing theories about how people read online.

My view is that while there is some value in the readability research and techniques espoused by the likes of web-writing guru Jakob Nielsen, they are not the only consideration when you’re writing for the web.

What a lot of these techniques seem to overlook is the fact that the best way to keep people reading is to make it interesting. If you can do that, you’re three-quarters of the way there.

If they’d done all this kind of readability research when they were inventing books, we’d all be reading large print Mills & Boon picture books, full of one sentence paragraphs, sub-heads and bullet lists.

Copyright Wordsworks business copywriting agency.

We came across this lovely story recently of an RAF pilot fighting the authorities for his right to wear a moustache.

It got us thinking what an odd word moustache is, so we looked it up to save you losing any sleep over its peculiarity.

Apparently, the English word moustache comes from the Middle French moustache, which in turn derives from the Old Italian mustaccio. This comes from Middle Greek moustaki, which is a diminutive of the Greek mystak or mystax, which means upper lip. Phew. By the time you’ve read that, you could almost have grown one.

Some of the most effective tools for clearer business writing are so obvious we tend to overlook them. Take bullet points, the unsung heroes of the print world.

Bullets work because they:

• Add structure and organization to your writing
• Provide multiple entry points in to the text
• Help simplify information
• Emphasise key points
• Improve comprehension

How to use bullets:

• Begin with a header/title followed by a colon (as above)
• Make sure that text and bullets are properly aligned
• Try to apply some sort of logical order, perhaps based on the alphabet, chronology or priority.

But watch out for these common bullet mistakes:

* Having too many of them: bullets should be used for emphasis, but if you emphasise too much, the emphasis is lost.

* Using different colours or fonts: the strongest colour is always black. Simplicity makes for clarity.

* Avoid non-parallel construction: bullet points still need to make grammatical sense and fit into the context of the paragraph. You’ll notice that the first two items in this list begin with a present participle ending in -ing. The third item (this one) doesn’t, and as a result it jars. It would have been better to start with ‘avoiding’ rather than ‘avoid’.

Bullets aren’t the answer to every writing problem, but they are a useful structural device to make your writing clearer, more readable and give key points greater impact.

The deipnosophists among you (go on, look it up), will love this site, Luciferous Logolepsy. It’s dedicated to weird and wonderful obscure English words. It’s certainly luciferous and not just for logoleptics.

It’s funny how certain words or phrases become fashionable. I’m not talking about obvious mots du jour like groovy or wicked, but more discrete verbal fashions. Iteration, last month’s word of the month, for example, seems to have been popping up all over the place in the last few months, as people presumably try and find a more high falutin’ way of saying version.

Take fit for purpose. Ever since John Reid, then Home Secretary, condemned the immigration service as ‘not fit for purpose‘, it’s become a phrase of choice for everyone from politicians to small business owners. A quick Google throws up, among millions, Sequence diagramming that’s fit for purpose and a cover sheet for small guest accommodation businesses to use as checklist when applying to be ‘Fit For Purpose’. We’ve even received press releases about ‘fit for purpose compost’.

Now, we’re all for rediscovering new words and improving our vocabularies, but it does become a bit annoying (not to say cliched) when everyone suddenly starts using the same phrases. Not to mention that there are numerous single words that could make the same point more concisely and just as, if not more, clearly.

 photo: jorgemejia