Come Again?

A few gems culled from the emails and memos of corporate America. If confronted with these examples, the writers would probably say, "That's not what I meant."

" What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter." (middle manager, Lykes Lines Shipping).

"E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business." (accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)

"Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule." (plant manager, Delco Corporation)

"No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them." (plant supervisor, 3M Corp.)

"Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say." (marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)

"This project is so important we can't let things that are more important interfere with it." (marketing manager, UPS)

Two anonymous classics, the first from a cable TV company, the second from a big-company supervisor:

"Next month we'll be upgrading our phone system, so it will be difficult to reach us."

"I need a list of all employees broken down by sex."

No Strategy? No Sale

Your competitors are cooking up ways to beat you. You can count on that. So don't make the common mistake of thinking that a simple description of your product or service will be enough to sell it. You've got to have a strategy, one that will showcase your product in a light that will attract buyers again and again. One way to create a working strategy is to challenge your thinking with a marketing communications strategy checklist, one like this:

1. What is the purpose of this product/service/Web site?
To convey information?
To sell a product, service, or philosophy?
To establish your company name or brand?
Other?

2. Who is your audience(s)? Do you have more than one?
What professionals, by job title, do you want to reach?


(a) What do they want? Keep in mind the story of the man who walks into a hardware store, looking for a quarter-inch drill bit. Does he in fact want a drill bit? No. He needs a quarter-inch drill bit because he wants a quarter-inch hole.

(b) What do you think their underlying fears or worries might be as they search for a supplier?

(c) Do you think they are biased in any way? If so, how?

(d) Do they have a problem they want someone to solve?

3. Any specialized terms or concepts that need to be defined or explained for your audience?

4. What is your primary message in one sentence?
(This statement may be similar to your mission statement)

5. Do you have competitors?

(a) Who are they?

(b) Do you know their strengths and weaknesses?

(c) What are your strengths and weaknesses?

(d) Who is dominant in this market?

6. Can you offset your competitors' strengths with those of your own?

7. Features vs. Benefits

The fact that a marina has a boat-lift is a feature. The fact that the lift can extract a boat 60 feet in length is a benefit.

(a) What are your features?

(b) What benefits do your features create?

8. What is your company history?

9. What related experience do you have?

(a) Number of years in business?

(b) Can you list relevant specific projects or contracts that you have completed? Any case histories that would amplify your capabilities?

10. What personnel, credentials, awards, equipment, or facilities do you have that will lend weight to your qualifications?

Make every effort to establish your niche in your chosen market. Set yourself apart from your competitors by creating and promoting the unique features and benefits of your product or service.

Finally, consider the late advertising great David Olgivy's assertion that we need to build our site around a "big idea."

"It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea."

What's Up With Up?

In one more memorable episode of Seinfeld, Kramer is visiting Jerry in the hospital. Injured when a fork fell on his head, Jerry listens as Kramer scolds him for not ducking.
“You know, Jerry, when somebody yells ‘heads up,’ you’re not actually supposed to look up.”

Although I am setting out in this short discourse to take pot shots at some of the needless uses of up, I just gave you two examples of when the little word is needed. I’m pleased to see that Webster’s New World dictionary backs me up, then goes on for six column inches of definitions followed by three and a half pages of words with up as a prefix or suffix, some hyphenated, some not.

These established examples have earned the favor of Webster, so we can set them aside for now; we’re on safari for up’s that are just taking space…make that taking up space.

You may have already concluded that I am just plain daffy, picking on the little thing – only two letters it is. But then I remember a scrupulous editor who long ago reminded me that each word requires inspection. Does it add? Does it detract? Can we do without it? He reminded me of professor William Strunk, Jr., author of The Elements of Style. Today, Strunk’s stabbing finger command continues to guide the pens of editors everywhere: “Omit needless words.”

Taking Aim

Enter my candidate critters, those up’s that continue to show up in the crosshairs. I’m guessing there are many more:

Listen up, write up, type up, bone up, fess up, button up, slather up, read up, eat up, burn up, sign up, wrap up, open up, close up, light up, *gear up, hurry up, hustle up, fill up, call up, fix up, wake up, save up, pay up, use up, brighten up, summon up, up and running

* Tom Sizemore in Saving Private Ryan: “You heard the man…gear up!”

These and others like them may be acceptable when we’re writing dialogue or slang, but I still find myself casting a suspicious eye – especially when I come across a debatable candidate like hook up. Webster votes for physically hooking something up, like a trailer or a power cord; in another definition, he calls it “an alliance or agreement between two governments.”

Today, we have a slang variant with two working definitions: one says it means people getting together for any number of reasons; the other says it means men and women getting together to get it on together. No matter. The hanky panky version will probably fade. Given my druthers, I would reserve this hook and its up for the trailer and the power cord.

Given the same druthers, I would also question the familiar conjure up. I don't think that up adds anything to the act of conjuring, but Webster says hands off. It stays.

In the shoot-‘em-up film, Training Day, Denzel Washington keeps telling his trainee, Ethan Hawke, to “Man up.” Are we to understand that he wants Ethan’s character to stop whining and toughen up? Like man up, and the slang example hook up, any offbeat up gets a free pass when a writer chooses slang intentionally and not carelessly.

But surely there must be a better way of telling someone to get tough. I can't see Oprah gently patting a teary female guest on the arm: "C'mon now, woman up."

Recently, while having lunch at an upscale bistro, I noticed the menu item “Cowboy Up.” It’s a burger bathed in barbecue sauce and other condiments. I didn’t order it, nor do I have the slightest idea what the name refers to. I imagine the bistro’s intent was to serve a burger that would make men feel like the Marlboro Man, even without a horse. In case you’re wondering…there was no Cowgirl Up. Maybe the bistro owner doesn't want to recognize anyone who wears make-up.

In his book, The Writer’s Art, James J. Kilpatrick sees our little critter as “…one of those idiomatic barnacles that cling to the keel of a sentence. To be sure, up serves a useful purpose in throw up, but ought to be pruned from rise up in wrath, saddle up the horse, sign up the contract, and finish up the task. When you look down on an up in your copy, see if the up can’t be lifted.” I'm guessing Kilpatrick would look down on the following up, inserted by the Reuters News Service: "...the government is going to buy up $15 billion of abandoned homes."

Standing Up for a Few Up’s

Among the long list of O.K. up’s in the dictionary, and in our spoken vocabularies, there are special cases that deserve mention. One that will endure I’m sure is ole floppy ears’s carrot-munching greeting, “Ehh…What’s up, doc?” Another phrase that’s been around a while is knocked up, brought to prominence in 2007 with the hit comedy, Knocked Up. British dictionarys include it, but over there it has less to do with lovin’ it up and more to do with waking up. For the Brits, knocked up means to interfere with one’s sleep by knocking on the door.

I should also mention words with up prefixes, words such as upbeat, upgrade, update, and upkeep. I can’t argue with those examples– and there are many. And there is a need, I suppose, for the up's in idioms such as give up the ghost, the jig is up, live it up, and it's up to you. Kindergarten teachers and parents with small children say they have a need of their own: they need the up that goes with sit.

As long as we’re handing out free passes, we ought to give one to stick up. After all, what literate bank robber would hand a teller a note that says, “This is a stick!” And if we waive stick up, we might as well waive the past tense, as voiced by Harrison Ford to Anne Heche in the film Six Days, Seven Nights (“You’re stuck up!”). As writers, our job is to train our critical eye, revisit the context, and stick with the up’s that help us fulfill our purpose.

One unanimous keeper is Winston Churchill’s memorable response to a junior officer who had just read one of his memos. In this example the issue is grammar, but who can forget Winston’s witty use of an up. After reading the memo, the officer thought it necessary to tell the Prime Minister that he had ended a sentence with a preposition. “This,” piped Sir Winston, “is exactly the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

Finally, it was not my intent to stir up trouble for lovers of up; it’s just that I’m a tad fed up with needless up’s. But then, I’m never going to round them all up, anyway, so I might as well lighten up, look up the nearest pub, and belly up to the bar – assuming the joint hasn’t gone belly up. Sounds like a good idea, as my editor just told me to shut up.

Dispelling the Grammar Goblin

I keeping saying that I’m a copywriter, noting my past writing assignments from Web site designers, corporations, ad agencies, and universities – but occasionally, when passing a mirror, I squint at my reflection and wonder: how could anyone with a serious lacking like mine make it as a successful copywriter? We need to return to the rambunctious days of high school, where the first sign of my haunting began.

Her name was Mrs. Mayer, and she taught English composition. Her favorite comment to me was, “Get out!” You see, I was ejected from her class – several times – for indiscriminate belching followed by muffled giggling. Somehow, I just couldn’t sit mute while she rambled on about what I considered to be the ghostly world of grammar – including that frightening exercise, sentence diagramming.

Classroom Deja Vu

Eventually I graduated, then joined the Navy. While watching the waves go by, I discovered a way to make some extra cash. I found that I could help shipmates write the Dear John letters they were getting from (former) girlfriends back home. I charged $5 a letter, and suddenly I was a professional writer. Still, there was that haunting, that mystifying world of grammar. Surely, I reasoned, after writing letters with tender openings like, “Dearest Donna, you can go to hell,” the rank of copywriter first class would soon be mine.

After the Navy, I enrolled at the University of Miami school of journalism, not because I had an enviable GPA, but because I was exceptionally tall and could shoot a basketball. My high school grades were, in fact, so bad the university had to admit me on probation. I felt better as time went by, though, because I got past the probation while some of my teammates goofed off so often they didn’t graduate. Proud of myself, I was sure there would be no Mrs. Mayer in my future – and certainly no belching at the college level.

Then, one day, in yet another English class, my professor threw an eraser at me. It went like this: the professor stood at the backboard and wrote: “Chesterfield tastes good like a cigarette should.” He then turned and asked, “What’s wrong with that sentence?” I piped up from the back row:

“It should be Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”

That’s when the eraser came flying – along with the professor’s cry, “You
idiot!” – and bopped me right between the eyes. Nice control. He should have tried out with the Yankees. Well, it should have been Winston, right? Little did I know back then the subtle difference between “like” and “as.”

Don’t Go West Young Man

So, the question remains. With such forgettable beginnings, and the goblin still hovering, how did I end up a copywriter, especially now that I am ready to confess that I could not pass a high school grammar test. You start talking about participles and appositives and I am totally lost. My mind slams its door and refuses to cooperate. I wish I could pass that test; in fact, I wish I were a grammar expert. Without the boundaries imposed by grammar, our written language would be unintelligible, a mess. Even with a certain F in grammar, I kept going. And I remember why: My uncle.

He owned two newspapers in Newburg, Oregon, and I thought that if I majored in journalism he would give me a job. My thinking was sound, if not my timing. By the time I graduated, he had sold both newspapers, retired, and moved to Ft. Lauderdale. So much for my planning skills.

So there I was…a degree in journalism and no job. But all was not lost. I recalled one of my professors telling me that my studies in journalism would also prepare me to be a copywriter. They had coaxed me away from the lofty world of literature (Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Homer, etc.), and toward the discipline of writing functional sentences, the kind that would help me get by in the world of business and other such serious matters.

Again and again, the professors kept declaring: “Think about what you’re saying!” and “Write to your reader!” and those now-famous words of Yale professor William Strunk and author E.B. White: ”Be clear” and “Omit needless words.” It was a good beginning; the goblin was beginning to fade in the rearview mirror.

With no offers from Wall Street or the Yankees, I began to ponder my professional fate. Was the role of reporter for me? On my first assignment for a weekly newspaper, I knocked on a door in search of a story about somebody’s domestic violence. Well, the scowling somebody before me slammed the door in my face. Maybe someday I might learn to write, but I doubted that I would ever learn to report. After searching other avenues, I finally decided to become a copywriter, a writer of corporate propaganda.

As I pursued the goal, I still found myself confronted by the same annoying specter…grammar. I just didn’t understand it. Today, if you want to send me into total catatonic shock, just look me in the eye and whisper: “Let’s diagram your sentences…Let’s diagram your sentences.”

Monkey See…

Then one day I discovered a book, The Art of Styling Sentences, and it gave me new hope. The authors, English professors at the University of Texas, were telling me I could construct sentences by imitating established sentence patterns. Their book contained 20 patterns – with little or no mention of diagramming or the puzzling dictates of Mrs. Mayer. As a child I had learned to speak the language by imitating what I heard. If I could do that, why couldn’t I shoo the goblin by imitating patterns?

It made sense, and I decided to give it a try. The authors gave me another hint, one echoed by E.B. White. They said, “Listen to the language and develop your own voice.” He said, “Cock your ear.” With sentence patterns in hand, and my ear cocked, I could see the goblin fading rapidly.

The patterns turned out to be my solution, my amulet. And, surprise of all surprises, the authors managed to slip a few elementary rules of grammar past me without my knowing – not enough to pass that high school test, mind you, but enough to help me write sentences that weren’t totally unintelligible.

Finally, I think my uncle did me a favor. Had he stayed in Oregon, had he given me a job, I would not have become a copywriter. That’s what I am today – and if it were possible, I would travel back in time, drop in on Mrs. Mayer and belch one last time. And if I were still thinking about payback, I would head south to my alma mater and hide in the bushes outside my English professor’s class, eraser in hand.


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