Listening to an interview with the Chilean/American author Isabel Allende on the radio the other day, she was asked for her best writing tip. She answered: “You can’t edit a blank page.” For the procrastinators, deliberators and postponers amongst us – and yes, I can be any of those at different times – it’s great advice for 2025 whatever the writing project. Just get writing and fill that blank space…baby.
In my household we’re all vegetarians and do like the odd bit of meat fakery. Interrupting our usual Quorn fest (and no, this post isn’t sponsored by the purveyors of the fine microprotein – Fusarium Venenatum – me neither!), we plucked from the supermarket shelf a chicken imposter: ‘THIS isn’t roast chicken and stuffing’.
What has this to do with my normal communications beat I hear you ask (or perhaps you’ve already disappeared to throw another juicy slab of microprotein on the skillet)?
Writing chick lit
What tickled me was the brazen use of AI to write a description of the product on the packaging. Rather than pretend a human wrote it, the THIS marketeers were quite happy to admit that they’d handed the creative pen over to our unseen AI scribes who came up with this finger lickin’ piece of chick lit:
“You could say that THIS is like the ultimate and daring undercover secret agent in the food world – dressing up in perfect disguise as pork, chicken and beef, but without any of the actual animals involved. It has a license not to kill, but to fill – your belly.”
Poking fun at AI
It’s terribly cringey as THIS themselves admit, but it made me think that a) it’s quite a good way of using AI while poking fun at it; and b) is AI literally eating the copywriter’s lunch?
To be honest, reading this poultry effort reassured me that there is still plenty of room in the coop for the human touch.
No, I’m not suggesting you go out and rob the local bank, or even (and I’m talking to men here attending industry conferences or going to sporting events) wear red trousers – that really is unforgivable – I’m talking about many of the arcane laws of grammar and punctuation.
Who says for instance that you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction? “But we were taught never to do that,” I hear you scream. And, why shouldn’t you use one word sentences? Don’t believe everything. They. Tell. You.
End with a preposition? That’s the stuff we want more of.
It can be fun to deliberately break the rules of grammar and punctuation to emphasise a point, add a bit of spice to your writing, or just to simply get a reaction. That said, you have to know you’re breaking the rules otherwise how do you know you’re breaking the rules? Where’s the fun in that?
So boldly go to split infinity, stick it to the punctuation pedants and grammar geeks and don’t be afraid to break those laws. Having said that, dangle your modifier and I’ll be coming for you…
*Any grammar and punctuation mistakes within this post are purely intentional (even the ones that aren’t).
Good writing should, quite literally, be quite simple. So why, as we often see, the temptation to over elaborate? Or, to put it another way, why do we succumb to verbosity as a means of conveying our meaning? (Can you see what I did there?)
George Orwell says a scrupulous writer should always ask ‘ could I put it more shortly’?
So here, courtesy of Orwell himself, are his five great writing tips:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
A bit late in the day, I’ve recently come across the phrase ‘jump the shark’ – so called after the episode in TV’s Happy Days (younger readers ask your older colleagues) when the Fonz literally jumps over a shark on water skis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4ZGKI8vpcg
This was the sad point when Happy Days had passed its best and the script writers started to resort to the ludicrous to mask a general decline in script quality. My own personal ‘jump the shark’ favourite would probably be Bobby Ewing ‘resurfacing’ in the shower in Dallas. But there are numerous others to while away your next coffee break.
Is your business jumping the shark?
Businesses too go through their own ‘jump the shark’ moments when particular initiatives pop-up that should probably have been resigned to the cutting room floor. As communications professionals, we’re often called upon to communicate these initiatives or work on the best way to communicate corporate messages that have a distinctly ‘sharky’ whiff about them.
As painful as it can be, it’s our job to call out those ‘jump the shark’ moments that are often lost in the echo chamber of corporate life. Failure to do so can mean anything but a happy day.