Making money from writing
I’m starting to wonder if there’s money to be made helping scammers write better emails. It’d certainly make them more convincing.
Take, for example, this story about “Microsoft” compensating victims of 419 scams. In case you’re not aware, a 419 scam is one of those “I have £5 million - you can have half if you give me £1000 now” schemes. Where, of course, the £5 million never exists. But the £1000 resolutely does.
Reading through the text of that email it’s a wonder anyone ever gets caught out by the scams - although people (and sometimes even well educated, sensible people) do get stung. The text is falling into quite a familiar trap - that you sound more professional, better educated and a better writer if you use longer words, subclauses all over the place, and words like “nevertheless”:
Nevertheless, note that, this payment will only be implemented based on your presentation/declaration of proven documents
Never mind that there are spelling and gramatical errors all over the place - there’s nothing which is going to reveal that you’re not a confident writer more than trying to look like you’re a confident writer. The best writers keep it simple, use short sentences and don’t over-complicate things. I’ve worked as a technical writer, with scientists, and it’s pretty clear that they’re incredibly well educated. They have great vocabularies. But are they good writers? No - they’re not trained in it, so they try to make out they’re better than they are by over-complicating things. And they try to use writing techniques which are difficult to pull off at the best of times. The end result? Text which loses all its flow, rhythm and humanity.
Dan Brown - author of The Da Vinci Code - does this the other way around. Rather than writing his text particularly badly, he writes his dialogue badly. All his scientists and experts talk like text-books - and dull, badly written text-books at that - and not like real people. In part there’s a feeling in his writing that he’s trying to show off - that his characters know something, and because he’s created the characters he’s obviously superior to them and must know more. But this erodes the credibility of the people he creates.
In essence, the one way to make yourself look stupid as a writer is to try to make yourself look smart. If nothing else, shorter words are easier to spell.
0