I’m working through Can’t Read, Can’t Write at the moment and it’s fantastic, but a real eye-opener. I’ve quoted the “average reading age in the UK is 9″ statistic at clients many times, but perhaps without as full an understanding of the implications as I should have.

The programme follows a load of people from their 20s to their 50s who’ve never been able to read – or read above a primary school level. Incredibly clever, cultured people in some cases – doing good jobs with careers and families and lives.

It’s quite moving in places, seeing the difference learning has made to them, and seeing how difficult life has been for some.

One of the very big points – and I’ll come back to this, I’m sure – is how easy it is to overwhelm someone with words. How they may be able to read and understand, given a little time, perhaps, but it’s incredibly easy to completely put someone off with sheer overwhelming complexity.

At one point Kelly – about 30 and mother to a fairly young girl and a 7-year-old son – got a letter from the council. There was a sheaf of papers in with it. She could read it, but did she need to? It was too overwhelming to even start sorting what was important – what the calls to action were, as we web types say – and what was just bumph.

How difficult would it be to put a simple, honest covering letter in with this?

 This letter contains:
- a form we need so we can work out your tax. You must read this.
- a letter with some information on benefits. You should read this. It could save you money.
- a magazine with some local news. You don’t have to read this, but it has your bin collection times in.

And that’s all you need. Writing can be beautiful, wonderful, well-crafted, inspiring – it can be fun to read and to write. Short, snappy sentences can seem rude and pushy. But they get to the point and could potentially save some people a lot of time and heartache because instructions are hidden in reams and reams of – frankly – crap.

Lesson: calls to action can never be too blunt, up front, and easy to find.

Looking back on past work is always like this, however, as an individual’s writing style and skills develop over time. Indeed, it can be a good thing to do from time to time; look back on past writing and reflect on how you’d do it differently nowadays. It could be, of course, that there’s a technique, a style, or a turn of phrase you used to use that you’ve dropped for whatever reason; there’s nothing wrong with going back to old work and re-discovering something from it.

Here are just a few exercises to do with a bit of old writing (you can do them with someone else’s copy, but you’ll be less familiar with it) to keep your editing skills up to date – and to keep note of for future writing work:

•  Trim it down – try to say exactly the same in half as many words. You’ll probably be able to do it; it might not be the best writing you’ve ever done once it’s shorter, but cutting down content to a word count is a useful skill to have. Being able to do it to extremes is a good way of practising this skill.
• Passive/active – if it’s written in a passive voice, make it active. If it’s active, make it passive. While the passive voice is dull and not always the best for engaging web writing, some clients need it; anything political and contentious is far better written in the passive voice because it’s less likely to be accusatory, or the subject might not be known. Science writing is also usually in a passive voice, giving the emphasis to the science – not the scientists. There’s a good (if very simple) lesson on the passive voice here.
• Re-summarise – write an executive summary for the work. It’s a better exercise to do this blind; read it all, then put the source away somewhere and write the executive summary. Read it back again with the source material to hand. You’ll see what from the source you’ve picked up on as important points – have a think about why you’re remembering those points, and if they’re really the key parts.
• Re-punctuate – open the document in Word (or Open Office, or whatever you use) and before you read any of it, select all > change case and select “lower case”. Then (again, before reading any of it) do a find and replace and replace every comma, full stop, colon, semi-colon, em-dash and en-dash with a space. Do one final find-replace and take out all the double spaces you would have created. Now re-punctuate the whole document to make it make sense. Compare to the original.

Hopefully these exercises will open your eyes to the way your writing has changed over time – the older the work you can re-visit, the better. They’re also good exercises to make you think about one particular aspect of your writing – whether it’s the voice you use, how you punctuate, or how many words you use. Most of all, enjoy what you do, and don’t cringe at old work – feel proud you’re now better able to spot those old mistakes!

I thought I’d pull together a list of some of the things I’ve learnt from this – and another recent writing job. If nothing else, it’ll stop me making these same mistakes more than once! Several of the below points might seem obvious, but it’s always worth reminding yourself of them…

1. Quote for a specific number of (or amount of time doing) revisions at the outset, or at least add enough time into your project plan for changes.  You’ll never write something which is approved straight off – writing doesn’t work like that and arguably shouldn’t work like that. If a client signs it off with no questions they’re not checking it. With the best will in the world, you’ll always end up with typos. But by specifying how many revisions you’ll do, and by planning time to do them, there won’t be any surprises.
2. Linked to this, of course, is allowing time for client sign-off. I’ve worked in places where sign-off is done quickly by one person, but that’s the exception rather than the rule; I’ve also worked in places where I’ve signed off work I’ve commissioned, in order to pass it to my direct boss to sign off so she can pass it to her boss to sign it off, who then told my boss it was OK, who then told me, so I could pass that on to the agency. Public sector are the worst at this, but in heavily regulated industries (pharma and finance spring to mind) it can take a while as well. Find out what your client’s sign-off process will be, and try to plan for it.
3. Stick to word counts. It may seem obvious, but lots of people think they can get away with a few words over here and there. Well, you can’t. If you do that the person editing it – who’s in the position to pay your bills and to ask you to do work for them in the future – will get a bit angry at having to get it trimmed down. If you really think a longer version would be better, send a trimmed and a full version – do all the work for the person paying you and they’re more likely to pay you in future.
4. Get it done on time, and if you can’t, don’t promise new deadlines and repeatedly miss them. If there’s a valid excuse for missing a deadline, explain early and work out a compromise. Don’t just let it slip again and again. Perhaps you can submit what you’ve done so far for sign off and while that’s going through the system finish the rest? Because content is often left until last on a web build (which isn’t, perhaps, the best idea) the whole project can depend on you getting your writing done. With design and technical build, there’s often another job which can run in parallel so a slightly late bit of work doesn’t impact massively.
5. If you’re working on a regular blog or publication, gather a collection of easily editable stand-by stories. If someone misses a deadline (and can’t explain why), drop them from that issue and think twice about getting them to write for you again.
6. If you’re working on a big document or website, send a sample as early as you can. Even if the project’s on the to-do list and you’re not starting it immediately, spend an afternoon pulling something together to send to the client as soon as you can. If you write the whole thing only to be told it’s the wrong style, too colloquial, too technical, or just plain wrong… well, you’ve only got yourself to blame.
7. Never assume about a job if it means doing less or more work that you originally thought. Actually, never assume. I assumed on a site that pages I’d not been asked for would, after all, need to be copy edited – they were completely out of style with the rest of the site. Half-way through re-writing them, I found out they would be part of phase II. I’d wasted about a day writing stuff I wasn’t getting paid for! Of course, I could have assumed I didn’t need to do those pages only to find there was a mistake on the part of the client – less of an issue, I grant you, but they’d still need to be done. If you have any questions about the brief, ask them as soon as you can. This is another good reason not to sit on a project if you don’t need to start immediately; the sooner you can find issues not identified in the brief, the better.
8. Bite your tongue – but not too much. Yes, if the structure of the site you’re working on makes no sense or makes your job harder, then suggest some changes – but don’t just go ahead and do all your writing work assuming your excellent IA suggestions will be taken up. They might not be excellent; the IA might be addressed in a later phase; more than either of these, however, you’re not getting paid to restructure the site. Open that can of worms and you’ll end up with nothing more than a missed deadline, an unhappy client, and a lap full of worms.
9. If you’re working to an incomplete design, think! There’s no guarantee that the brilliant “related links” box you’ve just written for will still be there at launch. You don’t know for sure that the section of the page you’ve lovingly crafted thinking that it’ll be highlighted for you won’t just be pasted onto the bottom of the body text. Always, always double check with the designers.
10. Notate like mad. If you’re not placing your text direct into a CMS, notate evey link and say where it goes. Explain if you want special formatting on some text. Most importantly, explain your annotations – you don’t want them to end up in the text when an over-zealous developer does a copy and paste job…

Most of the time, if you can achieve that, it’s great. Before a user makes an action decision (by which I mean buying something, clicking a link, or downloading more information) they need to be engaged. You need to get past that initial scepticism and convince them that your product or service is what they want. You need to sell.

The game changes, though, once that decision is made. As soon as that is done the user’s priorities change – and what would previously excite them will now turn them off buying.

Sell me vs. serve me

A visitor to a website is either decided about making a buying decision – in which case the copy will have little impact (and the checkout button is the first thing they’ll be looking for) or they need convincing. If they need convincing, it’s all about the benefits – keeping everything positive and active.

The assumptions you make about your users will depend on what you’re selling – Amazon, for example, makes the assumption that users are coming with a book in mind and so present the dull details first. Their role is not to convince people to buy a book – which they’ve probably searched for by title anyway – but to confirm that they’re about to serve up the book the user already knew they wanted.

Apple, on the other hand, push the selling message heavily – because they want to up-sell. Users come to the site with a rough idea of a product – a laptop, an iPod, an accessory – and can be convinced which one to buy. Page order is very different – technical specs are pushed down the page in favour of pictures and emotional benefits.

It’s all about balance. Do the majority of users know exactly what they want – and just need to click “buy now”? Then confirm quickly what they’re looking at. Do the majority of users need convincing that your product is right for them? Then give them the sexy marketing spiel up front.

But always, always include both lots of information. I’m just talking page order, not what you should include in totality.

I’ve clicked. I’m buying. Stop selling.

The same principle carries through to your checkout procedure. Once a buying decision is made, giving a user more text – and getting wearingly excited about a product – is just going to turn the user off.

With a buying decision on a “boring” product – somthing necessary but dull, like insurance – users want to make the transaction as quickly as possible and then forget about it for another year. By all means tell me about the courtesy car, protected no-claims and free tax-disc holder before I buy – but when I’m buying, just let me get on with it.

It’s very tempting to keep the same tone of excitement and activity on the “mechanical” pages of a site but it’s best to aim for brevity – say what you need to in as many words as you need to. If you’ve never read it, now’s the time to get a copy of “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug – which is a fantastic book for helping you make a functional site. Everything after the checkout button needs to subscribe to Krug’s rules for simplicity.

Form vs. function

Web designers and writers are torn in very conflicting directions. We need to give our users what they want, but we also have to sell – it’s all about getting more people to a site, about selling a product, or about pushing someone’s decision a particular way. While the usability experts will tell us that brevity, simplicity and functionality are the only things to think about, there’s no getting away from our role as salespeople too.

Fulfilling these roles can be simplified down to one choice:

Buyer decided? Make it usable.
Decisions to be made? Make it sexy.

What’s a Lolcat? It’s simply a picture of a cat – usually in an interesting or funny position – with a humorous caption. How funny these captions are is a matter of opinion (personally, I love them). But regardless of the humour, the language used – and how readers interpret it – teaches us some interesting things.

Lolcats depend on the captions being written in the language – as it’s called on I Can Has Cheezburger – Lolcat.

Lolcat depends on child-like misspellings and syntax and grammar to make you wince. What’s interesting about it, though, is that despite this – or perhaps because of it – it’s still very easy to understand. It might take a couple of readings at first, but it’s surprising – for someone as anal about spelling and grammar as me – to see that it’s pretty universally understood.

I can has pichur?

In big part, of course, this is due to the combination of image and text – which gives us lesson 1:

Images put things in context – and context clarifies complicated concepts.

There’s a compromise to be made between images and accessibility, of course, and every image needs appropriate alt text. The image, of course, can help you as a writer to put things in context as well as it will help the reader. Pick something appropriate and think how to write a caption for it which ties everything together.

Plz to bring dikshunry, k thx?

Lolcats transcend international English variations in the most interesting way – they make their own spellings. And this leads us to lesson 2:

When you read, as long as you get the meaning, the spelling doesn’t matter

Controversial, I know. But it’s true. Even putting completely the wrong word (my favourite being the use of pubic instead of public) needn’t be the end of the world if it’s an isolated case. Of course, you completely lose any professional respect you might have if your corporate site is nothing but typos; but for an immediate, dynamic medium like a blog the odd one here and there won’t hurt. Correct them when you see them – but a quick post rapidly responding to something newsworthy can follow the principle of publishing in haste and repenting – or re-typing – at leisure.

Hahahahaha – lols

Finally, the point of Lolcats is that they’re funny, and they’re instantly funny. And as such they’re shared, forwarded, visited time and again, and suckers like me keep going to see if there are any new ones… which gives us our final point, lesson 3:

Entertain, inform, or just plain bribe – but give ‘em what they want, and they’ll keep reading.

A successful website – which gets repeat visits, which gets its users acting as advocates, and which sells a product or spreads information or opinions, or which keeps people reading past the headline – needs to offer the user something. Don’t expect your users to read for hours for little reward. Hit them as soon as they arrive with an easy to see punchline – give them what they want as soon, and as easily, as you can. Gone are the days where site success was measured by length of visit. We live in a more enlightened age, and we know that the measure of a site’s success is entirely dependent on the purpose – and content – of the site.

Invisible summary!

So, is the future writing whole websites in Lolcat? Of course not. The lessons above could be illustrated without “fluffy teim”, but I thougt – for my first proper long article – I’d show I’m at least a little bit down with the kids and up with the zeitgeist.

Next time – buying books on the interweb. What’s that all about then?