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.

To make up for it, I’m keeping my hand in with the writing by giving you another recipe. This is one of my absolute favourite desserts (and I’m a big dessert fan) and incredibly simple and versatile to boot. It’s perfect for entertaining because it can be left to stand for 20 minutes or so (perhaps longer), it freezes well and re-heats in the microwave, probably because it’s very moist. It’s also got masses of lovely cholesterol and sugar in it to really keep you fit and healthy. Tonight I’m making one with real fruit in to try to counteract those effects.

A bread and butter pudding is, basically, bread and butter with an egg custard and other “stuff”. The root of it is incredibly simple:

Egg custard

• 4 egg yolks
• 300ml milk
• 300ml double cream
• 100g caster sugar
• 1-2 drops vanilla extract (optional)

Beat the egg yolks, then add the milk, cream, sugar and vanilla extract (pod can be used too if you’re feeling flush). Give it a little whisk to get a bit of air in and mix it all up - and you’re done.

The bread and butter

You don’t have to use bread and butter - there are myriad bread-based things you can use. As long as it’s absorbent (and works with sweet stuff - so white is probably best) it should work. I’ve seen recipes using hot cross buns, croissants, and even pain au chocolat - just remember that other fillings you may use need to complement the “bread” part of the dish, so sultanas would work well with hot cross buns, for example. Quantities depend on the size of the dish you’re using and your preferred custard/bread ratio; about 9 slices of bread works well with the above quantity of custard, though. It should serve 4 with the above custard quantity, so that’s about 2 slices of bread - and probably 2 croissants/1.5 hot cross buns each.

Cut into rough “soldiers” (I cut slices of bread into thirds) and butter, or tear up your croissants/buns and butter them. Put them higgeldy-piggeldy into a buttered, oven-proof dish or casserole which can hold at least 2 pints, layering with your filling (see below) until you reach the top.

Extras

The extras are where it can get interesting - use, basically, whatever you want, as long as it goes with the “bread” part. Marmalade seems to be used quite often, but I’ve never tried it (and don’t fancy it much); jam, likewise. Sultanas work very well - and are what I remember from childhood - but remember not to put them on the very top or they’ll swell and go crunchy. Chocolate chips could be used, as could real fruit - supermarkets often sell bags of frozen summer fruits for smoothies which are worth trying. Layer your extras between the bread and push them into any gaps. It’s not supposed to be pretty; just shove it all in but try to spread reasonably evenly.

About 150-200g of loose extras - fruit, chocolate chips - should be used, to taste. The beauty is that you can just grab handfuls and pop them in as you see fit, and keep the rest.

Finishing off

Once you’ve layered everything, pour the custard into the dish, making sure you get a little over all the bread - it should get absorbed so don’t worry if the level is below the level of the bread. Dust with cinnamon, nutmeg or a little of both and pop in a pre-heated oven at 180°C/gas mark 4 (try at 160°C in a fan assisted oven, but vary as you would any recipe to suit your equipment) for 45-50 minutes. Stand for 15-20 minutes and serve with cream, ice cream, or as it is. Lovely.

Now, this might seem a bit of an odd thing to say. If I can’t get it to be funny, then it must be unfunny, right? Well, maybe a little bit - it’s very corny - but I’ve heard this joke told right. It’s certainly not Monty Python’s “Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! … Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput,” but it’s OK.

The thing is, the wording of the set-up seems impossible. I know the punchline - a lovely punchline/second punchline combo - is theoretically very funny, but it’s the line immediately preceding this I can’t get. The gist is that Bob Marley buys doughnuts, then - and this is the difficult bit - something happens or is said - and then the punchline, based on the song “Jammin’”. It’s the something in the middle which needs to build tension I can’t get the hang of. The Wailers asking what sort of doughnuts he has isn’t enough, there needs to be some sort of conflict there about what they might be - and there was in the original version I heard - but for the life of me I can’t word that bit right. I have a complete mental block about it.

My question is this - can you tell the definitive version of this joke? No prizes if you can, just my admiration. And to start you off, here’s the best version I can come up with:

So, Bob Marley has a busy day at the studio and he pops out for doughnuts. All the Wailers are sitting around waiting for him to come back, and eventually he does, with several boxes of them.
“What sort did you get, Bob?” they ask.
“I got jam ones” he replies. “I hope that’s OK”.

Well, I’ve found a solution to this: baking cakes. I’ve developed something of an expertise with the classic lemon drizzle cake, and today decided to do a bit of experimenting.

Baking is something interesting to do and, when money is tight, it’s pretty cost effective, too. The basic cake recipe calls for the following ingredients:

• 6oz (175g) castor sugar
• 6oz (175g) self-raising flour
• 6oz (175g) margarine or softened butter
• 3 large eggs
• 1tsp baking powder

When you look at the costs, you can get the following:

• Castor sugar, 1kg: £0.77
• Own label self raising flour, 1.5kg: £0.41
• Own label butter/margarine, 500g: £0.90
• Organic large eggs, 12: £3.69
• Baking powder, 170g: £0.17

Which means you can make about three cakes for £6.00 - £2.00 a cake - and still have loads of eggs and flour left over. 1.5kg of flour is enough for about 8 cakes. Plus you get the fun of baking, a break from work, and an ideal present for someone if you’re too broke to buy them something from the shops. While I’ll happily buy own-label flour and marge - while money is tight, at least - I’ll never compromise on eggs and always buy organic, free range. If you’ve got a few pence to spare then fair-trade sugar and organic flour is better - and if you can get flour direct from a local mill, so much the better.

Today I made up my own variation on the basic recipe, and I’ve had one slice and it seems to have worked. Here’s my recipe for Adam’s lovely apple and cinnamon cake:

Ingredients:

• 6oz (175g) castor sugar
• 6oz (175g) self-raising flour
• 6oz (175g) margarine or softened butter
• 3 large eggs
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1.5tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 medium cooking apple.

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C (350°F, gas mark 4). Reduce this slightly for fan-assisted ovens.
2. Lightly (very lightly if it’s non-stick, which most are) grease a 9″ x 5″ x 3″ (23cm x 13cm x 7cm) loaf tin and line the bottom only with greaseproof paper. Be careful of getting too much marge into the corners of the tin - it may burn.
3. Put the castor sugar, flour, eggs, cinnamon, baking powder and margarine into a large mixing bowl. Use an electric hand-whisk (Tesco do a value one - with a year’s warranty - for less than a fiver, which is incredible value) to beat everything together for about a minute. Be careful: to avoid spraying egg and marge everywhere, you might want to start things off by folding everything together with a spoon first and start mixing at a low speed.
4. Peel your half cooking apple and cut that in half again. Grate one part in to the mixture and dice (fairly finely - 50mm square) the rest. Fold it in carefully with a wooden spoon, taking care not to squash it too much - you’ll put too much juice in the mixture. In my cake, the apple chunks sank to the bottom of the mixture while cooking - you might want to try rinsing and drying the apple before you add it, or perhaps dust them lightly with flour before you put them in. Unless you’re happy with the apple being at the bottom, which is fine.
5. Pour the mixture in to the tin and smooth the top a little with the wooden spoon. Don’t push it down too much - if you can keep the air in, it’ll rise better.
6. Bake for 45-50 minutes in the middle of the oven. Don’t open the door before about 40 minutes or it’ll sink. This recipe may take a little longer than other cakes using this basic sponge recipe - you’ve introduced quite a bit more liquid with the apple juice.
7. It’s cooked when the centre of the cake springs back up after pushing gently down and a skewer pushed into the cake comes out clean. Take it out, cool for five minutes, then turn out on to a wire cooling rack (a clean grill-pan wire rack works well if you don’t have a proper cooler). Allow to cool.

And there you go - enjoy! Store it in an air-tight cake tin, but make sure it’s cool before you do. Let me know how you get on. And how does this relate to writing? Well, it probably doesn’t. Except I’ve not written instructions like that since I was a technical writer in the pharmaceutical industry, and it’s nice to keep my hand in.

The same is true of certain books or films - we can often feel they’re talking directly to us as individuals, and there’s a great sense of comfort in that. We like to feel that we’re not alone in a situation - especially a difficult one - and even fiction can help. Whether it’s true or not, we like to think the author has experienced what we have, although you’ll often read interviews with authors expressing surprise about this phenomenon. So how does that have anything to do with writing for commercial audiences? How can you make a dull public sector case study resonate with people?

Know your audience

If you know your audience, you can tailor what you do to them a huge amount. It’s easier with a small audience, of course, and it’s easier still if you have a niche product or service - you can make certain assumptions about what your readers are going to be like. It also works with larger audiences. Although we’d all love to think we’re very different, there are fundamental cultural similarities, morals and values we’ve grown up with and shared experiences we’re all shaped by. French social theorist Émile Durkheim called this the collective conciousness, and it has parallels with Jung’s collective unconsciousness - shared attitudes and behaviours which are basic aspects of being human, innate rather than learned.

The assumption I made in that last paragraph - that we’d all love to think we’re different - is an example of the sorts of assumptions you may be able to make. Assumptions are dangerous, of course, but you should be able to back them up with some facts, especially because - in the most part - your audience will be self-selecting. Only certain types of people will be using your website - because they’re interested in the product or service you offer - and you should target your language towards those people. If you can find out more about your readers - by doing a survey or encouraging feedback - so much the better, but always be aware that surveys are a passive way of finding out information and rely on a certain sort of person - active readers who are willing to engage - who may only form part of your audience. Incentivising data-gathering can help get more people to give you feedback, though, if you can afford it.

The assumptions you’re able to make can feel pretty specific, too; good use of language - which I’ll get on to in a moment - can help with this. We want to feel like we’re being spoken to directly; we want to feel that - although we’re individual - we’re not alone. And because of that we’ll read in to things how we want to.

Just be generic enough

So why do we always feel songs are about us when we’re in love? It’s because we want songs to be about us, and when we’re in an emotionally vulnerable state we want that even more. We look for meanings which aren’t necessarily there because we twist words to our situation. It’s how a lot of psychics “work” - they prey on the emotional state of the people who come to them and say very general things until they gather enough information to make (slightly) more direct points.

Of course, you can’t target your site only at people in love, but you can make your writing open enough in meaning to let people see their own meanings, and you can use shared experiences to make that even more powerful. Going back to the issue of songs with meaning, let’s take an example from Maxïmo Park - Books from Boxes:

You spent the evening unpacking books from boxes
You passed me up so as not to break a promise
Scattered polaroids and sprinkled words around your collar in the long run
Said you knew that this would happen

So who hasn’t unpacked books from boxes? Who hasn’t had a sense of melancholy caused by finding old photos? The sense of melancholia invoked by these particular shared experiences are reinforced by fairly generic - in fact, incredibly open - references to promises. Because I know what it feels like to unpack boxes - and because I’ve been in situations with promises and love and things - I make my own mental ties between the feelings and between unpacking and promises. In my life, these situations haven’t ever come together exactly like this - the emotions I get from this song are from events many years separate. But A big part of me wants to tie them up into one neat package which someone else has experienced.

We also relate songs and books and films back to the emotions going on around us when we first experience them. Visual imagery around an article - or descriptive language - can create these feelings or remind people of past situations and get a strong emotional response. If that’s what you’re after, pick the images you place with an article carefully to reinforce feelings in your writing. They may seem somewhat abstracted from the real focus of your writing, but the subtle cues they trigger will help with the emotional context.

How does this affect what you write? Well, you need to remember the following points:

• Know your audience - this will help you target experiences and context as well as the language and content
• Don’t rely too much on specific examples - the more specific your examples are, the less likely they are to resonate with a cross-section of your audience
• Allow your readers to make emotional connections - use loosely connected feelings invoked by events - leaving out some of the context will allow readers to make the connections they want to, based on their experiences, rather than trying to relate to something specific on your terms.

And to reinforce the lesson, and because it’s a beautiful song, here’s Maxïmo Park - enjoy:

Inspired by a recent bit of work for a client, and a line I just very, very nearly wrote in an email about my experience (referring to the “hot topic of global warming”), I’m wondering what opinions are on inserting humour, puns, plays on words and so on into writing.

Personally, I think it can make an otherwise dull bit of work a little more accessible, but only if it’s in line with the brand. It’s good to personalise your product and website if you can - rather than being a faceless organisation it’s nice to be seen as real people from time to time. Humour - mostly inadvertent, but humour nonetheless - also has the potential to go “viral” quite quickly and incredibly cost effectively.

The big risk, though, is using a lame pun like my example above and making it seem strained. Do you accept that it’s bad and make a joke about that? There’s a risk people will see it and think it’s accidental, which is far from what you want. There’s also a risk of coming across as very smug, every joke becoming a “look how clever I am” cry for attention.

One of the main things stand-up comedy (and performance poetry) have taught me is that humour is a very, very subjective matter. While a good joke may work with a wide range of different audiences, you start to notice - when you do the same bit over and over - that the laugh can have a very different quality every time you tell it. There are so many factors contributing to the way an audience reacts - from their background to the stage lighting - that it’s impossible to know how it will be received. You can read an audience from the stage, but an audience you can’t see and - profiling aside - don’t know - is a risky one to try humour on.

So, audience, I leave it to you - joking, puns and word-games in professional writing? What do you think?

As with many financial services websites, the original content was long and complicated, and there is a regulatory need to present a large amount of information on certain pages. However, summarising the information on high-level pages and presenting more detail immediately before the “buying decision” or call to action makes it more accessible to the main audiences.

You can find the Police Mutual site at www.pmas.org.uk

The site - which includes a comprehensive glossary of pension terms and is aimed at both employees of local authorities and employers - went on to win the Website Design Award (Public Sector) in the Professional Pensions Scheme of the Year Awards 2007.

The content was written around the fund’s regular publications and technical documentation and re-purposed for an audience without a technical background. The content was finished in time to get sign-off while I was in Glasgow - which gave me a spare hour to visit the excellent museum of modern art in the city.

This project involved collation of press releases from across the Thames Gateway region and editing them to strict word counts - all the while maintaining a balance between the requirements of the different stakeholders involved. I also carried out interviews for the newsletter and summarised major strategy documents for inclusion - as well as ghost-writing introductory text and accompanying letters for distribution.

I’ve written on the subjects of electronic marketing and Web 2.0, and you can read some of my work by following the links below:

• Social networking
• Vlogging
• Web 2.0