tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28515945362325807272024-03-19T04:33:51.058+00:00Angry Sub-EditorTerms and conditions: by reading this blog you accept that all opinions expressed herein will henceforth be your opinions.Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.comBlogger100125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-69922945242549176362022-08-17T00:03:00.002+01:002022-08-17T16:43:36.018+01:00Better business writing pt2 Narrative versus factWe use words to tell stories. Words are a very poor medium for presenting facts, especially numbers. Our writing should present analysis, with facts presented as tables. The following (slightly edited) abstract of an academic study explains the distinction:Data is raw. [Items of data] are symbols or isolated and non-interpreted facts. Data represents a fact or statementPatrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-40030146828114957832022-08-14T23:22:00.000+01:002022-08-14T23:22:23.763+01:00Better business writing pt1 “If you can’t explain it to a six-year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”Albert Einstein (attr)*Back in about 2013 I wrote a screed called ‘How to write better’ for the company whose publications I had been hired to improve. I’ve redacted identifying elements, but otherwise it stands up. Here’s the first part.When you finish writing, it’s tempting to think that the job is done. In
Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-67047353940385019032021-11-24T20:35:00.003+00:002021-11-27T14:26:24.401+00:00 I've stopped wearing poppies. Here's whyHere in the UK, we fetishise the suffering of the English upper classes on the Western Front, as if that was all WWI was about. Yes, Waterloo was (apparently) won on the playing fields of Eton, but the Somme wasn't. Yes, lots of toffs died after writing their war poems, but thousands of miners, farmers and factory workers also died without a line to their names. But it was a World War. WORLDPatrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-86431313025010048132018-12-07T01:17:00.004+00:002022-08-16T21:39:14.157+01:00Fair, with a bit of play
“It’s a shipping magazine. We should put ships on the cover.” Nah
I wrote this piece to mark the closure of Fairplay magazine in November 2018 after 135 years of publication. I joined Fairplay in 1995 and soon became its first ever sub-editor, which meant I controlled everything that got published – a privilege I abused massively.
When I was asked to write something for its final issue, I Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-8731541596105784332017-06-12T11:35:00.000+01:002017-06-12T11:35:45.725+01:00Shall I compare thee…?<!--[if gte mso 9]>
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Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-91149181115266229022016-12-02T18:49:00.002+00:002017-06-12T15:07:59.819+01:00The rise and fall of high and low
Business writers like to use the words ‘high’ and ‘low’
indiscriminately. Numbers can be high or low, but physical things such as ships
can’t (except in the Panama Canal locks). Similarly, they use the verbs ‘rise’
and ‘fall’ – the process of becoming high or low – too much. If you use such
words for things other than numbers, you give the impression that you aren’t
thinking about the real worldPatrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-90784717694309795922016-08-10T19:10:00.000+01:002016-08-19T13:41:47.526+01:00How harassed are you?Another survey hits the press, this time from the Trades Union Congress and Everyday Sexism, telling us how badly women are treated at work.
Scepticism is the obvious response, because the TUC is in the business of protecting workers and is never going to put its name to a survey saying they don't need it. Everyday Sexism isn't in the business of denying there's a problem either, and has Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-37251259523664821842015-07-23T13:55:00.001+01:002016-05-25T14:43:30.675+01:00Articles: "the", "a" or neither?Articles are funny things. They're hugely important in languages where they are used, yet other languages get by quite happily without them. Unfortunately, anyone writing for an international audience will usually have to learn English, and that means using articles. For Indians, Japanese and many others, it's a hard skill to master.
Articles determine the role of a noun in a sentence, giving itPatrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-37589319430263894742014-08-19T14:25:00.001+01:002014-08-19T14:50:20.820+01:00The pay gap that might not be thereNeed to prove an argument? Chuck in some statistics. Any old ones will do.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if a journalist is ignorant of statistics or is being deliberately misleading. Like most of us, they seldom question statistics that seem to prove what they already think they know.
The Guardian is no better or worse than most, and it's been doing a lot of it lately. Some of its Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-17210212226307661202014-07-01T01:47:00.002+01:002014-08-19T17:59:55.345+01:00Say it clearly or not at allMost writers, and nearly all editors, secretly know that they care too much. Once upon a time, poor language was restricted to personal correspondence, because nobody got published unless they had a good grasp of English already, and even the worst of them (F Scott Fitzgerald springs to mind) usually had good editors who would make sure their writing was in decent shape before any reader saw it.
Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-24536781614602377172013-11-28T18:03:00.000+00:002013-11-28T19:25:32.573+00:00Why you shouldn't put numbers in text<!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]-->
Read any piece of business writing, and you're bound to encounter this sort of gibberish:
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Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-88128265663266015842013-09-22T14:12:00.000+01:002013-09-23T15:09:34.668+01:00Farage and the Hitler Youth
My only picture of Farage from school
It
has been reported recently that Nigel Farage, leader of the UK
Independence Party, sang "Hitler Youth songs" while in the Combined
Cadet Force (CCF) at his school, Dulwich College, in 1981.
I know Farage didn't sing any Hitler Youth songs because we didn't know any. I say "we", because I was
there; Channel 4 News wasn't and nor, for that matter, Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-77014164694999043662013-09-10T12:25:00.001+01:002013-09-10T17:03:07.778+01:00A tour of the Black MuseumEditors of business reports are constantly turning pretentious wankery into something approaching English, in the vain hope that the readers will understand what the writer was trying to say. Sometimes, the process of disentangling a sentence reveals that the writer himself didn't know what he was trying to say.
This blog began life two years ago as an extension of my Twitter feed, which only Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-86012753309255747002013-09-06T11:58:00.002+01:002015-08-06T01:22:40.574+01:00Shock news: your toilet is too cleanAnother week, another story telling us all the things that are dirtier than a toilet seat. I can't even be bothered to link to it, but don't worry, there'll be another one along in a couple of days. The narrative is always the same: something in your house has more bacteria than your toilet seat. From what I've seen of the research - because, like almost no journalist nowadays, I looked beyond Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-10490556685657243802013-08-22T03:47:00.001+01:002013-08-23T11:51:16.874+01:00Should top journalists write their own stories?
Lee gets his name in the noosepapers
Oh, the irony.
There was a story in the Daily Telegraph last month headlined Top comedians don't write their jokes, claims Stewart Lee. In this shocking exposé, top journalist Rosa Silverman revealed … well, pretty much what it says in the headline.
In a strange coincidence, only 24 hours before Silverman filed her story, top journalist Jonathan Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-8036242049816254232013-06-10T13:58:00.003+01:002013-06-28T22:10:19.746+01:00Leveraging your customer experienceThere are plenty of companies like Nunwood, using jargon to impress and doing just the opposite. Still, Nunwood is a particularly juicy example.
I found myself exposed to the company's incredible self-delusion in April, when I filled in a survey it had created for my gas and electric company. I looked at its website and found enough there for a whole blog post about meaningless, corporate jargonPatrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-48250356702009379022013-06-03T11:52:00.002+01:002013-06-28T22:11:22.632+01:00Corporation-speak: a phrasebookA new language for addressing the public has evolved in recent decades. It has no official name, but its most essential feature is insincerity. It began as a dialect of English, but it passes the test of being a separate language because it is now incomprehensible to English speakers.
There are two main dialects of this new language: 'Bureaucratic Obscurantism' and 'Corporate Bollocks'.
Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-87033543640348312962013-05-28T12:06:00.001+01:002013-06-06T10:10:59.910+01:00Confused words, part 3Here's a less-than-magnificent seven pairs (or, in one case, trio) of commonly confused words.
Compose / Comprise
I made a horrible mistake on Twitter recently. I pasted a phrase from a draft report where the writer had made the common error of writing "comprises of". Then I 'corrected' it and only did half the job.
Oops. The resulting firestorm almost got me thrown out of the Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-17072681965240833202013-05-19T02:14:00.001+01:002013-05-19T02:14:35.123+01:00The letter L deserves some LoveEvery now and then, somebody comes up with a poll for the most beautiful word in the English language. This is as gloriously pointless an exercise as I can imagine, but pointless fun is under-rated even in this post-Protestant-work-ethic world.
Joanne Whalley gives Michael Gambon the Spanish Archer
Last time I bothered to read such a survey, the surprising answer was 'elbow'. A fine rock Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-13010130754434204852013-05-10T21:31:00.000+01:002014-09-05T20:24:08.672+01:00America versus BritainWe all know that US and UK English often have different words for the same thing (gasoline v petrol, sidewalk v pavement, etc). The global presence of American entertainment means that people in the UK are familiar with most of them, and some American words are commonly used in the UK nowadays (so 'movie' seems to co-exist quite happily with 'film'). Others, such as 'furlough', didn't survive thePatrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-41125640578380578632013-04-24T16:21:00.001+01:002013-04-24T16:21:32.810+01:00How not to write a press releaseI have thrown away more press releases than you've had hot dinners.
No, really. Look, here's the maths:
Press release carnage (I used to get more than 10 a day, but I didn't throw them all away)
13 years as an editor @ 10 press releases a day @ 240 working days per year = 31,200
5 years as a publisher @ 10 press releases a week = 2,500
Total = 33,700
Chilli con carnage, and other hot meals Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-51949085256536001052013-04-17T15:06:00.000+01:002013-05-10T17:26:48.890+01:00Corporate clichés: "Dedicated to mediocrity"
I'm filling in a survey for gas and electricity supplier nPower, run by a market research company called Nunwood. Nunwood's slogan is "experience excellence".
As you can see, Nunwood abhors capital letters. That's not a major crime in the world of corporate branding (you might think 'nPower' is worse), and I'm not even complaining about the clichéd slogan. I don't mean that "experience Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-56518324637049364102013-04-10T18:19:00.000+01:002013-04-11T11:33:22.585+01:00Defuse or diffuse?What's wrong with this sentence?
In the UK, the old offence of incitement has been replaced with the much weaker offence of ‘assisting and encouraging’,
which includes such defuse crimes as ‘encouraging’ the accessory to a
crime (rather than the principal offender), encouraging a preparatory
offence (rather than a criminal act), and encouraging an offence which
is at the time impossible to Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-37505510935168857882013-04-04T02:09:00.000+01:002013-04-12T10:26:24.305+01:00Countries and people: whose word do you use?Back in the 1980s, a friend forced me to sit through a video of the Michael Schenker Group. Part way through the gig, the American singer introduced the band, bellowing out, "From Scotland, England: Chris Glen!" Glen left the band shortly after that, which seems an extreme reaction but it goes to show how sensitive people are about nationality.
You can tie yourself in knots about what to call Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2851594536232580727.post-56343835942945242982013-03-13T01:39:00.001+00:002013-03-13T01:39:29.284+00:00You can't say that!If you can't bear to read taboo words, don't read on. They're here in full. The post wouldn't make sense if they weren't. My use of them should not imply approval.
Two years ago on BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme, the appropriately named James Naughtie accidentally started saying Jeremy Hunt's job title (culture secretary) before he'd finished uttering his name. Thus, the UK's most Patrick Neylanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12809820426546001196noreply@blogger.com2