One of our local employers was on the front page of the Monadnock Ledger last week regarding a $400,000 settlement with OSHA for worker safety violations. Ouch! They not only have to pay the fines, but they also must take corrective actions & improve the safety of their workplaces for all of their employees. They have agreed to get a full time safety &...
What Not To Write
Submitted by TWP on Tue 7/20/10 8:16 pm
Negatives are sneaky. They invade our writing without (negative) warning, when we aren’t (negative) looking, in both subtle and blatant (negative) ways. But customers are far more interested in what a company can do than what it can’t.
The words not, never, neither and no weaken any message. One company’s brochure originally explained: “The system automatically builds displays. This doesn’t require any additional engineering time or effort.” The rewrite makes it easier for customers to understand the product’s benefits: “The system automatically builds displays, saving engineering time and effort.”
The variations of "not" are easy to find and eliminate. But read your documents carefully for words with negative connotations like mistake, no one, unavoidable, wrong and false; the sentences where they appear might also benefit from rewording. Take this example from a success story: “At first we couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but we finally succeeded in fixing it.” The company’s efforts sound a lot more successful in this rewrite: “Correcting the problem presented many challenges, and we met them all.”
Multiple negatives are particularly difficult to untangle as in “why not avoid the problem by refusing….” Multiple negatives are a specialty of the mythic land of Molvania (invented in Molvania, a Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry, by The Penguin Group). Take the question, “Can I drink the water?” In Molvanian, this becomes, “Is it not that the water is not not undrinkable?”
Because of the difficulty of the Molvanian language, visitors have given up asking if the water is safe. Instead, they merely point to the water, then clutch their stomachs to mime gastric distress.
Lots more people write in Molvanian than you might think. And a lot of their customers react exactly like visitors to Molvania. As the Johnny Mercer song says, “you’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative.” And stay far far away from Molvania. What negatives have you eliminated from your marketing message?
Sharon Bailly, owner of TWP Marketing & Technical Communications (www.twriteplus.com), writes articles, brochures, newsletters, success stories, user manuals, and web site content for businesses just like yours.