Hyphens: when to use them

When people ask about hyphens, I talk about Frankenstein, rhythm and glue. This is what makes me an unusual teacher: I make up more resonant ways to remember correct usage.

Examples are often easier to understand than rules, so let's start with a few of those. These hyphens are all correct:

-A do-it-yourself kit
-A technology-based solution
-A lily-lined basket
-A wish-you-were-here postcard
-A 6-year-old boy
-A 20-percent discount
-The end-user experience

These are all examples of compound modifiers. In other words, multiple words together ("compound") modify (or describe) a final word. You can usually hear the rhythm: BLAH-BLAH-BLAH blah, DA-DA-DA da. They feel like they go together. So if you write by instinct or ear and feel fuzzy on grammar and punctuation, I suggest listening for this rhythm as your first guidepost. Then clarify your thinking with a few easy principles, which I'll explain in a bit.

Also correct but confusing:

-I will make a follow-up call.
-I will call to follow up with him.
-I will handle the follow-up.

Same words, different hyphen usage. Bummer, huh? Why the inconsistency? Here's where we talk about Frankenstein. I'll warn you now: It's a little gory.

Think of "parts of speech" as body parts -- arms, legs, nose, etc., rather than nouns, verbs and prepositions.

Notice the "body parts" in the examples above:

• follow up -- verb + preposition
• follow-up call -- as above but "follow-up" is glued together with a hyphen and used as an adjective modifying call
• follow-up -- verb + preposition used to make a noun

Why this matters: You don't need a hyphen when the words are being used as their natural selves -- as in, a verb used as a verb rather than forced into service as an adjective.

The Frankenstein analogy refers to putting together disparate "body parts" to create a new whole. It's unnatural. When you do something unnatural, you need glue to hold it all together. (This sounds goofy in the real world, I know, but it's a good memory tip, so ...)

Hyphens are glue. They hold together Frankenstein words, which are words forced into unnatural service as something other than their natural parts of speech.

So if you "call to follow up," you are using "follow" as a verb, which it is, and "up" as a preposition, which it is. Nothing unnatural. No hyphen.

But if you "make a follow-up call," you are forcing the verb and preposition into an unnatural new role as an adjective modifying call. This is a Frankenstein word. You need glue (a hyphen).

Let's look again at the first set of examples. To get rid of the hyphens, you need to use words as their natural parts of speech:

• a kit that lets you do it yourself
• a solution based on technology
• a basket lined with lilies
• the boy is 6 years old
• the experience of the end user

There are two exceptions to the compound-modifier rule, but I will save those until the very end of this post.

Now you know most of what you need to know about compound modifiers. And now you realize that your "hyphen" question is really a "compound modifier" question. But there's another situation where hyphens turn up, and luckily the Frankenstein and glue metaphors apply there, too.

Here's Part 2: hyphenated nouns. When you put two words together to make a new noun, they become a Frankenstein word, so you need glue (a hyphen). In "I will handle the follow-up," we've turned "follow" and "up" into a noun, even though -- when taken separately -- the parts are actually a verb and a preposition.

Eventually over time, some hyphens go away. It's hard to keep up with which words have gone over to the other side. So I suggest checking http://www.m-w.com/ whenever you wonder if a word is one word, two words or hyphenated. The AP Stylebook is usually in agreement.

Examples of words people often think are hyphenated but aren't:

• pickup
• firsthand
• nonprofit
• end user (two words)

That last one is tricky, though, right? Now you know that it's not hyphenated as a noun but that would be if you turned it into a compound modifier: end-user experience.

Got it?

Hyphens are glue. You need them for Frankenstein words. Your first clue that you might be looking at a compound modifier may be the rhythm: two things modifying a third, three things modifying a fourth, DA-DA-DA da.

Now for the exceptions to the compound-modifier rule:

(1) Ly-adverbs never take a hyphen (which makes sense because the adverb remains an adverb) -- centrally located knob, specially designed interface, wholly owned subsidiary.

(2) Proper nouns never take a hyphen -- Jordan branded handheld, Web hosted application, Cincinnati based headquarters

A final word: A dash is not a hyphen, and a hyphen is not a dash. They are not interchangeable. A dash -- the long version of a hyphen or two hyphens together -- is scissors. Scissors cut things apart. Dashes can sometimes replace commas, as I've done two sentences above this one in blue. Dashes, as scissors, cut apart the parenthetical explanation from the rest of the sentence.

I could say more about the dash, but let's leave that for another post.

For now, just remember:

(1) Compound modifiers take hyphens unless they involve a proper noun or an "-ly" adverb.

(2) To find out if a noun is hyphenated, look it up in the AP Stylebook first and, if it's not there, look in up at http://www.m-w.com/.

When "cheaper & better" carries you across the chasm

My colleague @allenbush offered an excellent asterisk to my post on making the leap from trade press to business press. It's so well put and so right on that I'm sharing it with you, with his permission, of course. I added the subheads.

Here are relevant excerpts from his e-mail to me:

I found one exception (perhaps not an exception but an asterisk) to a rule you mentioned in your post - that reporters are not interested in better/cheaper - actually two on that same note. The big one is disruption.

Technology that removes a barrier

Disruptive products are interesting specifically because they remove a major price or complexity barrier and take something from niche into the mainstream in doing so. Reporters are very interested in this.

The key is that it's not just the "cheaper and better" that you lean on, but that it's moving a product across the proverbial chasm and creating or expanding on a market in doing so.

But it's in fact the "cheaper and better" part (when dramatic enough and in the right product spot) that can start a disruption. Unfortunately, truly disruptive products are few and far between!

Affordability as a timely topic

The second one is simply that there are opportunities for affordability stories out there as long as the economy continues to suck. So again, couching a significant price differentiator in the right terms can generate coverage.

e-Commerce, E-Commerce or ... ?? Not so easy to answer

We know that AP style says it's correct to write e-commerce with a hyphen and little "e." But what about in the headline of a press release?

My vote is for E-Commerce or e-commerce, but not e-Commerce or E-commerce, though I could be talked into any of the four, given the right argument.

If you are a PR person on deadline and want an answer without an explanation, I recommend that you go with E-Commerce. You can come back to read the rest of this later.

Here's what makes this a tough call: There are no AP rules on headlines.

The Associated Press, in its pre-Internet existence, didn't use headlines at all, and newspapers across the U.S. differ in their headline styles. If we look at actual practice on Web sites, we find that The AP now capitalizes *only* the first letter of a headline and that BusinessWire -- a distributor of press releases and a respected industry standard-setter -- usually capitalizes all the words in a headline, with the exception of articles (a, an, the), prepositions (from, under, with, to, by, in) and conjunctions (and).

Capitalize prepositions of four letters or more?

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal take it a step further. They use mostly caps but lowercase articles, conjunctions and prepositions of three words or fewer. So they capitalize the prepositions from, with and across but lowercase for, to and in.

Press releases usually don't apply the three-words-or-less rule. Most appear to do it the way BusinessWire does it. Scanning the news section of Business Wire's Web site, I found more incidences of E-Commerce than e-commerce or e-Commerce, but I did find all three. Not surprisingly, I didn't find E-commerce.

Building a "right-brained" case for e-Commerce

Although I said earlier in this post that I don't prefer e-Commerce, the right-brained part of me likes it best because it *feels* like it carries the intended flavor of the little "e," which I think of as Silicon Valley's casual tossing aside of convention as it reinvents all of our lives for the better. For me, the little "e" means electronic everything, bleeps of light -- as I envision it -- slicing through the physical clutter that used to cordon people off from one another.

But that's subjective, and no one pays me to be subjective.

Apply the AP rule on "titles" to "headlines"

The more complicated NYT/WSJ rule does in fact match AP style if you decide to interpolate. If you treat "headlines" as "titles," you'll find that the rule is to capitalize prepositions and conjunctions of four or more letters.

Most people don't do this. Most people don't even know where in the stylebook to look up titles. (Look under "composition titles," not "titles." The former lists treatment of plays, songs, lectures and television shows. The latter deals with job titles, mostly.)

Orgs that capitalize only the first word in a headline, thereby avoiding the question altogether:

• San Jose Mercury News
• Boston Herald
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Associated Press online

Orgs that use all caps or mostly caps for headlines, with varying exceptions:

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Chicago Tribune
• Wired
• InfoWeek
• CIO
• BusinessWire

The question of E-C, e-c, E-c or e-C is a toss-up, in my opinion. It depends on the other style choices your company has made.

For example, if you have a company name or product division that drops the hyphen (eBay or eBusiness Solutions), you may want to go that route for eBook and eCommerce as well, though I bet you'll balk at eMail.

If E-Commerce is a proper noun in your company's case (like Spain, Sally and Kleenex), then I'd suggest E-C.

The easy way out: Only capitalize the first letter in headlines

To make life easiest of all, I suggest companies go the way of The AP and capitalize only the first letter of a headline. Then you can use e-commerce with nary a second thought.

The PR industry adopted AP style as its own standard for good reason -- 98 percent of U.S. newspapers follow AP style. This means most people either know it or have easy access to it. So a freelance writer in Pennsylvania can turn in easy-to-edit copy on deadline to a corporation in Arizona, without a lot of wasted conversation about nit-picky style details.

Stop quibbling and get back to work

Why quibble about capitalization and hyphens when you could be doing something that actually advances your company's business objectives? Why insist on a unique corporate style that you will have to re-visit, defend and teach time and time again forever into the future?

Do more important things instead.

Even as print declines in favor of digital reading, the AP standard is still a good one. It's voice-neutral -- that is, it works for any kind of tone or aesthetic. It's neither formal nor informal. And no other single organization has the momentum, reputation or reach to efficiently replace it.

How to write quotations for press releases

Do you have to include a quotation in a press release?

No.

Then why bother to include one, other than that it's a PR custom?

No canned messaging, please

Adding a quotation to a press release gives you an extra opportunity to gain relevance in the lives of the recipients. Unfortunately, most companies squander this opportunity by slapping quotation marks on either side of canned messaging.

Credible? No. Compelling? No. Likely to induce the MEGO effect (My Eyes Glaze Over)? Yes.

Instead, consider quotations the perfect spot for tying your announcement to external context -- that is, something happening outside your company that's on your audience's mind. Make your commentary opinionated or interpretive.

Real-life example of context and opinion

Here's an example. [3/30/10 addendum: This quote example drew criticism on Ragan.com.] This an excerpt from a press release announcing that a top news exec is joining my employer's executive team. Richard Sambrook, previously the BBC's director of global news, has become Edelman PR's global vice chairman and chief content officer.

The italics and parentheses in our CEO's quote below are mine:

"... His journalism and senior media company management resume is difficult to rival (opinion); equally important to us
and our clients, Richard has been at the forefront of the digitisation of
news and its interaction with the audience and stakeholders (external
context)...."

This quotation helps answer the questions "why him" and "why now."

Yikes! Not this!

In contrast, this version would have been bad:

"We're delighted to announce that Richard will round out our executive team by
helping us deliver on our commitment to provide best-of-breed PR to all our
stakeholders."

I hope you're laughing. Familiar, isn't it? Too many press release quotes sound just like this.

Anxiety-ending tip: Don't write, just tweak

Here's a great trick I picked up from David Dickstein, whose role at Intel is at times similar to mine: Don't write a quote at all. Finish writing your release, then circle back to something you already wrote and slap quotation marks around it. Then tweak it to add external context that's on your audience's minds. Then tweak again to add interpretation or opinion.

The common pitfall is to write a press release, all except for the quote, and then say, "OK, now, what should I say for the quote?" At that point, your mind is empty, so no wonder it's a futile struggle. Always keep this in mind: relevant content first, wordsmithing later.

"Why this? Why now?"

I often hear about people trying to "sound like an executive" or "sound smart" or "write in the CEO's voice." Boollschitt. (Excuse me!) That's fake. Don't do it.

Focus on answering these questions: Why this? Why now?

The Yoda of Journalism Speaks

My all-time fave book on writing has been displaced. Sorry, Associated Press, I still love you and “The Word” by Rene J. Cappon, but you’re going to have to step aside for the Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark, the Yoda of journalism.

This Jedi grandmaster’s book was published in 2006, six years after I left journalism to become a full-time writing coach in the corporate world. I didn’t know about it until last week when the Poynter Institute tweeted Clark’s article on J.D. Salinger, who died last week.

I now have a borrowed copy of “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.” My colleague, also a former AP reporter who now works for A&R Edelman, pulled it off his cubicle shelf for me.

Here’s an excerpt, taken from Tool 21: “Know when to back off and when to show off.”

In “Why I Write,” George Orwell explains that “good prose is like a window pane.” The best work calls the reader’s attention to the world being described, not to the writer’s flourishes. When we peer out a window onto the horizon, we don’t notice the pane, yet the pane frames our vision just as the writer frames our view of the story.

Most writers have at least two modes. One says, “Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain. Look only at the world.” The other says, without inhibition, “Watch me dance. Aren’t I a clever fellow?” In rhetoric, these two modes have names. The first is called understatement. The second is called overstatement or hyperbole.

Here’s a rule of thumb that works for me: The more serious or dramatic the subject, the more the writer backs off, creating the effect that the story tells itself. The more playful or inconsequential the topic, the more the writer can show off. Back off or show off.

That’s most of one page. The next page and a half gives examples and commentary. The chapter (all 3 1/5 pages of it) ends with a section called Workshop, which lists four activities and more examples.

How I love this man! Like all grandmasters, he’s humble and keeps a low-profile. If you read his bio, you might nod off even before you tune out.

Clark’s accomplishments are in fact immeasurable because they are living things. His uncommonly nuanced wisdom and impeccable judgment guide and transform countless journalists whose growth and contributions in turn spark more growth and contributions by untold others. (Whew! I need to rest. Writing that sentence made me tired! ... OK, here I go again:)

He’s like the Olympic torch, always being carried forward, or a venture capitalist, creating wealth by investing wealth. Or Barbara Streisand, whose perfectionism and perfect pitch let her occupy a different perceptual world than the rest of us. He thinks, feels and sees better than we regular people do, and – most importantly – articulates his vision in a way that propels the rest of us forward.

I never met the man or even so much as exchanged an e-mail. My respect grew slowly over years. I used to read the annual “America’s Best Newspaper Writing” anthologies, which Clark edited for a while. Other editors were Don Fry, Karen F. Brown and Christopher Scanlan, also stars in journalism’s coaching pantheon.

The “America’s Best …” books are compilations of award-winning journalism from each year since 1979. The editors offer insights and raise questions intended to help the reader become a better writer. If you want a snapshot of journalism’s glory days, the "America's Best ..." series is it.

Like Yoda and The Force, Clark's work offers timeless lessons.

Listen for these moments to find client content that you can pitch

You can’t count on your client or your client’s customer to give you the storytelling fodder needed to catch a news reporter’s interest.

So you need to listen.

And ask questions, but at the right moments.

The following moments are storytelling gold mines. Listen for:

• surprise
• emotion
• lesson learned
• obstacle overcome
• counter-intuitive decision
• point where no one knew what would happen next

These are the places in a conversation where it pays to tune in extra carefully and ask “micro-questions.” By that I mean highly detailed questions that you normally wouldn’t pose elsewhere in the conversation.

Sample micro-questions:

1. What color was the cap?
2. Do you remember his exact words?
3. What was the first thing that he did next?
4. It sounds like that upset you. Why did it hit a nerve? Did it remind you of something? What?
5. What else was happening at the time? Who was doing that? Why?
6. What do you mean by “tough”? What problems were you having? Why was that such a problem?
7. What were you doing in the moment when you changed your mind?
8. What do you think would have happened if you’d done it the other way?
9. What made you think it could work? Why didn’t you quit? What were others saying?
10. Hindsight’s 20-20. Is there something you’d do differently if starting from scratch today?

Here’s the rub. Most PR people I know will hear the right moments and instinctually fall silent. Reporters, on the other hand, hear those same moments and ask more questions. My personal impression is that most of the PR people I know well are talented at putting people at ease. One way they do this, I believe, is to give people plenty of personal and emotional space when the conversation veers toward the possibility of pain or embarrassment. This is nice, kind, gentle, thoughtful, etc. I appreciate this in them.

But I also believe that these innately diplomatic people would also be good at asking tough questions gently. If they instead fall silent, no story will appear.

As a journalist, I learned this from experience. I was embarrassed many times when I was new because I often had to call sources back to ask for extra detail after I’d returned to the office. In time, I learned that the detail I needed always seemed to center around one of these turning points.

Storytelling is different from exposition (explaining) in that it involves personal transformation. Think of the last novel you read or movie you saw. A character for whom you felt sympathy overcame obstacles in pursuit of something he wanted, and learned something along the way.

This isn’t artifice. It’s really how human beings live their lives.

To make a technology story palatable to a mainstream audience, you may need to locate characters that the audience can care about and reveal some of the trials and errors they encountered along their road to success. Here’s an example of a software story that became a human interest story. It ran in Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle. When you read it, see if you can find any of the above “moments.”

Stories create community when they’re about real people we can care about and learn from. So if you find yourself feeling nosy and inappropriate, remember that if you’re nosy in the right way, you can create bridges among members of the human family who previously didn’t realize how much they had in common. Plus, your client’s name and contribution will get some good digital ink.

Become a verb warrior. Try this writer's resolution for the new year

Key points:

- Find out whether you're verb-impaired.

- Fix wimpy, vague writing that induces the MEGO effect. (MEGO = My Eyes Glaze Over)

- Use this list while in recovery.

***

The one way to most immediately see the biggest possible improvement in your writing is to choose higher quality verbs. For this reason, I’m suggesting this as your New Year’s writing resolution.

First, self-diagnose to find out whether you're verb-impaired. Then set out to become verb-talented.

Self-diagnosis

Print a hard copy of a document you wrote and circle all the verbs. Read them aloud as a list. You may realize without prompting that they're generic or repetitive. But even worse, your verb choices may be alienating readers. To objectively evaluate the strength of your verbs, ask yourself the following questions and compare with the following lists.

1. Are your verbs so precise that they aren't easily interchangeable with their neighbors?
2. Do they evoke one of the five senses? Can you picture, feel or hear them?
3. Do they have motion?
4. Are they …

… wimpy ?

§ Do
§ Have
§ Is, was, be, been
§ Serves to (another verb)

… vague?

§ Address
§ Affect
§ Impact
§ Enhance
§ Expand

… overused tech verbs? (fine to use, but other verbs may be more descriptive and precise)

§ Implement
§ Provide
§ Deliver
§ Deploy
§ Establish
§ Enable

Multi-syllable for no good reason?

Initiate (start), utilize (use), facilitate (help), educate (teach), designate (name)

Or are they active and precise?

Before ending this post with a list of super-hero verbs suitable for business writing, may I suggest that you begin harvesting your own favorites from an article or book that you recently enjoyed. My fave verb source is National Geographic magazine.

Secondly, I suggest you develop your ability to capture verbs in the moment of activity, rather than conjure them after you’ve returned to your desk. More on that in a future post.

And if I haven’t convinced you yet that college verbs (often derived from Latin) aren’t as good as plainer verbs (often derived from Anglo-Saxon), ask yourself whether this time-honored saying would still be with us today had it been stated less plainly.

Memorable and to the point: “A stitch in time saves nine.”
Not: “A sufficiently early suture eliminates the necessity for subsequent multiple interventions.”

Ring in the new year by becoming a verb warrior. Challenge yourself to choose verbs well.

Strong one- syllable verbs

SEND, MATCH, BUILD, RAISE, LOCK, FIND, BLUR, FRET, WIN, EARN, GAIN, SHOW, SOLVE, BLOCK, LOOK , STEM, POST, PACK, TALK, SAIL, FLIP, PUSH, CARE, TEACH, SACK, STRIP, BET, PLAY, END, HIDE, SWAY, STAND, LAG, SCRUB, CUT, FORM, BIND, LEAK, BELCH, SPEW, CRACK, HEAR, MEET, NEED, TURN, BUZZ, VIEW, SPEAK, FIT, STORE , MATCH , BREATHE, HOP, SQUELCH, PUT , FLY, RAISE, CHECK, GRADE , SCARE, RACE, FUME,WEIGH, FUEL, BUY, STOP, HOP, SPARK, FLOW, TRUST, WANE, LAND, ROLL, CHOKE, JOIN, CLEAN, SMOKE, CAKE, EDGE, SPEND, RATE, SAVE, STITCH, TRIM, SWIM, FEAR, DIG, ADD, SING, BOOK, BLEND, STIR, MIX, SHARE, DULL, SMOOTH, SLICE, RUN, HOLD, CLIMB …

Also OK

PROTECT, MEASURE, LEAPFROG, DOUBLE, TRIPLE, STUMBLE, COLLIDE, MANAGE, ABSORB, DICTATE, COLLECT, COMPLETE, SUFFER, QUESTION, ADVANCE, REPEAT, BOTHER, REVEAL, FORESEE, TOPPLE, WELCOME, BEFRIEND, COMPLETE, INDICT, PREFER, DECIDE, EVOLVE, LISTEN, REFLECT, CONSTRAIN, TIDY, PRACTICE, WONDER, WORRY, DONATE, EXTRACT, REPLACE, RESCUE, EXCEL, RELEASE, CENTER, PRE-EMPT, HURRY, COLLATE, REPEL, OFFER, INSPIRE, ATTRACT, STUDY, RETURN …

For Christmas, my interview with Maya Angelou: "All Human Beings Try to be Beautiful"

Key points:

- Teach tolerance
- Examine other cultures without fear
- Give every newborn a membership card to the UN

"Just let them know they’re born a member, and that they have all the privileges and responsibilities thereto appertaining."

- Maya Angelou

I wrote this article while working at The Associated Press in San Francisco. It moved on the national wire on Sept. 13, 1995. I tweaked the version below just a teeny bit.

At the time, Angelou was promoting a new book of poems called "PHENOMENAL WOMAN” and had just read “A Brave and Startling Truth” at the United Nation’s 50th anniversary celebration.

This story was the second of two. The first I wrote on deadline about what I thought I was supposed to write about. This second I wrote between assignments later about a question close to my heart:

"What advice can you offer a mixed-race child struggling with his identity?" I was asking about my nephew, then 12.

Guess which story got more pickup. Yep, this one.

Lesson learned: Questions close to your heart yield the best stories. Sometimes what you’re “supposed” to do is wrong.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – If Maya Angelou could give children a single luminous insight to help them do their growing, she would deliver it gift-wrapped in poetry and wait for the children to fold back the words to reveal tolerance.

A sampling from Japanese haiku to American inner-city rap could show that “everybody loves flowers or everybody has some fear of the dark,” Angelou said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“I would encourage the child to look at her/his world, at the people in their world, and to try to examine the cultures in their world without fear,” the poet said. “I would try to lead the children into seeing that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.”

Author of 12 best-selling books, Angelou has consummated her reputation for wisdom, particularly regarding a child's emerging sense of identity in a fractious world. Now 66 [now 81], she wrote “I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings” about her childhood self-revulsion as a black girl growing up in 1930s Arkansas. By contrast, her newest book, “PHENOMENAL WOMAN, celebrates self-possessed women in maturity.

Her life speaks well to the history of racial tension in America. She protested alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, prospered on her own merits during the shift from Jim Crow laws to affirmative action, and journeyed to Africa and back only to discover that a person’s search for roots may have little to do with race after all.

“It’s the striving in itself that is delicious,” Angelou said, explaining her buoyancy amid adversity and pain.

It’s hard to decide if she thinks people survive and forge ahead because they are courageous, inspired or just downright bullheaded.

“We have to kill to eat, and eat to live – and yet we want it,” she said. “If we dare to love, we might be devastated – and yet we want it.”

“The contradiction is so intriguing that very few of us willingly give it up,” she said.

When Angelou speaks, one gets the sense that more of her attention goes into hearing her words than speaking them. She’s alert and listening as she produces the sounds. She enunciates slowly. Her facial expression subtly registers expectation, uncertainty and then something like satisfaction.

Her life story offers hope that even down-and-out youth can pick themselves up and realize dreams of their own making.

Angelou was 16, pregnant and unmarried when she watched ambassadors and diplomats file by on the sidewalk on their way into a San Francisco hotel 50 years ago to sign the United Nations charter. She remembers feeling too black, too female, too tall and too alone to think about following them inside.

But she was invited inside this summer for the anniversary celebration of the charter’s signing. Angelou read her poem “A Brave and Startling Truth” on the same stage with U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

A few days before the event, Angelou reflected on how far the “united nations” have come and how far they still have to go. She said children’s singing star Barney and Sesame Street’s Big Bird give her hope.

“I mean, look at today’s children loving a purple dinosaur who doesn’t look like anything raised in their homes. And a bird that is 10 feet tall and speaks with a very strange voice,” Angelou said.

"It’s rather natural to fear those things we don’t understand and those people who might look different from us,” she said. “On the other hand, it’s very easy for people to overcome.”

She suggested promoting world peace by giving every newborn a membership card to the United Nations.

“Just let them know they’re born a member, and that they have all the privileges and responsibilities thereto appertaining,” Angelou said.

Her solution includes showing children pictures of the human family’s varying forms of ornamentation: intricately scarred torsos in Central Africa, bamboo-pierced noses in the Amazon, tattooed biceps in San Francisco and diamond-studded earlobes in Paris.

“Let the child see that all human beings try to be beautiful,” Angelou said.

Advice menu: Which situation is yours?

What kind of writing and editing help do you need? Check out this menu of constructive tips to see if any of these situations apply:

(1) You're distraught over a supervisor's consistently voracious re-writing of your work. This post suggests alternatives that he/she might go for.

(2) You need to evaluate team members' writing and hold them accountable for improvement. This post includes a chart and recounts our success using it.

(3) You want to give feedback that supports writing growth. This real-life example demonstrates an alternative to tracking changes. (Also see No. 1 above and No. 6 below.)

(4) You're a solitary, introverted writer or editor coping with grief and could use a little understanding and even a bit of advice on managing the winter holidays.

(5) You get dinged for grammar, usage and style errors. This post describes how we trained a super-star proofreading team that finds mistakes most people miss.

(6) You want to step back from overly reactive small edits and keep the big picture in mind. This post lists eight questions that help you keep your eye on the ball.

(7) You want to start off a new account on a good writing foot or need to find out why a client appears to be irrationally unhappy with your team's writing. This post helps you begin creating a cheat sheet on your client's unconscious writing preferences.

(8) Your press release approval process takes too long and results in jargony mush. This post offers guidelines for assigning roles and responsibilities. Or check out Ragan.com's nicely abridged version, minus questions for writes/mediators.

(9) You sometimes freeze and can't get get anything good onto a blank page. This post suggests that you break a rule to break through the gridlock.

(10) You wonder why I agreed to blog, even though for years I said, "Nooooo."

News releases: Fix your broken approval process

The worst thing about news releases is the approval process. Too many cooks, as the saying goes, right? After too many iterations, what comes out in the end often looks like something that's been through a trash compactor.

Does it have to be so painful and unproductive? Can we fix the broken process?

The solution, my friends, is discipline. Or baseball, if you prefer. By that I mean each player needs to play his assigned position in accordance with his strengths -- and no one else's. You can't have the shortstop sprinting to first base or the pitcher standing in center field.

Here are some guidelines to help each approver play to his strengths:

(1) Choose one person to write. Everyone else should be hands-off. Hands-off people should comment and give direction but not write, re-write or edit.

(2) Set parameters for each approver's contribution. Here are the roles I suggest for marketing managers, product managers and lawyers.

Marketing managers should ask, "Does it support the brand and long-term business objectives?" They should comment on messaging and emphasis.

Common overstep by marketing managers: Reciting messaging verbatim in the headline, subhead, lead or quotes. Instead, consider messaging an indirect takeaway.

Some explicit recitation of messaging may be OK, but only if blended with vocabulary and scenarios that are familiar and compelling to the audience. Try to balance messaging with empathy and authenticity, as seen through the audience's eyes. Otherwise, you lose credibility and induce the MEGO effect (My Eyes Glaze Over).

Product managers should ask, "Is it accurate?" They should comment on the technology, features and benefits.

Common overstep by marketing managers: Deleting or moving down social context. Instead, let the top half of the press release answer "why" and the bottom half answer "how." In other words, first establish relevance in the lives of the audience, then explain how it works.

Lawyers should ask, "Could we be sued or penalized?" They should comment on potentially negative consequences related to the SEC and other regulators, intellectual property (trademarks, patents, copyrights) and whether the company can deliver on promises.

Common overstep by lawyers: Changing punctuation and capitalization to meet style standards for legal contracts, and deleting social context for the announcement. Instead, let internal experts use AP style, the industry standard for news media and PR. Look for compromises that prevent legal problems while allowing social context.

The best way to avoid problems is to pay more attention to the pre-writing process. There should be substantive input before creating a first rough draft.

Don't even bother to write a "shell." It's a futile time-waster that creates needless frustration for all.

Instead, ask the approvers to do these tasks in advance:

Marketing managers should:
-prioritize target audiences and messaging
-weigh in on correct emphasis
-explicitly state what long-term business objectives are being served

Product managers should:
-demo the technology for the writer
-provide detail on specs, features and benefits
-weigh in on correct emphasis

A VP- or higher-level PR person on the agency side should "frontload" the writer. By that I mean provide context for the assignment. This should take less than 10 minutes and cover:

-news release's role in overall strategy
-detailed description of intended audiences and problems the product or service solves
-intended effect on audience (including actions to be invoked)
-competitive differentiators and indirect takeaways about the industry or audience, not just the product/service or company
-desired emphasis

Who writes? Usually a mid-level PR person, often an AE or SAE, who understands the task is to balance competing interests while appealing to external audiences. This person is more of a relationship broker than a writer because he won't be using his own voice or acting on his own priorities. The writer is really a mediator.

The writer/mediator does the following:
-receives content and other inputs
-looks for holes and asks questions
-consults with PR team members for frontloading, to find out what's been done in the past and for a mid-point check-in on content and structure (but not wordsmithing)

Ideally, the writer/mediator has access to:
-the sales department’s internal PowerPoints on customers and competitors to better understand the overall business and how to dovetail with parallel campaigns
-internal company and agency research, including Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO, and key initial findings that informed the PR plan in the first place

In many cases, the writer/mediator must develop the context that hooks the immediate announcement into the ongoing conversations of key influencers (while remaining within the parameters of branding and business objectives). A good way to do this is an audience analysis technique I call PDAs (Problems, Decisions and Actions). More on that in a future post.

Why add context? That's what makes it a "news" release. News is info that surprises people or helps them make decisions.

News = announcement + context

If you want to write solely about your product, that's OK, too, but -- technically speaking -- that's more of a backgrounder or fact sheet. Journalists do appreciate those and the SEC may require them, so have at it. You don't have to include context if you are talking primarily to beat reporters who already know your company well.

Throw out 95%

Now the writer has a big pile of inputs and must select the most compelling and relevant 5%, looking for intersections between disparate topics and resources.

Notice I said 5%. Writing is really a matter of deciding what to leave out. The writer should plan on deleting 95% or more of his source material.

Sometimes people ask me if it isn't more efficient to just collect only what matters in the first place. The answer is no because your final product will be shallow if you do. It will lack resonance. It won't have a shelf-life. And it will falter in the approval process.

Good writing comes from good content. First get the best ideas, then simplify and package them for easy absorption by strangers.

OK, getting back to process ...

The writer's unique contribution (separate from that of the others who gave early input) includes appropriate vocabulary and scenarios that will be familiar to audiences.

This last part -- audience vocabulary and scenarios -- is extraneous to what the marketing and product team may have had in mind. It also might feel superfluous and imprecise to lawyers.

However, it's the link to the audience, so please let the PR person proceed with this small contribution. When approving these few phrases, keep in mind your position and expertise. If you're the first baseman, stick to playing first base. Comment and compromise, but don't delete and re-write.

Ideal situation: Get PR, marketing, product and legal to agree in advance on appropriate vocabulary and scenarios. Key point: Look for language your audience really uses and delve into problems they actually talk about among themselves.

This is the same logic behind search engine optimization. But it has always been true, even before there were search engines. Know your audience and speak their language. Be useful to them, from their perspective.

Does the writer have to work alone? No, preferably not. Others on the PR team can help by providing:

-a speedy midpoint check-in to approve content and structure (not wordsmithing, which can still be rough and wrong at this stage) Time: 5 minutes
-a hands-off look by someone who didn’t draft the release and can provide outside eyes as to whether the information is clear to outsiders and mechanically sound (grammar, etc.), and to say what indirect takeaways they picked up on
-a hands-on look by a senior person who can finesse the small stuff while keeping in mind the big stuff (but please read my other blog posts for advice on this)
-proofreading
-submission to the person who will oversee the approval process, perhaps with a note explaining reasons for certain decisions and listing possible alternatives

Questions the writer should ask:
1. What are my client’s hot buttons, preferred vocabulary and customs?
2. What approved language from previous releases should be included to provide continuity and help beat reporters and analysts distinguish new info from background?
3. Have I added context that connects the client to the outside world without becoming distracting or irrelevant (and while remaining within parameters of brand and business objectives)?
4. Is the “why” at the top and the “how” at the bottom of the release?
5. Will the first paragraph appeal to relevant outsiders and make them lean in to listen?
6. Have I blended messaging with news value?
7. Have I met both the client’s and audience’s needs?
8. Are customer types specifically named in the release and generally in the fronts rather than middles or backs of sentences? (not users; instead educators, physicians, Web designers, network architects, business professionals, families …)
9. If I delete the quote, will I have to rewrite the release to fill in the missing content? (If not, then rewrite the quote. The speaker should add substance or remain silent.)
10. Have I added white space through effective use of subheads, bullets and short paragraphs? (White space is inviting.)
11. Do my subheads have verbs in them? (If not, consider rewriting. Drill down deeper. Be more specific.)
12. What is my gut saying that I’m ignoring? (Don’t ignore it. Honor your instincts.)

Discipline and self-restraint are make-or-break factors in fixing your broken approval process. Everyone needs to know their position and respect their teammates.

How to figure out your client's writing preferences

Of course, this has never happened to you, but it might have happened to someone you know:

A hard-to-please client is re-writing your team’s work in the wee hours. Team morale is sliding because new quality control measures haven't helped. Baffled junior staff wonder if they chose the wrong career, and senior staff schedule extra client meetings to get to the bottom of things, to no effect.

In case you ever land in this situation -- or better still, if you want to pre-empt it -- here's what you can do to figure out a challenging client's writing preferences.

(1) Find out who your client admires -- Ask for writing samples from third-party or internal sources that the client likes. These may be from a company the client admires or the work of a favorite internal writer. Most people can’t articulate their preferences, but they know what they like when they see it.

(2) Study a body of tracked changes -- Gather three to five samples of this person’s tracked changes and look for patterns.

(3) Analyze in three specific categories: (a) discretionary vocabulary, (b) sentence structure and (c) content decisions. (That’s for starters. When I dive into these, I tend to find more categories specific to the client.)

(a) Discretionary vocabulary –
Does your client prefer international, global or worldwide? They all mean the same thing, right? Does he like meet, need and look better than assemble, require and appear? Again, same meaning, different words.

But to him, one set sounds right and the other doesn't. He can't tell you why. For most of us, it's a natural inclination to want writing that we are editing to sound similar to the syntax and connotation that matches the voice we hear in our head when we read. Most of us don't realize that we have these personal biases.

Does your client choose customer retention over customer loyalty, dramatically over highly, and stimulate over fuel?

Make a list of words that potentially could have been interchangeable with other words of similar meaning. Analyze them.

Some people have biases for particular sounds – like the “uhl” sounds in loyal, highly and fuel. I can't tell you why, just that I've observed it.

Some insist on generic college words (Latinate) like establish, initiate, consolidate and examine, while others prefer plain words (Anglo-Saxon) like set up, start, join and find. I know of one individual who likes Latinate verbs but poetic Anglo-Saxon kicks at the ends of sentences: “….consolidate ….initiate… cash in on the car’s cachet.”

If you detect an underlying core image, it may be easier to guess which discretionary words will be the best fit. Your client won’t realize how deliberately you made your choice; he’ll just feel comfortable reading what you wrote and won’t know why.

One company’s preferred vocabulary reminds me of music from the 1968 sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s transcendent and expansive – freed from the limitations of, future generations, legendary.

Another emphasizes comparison (double the capacity, aggressive development milestones, outperform, minimal) and perspective (in a roundup of five, range from, longstanding, latest).

One reminds me of a race car: speed, accelerate, perform, grab, win, spin, stop.

(b) Sentence structure –
I know of at least one individual who systematically deletes all introductory clauses without fail. Meanwhile, others insist on them: “At a time when people are traveling more than ever (comma)” or “Demonstrating the popularity of mobile devices (comma).”

One company likes a rhythm of fours instead of the usual rhythm of threes, as in “apples, oranges, bananas and pears” versus “apples, oranges and bananas.”

I know of a company that deletes adjectives, except for certain ones immediately in front of product names – and nowhere else. This company mostly writes with strong verbs highly recommended). Many people do just the opposite. They mostly write with jazzy nouns (and quiet verbs like is, has, do), and love adjectives everywhere.

I know of a veteran professional communicator with an engineer’s love for efficiency but none for colloquialisms. So it’s “enables remote PC access” not “so users can connect to their PC while away from the office.” Another company with similar products prefers just the opposite.

(c) Content choices –
Some companies like to make explicit statements about business strategy in product announcements. Others stick to specs and features. A few (the ones that win awards and get talked about) emphasize social context. (Everyone agrees on emphasizing benefits.)

Once you’ve got these kinds of lists in front of you, the problem is no longer mysterious. You can create a cheat sheet for everyone on the team to use.

Don't channel your inner Henry Higgins while editing business documents

Skilled editors and mentors recognize individuality, respect deadlines, and know where a document lives in the big picture of the organization's reasons for being.

Arbitrary editors impose their own syntax and biases onto others, turning dashes into semicolons, replacing "seems" with "resembles," replacing "stemmed" with "originated," inserting a comma where they want to hear a pause, adding "transitions," and committing other crimes against nature.

Unfortunately, we are all arbitrary editors at heart. It takes professional restraint to keep oneself from transforming other people's writing into what "sounds right" to us.

But remember: What they told you in kindergarten is schmaltzy but true. People are like snowflakes, each one beautiful and like no other.

Yes, even if your team aims to write in a particular client's voice, you still need to give writers some elbow room.

Here are ways you can become a more productive editor.

On your first read, use the blue highlighter in Word to mark any phrasing, punctuation or content that hits you funny. Don't stop to fix it. Just highlight it.

On your second read, look only at the blue and ask yourself questions like these:

- Are there recurring patterns in what bothers me?

- Is a key perspective missing?

- Have the audience's needs been met?

- Are proof points missing?

- What long-term business objectives do we need to serve?

- Does this document dovetail with related efforts and campaigns?

- What indirect takeaways do we need readers to catch?

- Are the content and tone credible? Persuasive? Authentic?

- Is the hook, decision, recommendation, surprise or change at the top (where it belongs), with back story, rationale, alternatives, "the how," archival record-keeping details or chronology pulling up the rear?

Create three to five bullet points & ask for speedy tweaks

Next, compose an e-mail (that you may or may not send), articulating three to five points that can be expressed as questions or how-to suggestions.

Then, send the blue-highlighted version with your questions in an e-mail to the writer, asking for the fixes within 20 minutes. Or speak by phone or face-to-face.

When you get the document back, read it afresh, again with the blue highlighter. (You'll be delighted by the changes, believe me, and you'll have saved yourself time by doing something else on your to-do list while the writer made the improvements.)

Then read the blue and begin editing, consciously treading lightly, trying to make as few marks as possible on the page.

Better still, call the writer over and have him sit beside you at the keyboard. This results in a dialog that makes the edits go faster. When you voice a concern, the writer will probably have an idea for addressing it.

Avoid changing something for a vague reason such as "it sounds/flows better that way." Don't impose your values, standards or prejudices on the document, even if yours are better than the writer's, even if you are the mentor and he is the mentee. Let other people's work be different from yours.

Focus on business outcomes and decisions.

Try it. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Or continue as you are, Arbitrary Editor, so that you can alienate your team members, keep working into the wee hours, and feeling as frustrated as the pompous Henry Higgins of "My Fair Lady," who asked, "Why can't ________ be more like me?"

Eagle Eyes Find What Other Editors Miss

What if you could hit a panic button and have a flock of expert editors fly to your rescue?

A&R Edelman (my employer) actually has such a system in place. The panic button is an e-mail alias that reaches five volunteer “Eagle Eyes” who race one another to be the first to reply to the person in need. In addition, we have eight more Eagle Eyes available on advance notice (usually between two hours and two days).

Every other summer, we train a new flock recruited for talent and initiative. We only allow participants with somewhere between one and three years of agency experience. Less than one year isn’t enough, and anything more than three years is too much.

You’ve probably seen the perfect recruits at your own agency or company. They’re the ones you never have to correct twice, the ones you trust with your own editing, the ones who always seem to have enough time and efficacy for yet another project. They are service-oriented people who enjoy easing the path for others.

I can spot them a mile away.

We train for two months during lunch hours on Mondays and Wednesdays. In addition, recruits spend about an hour a week in solo study or with a buddy with whom they are asked to share whatever they’ve learned that week. We pair each recruit with a buddy but don’t monitor whether they actually meet. Sometimes, pairs meet together as a larger group.

Most people assume we are teaching grammar, style and usage. But we’re not. I ask them to study on their own. I provide a Knowledge Book and they are to come to class with questions about it. We take as much class time as necessary to answer questions.

The rest of the time, they learn to:

1. sense whether they are in the right brain-wave mode for editing (“brain off” mode)

2. recognize situations that tend to invite errors (“hot zones”)

3. look things up frequently (Confidence is bad; only the paranoid survive.)

4. find the hard-to-find references (I show them shortcuts through the woods.)

5. edit surgically (remove only the tumor and leave all other flesh intact)

6. ask the right questions at the right times (Some corrections require a brief conversation.)

They learn professional restraint. This means editing only what’s wrong without re-writing.

In the end, they pass three tests in a row. They can make two mistakes per test. An over-edit (rewriting rather than surgically removing or changing something that wasn’t wrong) counts as a miss. In the beginning, we do exercises, then simulations. The simulations and tests are press releases loaded up with errors, some of which are quite tricky.

You can see why we don’t train senior people, whose edits should be primarily for messaging, strategy, emphasis and business value.

When invited, Eagle Eyes can make further suggestions. Since they are gifted writers in the first place, their suggestions are usually genuine improvements, but they know better than to tamper with a document uninvited.

Eagle Eyes always retain the right to say no. They put their own account work first but take pride in squeezing in customers on other accounts. Nor do they edit sloppy documents. The person who sought their services is expected to have done his or her utmost to make the document perfect. Eagle Eyes find what other people miss.

As Eagle Eyes advance to leadership positions over time, they take their old strengths up the chain with them while acquiring new strengths. Having edited agency-wide documents, Eagle Eyes possess a broader perspective than peers who weren’t given regular exposure to other teams and clients.

Our Eagle Eyes command respect beyond what’s commensurate with their job title, and account teams gain an otherwise unattainable level of impeccability and confidence.