Author: Alison Chandler
We’ve all, at some point, experienced the terror of the blank sheet of paper, the empty Word doc. How do I start? Where do I start? What is it I actually want to say?
But often something else is causing the procrastination. Often the problem was seeded many years before, in school. Those years of tests, of exams. Those years of being told we’ve somehow ‘got writing wrong’, that we haven’t cracked the secret societies of spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Being told our SPAG is off feels shameful, humiliating. It’s like being picked last at PE. It’s like being bullied. It’s like rules and tools invented by others are applied precisely to make us feel permanently wrong.
Once upon a time there was a room full of wonderful 18 to 19 year olds. Advertising students. Bright, sparky, great company. Brilliant and confident at making films, creating posters, designing packaging. But when it came to writing, everybody froze.
As the workshop facilitator I asked a simple question to kick off our copywriting session: Who owns the language? It took a painfully long time to get the response ‘we do’. And the government and sundry other random authority figures were credited first. At this point I played them Michael Rosen’s Words Are Ours youtube.com/watch?v=9QNb2GSwtXU (Go on, treat yourself.)
Not long afterwards, on a dark and stormy campus, I ran a workshop series with a large university marketing department. I’d been helping to edit new content for their website, and was explaining that most of my work had involved removing or translating text written too formally. When we feel insecure as writers, we tend to revert to a tone sounding something like the BBC back in the 1920s.
The strongest writer emerging from the uni workshops was a young person with English as a second language. She was clear, entertaining and confident on the page. She totally understood how to capture the spirit of the university in words. But her role didn’t involve communications. Her potential had been missed.
Stories you can believe in
If you have a hunch your business’s storytelling could be stronger, here are a few questions to ask right now along with some ideas for next steps:
- Who’s telling your stories? Check in on your communicators’ writing confidence, whether their job is to communicate internally or externally. Do they trust their own abilities? If they don’t you’ll get overly formal, off the shelf comms that sound like everyone else’s.
- Who should be telling your stories? Who are the interesting thinkers who can’t always express themselves well on paper? Offer alternative ways of producing text. A voice memo transcribed and edited by a trusted colleague allows the ideas to emerge first, ready to be shaped into words that communicate and attract attention.
- Turn the mirror on yourself. Be truthful. Did your school experience give you the confidence to write, to reach people with words? Or did it leave you with the sense that writing is a mysterious art, owned by academics and prize-winning novelists? What is the impact? How will you change?
A story reaches from one heart to another, whether you’re Leo Tolstoy or Isabel Allende or telling a potential customer about the product or service you believe in.
If the heart reaching out has been frozen, the words will be too.