Observed

Let’s say you’re dealing with a sentence where your reader can’t deduce someone’s gender, and you want a pronoun:

“An attorney in our Shively office recently argued a case before the Supreme Court of the United States.  He and his client — a manufacturer appealing a case involving commercial free speech — prevailed.”

This example used  the traditional default pronoun for indeterminate gender nouns.  When I was first taught grammar, students were instructed to go with male variations for pronoun forms — he, his, him.

Nowadays, however, we strive to rid our writing of such gender preferences.  Some guides suggest we resort to awkward and wordy constructions such as he/she and the like.  Or, we’re advised to eschew pronouns altogether, repeating proper and common nouns.

There’s another, far more elegant solution when you want a gender-neutral pronoun for…

• A person of unknown gender
• A generic type or class, or
• Where a person defies gender labels, such as Placebo’s Brian Molko

Use they and its inflected forms (i.e., their, them and the like) instead.

The singular they is perfectly acceptable, according to modern usage guides.  Some will defend it, explaining that it has been around for centuries in English, including formal writing.

I’ll add that they also sounds a lot better to the ear.

Creating humankind may be one of the Divine Spirit's greatest acts of faith. It's comparable (in a small, small way) to the hope you and I demonstrate when we risk rejection, uncertainty and everything else that comes with sales and business development.

Cathe Dykstra recently began an excellent essay about the organization she directs with an analogy.  She wrote in Louisville’s Courier-Journal that the things that make the rooftop garden at Family Scholar House grow and prosper can be likened to the things that the single, working, college-going participants at Family Scholar House need to grow and prosper.

I’ll extend Cathe’s wonderful analogy.  In addition to support and guidance and patience and so on, many things we do also take hope.

Or, perhaps, faith.  As in, leap of faith.  As in, be prepared, minimize your risk and then…jump.

I realized that what Cathe wrote about is also true of sales, fund raising and business development — and of many, many other things many of us do every day.  Such as having a child, matriculating to law school or making a cold sales call.

So, while I hope my readers get this far in this post (148 words), I know (from plenty of user-habit studies) that a lot of you won’t.

Nevertheless…

1. I write and post anyway, confident that if I don’t (or rarely) post anything, I predictably reduce my chances of Getting Found.
2. I make what I write as engaging as possible.  Such as leading with an interesting bit about Cathe’s rooftop garden and how it’s like the worker-scholars she plants and tends to.
3. I leverage the visual and ensure that I bake my main message into the caption under my post’s main image.

Get it?  I hope so.

The New York Times’s Phyllis Korkki recently reported several reasons why we still prefer paper over computer screens. In Defense of the Power of Paper outlines three top advantages:

1. Because paper’s “in your face,” we’re more prone to act on whatever it calls us to do.  Unlike a digital document, we can’t merely click it away.
2. A paper printout offers a better way to read and comprehend the geography of a long, complex argument or set of complex facts.
3. A tangible message invites both the writer and the reader to slow down and contemplate.

Makes sense.

I’ll add that the analog is also a better way than digital to promote closer, stronger relationships.  When I take the time to write and mail a personal note — even a short one — I demonstrate that I care.  When I do that, I set myself apart in a good and more memorable way.

So, when I connect tangibly with another person, I’ve not only worked on the Get Found side of the marketing/business development side of the equation, but I’ve also shifted onto the Get Picked side…the one where emotions and trust factor in.

My buddy, Colleen Wainwright, shared several awesome tips yesterday on how to make you and your writing sound more natural and down-to-earth.  Here’s one suggestion that really jumped out at me:

Some people can avoid slipping into their Plastic-Man Voice by using dictation. One terrific way to sound more like yourself in your writing is to have someone interview you.

She’s right.

I like to read what I’ve written out loud.  It makes it MUCH harder for anything too lofty or unnatural or unintended to get by.

Scriptwriters do this all the time.  The Table Read is a major step in the script editing process, when the entire cast gets together and each actor reads their part.

Here’s what that looks like:

Visitors come to law firm Web sites mostly to check out lawyer bios.  It’s a fact.

Here’s a quick video offering five simple tips to improve yours:

Want more?

Your Web site is like a grocery shelf. How does it display your products? Does it make your readers feel like foreigners?

Yabancı

As a recent foreign exchange student spending four months in Istanbul, I didn’t need to be reminded that I was a foreigner.

Yet, virtually wherever I went, I overheard yabancı, the Turkish word for foreigner.

I knew I was different, but having others remind me was uncomfortable.

For example, the first time I went to the grocery store, I forgot my dictionary.   As a result, I got home with lumpy cottage cheese, a jar of tomato paste, and moldy vegetables.

This feeling of being an outsider might be how Web site visitors struggle upon encountering unfamiliar content.  They, too, can feel like yabancılar.

Readers visit sites, particularly sites in the professional services sector, looking for assurance and solutions.  Users look for providers who can fix their problems and make their lives easier.  They’re also seeking some kind of personal connection to feel like less like a yabancı.

So, sites should encourage visitors to relax and stay put.  Consider how well your site engages your visitors and if it is…

1. Coherent: Well-organized content is attractive and inviting, encouraging readers to spend time on your site.
2. Down-to-Earth:  Readers are often put off by jargon.  Use simple, clear language.
3. Brief: Remember the Nielsen effect.  Long looks hard, and hard doesn’t get read.

Eventually, I didn’t need a dictionary.  What I remember best, however, were the times that my Turkish neighbors  welcomed me and helped with my broken Turkish.  They made me feel like less like a yabancı.

Sportswriter Greg Bishop put on a clinic for bloggers in this morning's New York Times. Of course, it didn't hurt that UofL won. Go, Cards!

There are 357 really good words in this morning’s New York Times. They’re in a story about a college basketball game that happened yesterday in Portland, Ore., between the men’s teams from New Mexico and Louisville.

Here’s what I like about Greg Bishop’s report:

1. Brevity. If I believe what Jakob Nielsen and others say about our on-line attention span, Bishop made the first 120 words really matter.  They get the reader through the essential facts — who, what, where, when and why.
2. Engaging. In addition to the basics, Bishop gives us a splash of color…just to be engaging.
3. Well-structured. Bishop gets us in, creates a sense what it might have been like to be at the game, and then he gets us out.  Gracefully.

Think about that last word.  We make fun of TV and radio “sportscasters” and their tortured, clumsy, florid language manglings.  They’ve given a bad name, I’m sad to say, to the legacy of writers such as Red Barber, Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice and Ernest Hemingway.

Notice how Bishop captured the drama of a senior’s desire to get back in the game despite his injury, finishing his collegiate career, while “Louisville instead moved on.”

Or, how Bishop passed along the feeling when the Cardinals center “…took a pass and slammed home a dunk [which took the wind out of New Mexico's sails and] …effectively ended the Lobos’ season.”

I’m sure Bishop could have given us thousands of words about the game yesterday.  Thousands of good words.  But, he didn’t need them.

These are curated dog poop bags. For the person who has everything.

There’s a language for everything. Want to sound hip? Do this. Want to sound learned? Say that.

Want to sound…well, hip AND learned? Say curated.

So, I Googled some phrases and the like that include “curated.” Such as “curated dog poop.” To wit.

37.6 million results in under a second. We have such a wonderful language.

Yep, you guessed it. It’s curated.

Like words? Read Joyce.

At least not much.  They scan.

Particularly if they’re well-educated, high-literacy visitors to a Web site.

I was reminded of this bit of well-documented research in a recent post by Jakob Nielsen.  In this post, the king of user interface went on to report that the average reader reads just 120 words per page.  (FYI, that was 53 words…if you’ve even gotten this far.)

So, the big take-away for Web content is to Keep It Short.

PS:  Here’s a related post.

A tech novelties article caught my eye the other day.  I found Anne Eisenberg’s coverage of on-line dictionaries (think Worknik) fascinating for how it reminded me of the humanness of language.

(It also hit me that the editors of The New York Times placed an article about words on the Business page.  Yeah, I know, it was really a tech piece.  It also underscored — in my mind, at least — the importance of good writing to good business.  Just saying.)

I noticed the tension between Web purists like Wordnik’s founder, Erin McKean, and Old Schoolers who admonish writers not to lean too far into the Internet.

Example?  Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, likes Wordnik’s oceans of words and word associations.  On the other hand, Nunberg says,

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy.

“Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

Then again, Wordnik (launched in June 2009) has raised almost $13 million in VC so far and has business partners on the hook.  Somebody’s leaning.