I had the kind of day yesterday in which I wasn’t 100% sure who I was at any given point.
I started out being Mum
Hurrying people out of the house, preparing breakfast, putting out the rubbish, feeding the cat. Lots of ‘Hurry up’, ‘Yes, I understand puss, I’ll get to the cat flap in a minute’, ‘It’s school dinners today so you don’t need a packed lunch’, ‘Bye, love you!’
So far, so straight-forward. I do this every day, and I know the lingo.
Then I drove to a Business Breakfast, where I morphed into Businesswoman, with a side-order of ‘person with coeliac disease’. Both of those I can handle, together is a little more complex, but they know me at the venue, so are familiar with gluten-free rolls for the bacon, and will serve me first to ensure there’s no mix-up. Phrases like ‘gluten-free’ and ‘contamination’, as well as ‘traces’ feature in the vocab of a person with coeliac disease.
But my language as a businesswoman is all about customers, clients, networking, business forecasting, search engine optimisation, blogging, and establishing the requirements of the client. Different, with a different aim in mind. I’m not hurrying anyone out of the door here, nor ensuring there is food I can eat – this is about engaging with existing and potential customers, relating with like-minded business people and sharing experiences.
Brief stop-over in a coffee shop (back to the gluten-free) to check emails before an appointment at the GP. Here I’m in patient-mode, talking about prescriptions and flu jabs. I’m a customer, and they are the experts. I do what I’m told, and they simplify the complex medical world for me.
And then to the gym. Here I’m ‘person trying to do more exercise and get fit’. There are words like ‘abs’, ‘upper body strength’, ‘cardio’, and a brief diversion into business mode when I caught up with a contact from my previous work whom I’ve not seen for a few years. Rapid switching of hats!
In the gym I’m a novice. I need things explained to me in simple words, with pictures and demonstrations. The staff are excellent, and can tailor their support to everyone from people like me, to the muscular young men who seem to live in the place, and a group of young adults with learning disabilities who arrived with their carers mid-morning.
And then home. Lunch, work, cuddle cat…
Later I went back to school for parents’ evening. Words like ‘progress’, ‘ability’, and ‘improvement’, thankfully! This is an area where I am an expert on my daughter, and her teacher is an expert on the education she is receiving plus how my daughter behaves at school, so we can each inform the other, and I can find out more about where the progress needs to be made, and what support I can give to that.
I most definitely needed a cup of tea after that, before resuming the hat I left at home in the morning, making dinner and wrangling a child into bed!
Each of us, in different areas of our lives, uses different vocabulary, and talks for a different purpose.
Writing should be the same.
For instance if you are writing about a new business venture for your management committee, there is a certain expectation of formal language, ‘posh’ words, and you can assume a certain level of understanding of the subject.
Writing about the same subject for your staff newsletter, you want to lose the big words, and explain the subject clearly and in terms of the impact it will have on the day-to-day working for your staff – positive and negative. ‘As you may know, the new xxxx programme will be rolling out from next month. You should find that …’
Introducing it to your customers, you need to ‘sell’ it. Highlight the benefits they will receive, explain any disruption in realistic terms, then re-state how much better their customer experience will be once you’ve introduced it! Different language, different purpose to the writing. ‘We are delighted to inform all our customers that we will be improving …’
And if you want to talk about your new project on social media you need to be different again. Short and snappy is good; stick to one or two points per message. ‘Our new customer helpdesk will mean call wait times will go down by 50%. Please be patient while we introduce the new system next weekend.’ Short enough for a tweet, gets the main points across. In future messages you can give more details about any downtime, reference the company installing the system, join in with #MondayMorning, etc.
If you struggle to ‘speak’ in more than one style of English, then I can help. I have translated numerous pieces of ‘committee speak’ into readable newsletter articles. I can make a more formal version of a verbal description of your company, for your website’s front page. I can even lower the temperature a little, and try to make your product sound cool, for a teenage readership.
Give me a call or an email if you think I might be able to help you, and we can have a chat. I promise I’ll not assume you know anything about copywriting, and stick with short words!