The Communication Blog

I just watched an interview on CNN where the anchor asked a congressman “Would you support higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations?” because what the congressman had just said before that ‘seemed’ to allude to just that sort of thing.

The congressman’s answer did not include a yes or no. In fact, his answer included “what I’m in favor of…” and then described several things, including LOWERING the tax rate.

So she asked him again: “So, would you support higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations?” and again, a yes or no was not included in his answer, and he put that “lowering the tax rate” in his answer again.

Not too long ago, the big “O” on Fox, who I assume is their highest paid mouth, excoriated a senator who had said that the anchors and pundits on Fox continued to say that “people will go to jail if they don’t have health insurance”, and the big “O” didn’t just say, “no one has said that on Fox”, he pushed back with his usual bullying, dismissive, how-can-someone-be-so-stupid style and challenged the politician to name one person on Fox who had used the phrase. It was so over the top that, unlike many professional politicians, the dude was pretty much bushwhacked into silence.

And the next night, the big “O” had comedian Dennis Miller on, and he and “O” had a great chuckle over the whole thing.

And, of course, an organization that actually cares about this sort of thing put together a video of hosts, panelists and guests on Fox talking about how people would be put in jail if they didn’t have health insurance; not just a few mentions – over four minutes worth.

Now, the usual response from one side or the other to a post like this is to take the tac of the politician mentioned above who doesn’t seem to have the capacity, or the integrity, to reply to a question with “yes” or “no”; people will jump up on their chairs and yell about the other side doing the same thing, or point out that the real issue is (whatever). This post isn’t about political ‘discourse’, which is close to dead in this country in general, and simply ridiculous on Facebook (please, everyone, stop yelling at me; I already know who’s on which side, and Facebook, for the love of youknowho, is not the place to have any kind of rational discussion about, well, anything. I’m okay with friends and associates having divergent political, societal, and philosophical views).

This post is simply for people who should know better — as LISTENERS and as SPEAKERS — who continue to capitulate to the heat of the moment, who subjugate their humanity and integrity by taking an “if I don’t look at you, you don’t exist” approach to the people and world around them.

It’s not political, it’s “is this the kind of shit you really want to establish as a foundational example for the next generation to stand on?”

Really?

Here’s the video link. As to the example about a politician who can’t answer a simple question with yes or no, just watch any news program, any time…especially now.

Thanks to author-illustrator Brian Fies for alerting me to what I already should have had on my calendar (because I am a Canook): it’s Canada Day (before or after you watch the William Shatner thing, with a tissue close at hand, do check out Brian Fies’ blog, because he’s not just an award-winning graphic novelist, he’s a helluva nice guy).

Canadian and thespian

Brian posted a video of Shatner doing a very patriotic, tears-welling-up version of O Canada. Since this is a blog about — sometimes loosely about — communications, I think that William Shatner’s interpretation of the anthem is, gosh, so moving it deserves inclusion here as a wonderful way to communicate one’s love of country…please go experience it yourself, you won’t be disappointed.

Don’t you (us?) Yanks have a holiday coming up? Have a great holiday, ‘a?

"Okay, I want you to take your tank and turn right, no, left, wait...um..."

I’ve come close to saying that, in a slightly different fashion. As someone trying to help a client, and keep the client, a consultant may wish not to offend the client with direct language; instead, one helps the client understand why it might be that…

Aw, screw it. Enough with the nice-nice. Here’s the skinny: PowerPoint can, indeed, make the presenter look stupid, and make the audience feel like the presenter is stupid for making everyone sit through a bullet-laden, sentence fragment populated, “What, there’s a different way to do this?” presentation.

To all my clients, assoiciates, friends and others (?!?), you all know my views on this. Now, as quoted in today’s New York Times, there’s some muscle that supports my never-ending quest to rid the world of bullets, text-dense slides, and slide-reading presenters. The link to the story is at the bottom or this post, but here’s a sprinkling of it:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint  Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He  spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint  presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal  Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal  threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of  control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in  the world are not bullet-izable.”

For those of you who haven’t seen the alternative universe of visual, well-designed, effective PowerPoint slides, I know it can be hard to conceive of a world where PowerPoint slides make you say, “Ooo!” instead of “Oy…”. Until I can show people that world, though, it’s so good and, concurrently, so sad, that the biggest guns of the world’s best place to be have to point out how goofy it is to use PowerPoint to disseminate critical information.

Bullets don’t really mean anything. Those small circles in front of fragments or words only exist to indicate “what follows cannot stand alone to convey what I intend.” There is enough information without context in our lives; we don’t actually need software that enables us to compose nice looking incomplete sentences and short strings of words. What we need is more exposure to presentations that work.

I realize the article has ‘war’ as its focus, but the core of the story — how to effectively, successfully, convey critical information using presentation software and technology — is relevant to every industry sector.

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can  hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic,  persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in  slides instead of legal briefs.

As you read the last words of the article, remember them as you put together your next presentation.

Hmm…might be time for me to put on a seminar, and call it…

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting  information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for  questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr.  Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

How'd they like your presentation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?th&emc=th

I grabbed that mixed metaphor from a page on a blog about becoming an effective copywriter.

Great. We’re doomed.

The post’s title is (I’m paraphrasing here) An Introduction to Copywriting. Here are the first two sentences of the first paragraph below the header, Writing Headlines: The Most Important Copywriting Skill -
“Most writing designed to persuade sinks or swims right out of the gate. Whether the title of an article or the headline of a sales page, readers make snap decisions based on a quick scan of the top of the page…”

Who knew that a reader could be a title or a headline. I guess you really can learn something every day… or unlearn something…

I’ll go on record right here as stating that, yes, in the earliest phases of my career (when I was writing headlines on cave walls), I had a few goofs, but I wasn’t using my goofs as examples of how to write great copy.

The site’s design is nicely done; the content, not so much. I stumbled across it as I was looking around some agency sites. I was stumbling, reeling from what I’d read in one of the PDFs on the site of a long-standing, successful firm with highly recognizable clients. It was helpful, all right, but probably not in the way they conceived it.

I do have a habit of not adhering to the rules of sentence punctuation in my personal emails. I don’t upper case anything in my personal email correspondence, but that’s not a trait I would include in anything of a formal nature or in anything related to work. Because of this, I was willing to accept that someone else might find the all lower case use worthy of a ‘style’. What stunned me though, what smacked me around, was the goofy use of sentence fragments, known to many of us as “market speak”. Here’s a sampling from this well-established, we-do-it-all agency, lifted without any alteration from the file:

“consider content. not a very sexy or glamorous word. but in many ways, content is the never-ending mandate of marketing these days. advertising content. business content. user-generated content. rich content.

SEO, SEM, blogs, podcasts, online campaigns, video, social networking, emails and more. You name it, we’re doing it. Both the strategic and creative plan for it and the technology that will enable it.”

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder why I even bother to stay in this business. This was the most abrasive use of market speak I’d read since last year’s Microsoft two-page advertisement in many major newspapers. I don’t know exactly when market speak gained wide acceptance, but my personal belief is that it was born of the bullet points on a slide family.

I know that I can’t stop the continuing use of market speak, and I’m bummed that people of otherwise great intelligence either don’t think it’s a big deal or, worse, don’t know how silly it sounds. (What, you don’t think it sounds silly? Try reading it out loud, and no fair substituting a comma pause instead of a period stop.)

I guess the most I can ask, as a personal favor to me, is that you stop the market speak creep in your own communications and presentations.

Please. So important. Livelihoods at stake. Really.

Williams: “We need to start building a monetizable business. . .”
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, from his appearance at Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference

Really? This is what we need, the word “monetizable”?

Um, what happened to sentences like, “We need to start building a business that makes money?”

That is what Mr. Williams means, right?

Hey, maybe not. It’s debatablizeable.

Maybe monetizable is some kind of code word, or maybe it doesn’t have to do with money at all. Maybe what it means is that we must always seek to invent words that will make the user of the word sound like he or she has given great, continuous thought to a situation that’s a source of neverending thorniness — like conjurring up things to put on the Web that are occasionally interesting, grab everyone’s attention, and eventually brings all the world’s people together as one massive bullseye for advertisers developing some revenue-generating widgit, something futuristic, targeted, like reach-right-into-your-head advertising.

And, having pondered said situation, when asked a question about it, the user of such a word believes he must respond with something that sounds mighty, mighty educatedzable, something like, “We need to start building a monetizable business.”

Because if the answer was something clearer, like, “We need to start building a business that makes money”, someone might feel compelled to say, “Gee, isn’t that whole point of building a business in the first place?”

Now, all of my conjecturizabling is suspect, because perhaps ‘makes money’ isn’t what Mr. Williams meant at all, so I guess I’ve been assumizeable in my perspective on what monetizable actually means.

So, if I’m wrong, I guess I have to be apologizable.