Get to the point

The Gettysburg Address as a Power Point presentation is now a well- known (and exquisite) satire on the limitations of Power Point. The main drawback as this illustrates, of course, is how the loss of style has a devastating effect on the persuasiveness, not to mention, charm, emotional power, and depth of meaning of the subject matter.

One of the early qualitative researchers in London (a Harvard English graduate) used to place so much emphasis on style that part of training his researchers was to get them to write their reports in the style of different writers - Hemingway, Proust, E.E. cummings and so on. I always applauded this notion as in those days (when people actually wrote research reports rather than bullet point findings), reports read like they had been clumsily translated from German.   

But Power Point isn’t completely to blame for poorly communicated material. The leaden style of many writers not only lacks persuasiveness, but more importantly when it comes to market research, lacks the most important feature of a research report:  significance - exacerbated by the pressure to collapse a great deal of data into as few words as possible. Pascal’s apology for the long letter – ‘I didn’t have time to write a short one’ sums the problem up perfectly. Succinctness is very difficult.

Tyrannic jargon

Many researchers, planners and marketing people these days write very well, but many still do not. The demotic style of blogging suits some writers but is sloppy and falsely intimate for others. Jargon exerts an even worse tyranny. Nowadays, if I ran a research company I would send all of my trainees on journalism courses (Elen Lewis and Laura Mazur writing in Market Leader are excellent practitioners of the craft). The aim is not just to write clear English but to learn the first rule of journalism - what is the lead?

The great comic writer Norah Ephron describes her first journalism class. The teacher put a collection of facts for a high school newspaper on the blackboard and asked the class to write the lead. The story ran something like this: ‘Kenneth L Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking will be anthropologist Margaret Mead and the president of the University of Chicago.’

Ephron goes on to relate how she (and the rest of the class) went about re-arranging these facts in a variety of different orders, altering little more than the grammar and syntax. ‘We turn in our leads. We are very proud. The teacher looks at them and throws them all in the garbage.The lead to the story, he says, is: There will be no school on Thursday.’

Significance - to the listener or reader - is everything

This article was taken from the June issue of Market Leader. Read more from Judie Lannon.