Why My English 101 Students Were Better Writers Than Most Copywriters

I get a weekly update from a certain biz/marketing guru who shall remain nameless.  I like her work, generally, so I don't want to seem ungrateful for the gems she shares with us.

And I will, if I name her, because I'm gonna read (but not drag) one of her latest posts about how to improve your website copy.

In the advice she gives in that post, she's missing a big secret, and it's something that I used to teach even my introductory-level English students.  So regardless of whether you're an entrepreneur trying to get more hits or a freshman in college trying to understand why this writing class that you're forced to take even exists, this post in the Oratoria is for you.

It's the Rhetoric, Folks

Take a look at my second sentence in this post:

I like her work, generally, so I don't want to seem ungrateful for the gems she shares with us.

This sentence is rhetorically off the mark.  How so, you ask?  My English 101 students could have told you.

On day two (or so) of English 101, I told (NB: I don't teach anymore) students about rhetoric.  Aristotle defined it as the art of knowing the available means of persuasion in any given situation.  Today's rhetorical studies is less concerned with persuasion than with "communication of meaning," which encompasses persuasion.  But the rest of the basic elements are still important.  Based on that definition, what can we see that Aristotle emphasizes?

• Audience: In order to persuade someone, I have to know what they believe, think, like, are moved by, etc.  In order to communicate with them successfully, I have to know what language they speak (even better: what dialect of that language), what their mood is, what they care to hear about at any given moment, etc.  I have to know their motivations for listening.
• Topic: What am I trying to persuade them of or communicate to them?  What are the details of that topic that they'd be interested in?  Uninterested in?  Repelled by?  Curious about?  Aristotle spent hours and hours lecturing about how to appeal to very specific demographics of the typical audiences that his students might encounter, as proven by the hundreds of pages of class notes from his lectures that now comprise his Rhetoric. 
• Purpose: Why do you want to communicate?  Why is the other party listening and, perhaps, responding in a specific way?  What are you trying to achieve?

Those are the basics.  For any given item of writing--from a grocery list to War and Peace--my English 101 students knew how to break down any communication and understand it rhetorically.

In my sample sentence, there are a few problems, mostly to do with audience.  First, I don't identify who "us" is.  Secondly, I seem to assume that my audience will be persuaded by my discussing what I like, which is the topic of that particular sentence.  Speaking of topics, that sentence is shaky, because its topic seems to be what I like, while the rest of the introduction of this post is headed in a very different direction.  That set-em-up/switch-em-up approach isn't always problematic, but it's certainly risky, especially vis-a-vis purpose.  Why did I need to do that re-direct?  Why did I need to explain what I like and don't like?  Why did I need to shift gears suddenly thereafter?

This is, admittedly, a very, very close reading of just one little sentence, but my point is that my English 101 students were equipped to do that.

Oh, the Errors You'll Catch

So I'm watching this video post by this guru, and she's giving out very helpful advice: people should write their businesses' websites with the customer in mind, not themselves.  What does that mean?  Well, for example, my "About" section on this site is tucked away behind two pages; it's past the page about my company, Laughing Saint Editorial LLC, on a sub-page of that sub-page.  Why?  Because what I do for a living is about providing a service, not about providing a spotlight for myself.  It's you, the customers and readers, who come here looking for (here comes purpose) information about my services and about how to survive in the usage jungle.  (NB: Someday, I'm going to write a book titled Oh, the Errors You'll Catch: How to Survive in the Usage Jungle.)  So instead of writing about how I like copyediting, I write about what my services are and what they provide to you when I'm writing the main pages.  I do the same thing for my clients: your website (rather than your LinkedIn profile) is about your customers, so I'm going to write your website copy with a lot of "you" and "your," a bit of "our" and "we," and almost no "I" or "my."

The guru, in explaining that, was 100% right.

But, right at the very end of the post, she mentioned that being "cute" and funny on your website is pretty much required for catching customers today.

Woah, there.  Not so fast.

Clearly, she knows her own audience: they like her quirky style, and her brand is all about being personable.  Her audience expects this, but not all audiences are her audience.  Not all industries are her industry.

If I'm writing a website for someone in an insurance firm, I will not be using cute, funny copy on the website.  If I'm writing a website for a financial-services firm, I will not be using cute, funny copy.  If I'm writing a website for a community organization dealing with emergency services, I'm not going to use cute, funny copy.

Why not?  Because it wouldn't serve my purpose.  It might confuse readers, because rhetoric also includes issues of tone, genre, and timing.  If you're looking for a bankruptcy attorney, do you want that person to be cute and funny when they're trying to solicit business?  Apparently, this guru thinks you do.  My experience says differently.

Research and Field Testing

Thankfully, we could do a rhetorical analysis of other websites in any given industry to see what the norm is, and we can follow up with clients and in focus groups to ask people what their response to website copy is.  We don't have to trust a guru's gut (Not Trusting the Guru Gut will be the next book) about what's effective for any given purpose and audience. 

If cute and funny end up winning the day in every industry, sector, and audience, so be it!  I know, though, that if had asked my students about whether that was a sound rhetorical analysis, they'd have frowned.

Do Your Homework

So, instead of going to the copywriting service that this guru was recommending, which shall also go nameless here, you should find a copywriter who's got some knowledge of rhetoric or some very detailed knowledge about the audience you're trying to communicate with or the industry/sector that you're trying to reach.  Finding just anyone and figuring out too late that that person thinks a blanket approach to writing website copy will do...  Yeah, you don't want to find yourself in that position.  It'll be an expensive bag to be left holding.

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How I Used to Teach the Which/That Comma Rule

For some reason, I find myself adding a lot of commas before the word "which" lately.  It's just a fluke; I don't think it's due to a moral failing of our educational system or a lack of personal fortitude on behalf of the writers I'm working with.

But it does make me sad that I'm not still in the classroom teaching students my awesome method for remembering when and why, more or less, to use a comma before "which" and when to use "which" rather than "that" in the first place.  So I've decided to share my method here instead!  I hope that all you undergraduate writers and writing teachers will find it useful.  Remember: sharing is caring!

Don't Trust Your Gut

The conversation usually began like this: I'd ask my students how they know they should use "that" instead of "which."  More often than not, they would have no concrete idea of why; they just used their intuition, if they were native speakers, and while trusting your gut may have been good enough for Stephen Colbert, it's not sufficient for command of the rules/common standards of US English. 

Here's one of my favorite examples to use in class:

This spacesuit, which I wore yesterday, was made in 1965.  It is kept in the museum that I told you about last night.

For not-entirely-arbitrary reasons, in US English "which" is a non-restrictive relative pronoun in contexts like these, and "that" is a restrictive relative pronoun (as opposed to being a demonstrative, as in "Look at that spacesuit," but I digress).  Accepting that seemingly-but-trust-me-not-totally-arbitrary rule is step one.*

What Makes "Restrictive" Restrictive?

What, after all, is being restricted?  In short: the meaning of the word that the pronoun stands for.  In the first sentence, when we start the second clause, after the comma, we need to re-establish the grammatical subject, and it sounds clunky to say "This is the spacesuit, the spacesuit I wore yesterday," so we use a pronoun to cut down on the wordiness (and yeah, you could remove "which" and "that" altogether from these sentences, but you're just eliding the re-establishment of the grammatical subject if you do so, and I'm trying to explain the grammar to you, so play along with me here).  In the case of the first sentence, the use of "which" should indicate that the additional information about the object being described--the spacesuit--is information that is not necessary for identifying the object.  That is, the fact that I wore the spacesuit yesterday does not restrict the meaning of "spacesuit" in this sentence to the object being described; it is merely a further detail, not a detail that distinguishes this spacesuit from any other.  The restricting/defining information in that sentence is probably (depending on context) the fact that it was made in 1965.

Now, what about that second sentence?  Well, the fact that I've used "that" should indicate that the additional description of the object being described--the museum--distinguishes or restricts the meaning.  Without that additional information--namely, the fact that I told you about the object (in this case, the museum) last night--you could be confused about which museum I'm referring to.  The fact that I had to add extra information to restrict or specify the meaning of "museum" means that I need to use the restrictive relative pronoun "that."  If I'd used "which" in the second sentence, it would suggest that we both already knew which museum we were talking about, and the fact that I told you about it last night would have been already-assumed or non-restrictive information.

These are just some basic examples.  Distinguishing restrictive from non-restrictive can get pretty tricky.  For example, restrictiveness can also be a property of other types of appositive phrases that aren't headed up by a relative pronoun, but that's a bridge to cross on another day and in another post...

If You Have to Trust Your Gut, Follow This Rule

What I used to tell my students was that if they could understand when to use "which" and when to use "that," they'd have better control of the language.  But, since the restrictive/non-restrictive principle gets tricky, I also gave them what I called the back-door rule.  If they couldn't figure it out but had a pretty good feeling in their guts that they should use "that" or "which" in any given case, they could remember to use commas before "which" using this simple rule, which (hey, hey!) I drew on the board:

View fullsize

This worked particularly well for the science-minded in the class.  It's a basic chiasmus, or crossing of opposites to achieve balance.  If you think of non-restrictive and no comma as being "negative" and their opposites--the use of a comma and the use of restriction--as being "positive," then you can easily remember that the positive always goes with the negative.  Restrictive "that" should have a negative--no comma.  And the negative non-restrictive "which" should always include or add a comma.  You might be relying on your gut to tell you whether to use "which" or "that," but at least your punctuation will be right, and most instructors grading papers (whether they're teaching history, physics, or English) who get bent out of shape about such things only care about whether the punctuation is correct because, frankly, they couldn't distinguish restrictive from non-restrictive if their lives depended on it.

So there you have it!  Here's hoping my neat little diagram is helpful!

*One important note: the rules about using "that" or "which" exclusively as restrictive or non-restrictive relative pronouns, respectively, don't apply so uniformly in UK English.  They're a bit more liberal with "which" as a restrictive relative pronoun out there!

"The house caught on fire; also...": Why you should avoid using "also" as a transition

If there's one transition word that I wish I could wage holy (and, admittedly, self-righteous) jihad against, it's also.  As a transition, also is not your friend.  It is not here to save you.  And using it will only mark you as the noob to writing that you may or may not be.

Before I get too wound up, let me clarify: Today's lesson is especially geared to less-experienced writers, especially high-school and college-level writers, in addition to new teachers of English who're struggling to articulate why they feel queasy when they see a sentence that begins with "Also."  Even if you don't fall into one of these categories, keep reading, because I explain a principle about transitions that's helpful for everyone.

What's the problem with also?

There's nothing inherently wrong with the word also.  I'm not here to argue that it should never be used, that it's best to avoid it, or any of the other typical, universalizing, overly-generalized dicta that other writing gurus are in the habit of nailing to doorposts.  Despite my opening "jihad" metaphor, what I really want is not for us to abolish the word also but to understand that it is a top contender for Weakest and Therefore Most Useless Transition Word and should probably be avoided on those grounds.

What's the difference between transition also and other uses of also?

First, let's clarify that also, as a part of speech, is an adverb, so it's got lots of uses, functionally (rather than grammatically) speaking. 

Here's an example of also put to good use:

There are three good paths for walking to the store, but there are also two good paths for biking there.

In this case, "also" modifies the coordinating conjunction, indicating not a contradiction but an addition that is different.  "And" could replace "but," but the use of "but" carries with it a functional emphasis on contradiction, and "also" manages to squeeze in some of the additive sense that "and" would have added.

Now, here's an example what I'm calling transition also:

There are many reasons to adopt this policy.  Also, several experts have called for similar policy measures to be taken.

What the writer is trying to do here is tie the first sentence to the next one.  Sometimes, I see "also" used like this but with a semicolon instead of a period used between the two sentences/independent clauses.  Doesn't matter; the problem is still the same: the transition here is weak and vague.

I used to tell my students that also could be used to tie together any two sentences and make it seem as if there's a transition there without there actually being any there there (so to speak).  My favorite example of this was:

I went to the store today.  Also, the house caught on fire.

Huh?  What's the relationship of these two ideas?

See, that's the principle of transitions: they should always clarify what you think the relationship of Idea A is to Idea B.  If your transition misses the mark either by being vague or inaccurate, you're not doing your readers any favors.  You're suggesting that the path from Idea A is up some stairs and around the corner when in fact the way to Idea B requires crossing a highway and walking six blocks.  There's a slight difference between "and" and "but also" and a much bigger difference between "therefore" and "however."  It's up to you to help your readers know where they're going in your writing.

Still not sure how also is vague?  Try substituting another more-specific transition word in its place.  The results reveal just how comically vague also is:

I went to the store today.  Therefore, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  However, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  Alternatively, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  Consequently, the house caught on fire.

How can you remediate transition also?

I see transition also all the time in my EFL students' and clients' writing.  Whenever I see it, I ask the writer, "What's the relationship between Idea A and Idea B?  Why did you put this sentence [or phrase] after the first one?"  In the case of my favorite example, it's hard to explain how going to the store is related to the house catching on fire.  If there's no way to explain it, I'd tell the writer to reconsider organization: Maybe one of the sentences needs to find a more appropriate place in the paper.  If the writer can articulate the reason, then I suggest that we make that reason clearer.  Chronology seems to be the most likely reason for putting Idea A (about going to the store) next to Idea B (the house catching on fire), in my example, so I might suggest using "Subsequently" as an alternative to "Also."

So, the next time you find yourself writing "also," especially at the beginning of a sentence, stop to wonder whether you're using it as the glue that ties ideas together (not just in a list or in phrases like "and also" or "but also").  If you are, ask yourself whether there's a more-specific term you could use to express that relationship.  Your readers will thank you.

Is there such a thing as "bad writing"?

Sure, there is.  It just isn't as straightforward as you probably think it is.

Full disclosure: my dissertation is about a cognitive-rhetorical approach to understanding literature.  Rhetoric isn't always an easy fit with art, so in order to make the case that the two really have something to offer each other, I had to provide a definition of art, specifically literary art.  That was chapter 1 of the dissertation.  Maybe I'll lay out that argument in the Oratoria someday, but that day ain't today!

So I've spent lots of quality time considering academic arguments about what constitutes capital-A Art and capital-L Literature.  I'm still perplexed whenever I come across literary critics who breezily make aesthetic claims as if they're based on premises so foundational as to be universal.  Examples abound, but you need only find one of the book reviews in The New Yorker for a fistful of examples.

But today I came across a new post on the Lingua Franca blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education's website, titled "An Exercise in Bad Writing."  TL;DR: the author explains an exercise used in a creative writing class in which students are asked to take a short story and write it so that, essentially, the story is told, not shown.  Alternatively, students are asked to take a short story and rewrite it so that it's a bad news story. 

The genre-switching there could provide students with some real challenges, in a good way, but it requires two jumps: first, students need to be able to discover and articulate what convention dictates constitutes "good" writing in both short stories and in news articles/broadcasts; second, students need to be able to deviate from those conventions purposefully and explain the writerly choices they made.  If they can do that, then their writing-fu is truly strong.  I used to ask students in a freshman first-year writing course to do something like this exercise, and they did so to varying degrees of success.  Advanced Composition students usually had better luck with the theory and execution of that kind of prompt.  But I digress.

What the author of the post in Lingua Franca doesn't explain is why front-loading a story with details constitutes "bad" writing.  This excerpt begins with what the post's author thinks is an example of bad writing:

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park …

[Teju] Cole said, “To me, the wrong way to begin it, knowing what the book is about, would be: ‘As a Nigerian-German psychiatrist, living in New York City in my mid-thirties, I found myself quite melancholic to be in the shadow of the Twin Towers five years after they went down. In order to sort through my feelings both about the historic past of the city of New York and my own unsorted neuroses regarding my mother and my grandmother and my dead father I decided to wander around the city.’”

But a first paragraph like that sounds like something some of my favorite writers -- Saul Bellow, John Updike, China Mieville -- might start a book with.  How can I know that what I'm looking at is "bad"?

Perhaps -- and this is my modest proposal -- it's more important to ask students to think about how to define "good" or "art" or "literature" before asking them to start thinking about "bad" writing versus "good" writing.  If we did that, though, I'd probably be out of a job, as would a few psychologists, because we torture students when we lead them to believe that there's an objective standard of excellence in literary art that transcends definition or foundation.  They end up thinking "I'll never be a good writer" because they don't know what "good" means, and yet the implication is that there is a "good" that all "good" writers have an ear for.  That's not the case.

At the same time, we need to be able to evaluate literature.  Let's be clear: I'm not saying that all writing is born equal.  What I am saying, though, is that we have to have nuance -- that long-dead virtue -- when discussing the quality and trajectory of literature or any writing.  Sometimes, my clients want to know whether their manuscripts are "good," and I often tell them that that's not the right question.  The better questions are ones like, "Will it be easy to market this book to its intended audience?", "What is the likelihood that a publisher will be interested in picking this up?", "Does this article achieve my stated purpose?", and "What do you think would improve this manuscript?"  The answer to each of those questions entails some discussion of the quality of the story, information, research, etc., contained in the work, but it requires that I define "goodness" in terms of other objectives rather than on my secret-handshake knowledge of what the literati and I think counts as "good."  When I write for clients, I write for them, not for literary critics, literary agents, editors, or publishers whom I've never met.  I can only do so much to encourage a writer I'm working with to go in a certain direction.  At the end of the day, if a client tells me that she likes what I've written for her, I'm obligated to keep writing in that manner and style until she tells me (in detail) how else I should write for her.  "Good" only matters in that case if I think that what I'm writing will be in no way useful to the writer (e.g., she's contracted with me to write a website for her accounting business, but she wants the copy to be written as a poem; even in that case, I need to give her what she's asked for while carefully suggesting that this approach is highly unusual and may not be effective), but it's not something that's universal or even definable outside of a specific context with very clearly articulated terms.

So, it's not necessarily that writing can't be described as "good" or "bad."  The point here is that anytime you hear writing described that way, stop to ask yourself whether the person making that evaluation has made clear on what basis that evaluation has been made and whether you accept that person's premise.  Make sure you're also asking yourself why the question is "Is this good?" and if another question might be more relevant or useful.