Attention spans are short and getting shorter, long press releases cost more than short ones and most publications have word count limits, so learning how to edit quickly and well is a crucial skill for any communicator. But before you start cutting, consider the crash blossom. Coined when an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?,” the term refers to a headline that’s been pared down so far it unintentionally allows for alternative meanings. Classics of the genre include: “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim,” “McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers,” and “British Left Waffles on Falklands.”
EASY ON THE SLASHING
When it comes to editing, I’m all about slash and burn—but as these headlines make clear, it’s possible to slash too much. In the case of the McDonald’s headline, for example, the three-letter word “are” in between “Fries” and “the” would make all the difference in the world. These three steps will help you pare without crashing.
1. Look for the passive voice, specifically the past tense of the verb “to be” (“was” and “were”) and the preposition “by.” “The man was bitten by the dog” (seven words) becomes “The dog bit the man” (giving you back two words and in the process creating a stronger sentence). The passive voice is insidious —most people use it routinely without even realizing they’re doing it. To help sensitize yourself to it, challenge a colleague to a conversation in a passive voice. There is nothing like trying to twist your tongue around questions like, “Was anything enjoyable experienced by you this weekend?” and answers like, “A good movie was seen by me this weekend,” to convince you to change your evil ways.
2. Hunt down adjectives, adverbs and qualifiers. These are “helping” words: adjectives describe nouns (the shaggy black dog), adverbs describe verbs (the shaggy black dog slept soundly) and qualifiers can modify both (the rather shaggy black dog slept very soundly). These words have their place, but they are overused, and often unnecessary. The phrase “very unique,” for example, makes me want to scream, because something is either unique or it’s not—and if it is, it can’t be any more unique than that.
3. Print out what you have written and read it to yourself out loud. It will feel strange initially (especially when your colleagues peer into your office or the conference room you’re borrowing and wonder why you’re talking to yourself) but it is the single best way to focus on what you’ve written because the ear is often a better editor than the eye.
Does something sound awkward? Fix it. Is a sentence too long for you to finish with one breath? Crop it. Is something vague? Clarify it. Are you using a dollar word when a nickel one will do? Switch it out. When you’re done, read it out loud again. This is a particularly good way to guard against crash blossoms. Your mind will naturally want to pause, giving your brain time to register that there’s no visual clue to pause, which in turnwill cue you to create one.
KEEP THINGS SIMPLE
There are, of course, exceptions to all these rules. As the Elements of Style masters Strunk and White point out, Abraham Lincoln could have said “eighty-seven years” rather than “four score and seven,” but it would have diminished the rhythmic power of his speech. William Allingham’s poem The Fairies wouldn’t work without the adjectives: “Up the [airy] mountain, Down the [rushy] glen, We daren’t go a hunting, For fear of [little] men.” Strunk and White themselves used the passive voice to castigate the use of the passive voice: “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.” I like to think they did this on purpose—a little joke to see if anyone would notice—but one can’t know for sure.
Exceptions aside, most of us are not presidents, poets or professors. We’re communicators whose job is to keep things simple so that the people we want to reach will understand our company’s or our client’s message and act on that understanding in the way we want them to.
These three steps will help you whether you want to become better at editing your own writing, or make that critical transition to managing teams and helping them learn to edit their writing.
CONTACT:
This article was written by Beth Haiken, senior VP at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].