By the way, Peter, thank you for The Well-Fed Writer. It’s my new bible.

Cool tool, Ernest! I’ll check it out. And Carl, you’re right – bad writing HAS around forever. It’s just more visible now, since, well, it’s more visible now…;) Connect to the Web, and you connect, by definition, to a mother lode of writing – some really good, plenty really bad. And I say what you said all the time: thank goodness for all the bad writing – or we wouldn’t have jobs. But it’s still fun to have a few laughs at the particularly bad examples…

And SEO writing is a great way to prove our value to our clients. And it’s not as hard as it may seem. Visit Katherine Andes’ site (she wrote a two-parter for the ezine, in the March and April issues about the importance for clients to hire the writer first). She’s a great resource for anyone looking to learn more about the craft.

PB

Maybe I’ve been affected too much by my year and a half in China, but I just can’t get too worked up over the bad writing in a 4th-rate blog. I get a little worked up by the bad writing/thinking on China Daily (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn ) since, after all, this paper wishes to be considered a credible news source, and hires native-English speakers to write and edit the articles. But even that doesn’t bother me much anymore; such ham-handed propaganda is not worth more than a snicker. What really bothers me is bad writing and poor proofreading in American books and magazines. The blog format is casual, quick, and informal in nature — like an email to a friend. But books are supposed to last.

One last thought: Hasn’t bad writing been around as long as there has been writing? Maybe we should celebrate the bad writing, since without it, we’d be out of work. As professional copywriters, we’re in a great position now to learn SEO and combine it with our writing and marketing ability. Solid SEO combined with solid writing, will help our clients be more successful and ensure that we are valued for what we do best.

And, although I’ve been using one version of word or another since we lost wordstar, I didn’t know it had the same capability… why? Well , although the scores are interesting they mostly tell me I’m writing at the level I want to and there is so much in Word I don’t need I’d never dug that out.

Now that you’ve taught me something I’ll give it a try. Thanks.

For example, consider the following website content:

“Current activities include enabling leading Business Schools to develop new collaborative ways of working – these internationally recognised organisations will be helped by a process of us creating specific support packages built around progressive development learning paths for their faculty and students.”

The above copy has a “Flesch Reading Ease” score of 0.00 and a “Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level” of 25.1. For all practical purposes it’s incomprehensible. By comparison, a typical issue of “Reader’s Digest” magazine gets a readability score of around 65. “Time” magazine scores about 52.

I, like you, couldn’t resist offering my feedback to the writer, including offering up the FRE and FKGL scores. He acknowledged my input, opening his email to me with the line, “Trust me when I say, “I know.” More than two weeks later though, the content remains the same.

Here’s another example:

“Pipeline Coach’s services meet the expectations of business leaders who recognize the value of purposeful investments in human capital – often beginning with themselves – as a means of preparing and aligning people and systems in pursuit of growth.” This example comes in with FRE and FKGL scores of 13.7 and 20.5, respectively.

“Purposeful investments”? As opposed to what? Drunken spending? Oh, and of course, you want to be sure you work in good “corporatese” such as “human capital” (what a warm, fuzzy term; who among us does not enjoy being referred to as “human capital”) and “aligning people.”
I bet the folks who ran Enron and AIG (into the ground) were really good at “aligning people.”

All that said, FRE and FKGL scores are not a panacea for bad writing. Still, they are tools that, when properly applied, can make writing more readable. This is especially true for the vast majority of people writing today: Non-professionals who have never seriously studied the craft of writing and are never likely to do so. Unfortunately, this multitude includes a vast number of small business owners and other professionals.

I’m convinced that many of these small business owners and professionals, because they are well educated and have ready access to a word processor, delude themselves into thinking that they can write well enough to be effective in their business or career.

Yet, they don’t fully utilize the writing tools their word processor gives them.

Why not?

While it’s easy to see examples like mine and yours as evidence of a general decline in writing, and perhaps what’s considered “acceptable,” I don’t buy it. And I don’t buy it because the business models of these blog networks and the content mills is worlds apart from the one practiced by respectable business doing their level best to stay competitive in their respective industries.

Arguably, when all you care about is clicks, then, in a relative sense, content really doesn’t matter. Sure, you might earn more respect from readers if your content were better, but if the content you have, as crummy as it is, gets the job done, and keeps you profitable, then why do you need better? And by extension, why would you need to pay more to get better? You don’t and you won’t.

But a business trying to stay profitable selling a product or service simply doesn’t have the luxury of being able to settle for crummy marketing copy, especially when their competitors aren’t going down that road, because, they too, know how important good copy is to their overall marketing equation.

As for your COC, just because the newsletter is lousy doesn’t translate to members thinking THEY can get away with lousy copy for their businesses as well. Heck, they could be saying the same thing you are about their COC newsletter, and lamenting that the COC just doesn’t get it.

As for writers contacting those members (or NOT, in this case), no big surprise there. So many writers are mediocre marketers and I’d wager they’d get a good response if they indeed reached out to those members. But hey, that’s one of the most important cornerstones of this business: the opportunities that go unpursued by writers who chase the low-hanging (and low-paying) fruit. Our field pays more precisely because those clients who DO appreciate good writing have to be ferreted out and cultivated.

I totally agree with Jenn, and have seen the truth of this countless times in my career (as have you, no doubt…): when clients see the difference a professional writer makes, the light bulb goes on and suddenly they realize what they’ve been missing. Again, we need to be educating through our marketing. Sure, many prospects have poorly-written materials, but I’d bet good money that’s far more a function of them simply not knowing any better and not being exposed to the difference a good writer can make, than some conscious decision to NOT hire a writer.

My two cents… Okay, three…

PB

You could very well be right about my local writers and their marketing efforts. I have no idea who’s doing what in my area. Not because I’m not interested, but because I’m booked solid and priced out of the range of many of the COC members who could really use copywriting help. That doesn’t mean that I won’t write a constructive letter to my COC about their business mag.

It’s not so much that I worry that the low-cost writers will market to these audiences. I’m more concerned about a slow, broad decline in the quality of written content that will condition audiences to accept so-so copy as good enough. With the internet so flooded with goo (as Star puts it) and with the decline in proofreading of online content from reliable brands like the Wall Street Journal, NYTimes and others, will a day come when the business public no longer recognizes good writing? I hope not.

And I’ll admit, I’m taking this argument to extremes that don’t really reflect my personal worries. Fortunately, I’m not concerened about finding work — and if time does free up in my schedule, I’ll start cold calling my fellow COC members . But there are many good, solid writers out there who are hurting for work. Perhaps, as you suggest, they need to be on the lookout for these types of opportunities.