Usable Words

Businesses that deal with other businesses don’t sell products or services any more. They sell “solutions”. Technical Solutions, Mobility Solutions, Product Development Solutions, Volunteer Solutions…with this many solutions out there, we must have a lot of problems!

That, of course, is the point. Buzzwords become popular for a reason, and in the case of “solutions” the reason is basically a sound one. By offering a solution, we send the message that our starting point is the customer’s problem and what we can do about it, rather than our own products and our desire to sell them. The idea of a “solution” also enables us to bundle a whole lot of products and services together: for example, rather than a web development business saying “we do site design, coding, content creation, SEO, etc. etc.” they can just say “we deliver complete web solutions”. (“Solutions” are always “delivered”). I get it.

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Real estate signs are a great source of “copy in the wild”. This one caught my eye, but not for the right reasons. At the bottom right of the sign is a small ad encouraging viewers to list their houses on the company’s website: “Register at hockingstuart.com.au and let the house do the hunting.” (It’s a bit difficult to read on this picture, but trust me, that’s what it says!)

This is a pretty obvious homage to an old classic, “Let your fingers do the walking”. Advertising Age gives the latter slogan, used internationally for many years by Yellow Pages, an honourable mention in its list of the Top 10 Slogans of the [20th] Century. So famous was it that it became what the linguists at Language Log call a snowclone: a phrase with one or more substitutable words that becomes a kind of cliché generator, a template for new phrases, like “X is the new Y”, or “the mother of all X”, or (for the geeks among us) “I’m in ur X, Y-ing ur Z”. A quick Google search for “Let your X do the Y” comes up with “Let your thumbs do the trading” (about using a mobile phone to play the stock market), “Let your feet do the talking” (about an awareness-raising sponsored walk), and “Let your subconscious do the thinking” (about…well, I guess that one’s fairly obvious). “Let the house do the hunting” changes the template slightly by using “the” instead of “your”, but it’s still a very clear nod.

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Business owners, I have a question for you.

Does your website feature the word “Welcome” prominently on the front page or in the title bar? (Feel free to run off and check if you need to.)

If you answered “yes”, I want you to imagine you’re a first-time visitor to the site, then answer two more questions:

Would you feel unwelcome if it wasn’t there?

If your answer to both of these is “no”, as I think it might be, perhaps you should start thinking about what you can replace that “Welcome” with. Maybe something that really engages your potential customers and tells them something interesting about what you have to offer. Or something they might type into a search engine (nobody searches for “welcome” unless they want this place).

Don’t feel bad, though; you’re in good company! All of us have a tendency to repeat things we’ve seen on another sites without quite knowing why. But the conventions of web writing are still developing, and “Welcome to my website” has really had its day; it makes your site read like somebody’s GeoCities homepage from 1997, and it takes up room on the page or the title bar that’s too valuable to waste on formalities.

This is a blog about words in everyday life. People often say we live in a visual culture, but (in case you haven’t noticed) words haven’t gone away. If anything, in our blogging, text-messaging, status-updating times, they surround ufs more than ever. This blog is simply a place for me to write about some writing I like, some writing I don’t like, and the reasons why. Because I’m going into business as a copywriter and editor, my main focus will be on the words businesses use to communicate with their customers. And because I’m particularly interested in writing for the web, you’ll probably read a lot about websites here. But I’m not ruling anything out; anything is fair game if I think it illustrates something interesting about communication.

To begin with, here’s something I got in the mail the other day. Yes, it’s a direct marketing letter; not exactly a form of communication with a reputation for creativity. But this one, I think, is an exception.

First of all, your eye is drawn to the big red “teaser” on the front of the envelope: “You’re probably thinking of throwing this away.” OK, so this is one of those marketing letters that starts its sales pitch on the envelope itself. At this point I’m only mildly interested; there’s nothing unusual these days about advertising that “winks” at consumers, trying to engage their distaste for the fact that they’re being sold to and turn it into a virtue. It’s a standard way of trying to reach a certain kind of customer, the kind who thinks he or she is “above” advertising. But hey, at least it’s more interesting than “FREE GIFT INSIDE!!!”

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