Usable Words

My friend Tania took this photo of an official notice on the London Underground. It strikes me as a great example of atrociously bad mass-audience copywriting. In fact, there’s so much wrong with it that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s try.

Remember, you’re talking to EVERYONE.

If you’re writing something that’s going to be read by a big, diverse audience – every single commuter in the city, for example – keep in mind that everyone who reads it is going to assume, reasonably enough, that you’re talking to them.

From that perspective, the wording of this sign is horrible. It treats the entire body of commuters as one seething mass of repressed grievances, ready at any moment to burst into violence.

The person who chose the wording for the sign was probably assuming that the vast majority of readers – those who would never dream of assaulting a rail employee, no matter how late their train was – would just “self-exclude”. They’d read the sign and think “oh, that’s for violent people, not me” and be on their way.

But that’s not how people’s minds work, at least in modern Western societies. Even when a statement implies guilt – perhaps especially then – our first response is to assume it’s addressing us. A police officer yells “hey you!’ and we turn around, wondering what we’ve been caught at. (The philospher Louis Althusser called this “interpellation”.)

And because we don’t like being arbitrarily made to feel guilty, our second response – once we’ve worked out that we’re not the person being addressed – tends to be annoyance. So framing your rules and prohibitions in the imperative mood (“do this”, “don’t do that”), as a direct address to readers, is a good way to piss people off.

In fact, this kind of public address is a situation where (for once) you want to be as impersonal as possible. “Smoking is not permitted” is much better than “Don’t light up your filthy cancer sticks in here pal” precisely because it doesn’t address the reader directly (another win for the passive voice!).

This sign, on the other hand, reads like something one person would say to another, but in the worst possible way. It’s like one of the lines recited by a badly-trained service employee to a customer they perceive as “difficult”. (“Don’t take it out on me! It’s not my fault! I just work here! You’re not listening to me! I can’t help you!”)

Beware of “fill in the gaps” writing

I’ve written before about how rhetorical questions like “why not try my great product or service?” can be dangerous because people rush to supply unflattering mental answers to them (“because you’re ugly, that’s why not!”). This sign is another example of writing that virtually begs the reader to “fill in the gaps” in a way you’d rather they didn’t.

The key word is “it”. “Don’t take it out on our staff.”  This is a pronoun without a specified antecedent; in other words, what the “it” refers to is left to the reader to work out. And there are a lot of different ways to fill in the gaps in this sentence, none of them very flattering to London Transport.

“We know we suck, but don’t take it out on our staff.”

“Sure, your train is running late for the third day in a row, but don’t take it out on our staff.”

“Your life is lonely and miserable and we’re not helping, but don’t take it out on our staff.”

Perhaps the writer is so mired in corporatised culture that she expects the reader to be thinking something like “Service interruptions are understandable and everyone is doing their best, so please, don’t take it out on our staff.” But that seems rather optimistic to me.

Does it work?

We’ve established that this sign is going to piss off most of the people who read it, and that it gives them a frame to confirm their worst feelings about the transport system. But what about its apparent aim, to warn people against assaulting transport employees?

Call me cynical, but I suspect that if you’re angry and/or irrational and/or antisocial enough to actually be thinking about assaulting someone in uniform, knowing that Boris Johnson might try to put you in jail is unlikely to have a great effect on your decision.

In fact, I think if anything signs like this have the opposite effect to what they intend: they normalise violence against station staff. If assaults happen so often that we need a campaign to warn against them, perhaps that makes some people think “well, everyone else is doing it…”

In any case, this seems like gestural politics at its most counterproductive. And to be honest, I don’t really think something like this would fly in my own town. London friends have been telling me for years about the increasingly paranoid and hectoring tone of public discourse in their city; if this as an example, I see what they mean. What about it, Londoners: is this kind of thing normal?

And then there’s design…

I’ve already given this rotten sign more attention than it deserves (Seth Godin would have had three pithy dot points…) so I’ll refrain from writing at length about the design flaws that add insult to injury: the ugly font with its ridiculous diamond-shaped dot on the i (and this from a transport system that used to be renowned for good typography!); the awkward transition from big to small text (if you’re going to do this, the big text has to make some kind of sense on its own); and the colours! Eww!

But I think the most important point is this: the larger your audience, the more you have to think about the potential unintended consequences of what you write.

Do you agree?