How not to talk to the public
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!”) read more >
