When a designer is working on a page layout, they will sometimes put in ‘placeholder text’. It’s a feature in most modern desktop publishing programs. It begins with something along the lines of Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet and continues for a whole paragraph of 70-odd words. There’s a good explanation of the origins of the text here.

Of course, designers use it to see how a layout will look once words are added.

I’m going off on a bit of a tangent though because I wanted to talk about the dishwasher where I work.

There are a lot of people in this office and the kitchen is shared space. There’s also a system worked out for doing the dishes which has evolved over time. Anyone can put dishes in the dishwasher. When it’s full, someone on kitchen duty will put in the little dishwasher tab and turn it on. In order to let people know what part of the dirty/clean cycle the dishwasher is at, someone made a sign saying, on one side ‘dishes washing or ready to be put away’ and on the other, ‘dishes ready to be loaded’.

Now the pedant in me looks at the ‘dishes ready to be loaded’ side and thinks ‘Well, that should say “ready to be loaded with dishes”, or just “ready to be loaded” because saying what it says looks at it from the dishes’ point of view, not from the dishwasher’s’. We don’t know if dishes are ready to be loaded. If they’ve just been put away, none of them will be ready, at least not till anyone’s used them. If I had been making the sign, I would have made the sign say ‘load me’ and ‘empty me (if I’m finished)’.

But the point I’m trying to get at in a very roundabout kind of way, is that in this situation, it doesn’t really matter what is written on the sign, as long as people can glean some idea that one side indicates the dishes might be washed and should be put away, and on the other, that users may put dishes in. It could have just been a double-sided dot: red on one side, green on the other. Sometimes, the words are superfluous.

One of my favourite bits of graffiti is of two stencilled words that read: ARBITRARY SIGN.

The sign is saying “This is a piece of graffiti”. In this case, the medium is the message

I know of a company that somtimes hired a professional copywriter to come up with ad headlines and slogans. He charged top dollar for what he did, which was fair enough: he was in high demand and provided a very good product.

Most of the time.

Sometimes (not that often, though) he’d be a little bit off the mark. He’d do the work, put the time into reflecting on the brief, come up with a lot of ideas, refine those ideas and present this company with several options. But for whatever reason—a misinterpretation of the brief, an inference taken from a throwaway comment, whatever—he didn’t quite hit the mark with the tone. And the work wasn’t terrible; it wasn’t thrown back in his face; he wasn’t run out of town. He just didn’t quite hit the mark.

It happens.

Now, the company didn’t want to spend any more on the expensive copywriter so that he might go back (for another hour or two) and get it right. Instead, they gave the job to the employee that books the ads, who reworked it and got the tone right. But in doing so, made the copy grammatically incorrect, making a subject/object agreement error that wasn’t immediately apparent to the client who was just checking for tone by this stage.

The ad went to print and, of course, the error was picked up later. (Which is too late.)

The moral of the story is that good copywriters put more into their work than just cool ideas. They care about syntax, they worry about semantics and they pore over every conjunction or preposition.

Getting the tone spot-on 100% of the time is a bonus.

(As an aside, someone once asked me what difference a preposition could make to the meaning of a sentence. I offered “I just threw out last night’s dinner” vs “I just threw up last night’s dinner”.)

I was asked by a colleague to edit a small publication recently. An eight-page newsletter-type thing. It was written by professional people who know how to speak and write English very well. Almost as an afterthought, she asked me to give it a once-over, hoping I’d maybe pick up any spelling errors or such.

Every page, every article, almost every paragraph had something that needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t that things were all “wrong” but there were a lot of things that were just inconsistent or things that people deem not-that-important.

I handed the marked-up copy back to her and her response was “That’s amazing”. Not an amazing job, or an amazing talent but just amazement that there could be that many things that could be done better to improve the quality and professionalism of the newsletter.

What things aren’t you picking up on by not having a writer/editor look at the words you’re producing?