I’ve never forgotten it. She looked at me from behind horn-rimmed spectacles and said, “Why do you hide behind all those big words?”

It changed me for ever. I was a 22 year old account executive in an advertising agency. I had to brief this senior, elderly copywriter with what the client wanted. Doing the finals of the Advertising exams I knew all the technical terms. “Target market” was a new phrase, “opportunities to see” was another. Commercial television was very new. She was senior to me and a bit scary so she had the lot, all the big words, all in one paragraph. Wallop.

The thought of hiding behind big words was new to me and it hurt, because it was true.

Later I made a specific study of writing and speaking in simple language and I’ve used it ever since. The lack of precision is possibly part of the reason why much of my stuff is not too acceptable to academia but then academics are not in my target market.

You are.

We all see masses of incomprehensible junk. Computers must be the worst. At this moment, I am going in to the first three sites at random assuming I’m looking for a bit of software, something about palmtop machines and a scanner. What follows is from the only three sites I opened. It is bog standard junk.

From a Play Golf software programme. “CPU Type Pentium 200 MMX or faster/Graphics Any 4Mb Direct X 6.0 compatible graphics/” Your nine year old can understand it probably, but he/she does not play golf.

This wondrous selling pitch is from the second site selling Linux for palmtops “A new kernel for the netbook, supporting 32MB or 64 MB memory, large ram disks and PPP, and a new initrd filesystem can now be found at openpsion. The initrd is borrowed from the openzaurus project.

Compactflash is not yet supported. Here is a screen shot of linux on the netBook showing mounted filesystems, the output of ifconfig, and the memory available. See the netBook HOWTO at the “howtos” link above”. Love us, the Linux promoters have go a long way to go yet. Would this stuff make you switch out of Windows?

From a retail seller of scanners. “In addition, the ScanMaker 6800 offers high 4800 x 2400 dpi resolution, 48-bit color depth, FireWire and Hi-Speed USB (USB 2.0) interfaces, plus an integrated 4″ x 5″ transparency adapter.”

Now the following is better. From the Which? Report on low price scanners. Everything is in simple-to-understand phrases.

· What the Twain does

· How to choose the right scale and resolution

· How to edit your image at scan stage

· And our hints and tips for getting the most from your scans.

OK. HERE IS THE WAY TO DO IT. FIVE THINGS TO DO.

You need to use a lot of highlighting, and bullet points, because people scan the page rather than reading it thoroughly. But sometimes you need paragraphs of text.

These are from the notes I made many long years ago. Send them around your technical people, your sales people, your customer service people, your finance people. Use these rules for writing your web site.

1. Keep your sentences short. Get rid of conjunctions, turn a long sentence into two.

2. Use alternatives for long, multi-syllable words.

3. Use personal names, personal pronouns

4. Add the following phrase after every technical term, “This means that……”

5. Break up long paragraphs, add headings.

The shortest sentence in this pricing tip is two words. The longest word in this pricing tip is incomprehensible. So I failed.

Will it help you get better web results? Well, put it this way. If your proposition is up against a rival proposition and your customer can understand yours but cannot understand your competitors’ are you not more likely to get the business? Have a look at this page on our web site. Then ask your Mum if she can understand what you have written.

John Winkler

www.bayviewkentallen.co.uk/winterbreakhillwalking.html