We’ve had some excellent responses – which you can see here on Storify – and choosing a winner has been very tricky indeed.

The paragraph given was:

It is generally agreed among writing specialists that the more unnecessary detail you include in a piece of prose, the more work it becomes for the typical reader. Or as the English poet Robert Browning expressed it: ‘Less is more.’

What to keep in?

This paragraph breaks down into three concepts: first, that this is advice from writing experts; second, that unnecessary detail makes it harder for your reader; and, third, that Browning summed it up with ‘Less is more’.

These three elements are vital to conveying the meaning of the paragraph. Remove the first and you lose the context. Remove the second and you lose the advice. Remove the third and you lose the wit.

Most people who responded sensed this and kept all three, reducing the character count by trimming. But a few opted for a more strident approach. For example:

@emphasiswriting Good prose is brief. #EmphasisTest

(Doesn’t give any advice about how to achieve it, or why, and omits the quotation.)

@emphasiswriting adage “Less is more” = good both for reader & writer #EmphasisTest

(Doesn’t put the quotation in context, or give advice about how to achieve it.)

These are both nice and snappy, and work well on their own. But they don’t convey the whole sense of the original paragraph. Whenever you’re editing, especially if it’s someone else’s material, be cautious when cutting content.

Make sure that you only cut unnecessary detail, and otherwise restrict yourself to tightening up the wording and phrasing. Be careful, also, not to introduce suggestions that weren’t in the original. For example:

@emphasiswriting #EmphasisTest At least writing specialists agree on one thing – leave out unnecessary detail

(Omits the quotation, then adds a sense of incompleteness with ‘at least’ and ‘[agree] on one thing’.)

Choose your words carefully

When you’re trying to shave off a character here and a character there, it can be tempting to switch to a shorter word or an abbreviation, even if it slightly changes the meaning. Treat this temptation with caution.

In the following example, the tweeter saved five letters by replacing ‘unnecessary details’ with ‘useless details’.

@emphasiswriting The more useless details in a text, the harder for the typical reader to get it:”less is more”said R.Browning #EmphasisTest

However, useless and unnecessary have subtly different meanings. The former is of no use, no merit, ever. The latter is simply not needed – possibly ever, or possibly just at this time or in this situation. For the sake of brevity, needless could be a good alternative. It’s one character longer than useless, but then you can scrape one back again by cutting details to detail. Be strict, too, with your contractions. The there’s in the tweet below, for example, feels rather unnatural.

@emphasiswriting ‘Less is more’ – the more unnecessary detail there’s in a text, the more work it will take to read. #EmphasisTest

An alternative might have been to spell out the there is, but contract the it will to it’ll.

Keep an eye on tone

As anyone who’s ever sent a ‘cheeky’ email that landed them in hot water will know, in writing there’s a fine line between wit and bad manners. You can’t count on the person reading your message in the same playful spirit that you wrote it. Combine this with the fact that brevity can sometimes come across as brusqueness, and you’ve got a small but perfectly formed powder keg.

I don’t think I’d dare to word client advice like this, for example:

@emphasiswriting Pro writers and R. Browning agree–keep it simple, stupid. #EmphasisTest

The shortlist We’ve received many excellent tweets, and choosing between them has been very difficult. We loved this one (though note it comes from a professional editor):

@emphasiswriting Writing experts agree: Needless detail=more work for readers. Robert Browning said it better: “Less is more.” #EmphasisTest

And this one (again, a professional editor):

@emphasiswriting Most writing experts advise: to help your reader, omit unnecessary details. “Less is more”—Robert Browning #EmphasisTest

And this one (though we’d suggest using a single em- or en-dash before ‘Robert Browning’, rather than brackets):

@emphasiswriting #EmphasisTest Tip from writing specialists: too much detail makes readers work too hard. “Less is more” (Robert Browning).

And many more.

But the one we’ve chosen as the winner is:

@emphasiswriting Pro writers broadly agree: excess detail = more work for the av. reader. Or ‘Less is more’—Robert Browning. #EmphasisTest

So congratulations to @WalesPPA, AKA Jac Bond, soon to be the happy owner of a slick, swish, shiny prize, the envy of all his acquaintances. (OK, OK, it’s a book on mnemonics. But we think it’s very cool.)

So, what would you have done, smartypants?

Before we opened the challenge to the public, both Emphasis CEO Rob Ashton and I had a go ourselves. Feel free to use the comments section below to put us through the mill, as we surely deserve.

Rob’s version:

@emphasiswriting Most writing experts say extra detail means extra work for the reader. Browning was right: less is more. #EmphasisTest

And mine:

@EmphasisWriting The more unnecessary detail you put in a piece, the harder it is to read. To quote Browning, ‘Less is more.’ #EmphasisTest

<<Read the March 2013 e-bulletin

The example given was: ’The consensus was the chief executive was right’ vs ‘The consensus was that the chief executive was right’.

Our correspondent had written the former, but his colleague had insisted on the latter.

Which do you think is correct? Or, more pertinently, which sounds better to you?

When that is used as a conjunction, it’s a matter of preference whether you leave it in or not. For example, I would naturally put a that in ‘it’s great to hear that you enjoyed the course’. Personally, I think it sounds better. I wouldn’t, however, write ‘Personally, I think that it sounds better’. Because, personally, I don’t think it does.

So, in my opinion, the example given is one of those instances where a that improves the flow. I would write ‘the consensus was that the chief executive was right’.

Take care not to confuse

Sometimes, you’ll hear someone claim that that can always be left out. That’s certainly what I was told in my journalism training many moons ago. However, it’s not quite that simple. (Is it ever?)

It’s good to be concise, and concise writing generally aids readability. But be careful when omitting that that you don’t accidentally make a sentence harder to read.

The Guardian’s style guide gives the following example, where the direct quote is: ‘Nothing by way of an explanation will be forthcoming.’

If you write this in reported speech as ‘he said nothing by way of an explanation would be forthcoming’, the reader may begin the sentence thinking ‘ah, he said nothing by way of an explanation’ – and then have to backtrack a couple of seconds later. In this case, ‘he said that nothing by way of an explanation would be forthcoming’ is much clearer.

A versatile word

In Modern English Usage, HW Fowler explains that that has five main grammatical functions:

• Demonstrative pronoun – That was what I meant

• Demonstrative adjective – Why did you take that picture of me?

• Demonstrative adverb – It didn’t hurt that much

• Relative pronoun – It was not the drug that had done it

• Conjunction – He had assumed that we would want to see him.

It’s only the fifth of these usages in which that is optional. And there are some cases where it’s more often left in than others.

Verbs of suggestion or wish, such as suggest, insist, propose, recommend and demand, tend to feel a bit bare without a that, as do constructions such as ‘the decision was (that)’, ‘the conclusion was (that)’, ‘the solution is (that)’ and ‘the consensus was (that)’.

If you’d like to read more, there’s a post in our blog archives here: How do you feel about that?

And don’t be afraid to bring out the ‘personal choice’ card on this one if challenged! (Though if you are the challenger, can we suggest that you phrase it: ‘That that that that sentence contains – is that correct?’)

The Académie française, the state body appointed to protect the French language, has announced that the English word is to be eschewed in favour of the French mot-dièse.

Mot-dièse has attracted some criticism, partly because it can’t actually be written as a Twitter hashtag itself, as it contains a hyphen. It’s also inaccurate, say its critics, because dièse is the name of the musical sharp symbol (♯), which is vertically aligned, unlike the slanted hashtag symbol (#).

Nevertheless, hashtag has joined the list of 5,509-and-counting English words that the Académie says must be avoided in official government documents, as well as by schoolteachers and the media.

Other frowned-upon English terms, and their French replacements, include:

breaking news – information de dernière minute
early adopter – acheteur pionnier
email address – adresse de courier électronique
spin doctor – façonneur d’image
usability/user friendliness – convivialité
virtual shopping – achat sur simulation électronique.

French language in crisis

The list of banned words is part of a drive by the French government to reverse the trend for adopting Anglo Saxon words, following a report in 2008 that found the French language was in ‘deep crisis’.

The report called for an ‘offensive to ensure that French is developed in a confident manner’. It said: ‘This is a battle in which the real stakes are measured in terms of both political influence and economic growth.’

But can government policies really influence the words that the public adopt and use? Only time will tell. The main challenge may be that the English words on the list are catchier and more succinct than the recommended French alternatives. Courrier électronique rather than email – is that really going to catch on?

Herve Bourges, one of the authors of the report, himself admits: ‘In France, the concept of Francophonie appears retrogressive, obsolete and unheard especially among the younger generations.’

Wordy French alternatives to snappy English terms are unlikely to help change this.

French words in English

French and English have been borrowing, adopting and adapting words from each other for nearly 1,000 years, since the Norman conquest in 1066. More than a third of all English words are derived directly or indirectly from French, and it’s estimated that English speakers who have never studied French already know 15,000 French words. Don’t believe it? Test yourself here.

Some of the words and phrases that we’ve borrowed or adapted from French are easy to spot – raison d’être, bon appétit and pied-à-terre, for example – while others are less immediately obvious, such as entrepreneur, sergeant and repartee.

Often, the French words we use add a little je ne sais quoi, a touch of the risqué or simply an élégance lacking in the English equivalent.

‘Fat liver’, for example, doesn’t sound anywhere near as appetising as foie gras. Touché, originally a fencing term, has a succinctness that ‘you’ve got me’ can’t touch. A rendezvous sounds sexier than a meeting, a soiree more intriguing than a party. ‘Brown-haired woman’ lacks the sauciness of brunette (a word rarely used in modern French). And in the case of blond(e), we’ve not only adopted the word, but the masculine/feminine spelling convention too.

A fair exchange?

English would certainly be a less interesting and expressive language if we were to somehow root out and remove the French influence. Perhaps there is a trade to be had. As we benefit from the French gift for elegance, so they can benefit from our gift for getting to the point.

Or, is the Académie right to take action? Has the exchange now become too weighted in one direction, and are measures needed to protect the French language? What do you think?

‘Is it okay to write “OK” as “ok”? Or should the abbreviated form always be in upper case?’

Little did he know the amount of discussion his question would generate in the office, writes Cathy Relf.

The simple answer to Tim’s question is that ‘ok’, while just about acceptable in text messages, isn’t really OK for more formal contexts. The generally accepted form is ‘OK’ – upper case, with no full stops.

But, as there seems to be some appetite for a more complicated answer, here’s a little further information.

There are several wildly differing theories regarding where OK comes from, from the German ‘ohne Korrektur’ to the Ulster Scots ‘och aye’ and even the Wolof ‘waw-kay’. But the most widely accepted theory was presented by Allen Walker Read of Columbia University in 1963 and has its roots much closer to home.

He traced OK back to its first appearance in print, in the Boston Morning Post, in 1839. It featured in a satirical article on bad spelling, as a humorous abbreviation of ‘all correct’ – deliberately misspelled ‘orl korrect’.

(… And let’s just pause a moment here to chuckle at ourselves for discussing how we should correctly spell a word that started life as a deliberate misspelling.)

Some people prefer to write ‘okay’, because it looks more like a word and allows them to avoid the jarring appearance of block capitals. In Modern English Usage, HW Fowler writes: ‘The alternative form okay is especially useful as a verb (= to say OK to, to authorise), allowing more comfortable inflected forms (okays, okayed, okaying) than OK does.’

However, many insist that the ‘okay’ spelling shouldn’t be allowed. This is because when the word first appeared in print, in 1839, it was spelt ‘OK’. The spelling ‘okay’ developed some time later. A quick look at Google’s Ngram Viewer suggests that ‘OK’ had at least a 100-year head start on ‘okay’, but that for most of the past 100 years the two have been neck and neck. It’s only in the past 20 years or so that ‘OK’ has surged decisively back into the lead.

And that brings us tidily back to the present day. The most widely accepted spelling is OK, and for a quiet life that’s definitely the one to go with. But if you want to make a stand for okay, that’s OK by us.

Further reading:
• John McIntyre’s OK by me post in the Baltimore Sun explains the ‘orl korrect’ joke in more detail
• Stan Carey’s blog post Oke is OK discusses more variant spellings
• and for the truly dedicated, Allan Metcalf’s book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word (Oxford University Press, £12.99) is apparently a brilliant read.

Here are four tips that you’d naturally apply to face-to-face or written communication. Apply the same rules to your tweets and you’ll soon find you’re opening up a whole new channel of sector-specific news, networking and chat.

1. Strike a balance

One of the trickier aspects of tweeting in connection with work is that you need to balance being professional with being personable. If everything you tweet is dry, factual and work-related, few people are likely to want to follow you. On the other hand, if you only ever tweet about football and nights out, you’re likely to alienate colleagues and clients with whom you have only profession in common.

The answer is moderation. Of course it’s fine to tweet about both work and football – just make sure there’s a balance. Twitter is an informal space and your followers are hoping to see a little personality, otherwise they’d simply look you up on your company website. They just don’t want to know what you had for breakfast.

Don’t monitor your follower numbers too closely, though, or read too much into losing a few now and then. If your follower count is on a general upward trend, that’s good. But don’t check it more than once a week. It will fluctuate daily and hourly, partly because some people use programs that follow and unfollow accounts on their behalf. Incidentally, we wouldn’t recommend you do this, any more than you’d employ someone to make and dispose of your face-to-face acquaintances.

2. Don’t be a bore

Remember, just like a conversation in the office or the pub, it’s not meant to be a monologue. If people mention you or respond to your tweets, reply to them. If the only thing that responds to your tweets is tumbleweed, resist the urge to just repeat the same tweets again, and instead ask yourself why.

Perhaps you tweeted at a time when people tend not to be looking at Twitter. (There are apps that can help you with this.) Commuting hours and lunchbreaks are often good times to get conversations going. Or perhaps your tweets aren’t reaching many people simply because you don’t have many followers – in which case, try following other people and responding to their tweets. They’re likely to do the same in return. Or perhaps you’re tweeting things that don’t invite a response. Try asking a question to get things going.

In fact, one of the best things about Twitter is that it puts a whole community of communicators at your fingertips, many of whom are willing to share their opinions. It’s a great opportunity for brainstorming and feedback. For example, when I was planning this article, I thought it might be helpful to start by asking people what kind of behaviour they disliked on Twitter. The answers came flooding in (occasionally a little swearily, be warned), and I’ve used Storify to collate them.

3. Keep it wise … and legal

Remember that unless you’ve set your account to ‘protected’ (where only your followers can see your tweets), everything you write is visible to everyone, whether they’re a member of Twitter or not. So it’s not the place to complain about your boss, your colleagues, your clients … or anyone else.

Be as careful with the truth on Twitter as you would when publishing material in any other place. Libel is the publication of matter that is false and defamatory. That includes tweets and RTs, even if you delete them later and even if your account is set to protected. Earlier this month, lawyers for Lord McAlpine identified more than 10,000 potentially libellous tweets incorrectly linking him with child sex abuse. The fact that the tweets were triggered by a misleading Newsnight report hasn’t prevented Lord McAlpine taking action against some of the tweeters. Nor has the fact that in some cases they made only mysterious observations, rather than direct allegations.

There’s a simple way to stay out of this kind of trouble: never tweet or retweet anything that you’re not one hundred per cent sure is true, especially if it has the potential to damage the reputation of a person or a company.

4. Learn the lingo

You’re probably as keen on LOLs and ROFLs as we are (ie not very), so we’re not going to discuss those here. However, there are a few Twitter-specific abbreviations that you need to know, if you don’t already.

DM – direct message. These can only be seen by the person you’re sending them to. Everything else is visible to everyone. You can only DM someone if they already follow you, and they can only reply if you follow them.

RT – retweet. There are two ways to RT. Either you can click the retweet symbol to replicate the original message exactly, or you can do a manual retweet by copying and pasting the text, preceded by ‘RT @username’. This allows you to add your own comment at the start of the tweet.

MT – modified tweet. Sometimes when you do a manual RT you’ll run out of space and have to cut a little of the original. In this case, write ‘MT @username’ instead.

HT – hat tip. When you want to tweet about something that you found out about via another user, but you don’t want to use their own words, it’s polite to mention them with an HT (or a ‘via’).

#hashtags. These are meant to make searching for subjects easier. So, for example, if you’re tweeting something about Brighton, you might hashtag the word #Brighton. However, people often use them to add witticisms to the end of their tweets. #becausetheythinkitsclever (Incidentally, you can’t use punctuation in a hashtag. Yes, that ‘its’ pained me.)

FF – follow Fridays. On Fridays, some users share their favourite tweeters to encourage others to follow them. It’s a compliment, so it’s polite to thank them. But retweeting it to show off your popularity is a no-no.

In the December issue of the Write Away e-bulletin, we show you five ways that tools and apps can make your tweeting more effective.

Our example CV below is pretty good, overall. But it contains:

• 1 spelling mistake
• 3 apostrophe catastrophes
• 3 capital crimes
• 1 sentence chock full of clichés
• 1 clear sign that the writer ran out of space
• 1 link to potentially unprofessional material.

Not the best recipe for success, and yet these mistakes make it into countless CVs.

Don’t despair, though. Delve into our infographic below, take note of the ten pointers and your CV will soon take a turn for the better. We’ve included a lot of information, so we recommend clicking on the ‘Toggle full page’ icon in the bottom right corner. (If you’re on a tablet or mobile device, we recommend clicking here to view the infographic directly in your browser.)

For more graduate writing tips, read this guide on how to shake off the academic style: How to graduate to business.

« Read the November 2012 e-bulletin

Feel free to use this infographic (unmodified, of course) on your website. You can embed the Zoom.it widget using this code:

<mce:script _mce_src="http://zoom.it/qL43.js?width=572&amp;height=808px"></mce:script>

And display the fullsize image using this code:

<img src="http://www.writing-skills.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/CV_emphasis3.jpg" _mce_src="http://www.writing-skills.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/CV_emphasis3.jpg">

How did you get on? Full marks, we hope! Feel free to show off in the comments field below. Also, let us know if you have a quandary you’d like us to do a 60-second fix for in future.

And if you got any wrong and want to revisit the articles, here’s a handy index:

Bear/bare
Compare to/compare with
Complimentary/complementary
Different to/from/than
Judgement/judgment
Palate/palette/pallet
Spelt/spelled, learnt/learned and dreamt/dreamed
Substitute for/with.

<<Read the September 2012 e-bulletin

Just My Type, by Simon Garfield, starts off with an anecdote about Steve Jobs and his ‘world changing’ idea of offering a choice of fonts on home computers, but soon gets more interesting. One quickly realises it is a volume of short stories. Sure, the fonts are the hero of the story in every case, but the plots in each chapter are driven by some of the staples of literature – sex, power and money. The section ‘Gotham is Go’ suggests that Barack Obama was propelled to power by the canny use of the Gotham font, which, according to Garfield, managed to look ‘both establishment and fresh’.

Another chapter, Gill Sans, wanders into the dark world of the designer Eric Gill, a man whose sexual experiments make Caligula look like a chap with a great deal of self-restraint in the bedroom. Then there is a section on the anger caused in design circles by the popularity of the font Comic Sans, which seems to so offend design cognoscenti that a whole movement against it, driven by angry typo-maniacs, is still active. Who knew that this whole world was going on around us?

Just My Type is a really good and worthwhile read. My only problem is that the world around me now has another shouting voice in it. Another agent for me, a naturally cynical man, to feel I am being manipulated by. Choosing a font on my laptop now seems like a loaded decision and a statement about how I want my writing to be.

I have conducted a pseudo-scientific experiment armed with my new typographical knowledge, which involves looking at the door numbers on my neighbours’ houses. It’s quite surprising what we project into the world with these small choices. Number 8 has gone for a rustic look, suggesting a longing for a country life. Number 15 has opted for bold sans-serif numerals in stainless steel, screaming ‘I AM MODERN’ into the street. I still have the shabby brass 4, set in Times, that was on the house when I moved in. I wonder what that says about me.

Just My Type, by Simon Garfield, is published by Profile Books, RRP £9.99.

Gordon MacDonald is a writer, curator, editor and publisher.

<<Read the August 2012 e-bulletin

Our guest in this special episode of Communication Lab is Ryan Holiday, who dropped out of college at the age of 19 and went on to become global marketing director of American Apparel while still in his early 20s.

A sometimes secretive figure, he’s been behind major publicity coups, including orchestrating a fake smear campaign for one of his own clients – the controversial American author Tucker Max.

With no budget, and in under two weeks, he secured coverage in everything from the Chicago Tribune to the Washington Post. All of which is covered in his new book, Trust me, I’m lying – confessions of a media manipulator.

In this hard-hitting exclusive interview, he reveals why he’s finally stepping out from the shadows.

Further reading

The internal league table of page views for each Gawker.com blogger is at www.gawker.com/stats

For more on Ryan, to www.ryanholiday.net
The website for the book itself is here: www.trustmeimlying.com

<<Read the August 2012 e-bulletin

35 minutes

How do you approach new business in an era when cold calls rarely reach decision-makers and everyone’s on the guard against spam? Guest Bryan Kreuzberger, the founder of Breakthrough Email, shares his formula for writing an email that the recipient will both open and act on.

Plus: how words can rewire your brain, and the power of focus and rapt attention.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links:

Bryan’s website is Breakthrough Email, where you can see him talking more about his technique, or you can download his PDF guide here.

The three books mentioned are:

• Words Can Change Your Brain by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
• The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor
• Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher.

You can try the selective attention test that Rob refers to, with the basketball, here on YouTube.

And here’s the Harvard Business Review article, The Unimportance of Practically Everything.

What did you make of  the podcast?  Are you thinking of trying out Bryan’s tips? Share your thoughts in the comment field below, or by tweeting Bryan (@bryankreuz), Rob (@Robert_Ashton), Andy (@doctorpod) and Emphasis (@EmphasisWriting).