How to Make Your Writing Not About Nothing
By Becky Lang
If you’re like me, you hate reading people’s tips about writing. They’re too often about finding your spirit, reaffirming yourself, and taking a chance. In essence, they’re about nothing – and not in that cool way that “Seinfeld” is about nothing. My whole life, one of my biggest enemies has been the flurry of messages that are actually about nothing, messages that surround us in school, in books and in marketing. As a copywriter, I want to fight these nothing messages, but first, I want to show anyone who cares how to spot them at a glance. So here they are, my go-to red flags for spotting when something is about nothing:
1. SUPER-POSITIVITY!
- Happy Words: Words like “fabulous,” “extraordinary,” “great,” and “show-stopping” don’t actually mean anything, other than that the person talking likes what they’re talking about. Usually the motivation behind packing writing with these terms is either that you don’t know what you are talking about enough to use more specific terms, or else you are trying to sell someone something. When people sense either of those things, they tend to zone out. Attention lost. Score: Zero.
-Euphemisms: Going back to my favorite example of bad copywriting, the new social media service Path, euphemisms are unreliable and occasionally downright creepy. Path sent me an email saying a friend “had shared his Path with me,” adding, “ P.S. If you would prefer not to see [his] moments, simply pause him.” Occasionally an attempt to put a positive spin on a non-positive thing can make you seem like an alien, if not totally insincere.
-Affirmations: A lot of writing that I read is meant to congratulate a certain mindset or movement, or reaffirm what people already think about something. Motivational speakers are excellent at this. Leadership is great! Life is worth living! These are very big ways to say nothing.
2. YOU AREN’T LEARNING ANYTHING
-Lack of information: This might be my #1 tip for writing something about something: Make sure all of your paragraphs are at least 60% information. This is surprisingly hard for a majority of people, and I confess I have trespassed against this rule many times. Nonetheless, there is an instinct in writers to fill their paragraphs with clever puns and decked-out sentences full of imagery without exposing readers to anything concrete. Chances are, if they are reading about your topic, they don’t already know everything about it. Figure out what information is in your brain and not theirs, and use that as your number one go-to. If the information is not yet in your own brain, at least research your topic on Wikipedia for awhile. You’d be surprised how often people don’t even do that.
3. WRITING THAT DOES NOT RESEMBLE HUMAN CONVERSATION
-Write the way people talk. It’s that simple. People will sigh with relief.
4. SENSE OF HUMOR IS COMPLETELY LACKING
-I tend to hold everything that isn’t at least a little bit funny as suspect. Let’s go back to aliens – picture yourself explaining the topic to aliens and you will automatically see the absurdity in anything. People put brown powder on their faces. They drink wheat fermented with bacteria. I’m not saying that copy on a wedding cake box has to be a crack-up, but it’s easier not to get lost in an almost competitive (and thus insincere) flurry of emotions when you remember that nothing goes to plan, and if we just ease up and see the humor in things, we are suddenly back in reality. And that’s a good place to start if you want to write about something.