Writing Boots

Saw a pithy LinkedIn post yesterday:

The only problem is, I’m not sure today’s AI users know what the word “hack” means. I explained it, in a Writing Boots piece in 2021.

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A graphic designer I worked with a very long time ago once received my copy and began laying it out into a newsletter. After an interval, she yelled over the cubicle wall: “Dave, the sidebar on page three is three inches short. You need to write some more shit.”

That’s what I think about—still—whenever I hear someone describe writing as “producing content.” I think of it as “writing some more shit.”

Or this new term that I’m seeing writers using to describe what they do: They say they do “content writing.”

That means doing video scripts, blog posts, email newsletters, speeches, social media posts, podcast series, white papers, website copy, landing pages—what have you.

It means you’ll write any old shit that needs to be writ, to fit.

There used to be another word for that sort of writer, but it became impolite to utter, because at some point it described too many writers too harshly. As I described it here once: “A corporate communication hack is someone who with a straight face calls the new corporate podcast ‘slightly irreverent,’ the new employee video ‘kind of fun’ and the CEO’s blog ‘a bit edgy.’”

Not everything we write is art; but writers worthy of the name should always have a communication purpose higher than filling empty spaces with blank words arranged to look look, sound and smell like ideas or feelings.

And at the very least, we ought to know the difference between writing and “content writing.” To paraphrase e.e. cummings (as I often do):

Olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some content I will not eat”

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There always were and there always will be, a hell of a lot of people who have no faith that meticulously chosen words communicate better than hastily chosen ones. There are more yet who don’t care about communicating better in the first place. Most of these people are truck drivers or accountants. But some of them purport to make their living as professional communicators. Those people, whether they type their own clichés or prompt AI to burp them up, are hacks.

And you and I, my serious and honest writer friend, should steer well clear of these people, lest we get some of their cold-fart stench up our noses and in our clothes.

This ran here in 2015, a year before I started a company and began putting on strategic summits of my own. —DM

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Ragan Communications is holding a “Strategic Communications and Storytelling Summit,” this fall in Dallas. I’m sure it’s going to be a great event; Ragan puts them on reliably. But I’m not nuts about that title.

First, there’s “Summit.” I’ve been to lots of communication conferences. None were held at Yalta, and at no time did we discuss nuclear disarmament treaties. We bitched about our bosses, and drank liquor.

But it’s the rest of the title that itches my anus. Does it mean half the sessions will be on strategic communications, and the other half on storytelling? Or will half the sessions be on strategic communications and the other half on strategic storytelling? Or will all the sessions will be on communications and storytelling that are strategic?

It doesn’t matter, of course, because every story ever told, and every communication ever attempted, could be described as strategic. Via stories and other means, just about all communication is done for some reason: in order to impress girls, bamboozle prime ministers, fend off accusations, order a beer, or hug or punch a person without having to get up.

One of the worst things that can be said about a person is—and I should know, because I’m sure it’s been rightly said of me—”He just likes to hear himself talk.” (“Someone is boring me,” said Dylan Thomas one night, in his cups and rambling, at the White Horse Tavern. “I think it’s me.”)

Talking just to talk is a lesser strategy, but a strategy nevertheless. Another lesser purpose for storytelling is merely to pass the time. But we don’t really think anybody’s doing that in corporate communications, do we?

Then why do we so endlessly protest that our communication, and our communication conferences, are “strategic”? As opposed to whose?

I think what Ragan is trying to promise—and what I try to promise, with many of my own marketing promotions—and really, what all professional communicators are trying to promise when they claim their communications are “strategic”—is this: What we do is worth the money you spend.

If we wanted to be just slightly more straight-up about this, we’d replace “strategic” with more specific words, like, “worthwhile,” “disciplined,” “effective,” “thoughtful” and “smart.”

So we’d all be striving to make our communications not more strategic, exactly. Maybe just more worthy of the expense and the time they consume, and the risks they impose. And where would we learn how to do it? Of course, at the “Gathering for Worthwhile Communications and Thoughtful Storytelling.”

Doesn’t that sound like a more convivial and candid event? But your asshole boss wouldn’t send you, because it sounds like too much fun.