Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Sometimes the notes are as good as the piece they would have spawned (other times not)

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Clearing out my Writing Boots idea file the other day, I found in these posts that never a certain poesy of their own. —ed.

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It is possible to have social skills SO RADICALLY BAD and narcissism SO ACUTE … that normal human beings haven’t build up defenses against them. It renders the entire world defenseless in the face of your requests–and the more insane the requests, the more defenseless the world. This is how Hitler got started.

LADY IN MOVIE

ESSENTIAL CEO PROBLEM: TURNING TO RICH PEOPLE FOR HELP! (notes from Axios meeting, sister’s observation about how the first thing the newly rich do with money is separate themselves from others, McDonald’s CEO quote about his own “very narrow worldview.”)

“functioning alcoholic”?! how about “functioning teetotaler”?

It’s not always good when speakers go off script, but the REASONS they do are entirely good. They want to connect! (Go off my own script–IN REHEARSALS!)

Change is the only constant.

Who moved my cheese?

“Events, dear boy, events.”

MY INCONTINENCE STORY

If it weren’t for eulogies, funerals would be a real drag

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I was the funeral last month of Jerry Pitzen, father of my pal Chris. I always feel a little guilty at funerals, over the part of me that’s so eagerly looking forward to hearing the eulogy.

This one didn’t disappoint, even from the start.

“The story goes in the Spring of 1942, when I, Don Pitzen, newly born, was taken from St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital, to the upstairs kitchen on Whipple Street, my brother, 2 1/2-year-old Jerry, eloquently said, ‘Put him on the floor, I want to play with him.’ So our play of 80 years began.”

CAPTION: Don and Jerry Pitzen, young railroad men, 1946.

Why are eulogies so reliably good?

First, they’re usually told not necessarily by the person closest to the deceased, but by the best storyteller who was close to the deceased. This is a good choice.

Also: People question the integrity of eulogies because they focus on the good aspects of the deceased. But really, shouldn’t we always be doing that, in life? Should I be known as an above average writer, or as a bad soccer player?

And finally: Whatever is left out of a eulogy, what winds up being said has to pass a pretty holy smell test. It’s pretty hard to spin and lie in a church, in front of God and a couple hundred people who knew the person, too.

So ultimately, a lot of truth is gotten across in eulogies. A lot of human grace is demonstrated by eulogists. A lot of colorful stories are told, and told well. And a lot of really constructive, community-affirming communication gets done.

Don Pitzen wrapped up his eulogy by sharing that his dying brother had asked him to say something at his funeral. “I assumed he meant something nice.”

So I did what he would have done, I made a list; rearranged it; fleshed it out. As a [former] priest I’ve had many weddings and funerals. At a wedding nice and funny things are usually said about the bride and groom. At a funeral things tend to be more serious. Things are said about the deceased; who, we believe, or don’t believe, can hear what is said. I had a golden opportunity. Jerry could know the “something” I was going to say. So I showed him the “something” I had written. He read it, slowly and carefully. He finished, looked up from his bed, winked his eye, pointed his finger at me and said, “That’s it. That’s what I wanted. Give copies to all my family.”

“Anything to add? More or less to be said?”

“No.”

Is that true enough for you?

It’s true enough for me.

Like most eulogies I see.

Why Axios is worse than nothing (and what it could do to be better)

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I just realized that when I see an appealing Axios headline I groan with the same dread I feel when someone on Facebook posts something, “long and dense, but worth your time.”

Is it?

Axios articles, meanwhile, are short and light and not worth my time. In fact for me, they are almost impossible to read.

The upshot: Why? Because they keep interrupting themselves with those boldfaced copy-confusers that leave me wondering, “What makes this the ‘upshot,’ exactly?” When I should just be reading the goddamn copy.

The downdraft: Axios articles are so short, they don’t need these bold bits any more than a haiku needs a pull-out quote.

The assgrab: Axios is pretending to have a formula (they call it “smart brevity”), but all they have is a format that looks digestible but actually goes down like thumb tacks.

The throughput: I can’t remember a single phrase or even a quote from anything I’ve ever read from Axios. In fact, I can remember only two stories. On one, I was a source. And the other was last Thursday. (Read on.) Everything you read in Axios is unsurprising; it must be, because to get across something counterintuitive or unconventional, your source needs room to explain—and the Axios reporter or editor needs courage of conviction, which is not an Axios trademark.

The backsplash: Most Axios articles contain almost nothing of substance or sense, and the “smart brevity” format—that hundreds of corporations are paying Axios for the license to plague their employees with, by the way—is just a disguise, in the way that the old Dewar’s Profile used to make even the most inane interview look “juicy.”

The caveat: Axios is trying to appear to do something useful, by creating community-based newsletters. I subscribe to Axios Communicators, which is trying to basically recreate what PR and comms trade newsletters used to do before they all went out of business 20 years ago: trend stories mixed with “corporate moves,” which let communicators who get new jobs see their names in bold. But Axios’ format—and also, that format’s lack of room for iconic voices from the community and its absolute reliance on conventional wisdom—condemns all these efforts to be just … so … shallow. And so how rich and robust can the resulting “community” become? Not very.

The duck snort: Axios Communicators truly could become a useful thing in our business (just as I imagine all Axios community newsletters could be useful, too). But like all Axios products, Axios Communicators appeals to the skimmers who want to feel like they’re up on the latest—not knowledgeable people who want to build a deeper understanding of their life’s work. For instance, I know something about corporate communication. At least I did, until I spent four hours last Thursday gaping at this Axios infographic.

The dismount: Catering to the hopelessly incurious only reassures them they weren’t missing much in the first place. And it repels anyone serious enough to be worthy of your readership. Congraxios.