Writing Proper

At the risk of being seen to insult the education system — which is absolutely not my intention — most of the stuff I learnt at school has hurt me more than helped me. And the stuff I really needed to know wasn’t even mentioned at school.

I mean, why teach a young boy all about the reproductive system of a frog, when all he is interested in is the reproductive system of the girl sittin`g at the desk alongside? Worse, she is not interested in whether his request for a date is grammatically correct — despite the admonitions of the English teacher. She is interested in how well he understands her niche, in marketingspeak. As for Maths, you can matriculate knowing how to land a rocket ship on the wrong side of the Moon with a 1% variance, but you cannot calculate how much tax you owe this year, or how much your money will be worth next year! And I cannot recall a single thing I learnt in school that helped me to improve my dinner conversational ability one iota.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe it is critically important that young people go to school — especially today, because my children have been out of school for 10 weeks enjoying a full South African holiday, combined with a full UK holiday, while driving their parents insane. Schooling is vital in preventing adults from exploding.

However, that is quite beside the point I want to make. Your ability to be economically successful is based on one primary skill: your ability to communicate. Much as we would like to, sometimes, we cannot get away from the fact that the amount of money you have (or can make) determines the quality of your life — at least until you reach a certain level. Unfortunately, most of us do not reach that level, despite being extremely competent at what we do.

When last did you bump into a plumber, and after a long discussion over the state of your piping and tapping, felt assured that he must be totally incompetent, primarily because he barely had the ability to link three words together. (Pretty much the same applies to programmers, with that way they look at you as if you are a lower lifeform because you don’t understand that Ajax is not a soap powder.)

Of course, the reverse applies. There are a happy few with tremendous communication skills. Often, these people are in your employ. They might be utterly useless, but they were so good during the interview that you felt the need to snap them up before anybody else did. Despite being barely competent at the skill they professed to possess, they are doing much better than vastly more competent person’s who, unfortunately, haven’t progressed beyond monosyllabic speech.

And that’s the point I want to make today. The success of your business is not dependent upon how well you do the work you do. Your success is dependent on whether people think you do the work well. And the way they think is based on the way that you communicate — in your brochures, e-mails, web site, etc. Unfortunately, the communication techniques you were taught at school are guaranteed to make any reader think that you are a drooling idiot.

Petes Weekly manages to break every grammatical rule in the book, and I am often subjected to criticism for my catastrophic use of the apostrophe, to say nothing of my participles dangling incoherently. Fortunately, for every one of these, a whole bunch of people write to say that I made them laugh today. That’s communication!

Being able to communicate well is an unbelievably powerful skill. I am reminded of a story of one of the best communicators I have ever heard of. Our hero was hijacked, and squashed between two remarkably large miscreants on the back seat. However, he understood the market niche he was currently dealing with, and their spiritual needs. So he immediately, and very vocally, began calling on God to curse these evil men who were planning him harm. Realising his power, and his connections, they immediately let him go. Now, that’s what I call direct marketing!