On glue (or: The 0.1%)

James W. Pennebaker's The Secret Life of Pronouns should compel every single content writer online. (And those reading New Scientist in print.)

A precis? Sure.

James W. (who I can't help but refer to as such) tells us that it's not "content" words—verbs, nouns, and so on—that matter so much in communication.

It's "function" words—pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, negations, conjunctions, quantifiers, and adverbs, verbal glue—that create style, and underlie the personality of a communication.

"These words account for less than 0.1 per cent of your vocabulary but make up more than half of the words commonly used. Your brain is not wired to notice them but if you pay close attention, you will start to see their subtle power."

His article expounds duly upon such power. Let us focus instead on what this means for web and digital writing.

It's James W.'s 0.1% that makes style, that reveals subtleties of personality. I'm taking that to mean that, therefore, it's his 0.1% that creates rapport, empathy, and the digital holy grail: engagement. Indeed, James W. himself says:

"Function words require social skills to use properly. The speaker assumes the listener knows who everyone is and the listener must know the speaker to follow the conversation."

It's the 0.1% that makes this text sound like it's talking to you. This is important for web writers. Imperative, even.

James W. makes the point that people who write using a large proportion of I-pronouns tend to be more formal, concerned with social status and power, and less reflective.

A little box alongside the printed article suggested that a preponderance of I-pronouns in one friend's written communication with another indicated that the I-pronoun-user was lower in the social hierarchy.

I could go on for paragraphs, but for the sake of concision, here are the literal and metaphorical bottom lines:

• This research supports a reader-first approach.
• It indicates benefit-focused writing (all about you) will have greater personal impact that feature-focused prose (all about me/us/we)—but not just because of the content words it contains.
• It champions the careful use of function words in text.

Bored yet? Okay, let me get out the big guns:

• Do not cut function words when you're trying to reduce the word count of digital content. Function words are the tools of reader/user engagement.
  
• I-pronouns can subconsciously imply the brand's respect for the reader/user if used with care. (If not, they can make the brand sound like a stuck-up bore.)
  

Crazy? Maybe. It's a good thing this blog doesn't live and die by peer review. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, though.

[all the reasons why]

[The country thing is about horizons and emptiness and finding completeness in annihilation. It's about being real when you vanish, and real only then.

Yeah, you know what I mean. You know it. I can see it in your eyes.

The country thing is about the part of you that ceaselessly seeks reference. Here, we cleanse with soil. To cultivate, we cut. To fortify, we remove the fences. And to befriend, we find the other in ourselves.

Illogical? Maybe.

The country thing is about slow history, a painstaking obliteration of the past. You watch it happen by the year, by the decade. Even when it's gone, it's still there, an unreachable echo across the hilltops.

Here in the forests and river valleys live ancient gods—hawk-gods and possum-gods, parrot-gods, lizard-gods. Inscrutable as nature. Slow as evolution. They pay me no mind.

Who denies a place that absorbs your separateness imperceptibly, without question? That completes you without changing you? Maybe you, sucker. But not me.]

Plotless

It seems like I've been avoiding nanowrimo, which I literally cannot be bothered capitalising in the way its creators would like, forever.

I know that sounds contrary, and it is. I just don't like organised stuff: team sports, national novel-writing events, musicals, you name it.

The other reason I've been avoiding it is this: I am hopeless at plotting. Hopeless. The world's worst plotter. I never have writers' block, but I always, always, always have plotter's block. I can't plot a story to save myself.

Despite these gross intellectual limitations, I sort of volunteered to participate (off the grid, you understand: there will be no signing up for this little plotless moron) in this year's Big N with The Second Canadian. When he asked someone to talk sense into him, and stop him from participating, I told him I'd do it if he did.

So, here we are.

And by some miracle I came up with a plot on the weekend. A plot that doesn't seem too cheesy and, simultaneously, isn't born of my darker urges, those personality flaws with which we all wrestle. See? I told you it was a miracle.

I'm usually pretty psyched after I come up with a plot. This time, I'm actually looking forward to writing it, though...

Where do you want to go today?

Every morning, I wake up in India. In Mumbai, to be precise. It's all the work of the fantastic Aravind Adiga and his Last Man in Tower, which, along with The White Tiger, is the very definition of transportive fiction.

Can't afford the time or cost of an exotic holiday? Try these:

• Southern states USA: anything by Truman Capote
• 1940s Spain: Fabled Shore by Rose Macaulay
• Pre-commercialisation Corfu: Prospero's Cell by Lawrence Durrell
• Contemporary American West: The Last Cowboy, by Jane Kramer
• 1940s Alexandria, Egypt: The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell
• Occupied Norway in WWII: The Moon is Down, by John Steinbeck
• Japan, from 1963 to the 1980s: Lost Japan, by Alex Kerr

Of course, if you just want to be lost at sea somewhere warm, there's always The Life of Pi. But I don't need to tell you how to suck eggs, right?

Egomania and creativity

"I'm not an egomaniac," said a friend recently, "so I don't have a blog." It reminded me of that thing that so many writers say about writing out of loneliness—that it's a constant attempt to reach someone, to be understood.

Yet I've been talking to a lot of bloggers lately—some egomaniacs, some not—and many of them claim to hate writing. To me, that sentiment is like physics: nonsensical. Incomprehensible. Maybe blogging and writing can be two different things.

I write because writing gives me a scanty mirage of a chance to say what's meant, in a way that's understood as it's intended. To me, that's the most important thing there is.

But in real life, that's a dream, a fiction, a fake carrot on a phantom stick. I literally never say what's on my mind. Ever. If that's your starting point for communication, you'll always feel like you're screaming into the void.

Also, in the moments that really matter, I find words obsolete: a limited toolset with severely restricted applications.

In effect, I think writing, along with all other kinds of creativity, is a playground for those too scared to face the truth. Which is all of us, right?

Staying in business

Rental inspection 1: Drive 40 minutes, arrive on time. Agent 25 minutes late, forgets to bring keys to property.

Rental inspection 2: Drive 30 minutes, arrive on time. Agent on time, brings keys for some other property.

Rental inspection 3: Drive 10 minutes, arrive on time. Agent 20 minutes late, but brings right keys. I apply. Three days later I check receipt of my application: not received. Spend 40 minutes applying online. Call agent back because the email address they registered with the application site is incorrect. "Oh, don't bother," they say. "We found your application. It was here, it was just that no one had opened it."

At times like these, I wonder how some people stay in business.

At times like these, I wonder if I'll stay in business, given that such wrestling saps all the energy one would usually apply to getting work done for paying clients.

Select this

Direct from the Apple Store, I give you a button worth beholding:
Can you guess what we're selecting here? A financing option? A shipping option? An exterior fucking finish?

Nope, friends. Oh no. As it turns out, this button is in fact two different buttons that achieve two completely different goals. When you click on Select, you go to a page with more information about the product. Great!

The only problem is that little arrow to the right, which makes it look like "Select" is an instruction, and you must use the arrow to make your selection. When you click on the arrow you get a drop-down with two unlikely options: Share on Facebook and Share on Twitter. Confusing, no?

This is why I'm always going on about buttons.

[No way home]

[A glittering hill of city lights
fireworks and lightning
break up the night
We'll stay up late
and rise to the fight
there's no way home from here.

A lonely lit window
in a world of dark;
three tossing trees
in a stony meadow
Those easy days:
long-gone, long-past
there's no way home from here.

That dusty road
and the dented car
and the way we drove
(too fast, too far)
The blown-out tire
and the raging truck
there's no way home from here.]