Writing Wrongs

Snide Remarks #521

"Writing Wrongs"

by Eric D. Snider

Published in EricDSnider.com on November 13, 2006

Like all writers, I would love to write only what I want and never take on an assignment that isn't interesting to me personally. Unfortunately, writers who insist on being that selective usually starve to death, which is actually good for the rest of us because it thins out the competition, and also because writers are pretentious and we need fewer of them.

So I'm often called upon to write things I consider boring or stupid but that will pay the bills, similar to the way prostitutes must sometimes engage customers they don't find attractive. All professions require this kind of compromise, really. A plumber may not like the particular kind of problem you have with your toilet, but he's obligated to fix it anyway if he wants to get paid. Or a mathematician may have certain numbers he doesn't care for. 1,482, for example, or 6. Maybe those numbers strike him as inelegant, or maybe they were responsible for the death of a family member. Maybe he considers the loop on the "6" to be obscene. But if his boss puts a series of figures into his inbox and declares, "Johnson! I need these numbers added ASAP!," the mathematician has no choice but to add them, no matter how many 1,482's or 6's they contain.

One recent job I had involved writing copy for a jewelry Web site. Specifically, the owner wanted the bland, just-the-facts descriptions of his engagement rings to be rewritten so they'd be more appealing to potential buyers. There were 90 engagement rings. I only had to write 30-40 words for each one. But it was sheer torture.

The first hindrance to my success in writing advertising copy for 90 different engagement rings is that all engagement rings look exactly the same to me. This was often a problem when I was a student at Brigham Young University, which has more newly engaged women than it has Asians. Every other day some female acquaintance would be showing off her new engagement ring, and I'd have to admire it and remark on its beauty when in fact I thought it looked just like all the other rings I'd seen, including the ones she'd gotten the previous times she was engaged.

The second hindrance in writing about these 90 rings is that there are only so many different ways to say something is pretty and sparkly. The English language is vast, but it only has a few synonyms for "pretty" that can really be applied to rings. You wouldn't call a ring "hot," for example, or "doable."

But I slogged through it, and then had to contend with a final requirement: The client wanted me to come up with NAMES for each of the rings. All these rings that look the same and are appalling wastes of money, they need to have individual names, like "Eternal Promise" or "Precious Memories." The cheesier, the better. I came up with all the sickening names I could think of, then branched out into less viable monikers:

The Cheek-Gouger
Ostentatious Display
Desperate Measures
The Judge
The Glassy Stare
The B****slapper
Sweater-Snag
Tequila Hangover
The Pawn Shop
Furtive Glances

Then I hit on the idea of geography: "The Morocco," "The Parisian," etc. The rings looked nothing like Morocco or Paris, but how could they? Morocco and Paris are huge metropolitan centers with streets, sewer systems, buildings and people. Rings are round and go on your finger. An engagement ring has little in common with Morocco or Paris, though I guess you could say they're all overpriced.

Then someone suggested using geography combined with nouns, like "Egyptian Sunrise," or "Hawaiian Beachcomber." Along those lines, I came up with these entries:

Lebanese Breakfast
Albuquerque Bloodbath
Turkish Prison
New Jersey Turnpike

Personally, I would love to wear a ring called "Albuquerque Bloodbath." But I'm not a starry-eyed young bride-to-be, am I? (No.)

Probably the worst kind of writing I or anyone else ever has to do is something that is new with the Internet Age. It's called search engine optimization, or SEO. The way it works is, let's say you have a Web site that sells knee-length shorts. Your product is aimed at people who want to be modest in the summer months, but who want to look dorky and unfashionable while they do it. There are dozens of Web sites competing with yours to sell these products. How do you get people to come to your site?

The cheapest way is to make it so that when people search for "knee-length shorts" on their favorite search engines, your site is among the first results. And how do you do that? Pay someone to write an "informative" article that uses the phrase "knee-length shorts" a bunch of times, then post it on your site.

It used to be that webmasters would publish a lot of gobbledegook, or occasionally even mumbo-jumbo, with their keywords thrown in. Then the search engines started getting smarter, and the webmasters had to use content that actually made sense.

That's where SEO comes in. An SEO article might begin like this:

Knee-length shorts are a very popular item in many parts of the country. Many people enjoy wearing knee-length shorts in the summer months. When they are knee-length, shorts are more comfortable than long pants, yet more modest than shorts that are not knee-length shorts. Are knee-length shorts right for you? You can learn more about knee-length shorts on several knee-length shorts-related Web sites. (Also: knee-length shorts.)

As you can see, SEO writing is probably the worst writing anyone could ever do. It's really, really easy, but it's also really, really boring. It's no wonder so many writers are alcoholics, though I do wonder how they can afford it. I can barely keep up with my Pop-Tart habit.

Comments & Reaction:

When you're doing crap work like the stuff described in this column, you have to consider yourself less a writer than a hired hand. It's a lot like Van Gogh taking work as a housepainter: It's not the full expression of his creativity, but people don't often pay for creativity. They do pay to have their houses painted, though, and you gots to pay the bills somehow.

Also, on the SEOs: They are published uncredited, so at least I don't have to worry about my name being attached to any of them.

The part about the mathematician and numbers posed two problems for me. First, the Associated Press Stylebook, which I generally follow for all matters of punctuation and usage, says that if a sentence begins with a number, the number should be spelled out -- "One thousand four hundred eighty-two," then, not "1,482." But I really wanted the sentence to start with the number, and spelling it out would have made it unwieldy. So I defied the AP Stylebook and used the numerals.

I defied the book again when I said "no matter how many 1,482's or 6's they contain." AP says that while you use apostrophes for plurals of single letters ("I got two A's and three B's"), you don't use them for plurals of numerals. However, AP freely admits that this runs contrary to Webster's New World Dictionary's guidelines, on which AP usually agrees, yet gives no explanation for why they chose to part ways on this matter. I tried it without the apostrophes, as AP suggests, but I didn't like it. The purpose of punctuation is to avoid ambiguity and confusion, and I think that in this case, the apostrophes make it look smoother. (You are not allowed to use apostrophes in plurals of words, however, like "We took both dog's to the pound," no matter what.)

This item has 30 comments

Lowdogg says:
November 13, 2006 at 6:07 am
This made me think of Real Estate listings, where every property is spectacular, with charming appeal and "one of a kind." They really stretch the listings sometimes, and I like to translate the flowery language into real English.

I like "Turkish Prison."
Craig Checketts says:
November 13, 2006 at 7:46 am
I can't imagine any part of a toilet i would want to plumb. Come to think of it, no part of any plumbing appeals to me, no matter what the pay. Of course, that's why i'm not going into plumbing. Interestingly enough, i recently was in the market for a ring, and now i know who i have to blame for making them all sound so appealing to my fiance. Thanks a lot, Eric.
Joshua Steimle says:
November 13, 2006 at 8:23 am
Eric, if you haven't watched the documentary Okie Noodlin' I recommend you go out and get it right now. It will improve your ability to use references to the plumbing profession in your commentary beyond what you ever thought possible.

Changing subjects, it occurred to me while reading this that some might not trust Eric's judgement when it comes to technical matters such as search engine optimization, webmastery, and Pop-Tarts. But as someone who runs a web design and SEO firm I can say that Eric does no whereof he speaks, at least on the SEO stuff. Not only can the content be painful to write, it's also somewhat of a strain to read, which is why I prefer to hire other people to write it for me and yet others to read it for me. Next time you're hard up Eric let me know, I might be interested in having you turn some of your copywriting tricks for us.
pizzocalabro says:
November 13, 2006 at 8:39 am
I don't use apostrophes for decades, like "The 1990s," because I think the double apostrophe in "The '90's" looks horrific. But I don't see why it would necessarily apply to all numbers everywhere.

Also, I'm one mathematician who refuses to add numbers of any shape or form. That's what's great about a lot of higher-level mathematics--no arithmetic necessary!
Laura says:
November 13, 2006 at 8:41 am
Well, as a writer myself, I must first tell you that I am not pretentious. I am merely never wrong. (Honestly though, a few of us could die. Then maybe I could actually SELL my FICTION.)

I also related to this article in a billion ways. I write copy for a marketing group, as well as editing and proofreading and a bunch of other stuff. Usually I like it. But recently I had to write copy for a stationery catalog, with very specific branding. It took me hours and hours to come up with different ways to describe the notebooks, the mini-notebooks, the notepads, and the notepads with sticky notes. (Not to metion the invitations, two kinds of create-a-cards, blank cards, and correspondence cards.) Fortunately, I got paid for every single of one of those hours, since I'm not freelance and don't get paid by the word. And, yep, there are only so many synonyms in the English language for cute, stylish, and useful.

I poo the AP stylebook, though. If you use two numbers in a sentence, and one is more than ten, they should both numerals, not words. Even if they start the sentence. I've had to wrestle with the word/numeral thing quite a bit.

Today I will go in to work and proofread that stationery catalog once again. I'm okay with this. Hurrah for money. I like money more than not-money.
Matt Rasmussen says:
November 13, 2006 at 9:30 am
Referring to (or not, in this case) an engagaement ring as "doable" is one of the funniest things I've read in awhile. Which means that I don't read very often, or that particular comment caught me funny at just the right time. We'll go with the latter.

Well done, Eric.
Eric Herman says:
November 13, 2006 at 9:50 am
I defy the stylebook (at least from what I've been told, as I've never read it) when using quotation marks, and putting the period outside them for certain things other than dialogue. For example: She said, "I like toast." That's fine for me, but if I am quoting a song or something else, and that is at the end of the sentence, then I write it, "Stairway to 7-11". Apparently, I've been told (perhaps on the Snider board, even), that it should be "Stairway to 7-11." But I just don't like that.

I'm glad that 99% of what I write now is my own and what I want to write, but I've had plenty of experiences along those lines, one recently where somebody hired me to create a new arrangement for a Michael McLean song for a new recording they were producing. It wasn't that I didn't like the song, it was nice, and not that I don't like doing arrangements (I do), but it was really tedious to put together and felt moreso because it wasn't something of my own (I'll gladly spend hours and hours to produce my own music). I realized that I didn't charge nearly enough for what that involved. Which begs the question - does the tediousness of doing writing that you don't enjoy diminish depending on how much you're making for it?

I remember being excited to take a 'writing' job years ago at a Metro Community Newspaper, you know, the kind every suburb of a big city has. Turned out the job was really just going out to get businesses to essentially buy an article about them, and then writing that article. I quit the second day.
Nate Berrett says:
November 13, 2006 at 9:57 am
I also loved the name "Albuquerque Bloodbath" for an engagement ring. I suppose I still enjoy wedding/engagement humor after five years of marriage because of my father's sage advice to me on my wedding day. He told me to remember that although my wedding ring resides on my finger, it really runs through my nose.

Great column.
Tom says:
November 13, 2006 at 10:32 am
Wow. "Hot" and "doable" engagement rings FTW. I must confess that I actually LOLed.
john doe says:
November 13, 2006 at 11:25 am
Google keeps getting smarter - anyone writing keyword stuffing articles like that is stuck in 2003.
Pernell Ringlebottom says:
November 13, 2006 at 11:32 am
john doe is right - that keyword-stuffed crap doesn't rank well at all anymore. I just write informative stuff that uses my target phrase once or maybe twice. It also makes writing for SEO a bit more bearable... but I still wouldn't say doable.
card says:
November 13, 2006 at 11:52 am
I liked, "...including the ones she'd gotten the previous times she was engaged." So, so funny.

I agree with Eric Herman regarding the placing of the quotation mark before or after the period, depending upon the situation. Especially regarding songs or other quotation mark-able works.
AdamOndi says:
November 13, 2006 at 11:55 am
Related to the pluralization using apostrophes:

Today I received an email from someone at my company talking about new products being sent to some stores. He correctly pluralizes words that can easily be pluralized just by adding an "s" (such as word -> words). However, any word that requires both an "e" and an "s" is completely beyond him. Such as the word "boxes." He spelled it "box's" multiple times. Also: "pouch's."

I constantly wonder how some people at my company managed to pass any English course ever.
CK Rock says:
November 13, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Did anyone else get the feeling that the paragraph about numbers and plumbers had kind of a Daniel Handler (aka Lemoney Snicket) style?
whome says:
November 13, 2006 at 12:40 pm
Daniel Handler often uses such assides, so I see where you are coming from. But he also has a mock down-talking style that Eric doesn't use. Eric's is basically an absurd comparison, while a Snicket book has more of an overdone "It's like this, children" feel to it.
Momma Snider says:
November 13, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I feel your pain, AdamOndi. Those things make me want to hit myself in the head with a hammer. I'd have to say the worst one I ever saw, though, was the father of a student at my school, who spelled HIS OWN LAST NAME with an apostrophe. And it wasn't some weird name, it was Phillips. He put an apostrophe in every word that ended with S.
Roisin says:
November 13, 2006 at 12:51 pm
^Yeah, it did!

Oh my God. Maybe Eric IS Lemony Snicket!!!
apmusicman says:
November 13, 2006 at 1:46 pm
I also write copy for a marketing company and we've just recently started doing SEO copy for the new design of our website. The sad thing is, that I had just finished writing a mess of copy for the website, all nice and clean and AP appropriate, when my boss decides to start writing with SEO in mind. Essentially, I took what was once shiny and new (well, as shiny and new as sales copy can be) and essentially gave it an "Albuquerque Bloodbath" so that now, it blows completely.

As a related note, I used to work for a recording studio and we used to have people come in and do a vanity recording of cheesy, overly-sentimental music for their own purposes. Usually, they were rich and bored and had a lot of time on their hands and their music was totally awful. However, I remember spending 4, 13-hour days, working on 11 songs for this vanity album. After several hours, the boss came in and asked how things were going. My colleague, fed up already, turned to him said: "It's like I'm polishing [excrement]."

That's how I feel about SEO. And writing copy for rings. I just had to do that too, oddly enough, and I can totally relate. Guess how many times I had to use the word "brilliant?" So much so, I thought I was in a Guiness Draft Beer commercial.
Dan Ardia says:
November 14, 2006 at 7:32 am
Maybe another way to name rings is by how long the ring will keep them married... the one yearer, the two monther, the til-death-do-us-parter...
Momma Snider says:
November 14, 2006 at 9:36 am
How about the "As long as you keep your weight down" or the "Just so you don't go bald" or maybe the "Toilet Seat: Up or Down?"
Lynn says:
November 14, 2006 at 3:32 pm
I had a boss whose memos were excrucuiating, and brought whole new meaning to the garden path. After suffering through a few of them, I started to realize that that was how she talked as well, and I lost a lot of respect for her intelligence.
Ticia says:
November 15, 2006 at 9:45 am
I thought the first two paragraphs had a Lemony Snicket "feel" to them, but after that it was all Eric.
RandyTayler says:
November 15, 2006 at 3:18 pm
The copywriter at my last job was afraid of using semicolons.

AP Stylebook, eh? Is there a book for non-newsy writing?

I liked the part about the mathematician having a job. Oh, man.
David Cornelius says:
November 16, 2006 at 12:21 am
You realize, of course, that you will now wind up in web searches for knee-length shorts.

Meanwhile: They should name a ring "I Only Love You This Much." Or perhaps "The Infected Finger."
Peter says:
November 16, 2006 at 8:08 pm
One of my jobs is to write copy for an Asian art company. I like to focus on the cultural/historic aspects of a piece. But one of my colleagues always adds words like "stunning!" "gorgeous!" or "exquisite!" (exclamatory his) to my copy. He'll also change my descriptions to the second person. "You will surely love this beautiful, handcrafted caolongtu!"

That's the kind of copy that makes me say, "Stop being so excited or I'm clicking away."

Oh, and who places periods in or out of quotes depending on their personal sense of aesthetics!? Sheesh .
Lauren says:
November 17, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Albuquerque Bloodbath...I see that as a wide, heavy, silver ring with a large dark ruby in the center and a cryptic message engraved on the inside in Spanish lol.
Frustrated says:
January 8, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I was in a live chat with Comcast tech support and this woman's response to absolutely everything I said ended in an exclamation point. Everything. I wanted to tell her to quit yelling at me, but then she'd probably start my computer on self-destruct or something so I just let her yell.

And speaking of poor grammar, I had a roommate whose boss told her, "You know, you're really well at that!" Still makes my head hurt.

And it also makes my head hurt that Wikipedia has changed the punctuation rules for commas and periods in and out of quotation marks. You try to correct it, they change it. Stupid.
Jon Sandy says:
February 21, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I work in internet marketing as a copy writer. SEO is our trade and we sure have an interesting time figuring new ways to re-write the same stuff. We got 100 different cat5 cables in, and I got really really sick of writing SEO copy for all of it.

Best ring name Albuquerque Bloodbath.. not to mention you own on the term now on Google.
Greg says:
September 11, 2007 at 2:12 pm
The punctuation inside the quote rule has never made any logical sense to me. If the punctuation is part of the quote, then yes, it should be quoted. If it is part of the sentence that contains the quote, it makes no sense to put it inside the quote. Maybe it's the programmer in me talking, but I have always used quotes in the way logic dictates. You shouldn't end the sentence before ending the quote inside the sentence, that makes no sense whatsoever.
LittleWoodenBoy says:
September 13, 2007 at 7:54 pm
I frequently use apostrophes in words like "don't" and "wouldn't", where it's actually two words put together.

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