INBOUND 2015 I&E: Beth Dunn "Use Your Words"

Thank you. So when I was a little girl growing up on Cape Cod, my grandmother. There she is, not really, but she'll stand in for my grandmother. When I was a little girl growing up on Cape Cod, my grandmother was lived three doors down the street from the house that I lived in with my mother and two older brothers. And this was great for me because my grandmother was the kind of grandmother who baked a lot of cookies. She was the kind of grandmother who always smelled like freshly baked bread and warm melted chocolate. And every afternoon, the school bus for my elementary school would drop me off. Not in front of my mother's house, no, in front of my grandmother's house. She was the one with the cookies, if you recall. And every afternoon I'd get off that school bus and go straight into her kitchen and she'd turn to me with a smile and say, what do you say? Because more than anybody else when I was that age, it was my grandmother, that's me. It was my grandmother who taught me to say please. It was my grandmother who taught me to say thank you. She was the one who told me that I should excuse myself when getting up from the dining room table to say may I? Instead of can I? You know, she was that kind of grandmother more than anybody else at that age. It was my grandmother who taught me that the way that I choose my words and use my words determines how I'll be seen by other people. Now, another thing that my grandmother knew about me at this age was that I had somehow gotten into my head that the best thing in the world for me would be to be considered a dignified young lady. I was obsessed with this idea. I really wanted to be seen as, as a dignified young lady. I loved it when adults would kind of observe me and go, what a well mannered young girl. She is, mature beyond her years. I loved that. Yeah, I was a little bit of a goody two shoes. And so my grandmother got it through to me. She used this as motivation. She got it through to me that if I were to simply go barging into people's kitchens demanding cookies, that I would be, let's just say, presenting an image of myself that was somewhat contrary to the image that I wanted to present. Let's just say that. And that if instead I were to choose words like please may I have a cookie, that this would get me a lot closer to my goal of being perceived as what I thought was actually a true, truer representation of myself, that I was a dignified young lady. The words would help me get there now. What my grandmother knew then and what I was in the process of learning, and what I want to talk to you about today is that we are doing this all the time, right? We as individuals, as professionals, business people, companies and brands, we're constantly engaged in this act of self representation. Every word and phrase we use, whether it's in an email to a colleague or a tweet to the world, or those two or three paragraphs on your About Us page on your website or your LinkedIn profile, every word and phrase is another brushstroke in the self portrait that you're painting every day and presenting to the world. Now, you just heard in the introduction that my name is Beth Dunn. I am the product editor in Chief at HubSpot. And what I've discovered in my years as a writer and editor is that especially in business, there is a gap, there's a disconnect between what it is we mean to say about ourselves and what actually ends up coming out on. On the canvas. What actually ends up coming out on the page, on the screen, in the written word. There's a gap. And I think I have a theory about why this is. I think it's because in business, we spend so much time and energy thinking about what it is we want to say. What do we want to say? We have committee meetings about this, meetings, emails. What do we want to say? We don't spend nearly enough time thinking about how we sound. Let's take, for instance, just as an example, that About Us page on our website. We all have one, right? We all have to write one of these. Maybe if you don't have a website and you're not in charge of writing this kind of thing, you had to write like a speaker bio at some point or a personal bio, your LinkedIn profile. We all hate this. We all hate having to write about ourselves in the third person. I mean, who actually likes this job? Silence. And so I think that there are two universal things that are true about writing this About Us page or the personal profile. The first one is that we are all terrified that we're going to come across sounding pompous as hell. And the second thing that's true is that we almost always do. It's just. It happens. And I dug into this a little bit and I wondered, why is it so universally true that we all end up doing the very thing we don't want to do, coming across as somewhat pompous? And I think it's because we all reach for the same tools and it's the same set of bad tools. What are some of those tools? We grab for the biggest, fanciest words we can think of. We dig out some snazzy phrases. We look for some stuff that we saw on somebody else's website that we thought sounded cool. Some phrase like, oh, God, is that what the kids are saying these days? I don't know. Yeah, growth hacker. I don't know. Put that up there. Data scientist. I don't know what that means. Sure, yeah, put that up there. What we don't understand is that these tools are turning on us. They're not the right tools for the job. And so they are actively undermining us in achieving our goal of presenting ourselves the way we want to be seen. Those big, fancy words fall flat. The clever phrases actually end up sounding more conceited and sometimes condescending. The stuff that we picked up from somebody else's website makes us sound like we're some sort of helpless imitator of other people. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but condescending, conceited imitator of others are probably not top on your list of brand identity terms that you wanted to convey on your About Us page. And so what I want to do is think about why that is. What are the bad tools that we're reaching for and what should we be reaching for instead that will help us bridge that gap, that will help us achieve the desired result. Like my grandmother would say, to choose our words and use our words in a way that will present the image to the world that we want to present. So what I've got for you today are the top 10 things that I find are most bang for your buck, the most effective, easy, simple things that you can do today, right away to close that gap. Item number one. This is probably the most common thing that I get asked when I'm handed a piece of writing to edit, to revise, to proofread. People hand these things to me or email them to me, whatever, and they say, beth, I need this to sound more human. Now, this raises two interesting questions. First of all, do I work with a bunch of space aliens? Why is it so hard for human beings to sound human? And that is probably a question for another day. The second thing that this raises is why is it so important to sound like human beings? And I think it's worth spending one second on that. We know, right? We already know in our hearts that people don't do business with businesses. They do business with people. You don't build relationships with brands. You don't feel undying loyalty for a logo except some of us for that Google logo. You build relationships and emotional bonds, which is what we're after, right, with other humans. And that's why even in business, I'm going to say especially in business, it's vital that that human, human element come right through that. It's front and center in all of our writing. And the single most effective technique that I have found, that is probably the first thing I do with any piece of writing I get, is I fix stuff like this. This is one of the bad habits that we've all fallen into. When we think that we have to say something important about ourselves, we suddenly affect this formal, stilted language. Why do we do that? We think it sounds more impressive. And so the best thing you can do with any piece of writing that you want to make sound more human, sound less like a robot, is use more contractions. Start bashing words together like you're at the freakin roller derby. Go through like say for instance, your about us page. This is a good experiment, a good little exercise to try. Go through that page and just bash together the words that easily and naturally become contractions. I can't. You won't. It doesn't. You'll. You will becomes you'll. We're, we are becomes, we're all those things. Natural contractions. Why? Because this is how human beings actually speak. And we want to sound like human beings. This is common urge and we've already discussed that. It's important. We are all human and we have the same needs and desires. Thank you. Had to sneak that in there. Item number two. This is more subtle. Very few people actually come to me and say, beth, take this writing. I need you to make me sound a little bit less like a big fat liar. None of us really think that we sound like we're dishonest. But this is one of those subtle things. It's another bad habit, another bad tool that we've picked up that is undermining our efforts to sound honest and trustworthy. And what is that bad habit? It's these unnecessarily fancy words. And I'm going to call us all out on this in this room that we are prime offenders of this. In the business community community. And yes, in the marketing and sales community and in the inbound community. We use utilize and employ and leverage. Leverage when a simpler word will do not just as well, but better. Why? Because the unnecessarily fancy words. I'm not saying that just one use of utilize a Couple of leverages, whatever, are going to make you seem like you're some kind of crooked, but they have a cumulative effect over time of suggesting to the reader that you've got something to hide. It's a little bit extra razzle dazzle that suggests to the reader that there's some smoke and mirrors going on here. There's too much icing and not enough cake. What if there's no actual cake here? Clear, simple, concise language. More Hemingway, less Shakespeare, actually makes you seem more honest, which is why the next thing you should do is start shortening the words. You see words like utilize, employ, and leverage. And go for the simpler, shorter, clearer word. Did you know that a synonym for each of these words, thank you, is used? There's literally no shape, shade of meaning lost between the word utilize and use. There's not even a little bit of a difference in the definition. Leverage at least has something of a connotation. But I would argue that unless you're actually talking about taking a big stick and moving a disproportionate mass, like there's a physical definition of what leverage means, and 90% of the time when we see it, you just mean use. So say use. Not just because I said it was a good idea, not just because I'm sort of a grammar queen, but because I want you to seem like you're more honest in your writing. And I think you do, too. Item number three. This is my favorite. My favorite one. All right. As marketers and as salespeople, as marketers and as salespeople, as professionals, whatever people who are communicating with people that we want to serve, let's say it's a really common thing. We want to get people excited about what it is we're offering them. Announcement, an email, sales pitch, whatever. We want to stoke the fires of enthusiasm in the hearts of our readers. Right? And what do we use to try and achieve that goal? Exclamation marks. All the time. We use exclamation marks because we want to make our readers excited. Do you know what this actually does? The undermining effect is that it really just kind of makes you look like you're kind of new at this whole game, this whole wordsmithing game. I would urge you to try this exercise to go through at least just one piece of your writing that you like. An email, especially emails. Like, you've got some email in your stable right now that has an exclamation mark or 2 in the subject line and in the greeting and littered throughout. Just go through that Email and take out all the exclamation marks and replace them with periods and see what happens. I think what would happen is you would come back to me and say, beth, what's my name? My writing now sounds emotionless and flat. And I will say to you, good, because this exposes the weakness that was in your writing all along. And now you have. Now you know the truth, you have a starting point, you have some place to start with. It's time to beef up those words. Because punctuation in general, it's not just exclamation marks are uniquely badly suited to conveying emotion. But you know what's great at that? Words, words and language are built for it. Exclamation marks can't bear the weight of human emotion. Words do that. So strip away the exclamation marks and beef up your words and let them carry the weight of the meaning that you're trying to convey. This will single handedly level up your writing to heights that you couldn't even imagine. And you'll want to do a dance. Cha cha cha. Item number four, moving along. Super common thing that we want to convey in our writing, right? That you're helpful. I mean, I don't care where in the funnel you're talking about. You want to convince leads prospects that you're somebody that they can approach with their questions, with their inquiries, customers. You want to convince them that they should come to you with their problems as well and that you will be helpful to them. And what is the thing that we do that undermines us in this effort in our writing? We use jargon. Now, I can actually physically hear some of you rolling your eyes because this is one of the most common things that you'll see in those listicle blog posts about how to be a better writer. Don't use jargon. So you're all like, yeah, yeah, I know. Use smaller words. Don't use jargon. Can I still make that other session? Yeah, sorry about that. What I specifically want to call us out on here, and again, I'm a prime offender on this. And I think that we here in this room are particularly bad on this count. A certain type of jargon that we all tend to fall into the bad habit of using are these acronyms? Yeah, we love our acronyms in marketing, don't we? Cta, roi, dfui, stfc. What do they even mean? Well, we in this room know what a lot of those mean and we love to use them. Why? Because it's like a secret handshake. It's membership in the club, in this inbound club. And what is inbound except one great big tribal gathering. And I love it. I love it. I love being a member of this community and I love these little secret handshakes and inside jokes that we give each other. But in our marketing and sales communications, this is the last thing we want to do is have a secret handshake that's slamming the door in the face of your readers. It's saying you don't belong, you can't sit with us. And I don't think that's what we want to get across. So I would urge you to pull apart as many of these acronyms as you reasonably can. Again, this isn't an absolutist stance. You do, of course, once people understand your acronyms, want to just use them, but define them and define them a little bit longer than you think you should because not again, because I am a rule person, but because I would think that you want to appear to be more helpful. Again, this is one of those thousand paper cuts effects that a little bit of this sin doesn't really hurt you, but over time it makes you seem less helpful to your reader if you don't define these terms. Item number five and then we'll be halfway there. There are 10 items, if you remember. And then there's going to be a pop quiz after item five. Ready? Start reviewing. Start studying. This is another super common thing we want to appear as if we're careful. How many of you have gotten that resume? I know I have that resume that says I'm a highly motivated people person and super detail oriented. And then the rest of the resume is riddled with typos. Right? We've all, yes, we've all gotten that resume. And what do we say when we see that resume? We're like, oh, are they kids these days? Why don't they even know how to use spell check? And it's easy to say when it's something that was obviously composed in Word or Google Docs or something like that. But I think that we all fail on this count a little bit too, because not everything is a word processing piece of software and we don't think about it. But we need to be really careful about making sure we're using spell checking. Like what's your graphic design editor? What do you use for that? Do you use some sort of a web based thing? Does that have a spell check? Does it draw in the same dictionary as the spell check that you use for your word processing? Probably not. But isn't that where you put things like CTAs and stuff like that? Things that you really don't want to misspell? Do you just rely on some idea that you're going to like? Well, I'll proofread it later. I'll just eyeball it. Well, do you catch everything? And isn't it worth making sure that you will catch it if you use the wrong form of its? I'm telling you nothing. You want to know what my bounce rate is on your website? Tell me how soon you use the word its and whether or not you use it properly. Because the first time I see that thing with an apostrophe in it and you don't mean it is I'm out of there. Because it's like that resume. I'm like, well, they don't care. They clearly don't care enough. So I'm not going to trust them with my business using an apostrophe to mean plural. Anything. Can I get a witness? I'm out of there. Right? And this is stuff that spellcheck won't necessarily catch. Are you going to catch it if you're like, you know, you haven't had enough caffeine yet and you stayed up all night and you forgot whether it was I before E except after C? But what about Achieve and Chief and I can't remember? Just push it out there. I don't care. What about those companies that have that annoying capital letter in the middle of their name and I can't. Oh, well, whatever. They probably won't care. They won't take it personally. We do. What about capitalizing nouns and words that don't need to be capitalized? Well, I want to emphasize it. Well, put it in bold then. That's not correct. And what it does is it has a cumulative effect that makes it seem like you are not careful. And if you seem like you're not careful, people will not want to give you their business or want to hire you or something else important like that. So in order to get things right, to make sure you're spelling them right, honoring people's brand, whatever. What I do, this is what I do is I have a blank file on my desktop. I'm one of those annoying people that have a completely clear desktop on my laptop. I don't have anything on it except for this one file. I keep a blank text edit file in the upper right hand corner. And whenever I'm working on something that doesn't have spell check in it, I just copy paste it down there. Look for the little squiggly lines. Fix what needs to be fixed and I pull it back in. It's a really quick little workflow thing and it solves you so so many of these problems, these unnecessary errors and unintended impression that you are careless, which I know you don't want to project. Careful. Pop quiz. I'm kidding. I hate pop quizzes. I have PTSD from pop quizzes in financial accounting, which still haunt me to this day. No quick review. What have we talked about so far? Use contractions. You use smaller words. Don't use exclamation marks. Watch out for those acronyms and use spell check. We have covered so much already and we're not even halfway there. Who can remember all this stuff? This is ridiculous. Can I still make that other session? I'm going to tell you how you can remember it. It's a great tool. You're going to look back in five years and go, I remember that day when I first learned about the style guide. How many of you people here have a style guide? So many. I am so impressed. That's great. How many of you don't have a style guide? Great. All right. If you want a style guide, we created one at HubSpot and we made it available for download. You are welcome. Just do a search for HubSpot Style Guide. And if you have a style guide and you're not particularly happy with it, you're welcome to it, too. It comes with instructions as to how to make it your own. You can customize it as little or as much as you want. It's great. And it's particularly focused on this world of like inbound. So it's got a lot of words and phrases that in it that you won't find in a dictionary. Because we're freaks, right? We use all these weird words and phrases. What is a style guide? A style guide is really nothing more than an outline. It's just a map, a sketch of how you mean to proceed every time you go to create your next masterpiece. That's all a style guide is. It raises the bar and says, I'm going to hit this bar every time. There are things that spellcheck can't help you with. Reasonable dictionaries disagree on basic things like this. Is there a hyphen in email? Some say yes, some say no. You get to decide. With a style guide, you get to say, well, in my world, at my company, we don't use a hyphen in email. So there. Do you capitalize the I in Internet Some dictionaries say yes, some say no. You get to decide. Do you use the Oxford comma? Let's get a little, yeah, little love for the Oxford comma. And who here doesn't give a fuck about the Oxford comma? Come on, don't be shy. That's all right. Yeah, give us some applause. That's all right. It's up to you. You get to say, this is my style guide. And I'm going to say, we don't use the Oxford comma at my company, we do at HubSpot. So. And what about login? Is it one word or two? Does it depend when it all goes in your style guide? And the great thing about the style guide is the hidden awesomeness of the style guide is it cuts down on all those hours that you used to spend arguing with your co workers over whether or not you used the Oxford comma. From now on, once you have it in the style guide, you can just say, hey man, I don't make the rules. Even if you did make that rule and you put it in the style guide, you can just say, hey man, it's in the style guide. I can't, you know, can't help you. Cuts down on hours of fighting, I'm telling you. So try a style guide and use it. Don't let it just collect virtual dust in some file somewhere. It's super helpful. Item number seven is related. Hire an editor. More eye rolling. I can hear it. Oh, who's this lady up here telling me that I need to spend money on another full time employment employee? I'm actually not saying that. What I'm saying is that there is somebody already in your midst. They may be sitting next to you right now. They're the person who's been nodding, right, and maybe giving you an elbow. Right? We walk among you. There is somebody you already know who is an editor at heart. And all you need to do, if you're not that person, is invest in them the power and the authority to use that superpower for good for your company. They are dying to be asked to use this superpower. So when I say hire an editor, that's all I'm saying. I'm saying invest in that. Identify that person in your midst and invest in them the power to implement your style guide to, to lay down the law and then use them. And by that I mean you have to make a commitment then to show any writing that then goes out into the world to them very quickly. Now, a lot of people worry this is going to slow us down. It's not going to slow you down. Because for those of us who are at heart, editors and wordsmiths, this is like falling off a log. We can do it in our sleep. And it takes like a millisecond to go, yeah, no, you get rid of that apostrophe. Like, it's just. It just jumps right out at us. So it doesn't have to slow you down at all. And the gains that you get out of using your editor and investing them with the appropriate power are so immeasurable. Again, we've talked about all these different things that we'll give you. Item number eight, closing in on it. Closing in on item 10. We want to be seen as people who care about our readers. Right? This is vital. I care about you. I'm here for you. I'm focused on your needs. Check your pronouns. I don't mean gender, although that's an important thing to focus on as well. The thing that's undermining you in your desire to be seen as somebody who cares about your reader is not whether or not you're using he or she as much as it is whether you're using crap like this. I'm excited to announce. We value your feedback. We're working hard to bring you who cares? You're leading off each one of those sentences with me and I and we, and you're putting the spotlight on yourself, not on your reader, and talking about your emotional state like, I'm excited who? I don't care about your emotional state about this new thing that you're announcing. I'm your reader. Tell me why I should care. So when I say check your pronouns, I mean if you want to look less like you are all about you, avoid using we and I, especially in, like, announcement type communications, and use you and your instead. Again, just like with the exclamation marks, if you make this one simple change, it will require you to do some extra heavy lifting. You'll suddenly have to change the rest of the words in the sentence. But that's a really valuable exercise because suddenly you will be forced to cast what you're saying in terms of the value to your reader, not about your emotional. Say, like, I'm so excited about this new feature. That's not the point. If the point that you're trying to get across in your email is why they should be excited, then say that instead. You'll be happy to hear your opinion matters. Fill out our survey. You're going to love this. It's a simple, subtle change, but it Gives the impression that you're all about them. The spotlight is on them. And you really do, as I know you do. Spend all of your waking hours and all of your sleepless nights thinking about your customers, your users, your readers. Number nine, closing in. This is another one of my favorites. You've reached just about the end of the editing stage on your draft here. You've checked your pronouns, you've worked on your contractions, you've pulled apart your acronyms, and you think it's pretty much ready to go. You think it's pretty much in its final shape. So now what do you do before you hit publish? And I do this all the time. I sit at my desk and I imagine I'm somebody else. I imagine I'm one of my readers. A specific. A specific person. Like, if I'm writing, like a wiki post for our internal wiki before I publish it, I'll imagine I'm reading it in like I'm Brian Halligan. I'm not going to do my Brian Halligan impression right now, but that's as close as I'll get. This is being recorded, after all. I will actually, like, imagine. I will actually imagine his voice in my head and read it and think, how is this going to. How are these words going to sound in his brain? Right? If it's a customer communication, you can use a Persona, a vague outline of a person. But it's much better if you can imagine you are a specific customer, somebody that you've had a conversation with, somebody you know what their Midwestern twang sounds like in your head. And you can sound like Mary from Topeka, right? So do some role play. The advanced version of this is imagine yourself as this specific person having the worst possible day. Mary from Topeka is in no mood, okay, for your little funny jokes. She's had a really rough day. She was late to work, spilled coffee on her favorite new shirt, her boss reamed her out, and now she's opened up your funny little email. Is it funny or is it going to fall flat on her worst possible day? Because you don't write, you don't communicate out into a vacuum. You communicate out to human beings who are having good and bad days and probably arguably more bad than good. Or at least it's best to prepare for that eventuality. It's a really useful exercise. I highly recommend it. Final item number 10. I just mentioned a little bit about humor and how it can maybe fall flat or maybe turn somebody's day around. And this is my final piece of advice is about humor and the use thereof. As somebody, myself, as somebody who is called on on a regular basis to be funny in the writing, in the microcopy, in the win, the newsletter that I write, this is something that I work on all the time. And the one bit of advice that I have for you, if you want to come across as particularly hilarious, and I know there's usually times when you do, try not to be snarky. We all spend a lot of time on the Internet and the Internet has given us some bad habits. And the Internet is a very snarky place. And somehow we've gotten convinced that snark equals humor. And that may be so. And I know that there was. I know that a lot of you are probably really fond of your own sarcasm, right? And there was recently a study that says, like, sarcasm is the highest form of wit and actually secretly means you're a genius or something like that. And that's great. And I have a lot of sarcastic friends and I cherish them as well. But in your communications, in your marketing and sales communications, the cumulative effect of sarcasm, even slightly mean jokes, making fun of anybody but yourself, anybody but yourself, self deprecating humor is always pretty much okay. Gives the effect that you're kind of a jerk. Because if you're talking about that about somebody else, how are you talking about your customer when they're not in the room? That's the impression that it gives. Take it or leave it. I know humor is a very subjective thing, so I'm not going to lay down any absolutist rules here, but I would urge you to be careful about snark. There's a fine line between snark and sass. And again, role play really helps in this endeavor. For a long time I used to imagine, if you can imagine somebody, think about somebody whose humor you admire and specifically try to think about somebody who never comes off as mean spirited. Maybe for you that's Stephen Colbert. Maybe for you it's the early days of the Muppets, which it was for me for a little while. If you think about, remember the 70s Muppets, their humor was never at somebody else's expense. It was always kindhearted. So if you can channel that person, it might help you avoid this trap of seeming like a jerk when all you want to do is sound like you're kind of funny. The great 19th century writer William James was at once asked, what's the secret to being a good writer? And he said, you must do three things. I had 10. He has three. That's why he's a great writer. He said, first, you must be kind. Second, be kind. And third, be kind. I think my grandmother would agree. I think she would say that I should say thank you for your time, which I do. Very appreciative. And if anybody has any questions, I have cookies for you. Thank you. And if you. If you do have questions, we have microphone. We have a microphone right here. That would be the one to use. And. Yeah, go ahead. I have two quick questions. Yes, ma'. Am. So on your. So on the point about choosing simplified language. Yes, ma'. Am. Utilize, leverage, employ. If I've got to say the word use three times in two paragraphs, I choose other words to avoid the repetition. That's right. So how do you strike that? That's definitely something that I spend a lot of calories doing, is trying to not use the same words repeatedly. Basically, what I end up doing is I change the sense of the phrase. Like. Well, if I'm using the sense use like three times in two lines, then I probably need to vary the sense of what I'm saying and not just the word. So it's not just about reaching for the thesaurus, as you already know. It's probably about actually changing up, like, what's the subject, what's the object? You know, like actually changing the meat of the sentence. And then the second question, in regards to choosing the right pronouns, I write a lot from first person plural, but not from the perspective of which we our company, but we as marketers to create that sense of resonance with the audience and realize that I'm just like you. I'm in that same position as content. I'm writing for me as well. As you still come across the same way as using I or our. I don't think so. I think that if it's clear and you just have to maybe do some role play or some user testing, throw it in front of some other people and make sure that that same sense of we is coming across. But I agree that we kind of has a you implied in it. I think you're good. I just have a quick question. I know that we didn't really touch on this, but I have a quick question about writing for a particular audience. When you're trying to write for two audiences and you have two very different customers that you know are going to be reading this, like, say one that is a younger age group and one that's an older age group, you want to appeal to both and you don't want to be Exclusionary. Do you have any good tips or tricks on how to do that? I mean, it really depends on what the subject matter is. If there is a happy medium, probably. I would try to do segmentation if I could, if. If there isn't a happy medium. But I would say that, I mean, it really depends on what different messages you're trying to get across. If you're really trying to get a different message across, then it's time for segmentation. But if you're just trying to say it in a different way, maybe a less sophisticated way, I would see if there was a way to say something. Again, less sophisticated is often code for simpler, more honest language. And so that probably done right. That should work for your more sophisticated audience as well. Okay, thank you. Yep. Could you guys actually come over to this? Because otherwise you won't get a cookie. Thank you. So if my question was already asked, can I still get a cookie? Absolutely. Okay, thanks. So could you talk a little bit more about resonance with. With the audience? Because I do a lot of writing in a volunteer position to help build community, and my co writer will often say, we want you to do X or you will want to do X to build the community or your community. And I always go through. And I change it. Like, we want to do this together for our community. So could you give some more suggestions on. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is usually covered when you do your Persona research and you really dig deep into what are the motivations for your readers? What resonates with them? You know, like, why are your volunteers building houses for the homeless? What do they get out of it? And so when you're writing, you actually want to explicitly call out those motivations, you know, like, whether it's to meet other seniors who are handy or to, you know, to make a difference in the community. And yes, I would say steer very clear of anything that starts off with we want you to X. Okay. So it would be. Then you will not even necessarily. You will. Sometimes you try and steer clear of those sorts of pronouns entirely and just make a declarative sentence like, you know, building houses in the community engenders da, da, da. You know, like, it's a statement of fact. This does that thing, and the Persona, the person reading it will say, that's a thing that I want. Okay, that's great. That's very helpful. Thank you. Are the cookies good? They smell great. Okay. I own a partner agency and really appreciated this advice and will share it with our clients as we work as writing coaches to Help them create excellent content. Is there anything else besides the tip on poor punctuation mistakes affect bounce rate? Any other information that you can that you'd recommend sharing to demonstrate ROI when it comes to paying attention to your. The quality of your content? Well, you could actually do some a B testing on like, you know, improperly punctuated pages and that sort of thing. Like, put out some crap and be like, see, those didn't convert. I mean, to be honest, like a lot of people who aren't writers and editors, I think there is this perception that good enough is good enough and it doesn't matter. And so that might not be the worst exercise. Like, no, actually, it really does affect people's perceptions of you. So I'd love to hear about it if you do that sort of a B testing. Great. That's an excellent idea. That was interesting because you in a way touched on something that I was going to ask about. For us, it's been kind of a struggle to get our internal team speaking the same language when it comes to how we speak. And so I was going to ask if you had thoughts on getting the team internally to agree to adopt a style style guide, Because I get a lot of bounce back. I'm an editor. I'm not technically in the marketing group. And the marketing group always says, you don't understand. It's just marketing speak. Exactly. Don't do that. Yeah, well, how to actually be a change agent in your organization to evangelize the importance of a style guide? One thing that might help is that if you do the search for the HubSpot style guide is that it's wrapped inside of a blog post that talks pretty in depth about the importance of a style guide in an organization, probably more articulately than I could do right now. So I would start off with that maybe, and see if that gets you further. I mean, personally, I would just be autocratic about it at some point and just say, you know, okay, so guys, we're going to have a style guide now, and I'd like you to contribute to it. You know, and so if they have certain things that they think are okay, like it's marketing speak and this is fine, and good enough is good enough, or maybe they actually truly and honestly believe this kind of language resonates with their audience, you know, then we need to come up with like, one paragraph that concisely describes what our voice and tone is. And that's usually the most powerful paragraph in your style guide. And then the second best thing you can do after you've done that is designate a person who gets to say whether or not a piece of writing matches that voice and tone. Thank you so much. Good luck. Doing okay? Yeah, I'm all right. I just. Yeah, I know I got something in my throat. All right, welcome. I work with software developers, so the issue isn't brevity. They're fantastic at that in their writing. But maybe you have some experience when it comes to the herding cats issue. You assign a deadline or say, I need support for this piece of collateral and you get pushback. You know, who are you to assign this task or be the warden of my time? How do you deal with that? It's difficult, and it's something that I definitely struggled with, specifically with software developers, because you don't want to get in the way of their work. You know, they have speed matters and, you know, it's very hard to kind of intercept the words at the right point when you can do the most help and the least harm. And so what I found worked for me was to and for our team was to work closely with the developers and find a workflow that worked for them. And I completely changed my expectations around how an editorial process would work. And we actually rigged up an automatic email so that whenever a piece of language got introduced into the software, I got an automatic ping and they didn't have to lift a finger. And then I could go into the code base myself and make the changes that I wanted to make, and then they would review them and push them out. So, like, that worked for us, and it took a couple years to get to that point, so I needed to find a way that worked for them if I was going to get that done. Thank you. You're welcome. Hi, for my co workers who are not here, is there a particular book you would recommend on blog posts on how to write? I think that I would suggest that you check out the. Ginny Saski just gave a talk today. She's a hubspotter on blog post writing, and from what I've heard, it was brilliant and filled with really actionable advice. So you might want to check that out once the posted talks are posted. And it's not specific to blog writing, but the piece, the writing book that I always recommend to everybody is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, because it gives the advice that I have found to be most helpful to people who are not currently happy, productive writers, which is how to get over that hump and just like. And just start writing. Right. But stylistically, like, what is it can you repeat the name again? Bird by bird. It was. Does anybody know what Ginny's talk was called? Ginny Soski. S O S K Y. You can. Thank you. You have the bitly for it. Yeah, go ahead. Bit ly GS inbound 15. Sorry? Oh, it's bit ly GS inbound 15. Is that what you had? Okay, good. Thank you for offering that. Didn't mean to let her scoop you. I'm sorry. Hi. What about he, she or he and she? There and there? Drives me crazy because I have a very predominantly female audience and industry, and I like to use she. But then all my editors say we need to do he and she. What's your thoughts on if you have a predominantly female audience? Use she. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. Use she. And I'll be. I will come out right now and say that I have softened on my stance of there in light of some of the transgender gender movement. So there can be okay. T H E I I. There can be okay as a singular pronoun. Absolutely. It's something to think about and decide if you're going to add it to your style guide. But on a less esoteric note, I would say just exercise your authority and say, I'm speaking to women. And so as a graduate of two women's colleges, you know, that's bullshit. I mean, in the quilting industry. You're in the quilting industry. What can I do? Yes, there are men quilters, but they're, you know. Yeah. In a software industry. Do you know Quilt Dad? He's a friend of mine. I know the quilt. I know some quilters. Cool. All right. Hi, Beth. First of all, thanks for this. It's giving me life, honestly, as the sole content creator on my team. It's awesome. So a lot of companies have internal jargon that they use. For example, daisy chaining and Face tweet are some of my favorite. Give me indigestion. Can you recommend some ways to help with company culture, especially in sort of the executive suite? How to teach, lightly teach people to move away from that sort of stuff and start accepting more of these wonderful and very real rules that you've offered today? Yeah, the exercise of actually creating an organizational style guide. I know I keep going back to that, but it's like, it kind of allows everybody to have something to rally around, and it allows everybody to have a voice in it. Like, you don't just come down and say, we're now going to use the HubSpot style guide because it's great. You say, we're Going to create a style guide, and I want your input into it. And it kind of allows them to have a voice. And that creates kind of a teaching opportunity to say, here's why we don't want to use. Use these insider jargon things. And if you have any research to back that up on, like some of your Persona research or, you know, whatever, some a B testing or something like that that can back up that claim, that would be great. Or just even if you were able to bring in a customer or constituent in some way to say, yeah, no, that doesn't resonate with me. That usually works for the executive suite. Like actually a face being. Being like, you're wrong. Great, thanks. And not somebody that they pay saying that you're wrong. You might have kind of already answered this, but it's the he or she conundrum. Yeah. We're in education and we write to parents and we have to say, you know, is your child in high school? Does he or she? Blah, blah, blah. Yep. And it drives me crazy because marketing, you always want to do short. Yeah. So can you say, do they? Yeah. If you're in education, you're going to get a lot of angry letters if you do that. I've already said that things are changing on the they front. Things are definitely changing on that front. And if you're up for a fight, you can certainly say, no, it's an acceptable thing to do. And we're on the vanguard of that. In 10 years from now, it will be an acceptable thing. The language is moving in that direction. But if you're not up for that fight, then what I find to be most effective is simply try and employ a 50. 50. See, I said employ. I do that too. Use a 50, 50. Mix of the pronouns. Use he sometimes. Use she sometimes. Okay. That's what I do. Thank you. Yep. How are we doing on time? Are we. One more question and then you can come up and I'll be at the front, but you still get a cookie. Go ahead. Got it. Okay. So we hired an editor. Love her to death. She's the savior to all of our content. But now we're trying to figure out how to kind of measure editorial impact or value in a less than qualitative and more quantitative way. Have you come across anything that speaks to that without, you know, ab testing? The crappy blog that I wrote versus the one that she, you know. Can you give me an example of exactly what it is you want to. She's got such a strong editing sense about her that she's on top of her day and is now trying to figure out, okay, how do I show the value that I've brought by editing content that you guys are putting out so that, you know, basically editorial roi? Yeah, it is tough nut to crack. I mean, it's really about institutional and organizational culture and just getting people to kind of agree. I mean, this is why I framed my talk the way that I did is that it's not just about saying there are rules and they should be followed because that doesn't resonate with non writers. What resonates is this, I hope, is this idea, at least in part, of like, brand identity and what it is you want to convey. And there's a direct line between some of these pitfalls that we fall into and whether or not you come across as honest, you know. Wish I could be more helpful. Oh, I just knocked over a plate of cookies that I was saving for myself. Busted. All right, thank you very much.