Bad-Writing Syndrome Goes Viral

By a pool at a Florida hotel recently I saw this guy, seven kids, trophy wife, three nannies, 10 pool boys with 50 towels in tow, 60 years old or so, deeply tan, NetJets baseball cap, CEO of a Wall Street securities company, I guessed. But the thing that got me was the T-shirt he was wearing. It read, "I'm Bill, and you're not. Na na na na na na!" Maybe it was the sun and too many umbrella drinks, but I found myself thinking, "Geez, what is it with what tries to pass for writing these days?!" "I'm with stupid." "I went to Albuquerque and all I got was this silly T-shirt." "Windsurfers do it standing up." "Impossible is nothing." "Reach higher."OK, the last two are ad campaign slogans (one for a car, the other a sports brand; impossible is guessing which belongs to which), not T-shirt slogans, but bad-writing syndrome does not seem to be a containable virus. In the new-fangled new-media digital social-networking consumer-generated do-it-yourself universe that everyone seems so desperate to be seen to be espousing, great writing seems to be quite some way down the line of essentials.Quickly but surely, the technicians are taking over from the poets. Some companies even hire creative supremos on the basis of their aptitude with computer technology or their knowledge of wireframes or their general modernity of thinking or whatever.When the SLR camera hit the market in the 1960s, Life magazine didn't start hiring geeks who got the technology. They rightly assumed the artists who knew how to take brilliant pictures would master whatever new technologies they needed to. If you have a tin eye, no amount of hardware hanging around your neck is going to make any difference.But in our business, the fundamentally gifted creators and judges, the people who simply know what is precisely terrific, seem to be out of style. Very much in style are ROI and proprietary tools and dashboards and black boxes and new media—none of which matter if the writing is garbage. Then again, so many car ads begin, "Introducing the all-new Ford whatever with available whatever" that maybe people actually are happy to have the creation part cheaply done by a generic computer program. Leaves more money to activate the stuff through new media, the thinking goes perhaps. But why activate crap?Small wonder the effectiveness of TV advertising is under fire. The best TV work, like Apple's Mac/PC series , is just that, a TV series, qualitatively on par with anything else on the box. Certainly a lot better than dross like The Big Bang Theory or Moonlight. I look forward to each new spot. The sad thing about the poets who write this great stuff, of course, is they're not that good at boardroom politics—most lack great partners, so when they get mad, emotional and start throwing things quite early on in the proceedings, they're easy to ignore or fire. Consequently there aren't that many of them driving agency agendas: Jeff Goodby, Alex Bogusky, Lee Clow, umm...But the simple fact of the matter is that not only writers communicate in words, everybody does. Everybody. The art director to the designer, the photographer to the model or model maker, the director to the cameraman and editor and actor. Everything is about the correct use of words, everything as imaginative and perfect and precise, or not, as the words we use. I somehow can't imagine Scor-sese saying to De Niro, "Just say it like you're kinda angry maybe."Sir Tom Stoppard puts it this way in his play, The Real Thing. A character named Henry criticizes somebody's writing using the analogy of a cricket bat, but just imagine a baseball bat and it works just fine:"This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel 200 yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly... What we're trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might travel... Now what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about 10 feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting 'Ouch!' with your hands stuck in your armpits."The other day I was walking down a street in Milwaukee, and a family came toward me: mom, dad, 12-year-old daughter and huge 14-or-so-year-old son who must have weighed 450 pounds if he weighed an ounce. He was wearing a T-shirt that read, "Fat kids are harder to kidnap." As exquisite a piece of writing as I've seen this year. Not far off is a whole campaign for beer in which the only dialogue is the perfectly rendered and modulated use of the word, "Dude."Where more appropriate than in this first issue of the gorgeous new Adweek to make a plea that we expend at least as much effort searching for les mots justes and their champions in 2008 as we will for those who write code and construct Web sites?

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Bad-Writing Syndrome Goes Viral

Mark Wnek

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Mark Wnek