Writing That Works, 3e_ How to Communicate Effectively in Business - Kenneth Roman [49]
Direct mail was once “pretty intrusive,” acknowledges Howard Draft. “But now we’re trying to understand what a customer’s needs are and how to create an invitational approach.”
People read direct mail and they act on it — if the product or service or cause is something they want or believe in, and if they trust the mailer. The single most important thing you can do to send money through the mail is to convince people that they can trust you.
Never exaggerate, either in word or picture, what you are offering, or when you will deliver, or any other detail. If, for some unforeseen reason, you can’t live up to a promise, send a postcard saying so; apologize; and say what you’re going to do about it. The trust you build will be well worth the extra cost.
10 Coping with Political Correctness
“…I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our egos.” So says Kenneth Clark in the conclusion of his classic book Civilization, revealing himself “in my true colors, as a stick-in-the-mud.”
A similar old-fashioned respect for the feelings of others has ballooned into what is called, often scornfully, “political correctness” in speech and writing. It is all too easy, however, to ridicule the politically correct language police, ever on guard against any word or expression that might possibly offend anybody anywhere. The suggestion, for example, that All The King’s Men, deemed doubly sexist with “king” and “men,” should be retroactively retitled All the Monarch’s People, deserves the hoots and hollers it arouses. And a bit later we will unload a few hoots and hollers ourselves.
Nonetheless we respect the underlying impulse of politically correct writing and commend it to you. It arises from sensitivity to the feelings of readers. You would be wise to be alert to the power of words to distress and infuriate people, and to do your best not to wield that power recklessly. As a country song puts it, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can break my heart.”
Bernard Shaw defined a gentleman as somebody who “never insults a person unintentionally.” In business writing we try to be gentlemen in just that sense. We make a conscious effort not to insult people — nor offend, nor upset them — unwittingly and by accident. It is good business as well as good manners. Why rile up your customer or your client or your prospect?
From time to time, for one reason or another, you may have reason to use a word or an expression which you know will rub somebody wrong. When you do so, you should be prepared to face the consequences with your eyes wide open.
Sensitive — but not hypersensitive
Gender, race, ethnic origin, age, and sexual preference are where most of the sensitivities reside. Our policy is to be sensitive but not hypersensitive.
Minority groups often have strong feelings about the terms used to refer to them, and their preferences can change over the years. “Negro” was the polite term for decades. After it was replaced by “black” and “African American,” Negro became a target of derision among black comedians. If preferences should change again, so what? Use whatever happens to be the current preference of the group in question — and take the trouble to find out what that is. Minorities suffer enough without being labeled with terms they regard as offensive, regardless of what the writer may think of their preferences or their reasons.
You should not, however, feel obliged to scrutinize in depth every word in your vocabulary for possible derogatory connotations. Some years ago the Multicultural Management Program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism published a checklist of words that journalists should be wary of. The fifteen-page list contained over two hundred entries,