What Sarah Palin’s Facebook page can teach us about writing

No that’s not a joke. And, no, this isn’t a critique of poor writing style and all the things you shouldn’t be doing with the written word. While the former Alaska governor and heroine to Soccer Moms everywhere has been the butt of more than a few jokes and Saturday Night Live impressions, she understands some very important things about writing that we should all take to heart.

While nobody has seen her planned book – which she’s writing with co-author Lynn Vincent — most people are already familiar with her writing through Facebook. There she treated her many “friends” to a now famous post about “death panels.”

In case you’ve been trekking in the Alaskan outback and missed it here’s the entry:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Nobody will accuse Palin of a lyrical approach to language, but she (or her ghost writing staffer) clearly understands one thing – writing is about connecting with an audience and getting your message across.

The “death panels” idea reached into the dark lonely place inside many people and stoked the fear that we all have about our own mortality. It vividly painted an image of a faceless, soulless government bureaucrat deciding that they weren’t entitled to the care that might allow them to keep on living, seeing their families, playing with their children….well you get the idea.

The fact that it was a complete distortion of the legislation really didn’t matter. It was effective.

Palin understands that people who are not engrossed with a particular subject need a vivid and simple  image to remember what you’re telling them. Once a powerful idea is implanted in someone mind it will stay there even if it’s followed by vigorous denial, says physician and behavioral scientist Peter Ubel.

When an idea is then picked up and repeated over and over again by the malicious or simply credulous, it takes on a life of its own. People remember the colorful phrase, but quickly forget the less colorful attempts to debunk it. In some cases, the denials just serve to give the story even more life.

The initial rumor can then only be counteracted when opponents “create powerful images to counter those myths…” explains Ubel.

While I’m not suggesting you go out and make stuff up – even if you’re in politics – Palin can serve as a guide for communicators in any field. Whether you’re writing sales copy or a news story, if you want to make readers remember your words you have to give them something to remember.

It’s essential not just to think about what you want to communicate, but how it will touch those you’re trying to reach. Creating those images can be easy if you can play off deep-seated desires and anxieties.

For example, if you’re a small boutique firm selling financial services maybe you want to create an image of the dangers poised by a large company that cares only about selling their products, not what is best for the investor. Virtually every investor already has an image of Bernie Madoff being led away to jail after destroying the wealth of countless people and organizations, so the distrust is already there.

Of course, if you really want your message to have staying power, make sure those vivid images are firmly grounded in truth. Otherwise, they may very well fall victim to better ones.

Make your writing hip and cool with the simple and time tested

While there are many ways to improve your writing one quick and easy – if not painless – way is cut the clichés, the hip sayings, and other jargon that cloud rather than advance communication.

Let’s confess, we love them even if we don’t always recognize a cliche as a cliche. The job wasn’t easy. No, it was a slam dunk. It wasn’t an obvious choice, it was a no-brainer. The passé was “so five minutes ago.” It’s not that they so aptly describe a situation – they really don’t – but we feel that by uttering them we have acquired a bit of the cache of the trend setters. It makes us feel cool and even more  intelligent. (A friend described it this way: “Yes, it makes me feel smart: S-A-M-R-T!) All these hip phrases aren’t new and cool. They’re just more overused and tired expressions — in other words clichés.

Leslie Savan, in Slam Dunks and No Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and Like, Whatever explained it this way: “The catchwords, phrases, inflections, and quickie concepts that Americans seem unable to communicate without have grown into a verbal kudzu, overlaying regional differences with a national (even an international) pop accent that tells us more about how we think than what we think.”

Of course, its one thing to pepper water cooler conversation with pop references. At worst you’re only boring a few office mates. Once you start incorporating them into the written word you automatically begin to date your work. If your article is posted on the web it’s going to have much longer life than you might imagine and buzz phrases will seem awfully dated.

The editor at a local business journal issued the edict that never again would there be a “perfect storm” in the pages of her newspapers – unless it was in reference to a motion picture starring George Clooney. Even though the film debuted back in 1997 commentators, entrepreneurs and even ordinary people are still finding “perfect storms” in their lives.

By time you picked up that hip turn of phrase it has already been uttered and written millions of times – disseminated over and over again through a never sleeping, coast-to-coast and around the world media. Every bit of life and originality has been painfully squeezed from every pop phrase. Worst of all, the hipsters who originated the phrase stopped using it a long time ago and moved on to new and ever more trendy phrases.

The same can also be said of the endless stream of specialized industry jargon. Oddly, enough although most of the media including books, articles, and blogs have been dumbed down to the point that it’s unlikely you’ll come across any unfamiliar word, business reports, white papers, sales copy and brochures are often filled with words that nobody outside the industry could possibly know.

So, if all the clichés and cool expressions are out what are you left with for your writing. Well, there’s plain old English. Using simple accurate words always work. If you’re really good you can probably come up with your own turn of phrase that’s just as good as a “perfect storm” but maybe more original and more fitting. When you do that then you will be hip and more than a little cool.