I was recently reminded of two related mantras from the world of literary writing that are highly relevant to marketing and communications:
“Kill your darlings”
“Put every word on trial for its life”
“Kill your darlings” is above all advice for the long form writer, whether novelist, playwright, scriptwriter or speechwriter. The darlings are the parts of your draft copy that you have fallen in love with, but may not be needed. In literary writing that could be a character not essential to the plot, or superfluous paragraphs or whole chapters. But it’s equally relevant in business life to white papers, business plans, presentations or by-lined articles. The inability of most of us to identify the darlings we need – sadly – to kill is why every writer needs a good editor. Robert Caro famously submitted a million words of his first book “Master Builder” (The book on Robert Moses beloved of Zoom bookshelves), which editor Bob Gottlieb fortunately cut to 750,000 words.
In communications and marketing, and indeed business life generally, one crucial arena for use of “kill my darlings” must surely be the powerpoint deck. You fall in love with a slide, or an idea, or a graphic. But will your 40+ pages help persuade your audience? Does each slide beat the “so what?” factor. The more effort you have invested in crafting the words, or in formatting the slide or the chart, the more you likely resist killing your darlings – human nature being what it is. But it needs to be done. Cut slides, and cut within slides.
For a powerpoint deck supporting a live presentation (its purported main use), “killing your darlings” must be connected to live rehearsal, to see whether the slides do a good job of illustrating what you say. Rehearsal and candid review by a non-involved colleague are vital.
Once you’ve cut big, then need to start cutting small, which is how I think about “putting “every word on trial for its life”. Every day I come across business and marketing copy that badly needs editing. In addition to problems with storylines and structure, rambling sentences are packed with cliches and repetition.
“Putting every word on trial for its life” might be thought of as applying to two broad categories. The first is communication where you want to provoke a reaction of some kind, such as a press release, a pitch to a reporter, a tweet or an advert. In PR, we often care most about maximizing the positive reaction, such as use of a release or a pitch, while what those others who ignored it thought about it matters little.
The second application is when you know that your audience are all going to read your text with great care. An internal audience reading about management changes is a classic case. The trade-off between grabbing attention from some recipients, and persuading the entire readership, is quite different. You need to be certain that you are using the best words, and only the best words. Anything else could have adverse consequences, whether legal, business, political or personal.
Many will say that in practice there is simply no time for all business copy to be written with such care. My counter argument would be twofold. Good writing, such as clear emails to clients and the media, will increase your efficiency and success. And practicing good writing when it is less critical trains everyone’s writing muscles for when it really matters.
Most of the classic techniques of good writing are straightforward, such as killing unnecessary nominalisation and sub-clauses, using active voice, making main verbs strong, preferring right-hanging sentences, and cutting cliches and jargon. But I accept getting adults to change how they write is not easy.
I claim no special AI expertise. If AI lightens the load of initial research and drafting, that is generally to the good. But if you care about the final product of your writing as the author, you will still need to kill your darlings and carefully judge each word and each sentence. At present I see AI doing a much better job of producing first drafts rather than being able to edit well, though undoubtedly things will keep changing.
New for us all is having to write so that a both a human and a machine audience can read our copy. Most of the time, there is no difficult trade-off: in other words, good writing for a human audience will generally also improve the ability of AI bots to understand and use it. And some sensible modifications to improve GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) can often be made (eg more subheadings) without contorting the text terribly. Concepts like semantic chunking and similar GEO techniques are actually closer to what I think of as good writing than SEO ever was. Ultimately, the main thing around GEO-oriented copy (ie for the bots to read) is to be aware of any concessions you are making and why.
Poorly written text and slides are a huge unrecognized cost to businesses. That’s especially true in B2B marketing in fields like fintech, because the measurement and attribution of comms and marketing activities are much harder than in B2C. AI does not solve or diminish that problem, but rather gives new urgency to making your business writing as distinctive and persuasive as possible – and the mantras of literary writing are worth living by.
