On Writing

I’m a writer. I always have been.

I wrote horrendously cheesy short stories as a kid, there was one “novel” I naively tried to write as a teenager, and reams of angsty poetry that I wrote as a preteen as a kind of release valve for the internal pressure of constantly wishing myself out of existence (don’t worry, I’ve recovered from that – might be why I haven’t written poetry in longer than I can remember).

Academia appealed to me precisely because it was an outlet for my creative writing process where I was actively praised for being a clever smart-ass. Even in the instances where I wouldn’t draw the same research conclusions anymore, I am still extremely proud of the quality of the writing, which I generally loved every minute of.

Writing for my businesses, however, has become a chore that I avoid like the plague.

Why?

Because I HATE the way most marketing copy reads. And I die a little inside when I am being encouraged to emulate it.

I recognise the fact that I am an outlier in how quickly I can read and parse information. I get antsy reading repetitive copy that leads you by the nose, dangling a hook that it won’t come out and deliver until the very bottom of thirty pages of “Still not convinced?” immediately after a call-to-action button. I know the formula and I just want the actual information I’m looking for. Typically that’s concrete details like price. And the more they make you read before they tell you that information, the more I feel like they don’t actually believe in their own product.

But I know I have to be an outlier because there’d be an awful lot of businesses out there going bust if I wasn’t. Also, my reading and writing habits are the source of much lovingly teasing verbal repartee with my husband, who is a UX specialist designer/developer with nearly two decades in marketing, and who would almost certainly never hire me as a copywriter if I didn’t own half the company.

I also hate having to dumb down my language. I’m not particularly heavy on jargon, but I was a hyperlexic child and I just use somewhat unconventional vocabulary. I am often intentionally selecting for nuance of meaning that gets lost with a more common or “simpler” word.

Often the extent and precision of my vocabulary is attributed to my post-secondary education. It’s not. At least not entirely.

I cannot count the number of times I have been teased and/or lauded, especially as a child, with some variation of equating me to a dictionary.

It’s probably telling that part of why I found that so irritating is that it is inaccurate. If I was (or “had eaten”) a dictionary, I’d be able to spontaneously give you a definition of the words I use that you don’t know, in a way that you would understand. I’d also be able to spell them confidently without spellcheck.

That’s not me. I was just a voracious reader with an accuracy kink. (And undiagnosed ADHD that made me paradoxically also a terrible speller.)

These days, using big words that have very precise definitions still makes my brain all warm and fuzzy. But interspersing them with vernacular – particularly profanity – just tickles me more than an abnormally advanced vocabulary alone ever did.

I feel like I would have to scrub my very favourite things about language from my writing to conform to how I’m “supposed” to write to promote myself and my business.

That’s not just personally a little painful. It feels at best ingenuine and at worst outright deceptive.

I write like I speak, for the most part. If I have to change my voice to persuade people to work with me, how can I expect them to be comfortable working with me when they hear what comes out of my mouth?

Moreover, I don’t think we give people enough credit. Even without censoring my word choice, I’ve had a lot of people over the years tell me how impressed they were that I was able to communicate very complex ideas, in ways they understood, without them feeling like I thought they were too stupid to understand, precisely because I don’t dumb down my language.

I hate the kind of dense academese that is unnecessarily complicated just to show off or keep it inaccessible. I avoided that kind of jargon in my MA thesis, and I avoid it in conversation. Where the originator of a concept called it something unnecessarily complicated, I say “this is what it’s called, but this is what that actually means.”

Outside of that? Most of my “big words” aren’t outside of people’s understanding, they’re just not words that everyone is exposed to often enough to be at the top of the list, or the tip of the tongue, for their own word choice. And limiting their exposure to them by completely changing my own vocabulary isn’t going to help rectify that.

I’ll step down off this soapbox (for) now.

…and keep using my big words.