Forgotten Ground Regained

Greet Another Day Gone By

First published in 26 Ways of Looking at a Blackberry, A&C Black Publishing, Ltd., 2009.
Greet another year gone by – good but not great,With sales up twenty per cent, a pleasing enough result.Now consumers are accustomed to communicating by phone,We are no longer the only ones who light and lead the way, Because our competitors have also served customers,Perhaps making the market more mobile, so to speak.So times have become tougher, but that’s fine for TH,And we’ve posted good profits, a notable performance.We depend on new products, they build our reputation;But we need to know what’s necessary just for you, The consumers who keep our company growing,The best people to build our product platform.We value intellectual property, so purchases are possible,And we will watch what happens, in technology’s wake.We strive to be first, fresh frontiers are before us,And innovation is inside us, imbedded within.Let humanity be our helper, the whole of our focus,For it’s you and it’s your needs that keep ideas young.The future we face is clear,It’s up to us, each and everyone.But for now there’s nothing to fear:Seize the moment, life moves on.
Constraint 7: Alliteration
People in charge of companies always want to make their company the best. At least that is the claim. But how do you achieve that? There are always business books out there willing to offer you a particular answer, even if not quite a panacea. Good to great by Jim Collins was one of those, and its title is referred to in the first line of my alliterative version of the base text. The title is a small demonstration that alliteration, almost unnoticed, has an influence on the minds of business people.
Those business books, of course, will give you some advice on what you need to do to shift your company from good to great. The lessons might be to do with your personal development, team management or principles of financial negotiation. Successful business people will learn from this advice, adapting its messages to their own situations; others might not. As my favourite advert from the long-running campaign for The Economist puts it:
I never read The Economist.
Management Trainee, aged 42
It remains rare for business advice to focus on language even though the use of words is an inevitable element of any business. Even when language is an inescapable part of the management mix, companies often give more attention to thinking about how an audience will receive their communications than to how they might write or speak them. Enter another focus group through the research door.
The result is management-speak. But if companies are really concerned about how their audiences will receive their communications, it’s better to start from the other end of the process. Give more attention to what you really believe and want to say, then craft that message to be as engaging as possible. Otherwise you will lose your audience before you even get to the point.
One of the most important aspects of writing to consider is the sound of words. When we read, we hear the sound of words inside our heads, and we respond to that sound – unless we’re doing the crudest of skim-reading, in which case very little of anything will go in. But if we are present at the delivery of a talk, announcement or any oral communication, there is a stronger possibility of being engaged by the poetry and performance of words. I deliberately use the word ‘poetry’, although I am not necessarily advocating that chief executives should start speaking in rhyming couplets. However, awareness of the poetic potential of language is vital, and poetic techniques have a big role to play in producing business writing that persuades.
In that last sentence, I used alliteration without being conscious of it at first. Alliteration is one poetic technique to develop, alongside rhyme, assonance, metaphor, metrical rhythm. These techniques add to the beauty of the language you use, and we all respond to beauty. When we object to the worst excesses of corporate language, it’s often because rhythm and elegance rather than clarity have been lost.
To rewrite the base text I borrowed the alliterative poetic form of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This medieval poem in Middle English has been reworked into a modern version by Simon Armitage, brilliantly rendering the original alliterative and poetic form. My version follows the same format, with three stresses in a line on the same sound to make the alliteration. Sometimes the consonant stressed is contained inside a word, for example in the first word of the line
“Because our competitors have also served customers”
This has the effect of re-emphasising that it is the sound that matters, and it is always a good rule to listen to the sound of your words.
The result of my version surprised me because it sounds reasonably credible as a piece of modern business writing, rather than a pastiche of archaic verse. This in itself shows that alliteration is inside us, it’s innate to the way we use language, particularly in English. The alliteration gives a heightened but not implausible form of address.
When writing a recent annual report I decided that alliterative verse would be absolutely the right approach. I was asked to write the annual report for CreateKX, the development agency for the King’s Cross area in London. King’s Cross has had bad times but it is currently on the rise, with the relocation of the Eurostar terminal that links London to Paris by train. This, plus existing and new developments such as the British Library and the University of the Arts, makes King’s Cross potentially a prime location for creative organisations.
The annual report needed to express that potential through its language. The necessary passages of prose reporting and lists of organisations involved needed to be lifted by something a little more creative. Inspired distantly by WH Auden’s Night Mail poem for the Post Office in the 1930s, I decided that a thumping rhythm and strong alliterative stress on the consonants K and X would be right. The resulting poem, when divided into couplets, also provided a structural framework for the annual report:
Kings marking crosses and correctionsKindly keepers making connectionsCollecting exciting exceptionsTo every golden rule.Commerce seeking sparks from exhibitionKeenness finding networks with expeditionColleagues extending invitationsCommunities making exclamationsAnd all exploring collaborationsAt the spot marked X.
This helped lift the report above the usual expectations of bureaucratic reporting but did so in a way that was appropriate to its creative theme. It had the added advantage of suggesting a strong graphic style for the cover based on the letters KX. As well as creating sounds, words create pictures.
Copyright © John Simmons, 2009