If your client wants to distance themselves from something it might seem worth using the passive rather than the active voice. For example, instead of telling you we let a typo through in a blog entry we might say “A typo was not corrected”. It makes it sound as if it wasn’t actually us failing to spot it (we could blame the cat but basically everything you read from me is actually our own work). Technically there’s nothing wrong with it.
Gramatically it’s when someone diverges from the standard subject, verb, object sentence construction and move to object, verb, subject. The primary school example is “The cat [subject] sat on [verb and OK, preposition but basically the verb] the mat [object].” Switch that around and you get “The mat was sat on by the cat” which is awkward, take the subject away and you get “The mat was sat on” and nobody knows who by. It’s been tried at high levels.
It’s a trick President Reagan used to use when saying “mistakes were made” instead of “I/we made mistakes” and the reason we’ve recently been reminded of that is the kerfuffle (technical term) over Raynor Winn’s book, “The Salt Path”. The Observer newspaper has made several allegations, We’re not visiting those specifically because Winn is taking legal advice so they may well be disproved but in terms of how she and her husband lost their home and the financial process behind that, she has said “mistakes were made”. But by whom?
We’re calling it: if you’re in PR you need to tell your clients that this approach doesn’t get you off the hook. It sounds as if you’re deliberately trying to make it sound as if you weren’t part of this process. It’s frankly as ineffectual as “No comment” which is almost always an evasion.
Monzo had a really good guide to this in its writing guidelines a while back (they’re still worth reading but they’ve taken our favourite part off); to detect a passive or just inclarity, just ask yourself whether you could add “by a monkey” and end up with something that makes sense even if it’s rubbish. So “I made a mistake” is clear. “Mistakes were made” is something to which you could add “by a monkey” so you’re leaving the reader to work out who made the mistake.
It doesn’t do much except make your client sound as if they’re wriggling out of responsibility. Journalists have been wise to it for decades – the best advice is either to make a full declaration or none at all.
Now if you’ll excuse us, more coffee must be made and drunk.
One of the things I look for in a media training session is whether the spokespeople are good at storytelling. If you’re running a startup then trust me, your storytelling skills can be as important as your financial acumen, your marketing prowess or anything else. Well, almost.
It’s why the Chartered Institute of PR, of which I’m a member, has been agitating for communications specialists to be on boards or at least advisory boards for some time.
Storytelling is one of the major ways in which you can amplify your credentials and make them more memorable. Here are three ways in which I could tell you about my business:
* I’m a media trainer
* I work with PR companies to help spokespeople clarify and deliver coherent messages
* I’ve been that journalist who is after quotes but who isn’t the expert in a field other than writing and reporting for years. I’ve realised increasingly that I’ve been dependent on people making themselves and what’s going on very clear during all of that time – but I only interview them when they’re feeling tense about speaking to a journalist. That’s when they screw up. So I like to help build confidence and ensure that when someone speaks to a journalist, their expertise gets into the resulting coverage and it’s accurate.
The third needs cutting but it offers a much more relatable and interesting version of who I am and why I do what I do than the blander first two, accurate though they are.
So if someone asks what you do for a living and why, do you have a story behind you? Every board has someone dedicated to employing people, someone else whose job is to build sales, someone assigned to financials – but often the board misses out the bit about how they explain themselves to the outside world and even internal stakeholders.
If you’d like to talk to me about developing your storytelling, don’t hesitate to ask.