No Small Change

CHAPTER 15Whatever It Is, Can You Make It Simpler?

If there's one thing that really must shine through in the new financial services marketing, it is that we must learn to express ourselves more simply – most of all in writing, although at the same time it's also true that we should use writing to express ourselves less often, and other techniques much more often.

To help make sure we practise what we preach, we're going to write all (or actually almost all) of the first section of this chapter in words of only one or two syllables.

We say ‘almost all’ because we're going to give ourselves a small handful of get-outs – longer words that we're going to use even though they have three syllables. Yes, you've spotted it, the first word in that small handful is indeed the word syllable (and also syllables) – it would be hard to explain what we're doing without using the word at least once. We'll allow ourselves a few other get-outs too: we can't manage without the words financial, services and marketing, already used in our first sentence; we'll be using the names of firms, people and other bodies, some of which are longer; and also we'll allow ourselves some words used in comments made by other people that we'll be quoting in what follows.¹

To be honest, writing in this way isn't a new idea for us. A year or two ago one of your authors put it forward to a client who wanted to focus his brand promise on the idea of keeping things simple (and it wasn't a new idea then, either). ...