IRELAND JOINS THE REST OF US IN ILLITERACY

The country of Ireland has a strong tradition of noted authors and the reputation of general mastery of language. So it it is all the more sad to learn that, according to columnist Sinead Ryan, Eire's standards of literacy has apparently plummeted too, joining what seems to be a widespread trend in the English-speaking world. She writes:

This week's Apprentice [TV programme] was a cringe-fest as resident eye candy Will McCreevey was fired by Bill Cullen who had enlisted eagle-eyed recruiter Mairead Fleming to check out his CV.

"Did you get help writing it, Will?" she asked sweetly. He hadn't, he said proudly. "Maybe you should have," she answered pointedly.

The former Bank of Scotland executive claimed "being a perfectionist" was one of his faults. Mairead agreed he had a few alright, but "clearly being a perfectionist isn't one of them", as she labelled his written application "atrocious" and "a shambles" citing basic spelling and grammar mistakes and an inability to articulate himself on paper.

Will was lucky. Others displaying such poor skills might not get so far. Indeed, Ireland has just been downgraded in the literacy stakes in a wide- ranging three-year study by leading thinktank, the OECD.

Ireland has slipped from 5th to 17th place in English and 15th to 25th for Maths. This isn't advanced calculus and interpretation of Ulysses we're talking about -- it's the basic skills of our 15-year-olds in the three Rs.

It is most pronounced as it comes at a time when our own assessment of the same pupils is glowing. Junior Cert honours grades have actually risen, with 79.4pc getting an A,B or C at Ordinary level this year compared to 71pc a decade ago, leading to inevitable suggestions that our exam system has been 'dumbed down'.

Grammar

What can't be denied is that our kids are actually getting worse at expressing themselves in written form and undertaking basic mathematical problems. The OECD is not the first organisation to rap us on the knuckles. Tony Donoghue, head of education policy with IBEC -- who represent the employers seeing CVs every bit as bad as Will's every day -- said they had already raised concerns over literacy levels with the Government.

Google executive John Herlihy spoke earlier this year of the number of CVs and letters he routinely bins due to basic spelling and grammar errors -- and they're from graduates. Clearly parental influence has a huge role to play. It's not fair to simply lay the blame at teachers' doors when they are dealing with larger class sizes, an increase in pupils for whom English is not a first language and a fuller curriculum. Children who come from homes where parents are well-read do best in literacy tests. Those who are supported in their learning, likewise, but simple measures seem to have passed many by.

For instance, we have fantastic free libraries in Ireland. While well over half of the 15-year-olds in other countries borrow regularly for pleasure reading, just four in 10 here do.

Those from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to have a TV in their room, fewer books in the home and suffer the worst literacy problems according to studies here.

Getting it right early on is the key. It's too late when our engineering, computer and science graduates discover they can't write articulately only after they apply for that all-important job.

- Sinead Ryan, Herald.ie

BUSINESS COMMUNICATORS WHO ARE CLOSET NOVELISTS -- TAKE HEART!

More than a few business writers have secret yearnings to also become novelists. There's a lot to be said for such literary aspiration, not least because it tends to spur higher standards for day-to-day 'non-creative' writing chores. However, most salaried business/government writers think of themselves as realists, inclined to estimate their chances of being published at close to zero, so fearful of likely rejection they are reluctant to make the effort. True, competition is tough, but it is for every wannabe writer, and has always been so. A refreshing dictum of screenwriter, William Goldman, is: "Nobody knows anything beforehand about what makes a successful script.".
Similar ignorance exists in the print publication world too; some acquisitions editors repeatedly unable to predict which manuscripts are potential best-sellers. (On a personal note, one of my own books was submitted to 23 firms before being accepted and becoming successful enough to be published on both sides of the Atlantic. It is still in print 20 years later, and continues to sell.)
If you are working on a book on the quiet, take heart in knowing that -- time and again -- publishers can be wrong about which manuscripts to bring out as a book. Here's just a few examples of now perennial best-sellers which had to first survive publishers' repeated rejections:
"Peter Rabbit" -- turned down 16 times.
"Love Story" -- turned down I I times
"M*A*S*H" --turned down 16 times.
"Silent Spring"" -- turned down 5 times.
"Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid" -- turned down 12 times "Day Of “The Jackal" -- turned down 8 times.
"Jonathan Livingston Seagull"" -- turned clown 18 times.
"Kon-Tiki" -- turned down 23 times.
Now I've cheered you up, here’s a word of caution. Try not to write your book on company time.

Commercial Novel Plot Summary:
Boy meets girl.
Girl gets boy into pickle.
Boy gets pickle into girl.
-- Jack Woodford
Writing To Sell.

Though I have mainly earned my living as an advertising copywriter, my greatest enjoyment has been the writing of historical novels and studies of military history, regardless of the fact they are not all that well known. Often, I have gained pleasure from imagining one of my books being discovered many years hence and read by a person yet unborn. So I was particularly pleased to learn that my dream of being stumbled upon and read sometime far in the future was also shared by a famed author.
"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York, but toward a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews,the stacks in Brentanos, are just hurdles to get over, to eventually place the books on that shelf." -- John Updike.

OGILVYISMS.

The happiest and most rewarding years I spent as an advertising copywriter was when I worked as a Creative Director for Ogilvy & Mather International in Toronto, New, York, Houston, Los Angeles, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. Most memorable of all were the times when I was privileged to work with David personally. He did not lecture to his writers; he taught by example of his own straightforward writing style, and by voicing his clear-headed civilized approach to life.
David Ogilvy published his first book, "Confessions of an Advertising Man," in 1963. It became the most widely read book ever written about advertising. It was followed by "Ogilvy on Advertising" (1983) which expanded on David's beliefs about advertising. Together, the two books set forth a coherent point of view and a compendium of detailed knowledge and specific advice, unlike any other available to practitioners of advertising, before or since.
David Ogilvy has been widely quoted both in and beyond the advertising industry. The following are just a few of his numerous precepts, mostly excerpted from Confessions Of An Advertising Man, while others were voiced by him along the way during his long career.
“I have never wanted to get an account so big that I could not afford to lose it. The day you do that, you commit yourself to living in fear. Frightened agencies lose the courage to give candid advice. Once you lose that, you become a lackey.”
“Every word in the copy must count. Concrete figures must be substituted for atmospheric claims; clichés must give way to facts, and empty exhortations [need to be replaced] by alluring offers.”
“Do not compete with your agency in the creative area. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?”
“Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline: exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?”
“I always tell prospective clients about the chinks in our armor. I have noticed that when an antique dealer draws my attention to flaws in a piece of furniture, he wins my confidence.”
“Notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment. They are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp-post for support, rather than for illumination.”
“I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings. I abhor quarrelsome people. I abhor people who wage paper warfare. I despise toadies who suck up to their bosses; they are generally the same people who bully their subordinates.”
“The headline is the ticket on the meat. Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.”
“You have only 30 seconds [in a TV commercial]. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer. People screen out a lot of commercials because they open with something dull ... when you advertise fire extinguishers, open with the fire.”
“I once used the word "obsolete" in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word "ineffable," only to discover that I didn't know what it meant myself.”
“No manufacturer ever got rich by underpaying his agency. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.”
“Tourists do not travel thousands of miles to see things which they can see next door. For example, people who live in Switzerland cannot be persuaded to travel five thousand miles to see the mountains in Colorado. Advertise whatever is unique [to each particular audience.]”
“When people aren't having any fun, they seldom produce good work. Kill grimness with laughter. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs that spread gloom.”
“Don't judge the value of higher education in terms of careermanship. Judge it for what it is -- a priceless opportunity to furnish your mind and enrich the quality of your life. My father was a failure in business, but he read Horace in the loo until he died, poor but happy.”
[From a letter to his 18-year-old great nephew]
“If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.”
“Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it's Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it's Jack Daniel's. Ask them which they prefer. They'll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting [mental] images.”
"If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants."
[from Ogilvy on Advertising]
"If you ever find a man who is better than you are, hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself."
“It has taken more than a hundred scientists two years to find out how to make the product in question: I have been given thirty days to create its personality and plan its launching. If I do my job well, I shall contribute as much as two hundred scientists to the success of this product.”
[From Confessions of An Advertising Man, by David Ogilvy.]

KEEP YOUR WRITING SIMPLE

If you write for US audiences, best keep your writing simple, lest a large segment of readers are unable to fully understand what you mean. Some lamentable problems of comprehension among the American general public were found in a survey study by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman.
The U.S. is 11th among developed nations in the proportion of 25-to-34 year-olds who have graduated from high school, 16th in college completion rate, 22nd in broadband Internet access, 24th in life expectancy at birth, 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college graduates who have degrees in science or engineering, 48th in the quality of kindergarten to Grade 12 math and science education, and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.
Forty-nine per cent of U.S. adults do not know how long it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun. U.S. consumers spend more on potato chips than their government does on energy research and development. The average American kindergarten-to-Grade-12 student spends four hours a day watching TV.
During a recent period when two high-rise buildings were built in Los Angeles, 5,000 were built in Shanghai. Sixty-nine per cent of U.S. public school students in Grades 5 through 8 are taught mathematics by teachers who have neither a degree nor a certificate in math.
Friedman has been-writing about this stuff for a long time. He thought the U.S.'s future in the world's economy should have been the overriding issue in the campaigns for the Senate and House of Representatives. All indications are that more trivial issues occupy centre stage.

As novelist Sholem Asch said, “Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”