See a photo of Jon, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2,Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with Jon Buscall, Question 5:

Q: Your “About” page on your Web site notes: “I love helping people communicate more effectively in English, particularly if that involves the web.” You also say that you particularly like helping people communicate in business. In what ways have you brought storytelling into your interests in business English communication and the Web?

A: One of the things I try to do is get Swedish businesses to use storytelling as a way of reaching out to new audiences. I recently did a lot of work for Stockholm University in building its international profile. This involved writing 30 or so profiles of key researchers and international students. The aim was to give international visitors to the website a better flavour of what is going on in Stockholm and encourage students to study there and academics to make links with the university.

Although we used journalistic articles to “promote” leading research at the university I was very cognizant that each article was part of an ongoing story: that Stockholm University is an innovative, forward-thinking, internationally minded university. So I wasn’t just reporting on research initiatives, I was helping academic departments redefine and tell their story in a public setting. Of course, being a former academic myself, I know how cautious you have to be with the press. So I did a lot of work talking to professors, helping them get a story across that would benefit them as well as the university. For example, several people I interviewed wanted to increase their international network and collaborate with more people. I made sure that the articles I wrote on them reflected this.

I think companies need to realise that old-school press releases just don’t work anymore. You have to tell your story in an engaging narrative that will hold an audience. One of the knock-on effects of the Net has been that people graze text on the web. They read incredibly fleetingly. So it’s important that web writing holds the reader’s attention. Through stories and narrative techniques that hold an audience, you can help businesses get their message across.

Convincing managers is the difficult part, though. I find that often people in positions of power underestimate the power of the web and storytelling. I recently tried to convince a CEO that he needed to change the way he communicated in writing email to employees. Each time he wrote anything it was telling a story of how authoritative and unfriendly he was — although he was, in person, actually very amenable.

This came about because his emails were so archaic and blunt. He continually addressed people as “Mr” or “Ms” in emails and the whole tone of them was like some archaic Dickensian missive. This resulted in him effectively coming across as cold and authoritative. Archaic, even. Middle-managers in the company, many of them Swedish, adopted the same rhetorical strategies, following his lead in English, and this led to a lot of bad feeling behind the scenes. Simply because people copied the CEO’s style.

I tried to get him to understand that each email told the story of how people should communicate with each other. It also said a lot about their relationships.

The whole concept of “show, don’t tell”, which I used a lot when teaching creative writing, was very useful here in getting him to change the way he wrote.

It doesn’t matter how much you tell someone that you are friendly if you show them that you are cold and arrogant with the way you write.

So in this instance I helped him develop strategies to show, through his writing and emails, that he was friendly and pleasant. This in turn led middle-managers to change their own tone and things in the company improved. You have to be careful in Sweden because many Swedes copy the English strategies they see native-speakers (or senior staff) using. This can lead to no end of problems.

The same thing can be applied to web copy. Translations of Swedish copy often don’t have the same cultural nuances as the source text. It’s better, often, to write the text from scratch in English. A lot of businesses haven’t grasped how important this is yet. Unfortunately, there are a lot of businesses out there in Sweden who think that because international customers haven’t complained about their English, they must be doing okay. I try and tell them that, well, those customers probably aren’t their customers anymore.

So it’s a bit of an undertaking to persuade some Swedes that if you’re going to tell your story in public in English, it should be done so in a manner that really nails the brief. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of corporate waffle out there that goes for copywriting simply because managers have underestimated how important it is to tell your story effectively in the target language.