Language shapes ideas — even bad ones

Tenet Healthcare tops – or should we say bottoms – Fortune magazine’s least-admired companies for 2007, coming in at number one in all eight key attributes of reputation.  Its problems are reflected in the language on its most public face, tenethealth.com.

Follow the link to “Mission and Values,” for example, and here’s what you get:

Tenet’s name and logo reflect its core business philosophy – the importance of shared values between partners in providing a full spectrum of quality, cost-efficient health care.

What’s wrong with that statement? Plenty. This health-care company promises you a link to its mission, then tells you about its name and logo – sort of. What are those shared values? Who are those partners? You’ll never know unless you’re willing to spend a lot more time on this site.  

Hospitals are about patients who want to be treated as individuals. Browsing this site wouldn’t give me any sense that a Tenet-affiliated hospital cares about you as a person. Here’s every bit of the verbiage under the section labeled “Our Advantages”: 

Throughout our hospitals and our company, we’re focused on two key areas: quality patient care and customer service.  Our people are – The Tenet Difference.

You can follow another link to “Patient Care,” but you don’t find out anything about any patients. 

As writer Dale Spender said, “Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.” 

Tenet’s language has shaped the ideas that helped it land on Fortune’s least-admired list.                      

Stopping readers dead

Think about the last time you flipped through a magazine or a newspaper, or you surfed the Web. If an article didn’t grab your attention in a couple of seconds, did you stop to read it? 

Here’s an example from Smithsonian online that stopped me dead and sucked me right into the story before I knew what was happening: 

Cy Twombly’s Scattered Blossoms 

One rainy Friday afternoon in 1964, a 24-year-old Richard Serra, then wrapping up his studies at Yale, hopped a train from New Haven to New York City. Upon arriving, he headed uptown, to an East 77th Street townhouse, where he first encountered the work of Cy Twombly. “They gnawed at me,” Serra has said of the paintings he saw that day at Leo Castelli’s gallery. “I couldn’t forget them.”

  Fabulous.

Great writing in the unlikeliest of places

Thank you, Seth Godin, for leading me to more of the nooks and crannies on the Web where fabulous, funny writing lurks: Reviews of the Bic Crystal ballpoint pen and Amazon’s best customer-service e-mail ever.

Nothing sadder than a lost opportunity

Writing accurately doesn’t equal writing well. 

When earning an undergraduate degree, soon-to-be PR professionals learn to write in the news-pyramid style of a beat reporter: put the most important bit of information first, followed by items of decreasing significance. 

Fine if you’re a beat reporter, I suppose. Lousy if you want someone to read and care about what you’re writing. (And “someone” should include editors.) 

Here’s the start of a recent FedEx press release out of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India: 

Safe Kids Foundation, India’s first childhood injury prevention organization, and FedEx Express, the world’s largest express transportation company, today launched the Safe Kids Walk This Way program with school children in Mumbai. This program aims to educate child pedestrians and save lives, and will be introduced in additional schools over the next year.

What a lost opportunity! It’s wordy, stilted and somewhat passive. 

When you think of FedEx, what comes to mind? Speed, right? Speedy drivers, specifically, right? So how about an attention-grabbing start like this: 

FedEx drivers spend 10 hours a day on the same streets Indian children play near. Now, they’re helping make sure those children stay safe.

 Or 

When a child in Mumbai, India, crosses the street, a FedEx driver is watching out for him. FedEx Express, the world’s largest express transportation company, today joined the Safe Kid Foundation to launch Safe Kids Walk This Way, a program to educate Mumbai’s schoolchildren about pedestrian safety.

By personalizing the story and painting a picture in the reader’s mind, you suddenly give him or her something to care about. You take the spotlight off FedEx and put it where it belongs. And you create a piece of writing people don’t struggle to read. 

Because they won’t, you know. And all your work will have been for nothing.