SCOTT KEYSER KNOWS WRITING. Since 2004, he has trained over five thousand professionals in persuasive writing, including staff of The Economist Group, PricewaterhouseCoopers, a number of international law firms and the Foreign Office, a major UK Government department. Listen in and read along as he and I discuss the art of rhetoric.
Marion: Welcome to QWERTY. I’m Marion Roach Smith. Each episode I talk to writers from all genres to discover what makes a good read, and along the way we discuss their writing process, discover their tips, and talk about what matters most to writers. So, step away from the computer or typewriter for a bit and join us. Today, my guest is writer Scott Keyser. He’s the author of two books, both of which persuasively argue about the power of words to move, bewitch, and persuade. His new book is called Rhetorica, published by Rethink Press. Welcome, Scott.
Scott: Hi, Marion. Delighted to be here.
Marion: Well, it’s delightful to hear you, and I really do think this is, as we were saying offline, this is also a physically beautiful book and I want everybody to go get it. It’s just a gorgeous artifact as well as a lovely piece of work. So, congratulations.
Scott: Thank you. That’s very sweet of you to say so. And I do mean, obviously as a writer, and I’m sure people listening can relate to this, I’ve always been in love with books, not just to read them, but as physical, tactile artifacts to use your word from earlier. So I am very pleased with Rhetorica or I have to say, I think it is a lovely thing to hold as well as hopefully to read.
Marion: It is. It is. And I did both. I held it and I read it. So this is good. So you’ve had tremendous professional success helping businesses find their voices. Specifically since 2004, you’ve helped over 5,000 professionals find their voices and get the results they seek. Your clients include the Economist Group and all the big four accounting firms. And you took what you know and turned it into this lovely book with a system of 15 persuasive writing techniques that are simple and that work. So let’s talk about that for a moment since my audience is writers and many of them have professional accomplishments, but do not know how to convert their expertise into a book, though they really want to do that. So set this up for them. How and when did this book develop?
Scott: Right? I suppose it really started when I met someone called Andy Maslin in 2004, who was at the time one of the best copywriters in Britain and has since gone on to write novels. So he’s left the professional copywriting space. But he and I basically got together, we were introduced by a mutual friend, and we ended up founding a company called Write for Results, which is my current company. And we worked together delivering training courses to the likes of The Economist Group, as you’ve mentioned. In fact, our very first gig in January 2004 in a snowbound New York City was to the Economist Group, and that’s really where it started. So we ended up being the preferred trainers to the Economist Group for a decade. And that inevitably obviously opened up a lot of doors for us and we’ve delivered a lot of very successful training courses in persuasive writing and in copywriting and workshops.
So in 2011, I went on a course called KPI, which was about how to become the key person of influence in your industry. And one of the things that they invited and encouraged subscribers to do was to write a book. And my first book was actually not Rhetorica. My first book was called Winner Takes All, and that was on how to double your tender win rate. In other words, how to win more bids, tenders, pitches, and proposals, because that’s what I’d done at Ernst & Young for about six years. Ernst & Young in London, I worked as part of a small team, and within 18 months we’d helped the UK firm to double its tender win rate. And I thought in combination with the course that I was on, it was about time I wrote a book. And so I did. And that was a really gratifying experience and opened even more doors for me.
And I thought, well, if I can write that book then I’m sure there’s another book in me. But I had to wait another five years before I was ready to write Rhetorica. And that was because consciously or subconsciously, I felt the need to get more training years and more training experience under my belt around the subject of persuasive writing. But when I felt ready to write the book in about 2015, I had already trained about 4,000, three and a half thousand people in persuasive writing all of whom had given really amazing feedback on the technique. So I knew that there was a book in me. So I diligently obviously being a… I practiced what I preached and I planned every single chapter. And in fact, Rhetorica, the book that came out in 2016 presents 21 techniques. And so I planned, I did 21 mini mind maps, a mind map for every chapter, and that enabled me to write the book very, very quickly. I wrote the book cover to cover in three months in the first draft because I was so clear in my head about what was going to go in it.
Marion: Yes, okay, so my mistake in the opener, I said 15 persuasive writing techniques, I meant 21. And that’s a great correction. And we’re going to talk about corrections because your last chapter is all about typos, which I just loved. But let’s just back up a little bit. Start with the beginning, you argue in the opener of this lovely book that any big idea you care to mention was given life through words. And that’s true, of course. In my family we have a motto and it’s just say it with words. And while it’s kind of funny, it’s also born of the realization that the power to communicate seems to be missed or misunderstood by many. It’s underestimated every time we sloppily communicate anything. So talk to me a bit through your expertise on the need to understand valuing each word.
Scott: Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I suppose it’s two things, really. It’s actually probably many more than two. But let’s start off with two. The first is whatever you are communicating your reader, and obviously we’re talking about the written word here, and particularly as I work in business in B2B, your reader needs to be able to get your message in one go, in one reading. It’s not like a novel where if you love the writing and the characters and the writer, you are going to savor it and reread a whole paragraph and maybe flip back, savor the language. It can be more utilitarian in B2B writing. So the first imperative for me is sheer clarity. And in my training I ask people a question that may come across as rather facile, which is what is clarity? And they say, well, it’s being clear. And I say, well, actually, clarity for me is more than that. Clarity, clear writing is writing that’s so clear your reader gets it in one go, in one reading.
And that I think is vital because people are so stressed and so busy in business that they, they’re not going to invest the time and energy in rereading your stuff if it’s not immediately clear. So that clarity is the first thing. The second is that I think the best B2B writing, particularly if trying to change somebody’s behavior, which for me is a definition of persuasive writing, you are trying to get them to think or feel or act differently from the way they were before they read your words. It’s about moving them as well. It’s about writing in a way that resonates with them and they can hear your voice. So the authorial voice comes through in your words. That is something that is singularly missing in my opinion in B2B writing. Most B2B writing is dull and jargony and robotic, and it’s actually been dehumanized. A lot of B2B writing is non-human and therefore we can’t divine the sense or the spirit or the voice of the human being behind the words. And that’s missing a trick. So there is something around voice and authenticity.
Marion: So we’re going to dig into voice and clarity in a minute, but define quickly the B2B writing definition.
Scott: So, “business to business” covers a multitude of things ranging from whether writing a blog or a LinkedIn post or an article or a thought leadership piece or a horizon scanning piece in your industry in or your sector, whether you are writing a book, a report, a bid, a pitch, a tender proposal, all my techniques apply universally to any of the above.
Marion: Great. And I found myself while reading the book, applying them to my op-ed, writing to my memoir, writing to my personal essays. And so B2B, I think it’s just not a phrase that everybody listening and might have known. So, I wanted to make sure that understood that. So I love the way this book is structured, three parts, plan, draft, edit. So, let’s begin with planning. I think many people think that writing is some kind of cosmic experience that drops from the gods into our heads and hearts and comes magically out through our fingers. And I can say with great assurance, having written and published hundreds of thousands of words, that has never once happened to me. So you remind us in your book of the old adage, fail to plan, plain to fail. Well, my audience is entirely writers writing for mass market publishing. And you state in this book that planning gets us on our mean message, and I would agree. So talk to us a little bit more about the relationship between planning and clarity, please.
Scott: Sure. In my opinion, planning is the most creative part of the writing process, particularly in the B2B space in which I currently work. Because for me, when we are planning and when we are planning properly, we should adopt what I call divergent, expansive, radiant thinking. We are thinking outside the box, we’re thinking of the big picture. We’re thinking of all the things that we might want to include in our writing, in our communication. And so it’s divergent thinking. And that’s for me very closely allied to creative thinking. We are brainstorming either solo or with our team or with colleagues, all the things that we might want to in the content that we might want to include in our writing. And once we are clear about that, we need to always, by the way, being cognizant of who the reader is and what their pain points are and their motivation for reading our words.
Once we’re clear about that, we then need to structure the content in a way that is logical and makes sense to the reader and renders our communication navigable and easy to follow. So ironically, Marion, one of the biggest problems I see, particularly in business to business writing, but generally anyway, is writing that is ill structured where the writer begins with topic A and then jumps to topic F and then back to C and onto D and so on and so forth. And most readers, particularly in business who I said earlier, tend to be stressed and very busy. They’re spinning lots of different plates in the air at once. They’re going to be very unforgiving of writing that is ill structured. And so they don’t know where they are, where they’ve been or where they’re going. So planning is absolutely vital. People pay lip service to it.
But in my experience, very few people do it well if they do it at all. I mean, I was training a group today, a group of management consultants. It was a small coaching group, and I said, how’s your planning going? And there was this sort of stunned deafening silence where they’d sort of forgotten to plan. And I said, guys, you’ve got to get the basics right. Yeah. The advantages of planning a manyfold, I mean, just to quote a couple, first of all, when we plan, we gained clarity. We gain clarity about who our reader is. We gain clarity about our objective or our purpose. In other words, why are we writing this, and how do we want to change the reader’s behavior? What dimensions of their behavior are we trying to change? It clarifies the structure and the sign posting and the navigation. And crucially, it separates thinking from writing. I observe a lot of people in business and indeed outside of business, trying to do all three activities at once, i.e. planning, drafting, and editing at the same time. And that is a recipe for confusion and confused writing.
Marion: Absolutely. I see that all the time. And I have people, I have various ways that I try to get them to slow down and consider what they’re going to write first. And many of my writers use charts, drawings, spreadsheets, all manners. I’ve talked before on this podcast about the great American writer, John McPhee and his sketches and the shirt card-boards that the great non-fiction writer Gay Talese uses to sketch out his work. You suggest mind maps, and I’ll put a link in to the great mind map guru. You suggest mind maps for a way to draw out the clarity you seek when writing. And you also make a good solid point that if not a mind map, maybe you want to use post-it notes or any other method that works. I’ve used index cards on a cork board, so just give us another minute or so about this idea of mapping and planning and giving people permission to say, oh, because so many writers, they actually make a sketch, but then they think they’re the only one who’s ever done it. I really believe in it. What about you?
Scott: Sure. No. Well, I’m obviously a solid convert to the idea of mind mapping developed in the 1970s by Tony Buzan, B-U-Z-A-N, if any of your listeners are interested. For me, mind mapping is a fantastic way of getting lots of ideas down on one piece of paper. And I say advisedly paper, not screen. So I’m a great believer in making planning a dynamic physical, tactile process. So when I’m planning anything that I’m writing, and I did it last week, I took myself off for a solo retreat to think about my year ahead. And I took magic markers and crayons and great big sheets of A-1 paper. And actually I played with it. I was playful. So there is something around playfulness being linked to creativity when we’re on our feet and we are mind mapping and we are thinking and we’re talking out loud and thinking out loud, either solo or with other people, that stimulates the creative process.
And I get the fact that mind mapping is not for everyone. I get that, but as you’ve just suggested, use index cards or do spider maps or just doodle on a great big piece of paper. The point I’m making is that the more tactile, the more physical, the more dynamic, and ideally in non sedentary the planning process is, I think the more creative it’s going to be. And the divergent thinking that I talked about comes to the fore, particularly when you are mind mapping because that’s the whole premise of mind mapping is your thoughts are radiating out from a central image and a central idea. But you’ve got to find what works for you.
Marion: And I love that. And I think giving permission to people to sketch it out, have some fun, be playful, go on a solo retreat, even if it’s just to the furthest corner of your small apartment away from your family with a box of crayons and a big piece of paper allows us to see that we have to get this on the page. And I agree with you on paper, that by getting it on the page, we get to see what territory we want to cover. And it’s just a gorgeous way of thinking about it. You really make a strong argument. And you mentioned this before a, about how all this process that you suggest, these 21 points also really get in, allow an authentic voice, a voice that writes with personality, persuasion, and power. But if there’s a question I get more than any other question it’s this, how does a writer find that authentic voice? What tips do you have for people?
Scott: Can I answer that by telling you a little story?
Marion: Yes.
Scott: Well, we all love stories. Couple of years ago, I was running a workshop in a client of mine in the city of London. The people attending it were graduates, so they newly joined the company and they’d were fresh out of university and they were shiny eyed or bushy-tailed and fresh-faced, all the rest of it. So in the morning I shared my rhetorical writing techniques with them. And then the afternoon, and this is the format of all my workshops in the afternoon, I gave them a longer writing exercise to do where I had asked them to either bring in a piece of writing that they’d already produced and rewrite it or rework it or to stop from scratch. And there was a particular girl, I think her name was Gabrielle, very bright. I mean, they’re all graduates. They’re very bright, highly educated people.
And about halfway into the exercise, because it was a 90-minute exercise, she came to me and she was obviously really flustered. And I said, Gabrielle, what’s the problem? She was almost in tears, she said, with tears of frustration, she said, “Scott, I just can’t find the right words.” And I just looked her in the eyes and I said, “Tell me what you’re trying to say as if you were explaining it to your significant other, your husband or your partner or your best friend or your sister or brother or mom or dad or whatever.” And she turned to me, she looked a bit funny and then she just went, “Well, what I really mean is …” It was fantastic. And I said, “Write that. That’s your first draft.”
And so what I developed from that is a very, very simple technique, which is that if you are struggling to find your voice, then grab your mobile phone or your cell phone as I think you guys say on the other side of the pond, grab your cell phone and create an audio file. Speak into the cell phone, what you are trying to say. You will create an audio file using one of the default audio apps on your cell phone, and that will be your first draft. You then upload that to a transcription service like rev.com or auto.ai, and then you can start work on your first draft. But I’ve found that people, particularly dyslexic people really relate to verbalizing what they’re trying to say. It’s almost a physiological process whereby they’re dragging from deep within them up through their sort of windpipe and their lungs and their throat and their voice, their verbalizing what they’re trying to express through the written word. And often by trying to jump too early to the written word, slows them down or undermines the whole process and their confidence as well.
Marion: Well that’s a great little story and it speaks to the sound of the voice and what we can do with it. And it really links to the next question I have, which is you suggest reading aloud and oh, how I love this. I suggest this to all of my students. I learned this from my very first book editor, the great Nan Talese who taught me to read aloud, touching a pencil to every word while I read. And I do it every single day. And my husband is a writer and he does it. And it’s really good that we live just the two of us because anyone walking through this house would think there’s two mad people in this house. Because we’re constantly reading aloud, pacing around, reading to ourselves. So what is the value of reading aloud? You kind of just covered a little bit, but just get under that a bit more in terms, because it’s different than recording your initial thoughts to your home people on your phone in a way. What is the value to reading your work aloud to yourself?
Scott: Of all my 21 Rhetorica techniques, I think it’s my favorite because it’s so elegantly simple or it’s so simple, but it’s so elegantly effective. Every professional writer, as you’ve just said, does it or should do it. I think it does lots of things. I think it helps us to verbalize what we’re trying to express through the written word. But obviously we are reading out loud what we’ve already committed to pen and paper or we’ve put on the screen and it enables us to hear the music and the cadence and the rhythm of our writing. I mean I’m making these points in no particular order, but that is one of the benefits that I think great writing has an auditory element to it. So not only should great writing read well, I think it should sound good as well. And the lesson of that, if you like, is that if something is hard to say, it’s probably going to be hard to read.
So it’s a great way of checking your work. It’s also a great way of assessing the tone of voice of your writing because when we hear it out loud audibly, we are more likely to hear it as it will sound to our reader and make them feel yes. So [inaudible 00:23:06] is a great way of assessing the tone of voice of your writing. And then I think there’s another thing as well, which the great Peter Elbow in one of his superb books said, which is, we need to enlist the support of something that we find easiest to do, i.e. speaking, to help us with what we find hardest to do i.e. writing. And so that is about vocalizing and verbalizing what we’re trying to commit and express through the written word. And the other thing I love, Marion, it’s just anybody can do it. It’s like you don’t need a degree in quantum physics to do it. It’s within the gift of everybody.
Marion: No batteries required.
Scott: Yeah, exactly.
Marion: Yeah, I really like it. There’s a million different varieties of using one’s voice to improve one’s writing, but that’s the first and foremost one. Read your stuff aloud. Yeah. It’s where I catch repetition of words, right? I have some words that I use too much. That’s all. I always do it and I don’t catch them on the page anymore because it’s as though I’ve got blinders on, but I catch them when I read it aloud and I agree with you about the sound. There is a tone, a tempo, a syncopation to good writing That you feel thrumming in you when you read it and you can’t see it merely on the page. It’s beautiful.
So as we wrap this up, let’s talk about that last chapter in the book, which I just love. It’s on typos and it includes some wonderful rules for finding those mistakes in our work, including reading aloud, of course, running a spelling and grammar check of course, and checking for one type of error at a time, all of which I recommend all the time to my writers who say, make one edit that’s just for nouns. Make one edit that’s just for verbs. And I think we agree on so much, but you have one that I have never seen before and I tried it and it was a completely wild ride. You suggest that writers read backwards. So go on. Over to you, Scott.
Scott: Your listeners are going to hate me for this.
Marion: Yes, they are.
Scott: Say, I’m going to be an object of ridicule or fun or whatever. But yeah, so if you want to banish any and all typos from your writing, assuming that you’ve already done the spelling and grammar check, you’ve already read it out loud. This technique is a professional proofreading technique and that is that you print out your document. It’s a very inefficient and very exhausting as well to proofread on the screen. You print it out and you go to the last page and you go to the last word on the last page and you read from right to left and from the bottom of the page to the top revealing each new line with a blank piece of paper or index card as you work your way up line by line and word by word from the bottom of the page to the top.
And so therefore, you are literally reading every line and every page backwards. The reason why this is so effective is because it destroys the brain’s ability to make sense of what you are reading. Because it already assumes that you have checked, you have sense checked what you’ve written, and you know that it is pretty much 98% saying exactly what you want. But it catches all the things that smell cheek might well miss. Like sing where you meant sign, sign where you meant sing, form where you meant from, and from where you meant form. Things like… Very bizarre, when I was using this technique on the manuscript of my second book numbers inserting into the middle of words, which was very strange, kind of ghost in the machine. So it is to read backwards from the bottom and the end to the front, the very first word, it prevents the brain going on autopilot.
Marion: Yes, it does. And that’s one of the great problems with writing and editing your own work. It’s that when you fall in love with your sentences or you start spacing out about the groceries you’ve got to go get later, and your eyes are moving, but nothing’s going in. And this, when I tried it, I did. I did curse you. I did several times just curse you.
Scott: My ears were burning.
Marion: I hope so. But it worked. And I found the form instead of the from and I found those things that spell check cannot get. There’s nothing like making an editor or potential agent or someone in a publishing house angry, like sending them copy that isn’t perfect.
Scott: Yeah, that’s right.
Marion: It’s a beautiful thing. As is this book. I just can’t thank you enough, Scott. I think this book is as beautiful a book as I’ve seen, and it’s also an awful lot of fun to read, and I learned a lot.
Scott: Oh, great. Well that’s compliment indeed coming from you, Marion. Thank you.
Marion: Thank you. The author is Scott Keyser. His new book is Rhetorica, out from Rethink Press. See more on him at writeforresults dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com where I offer online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty wherever you get your podcast and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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