A new year, a new decade. It’s a good time to think about fresh beginnings.
So I started by opening up three books I’d been given for Christmas and reading the opening lines. Here they are:
“The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.”
John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
“On a dull day in the early 1990s, I took the number 13 bus to Hendon, got off at the corner of Shirehall Lane and walked along it towards the house where I was born.”
Oliver Postgate, Seeing things
“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long.”
John Irving, Last night in twisted river
None of them is going to make it to that list of classic first sentences. But each of them is intriguing, each establishes straightaway a tone of voice, and each of them is an invitation to read on. They do it not by telling you a mass of crucial facts but by tempting you with the information that’s withheld.
The Le Carré starts with the death of a character who will play no part in the story and with lots of questions raised in the reader’s mind. That will continue; it’s the nature of the spy thriller genre. The Oliver Postgate (author of Bagpuss, Noggin, The Clangers) sends you strolling comfortably back down a road to childhood, to a familiar feeling in an unfamiliar setting that we all still recognise from our own life stories. The John Irving leaves you wondering about consequences. What happened as a result of the hesitation? You won’t have to wait long to find out; there’s already a momentum to the storytelling.
I wondered how fresh the beginnings might be in the writing for some of our biggest corporations as we enter the century’s second decade. If, for example, I were looking for a change of career, how would I be persuaded to apply to join a big company? So I went to three websites, not knowing what I might find. Here they are:
Sony Ericsson
Energising people’s experiences
We want our employees to experience a career with us as being both satisfying and lucrative – because we believe this leads to our collective accomplishments.
Microsoft
Imagine
You have unique experiences, skills and passions – and we believe you can bring them all to Microsoft for a rich, rewarding career and lifestyle that will surprise you with its breadth and potential.
HSBC
If you like working with customers face-to-face, you might be well suited to a role in our retail network, providing local customers with the kind of excellent service that will help drive the profitability of your branch.
Intrigued? Enticed? Persuaded? I thought not. The problem is that the business world does not learn from good writers outside its world. It sees the two as unconnected, and that’s a big mistake.
As a result the corporation thinks of its own agenda rather than ‘how can we intrigue people enough to read on?’ So the corporation writes introductory sentences that try to cram as much information into the opening lines as possible. It comes up with long sentences that repel rather than invite. (Long sentences can work if they are well-constructed to reinforce the meaning of the words – see the Oliver Postgate sentence).
But it’s not as if the information crammed in is all worthwhile. The 39-word opening sentence from HSBC might be rewritten more simply and honestly as: “Do you like talking to people? You could help our customers, and you could help your branch make money.”
The opening sentence is so important because it helps the reader to decide. How do I feel about this business? Should I read on? It’s worth thinking hard about how you can best do that. It might be by not trying to say too much, just enough to arouse interest.
I think I’d be more inspired by something offering flexibility and opportunities for growth or personal development. The way job adverts are written puts people in boxes rather than appearing open to who might be out there.
I love this stuff – it’s so true, so simple and yet remains so pervasive across the business world. I wonder why?
It affects everything. The business cases. The strategy presentations. The detailed plans. The progress reports. If the words are confusing, where’s the meaning?
David Attenborough to me is a great communicator.
‘What would you like to be,’ people sometimes ask, ‘if you came back to earth as an animal?’ The answer I give depends, I suppose, on the company’ [people].
Opening sentence, Chapter 1 in Life Stories. Shows it is all about people and personality. None of the corporate examples give me the feeling of their people or personality. Read the rest of the opening, very funny. Not enough space here. Read the book, listen to the recording. Enjoy
It was the best of beginnings.
It was the worst of beginnings.
by Darles Chickens, close friend of Charles Dickens.
I told you last night I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord,and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.
The opening two sentences of GILEAD by Marilynne Robinson.
A beautifully written book, from start to finish. Beautiful is hard; very hard. May we all strive to at least write as elegantly as we can this year.