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Before today, I exercised months of great restraint.
I was doomscrolling LinkedIn and I spotted my least favorite writing trend for the 345,654,872nd time.
An influencer wrote 79 words about the man behind Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. A yes, a masterful campaign all copywriters should study. It’s such a good campaign, nothing more needs to be said after those two words.
But this LinkedIn user followed the backstory with 281 words about clear messaging. He typed, “We can’t afford to be abstract or pretentious. We have to be ruthless in our pursuit of simplicity and clarity.”
My brother. You had it 281 words ago.
Finding Meaning in the Mundane
Humans, LinkedIn users especially, have leaned hard into this writing style: Start with an innocuous personal anecdote and tie it to a life lesson.
I put a cucumber into pickle juice. As I watched the herbs floating around the cucumber, I thought of myself as the cucumber and the dill as the stars. The fennel and coriander were the planets.
And yet – the cucumber is the only thing in the jar that changed. The peppercorns are still peppercorns. The star anise is still star anise. Then I realized how much the universe shapes who you are, whether you realize it or not.
As the cucumber transitioned into a pickle, it reminded me of my transition to CEO. As the center of my company, I am constantly growing and changing while making sure my employees feel secure in who they are and feel fulfillment in their role.
Any other pickles out there agree?
– A story I made up while writing this piece.
Social media has turned normal people into wizards. We can connect anything to anything. Or is it a flimsy connection as a catalyst to make a bigger point?
There is no sane reason to compare a CEO to a pickle. You can replace “CEO” with any noun, and the above passage post could still make sense. It’s not a unique comparison.
Twenty-year-old me wrote this way all the time. My former blog’s most popular post of ALL TIME was about the Pokemon Dratini. The post paralleled the little dragon to my struggles as a young journalist. If I could rewrite it, I wouldn’t mention myself at all, cutting the length down by 40 percent. The message would probably stick better while being universal and unpretentious.
Anecdote-to-life-lesson posts are not necessarily wrong or bad writing. But more often than not, there are quicker and more profound ways to make your point.
These days, whenever I draft a post that begins with a personal story then transitions into a complex ideal, I nix it. First, because it’s not worth the trouble. And second, because the story needs to be self-reliant. If the story on its own doesn’t send the message, it might not be worth writing.
I wanted to write about how a coach yelled at me once and reframed my view of setting self-imposed limits. Here’s the story: As a C-teamer, I said I would to hate to be on the varsity cross country team because they had to run eight miles. My coach told me, “I don’t ever want to hear you say that.” I ran a half marathon three years later. End of story.
I would rather save the parables for the preachers.
Show, Don’t Tell
This is a Writing-101 lesson, but showing-not-telling is the solution here.
The most powerful stories are the ones that extend beyond the what is written. All the exposition is implied, not expressed.
Almost every fairy tale does this. Did Aesop need to clarify the meaning of The Boy Who Cried Wolf with a personal tale of getting benign moles checked until his doctor started ignoring him? To my knowledge, he did not.
Here’s a fun story I think would make an excellent LinkedIn post:
“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Tell truths. Provide what is essential. Allow space for critical thinking and trust the reader to find meaning.
I have a post coming soon about Bitcoin. It will not mention Bitcoin at all. A true SEO nightmare.
Tell the story. Then stop.
I tried finding a good example of this on LinkedIn:
“I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as TITLE at COMPANY.”
– Someone I follow
When to Go Big
When you’re a journalist or a novelist.