2011 WriteMark |
Friday 3 September 2010 |
New Zealand Plain English Awards |
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John Ansell: Keynote speech
Confessions of a Distiller — An ad writer’s take on poetry, politics and paper manners
John’s arrival followed a thundering rock video, equating gobbledygook to lying and urging the elite to 'stop talking like turkeys!'
John Ansell likes to stir things up. By boiling things down.
Things like politicians.
In 2005, he boiled the National and Labour parties down to a set of red and blue rectangles. Straight away, the boys in blue shot up 10 percent in the polls. The girls in red drafted the Electoral Finance Bill to stop it happening again.
Such is the power of simplicity.
John boils his English down plainer than most. He calls it ‘good paper manners’. In ad agencies, he told us, copywriters have the perfect incentive to make sure their readers can understand every word at first glance.
It’s called getting sacked if they don’t.
How to display good paper manners? Keep your writing:
- Live (active not passive),
- Light (sound like a human being, not a human resource),
- Tight (prefer the punchy Anglo-Saxon to the waffly Greco-Latin),
- Right (correct spelling, grammar and punctuation)
- White (short paragraphs, more white space = less eyestrain).
(Rather like this report, we trust.)
When he’s not working with words as a copywriter or plain English crusader, the Iwi / Kiwi man (AKA Simpleman) is playing with them as a silly poet or entertaining linguist.
The poems come from his book I Think The Clouds Are Cotton Wool — Rhymes Committed by John Ansell.
They range from the hard-boiled (Mary had a little lamb / She couldn’t eat the rest) to a song about an eel (That’s a Moray) to a rambling 11 page rhyming epic about the longest place name in America, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.
(Or, in plain English, Webster Lake.)
Most are rather Milliganesque, like In Defence of Egyptian Daddies:
He may have a daddy’s body
And his friends may call him Fred
But this dad you see is bound to be
A mummy when he’s dead.
John is fascinated by the origins of words. He notes that 'the word dollar is Czech, while the word cheque is French. The word French, however, is English, while the word English is German, and the word German is Latin, as is the word Latin'.
'But you will be pleased to know that the word letter is, in fact, French.'
John berated the audience for their ignorance of the word ACACEBE. Then he confessed: it wasn’t really a word, but his last seven end-of-year maths marks at school.
His up and down maths record, he explained, was due to the wildly uneven explanatory powers of his teachers. This has caused him to focus on 'the craft of explanation' ever since.
He believes that if Paul McCartney and John Lennon had been at Victoria University when he was there, one of their hit songs would have been called, 'All you need is the cognitive-affective state characterised by intrusive and obsessive fantasising concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance, da da-dah da-daah.'
Along with his fluent recitation of gobbledygook, the highlight of John’s talk was his impersonation of a maths-teaching school rugby coach explaining the game as a convoluted series of mathematical equations.
'A try is five-sevenths of a goal and the last two-sevenths is scored by the first five-eighths...'
John used PowerPoint as a colourful and lively backdrop. 'Bullets,' says John, 'were invented to bore people to death. Your first duty as a writer — whether you’re speaking on stage or on paper — is to keep your audience awake. '
His message of keeping things simple and visual certainly did that.
