Let’s schedule a phone call.
“Who is Jerry Marlow?”
Thank you for asking!
I’m the Chief Writing Officer
at wasyourcartotaledorstolen.com.
I also do all the research,
concept development, writing,
design, graphics, and programming;
but, if wasyourcartotaledorstolen.com
ever grows into an organization
of more than one person,
then I will retain the role
of Chief Writing Officer.
“And what exactly does
a Chief Writing Officer do?”
you might ask.
Many of the duties
of a Chief Writing Officer
are eye-poppingly similar
to the duties
of an organization’s
Chief Data Quality Officer.
An organization’s Chief Data Quality Officer
does whatever he or she can
to ensure that an organization’s data
is of high quality.
High quality data is:
-
Accurate,
-
Current,
-
Precise,
-
Accessible, and
-
Useful for the purpose at hand.
Likewise, high quality writing is:
-
Accurate,
-
Current,
-
Precise,
-
Accessible, and
-
Useful for the purpose at hand.
Of course you want
your organization’s writing
to be accurate and current.
Let’s talk about the many things
that writing can do
for your organization
if the writing is also precise, accessible,
and useful for the purpose at hand.
Who_is_Jerry_MarlowChapter
Precise writing can bump up
your organization’s energy level.
If a Chief Writing Officer
can write, edit, nudge,
educate, coax, and inspire
members of an organization
toward a culture
of more precise language,
then the Chief Writing Officer
can bump up the energy level
of the organization.
“Yeah?
“How does that work?”
When you wander
into the thermodynamics
of information theory,
you learn that more precise information
has more thermodynamic energy
than less precise information has.
In a statistical sense,
the more precise language is,
the less probable
the information conveyed is.
The less probable information is,
the more unexpected the information is.
The more unexpected information is,
the more surprise value the information has.
All else being equal,
the more surprising information is,
the more value the information has
for its recipient.
Claude Shannon,
a pioneer in information theory
who worked at Bell Labs,
went so far as to proclaim:
“Information is surprise.”
Imagine how much more
intellectually exciting
your job would be
if your colleagues
communicated with you
in precise and surprising language.
Imagine how much more alive
your brain would become.
Imagine how much more fun
your job would be!
You might even discover that you have
a new work-life-balance problem:
Your job has become more enjoyable
than your personal life.
Perhaps to their detriment,
many organizations have evolved
cultures of imprecise language.
Members of such cultures
may think, speak, and write
not in precise, improbable,
unexpected, valuable, surprising,
high-energy words and sentences,
but in whatever words and sentences
they think their listeners and readers
expect to hear or read.
Instead of sharing
precise information and valuable insights
that might spark vigorous verbal exchanges,
members of such cultures may use
familiar words, phrases,
cliches,
metaphors, and analogies
to comfort one another,
to dampen enthusiasm,
to lower expectations,
and to maintain the status quo.
Dispiriting discussions and conversations
may climax with the question:
“Are you comfortable with that?”
Is your CEO’s appetite for risk
such that she or he wants employees
to do only
what makes them feel comfortable?
I advocate the cultivation
of an organizational culture
that produces writing that is:
-
Accurate,
-
Current,
-
Precise,
-
Accessible, and
-
Useful for the purpose at hand.
Yet, in many organizations,
people no longer even utter
the word “writing.”
Instead, in knowing tones,
they speak of “creating content.”
The origins of this energy-sucking,
imagination-killing malaise
trace back several decades
to the dawn of the internet.
Back then, of a sudden,
technologically adept people
created a vast network
that could deliver digital containers
all around the world
faster and cheaper
than FedEx and UPS could deliver
cardboard boxes and envelopes.
Our new technological mandarins
needed only one missing ingredient.
They needed something to put
into their empty digital containers.
They needed, as they thought of it:
“Content!”
What is content?
Content is anything
that can fill up
an empty digital container.
Where writers seek to inform,
energize, inspire, and persuade;
content creators seek to fill up
empty digital containers.
In many organizations,
a culture of content creation
has produced a methodology
of cross plagiarization.
In this methodology,
a firm’s content creators access,
gather, synthesize, homogenize,
and re-purpose their competitors’ content.
Content creators mix in a list of words
that they got from their firm’s
SEO (search-engine-optimization) guru.
If a content creator
wishes to take no responsibility
for the style or structure
of his or her work product,
then he or she may run the content mix
through an AI app
that churns out sentences.
Content creators then fill
their firms’ empty digital containers
with plagiarized,
synthesized,
homogenized,
re-purposed,
SEO-words-injected,
AI-stylized
content.
Readers, listeners, clients, and customers
then get the low-energy, low-value,
expected, comfortable, SEO-injected,
homogenized, consensus view
of the product, service, pitch,
or proposal at hand.
Energy?
More like entropy.
Surprises?
None to be found.
Value?
Maybe as a Bayesian prior
to give you a picture
of what the less clever among us
assume to be the current state
of the phenomenon under inquiry.
In my writing, editing, and coaching;
my goals are not reader comfort,
listener comfort, and organizational comfort.
My goal is not to fill empty digital containers
with low-value consensus views of anything.
I value
insight, courage, originality, and audacity.
My goals are reader action,
listener action, and organizational action.
In much of business writing,
actions are transactions.
To lead readers and listeners into action,
I tap into their motivations and goals.
I lay out concepts and facts.
I engineer my writing against
my target audience’s decision criteria.
I write boldly and with clarity.
I mix words, graphics, images, and exhibits
in whatever way will accomplish
my or my client’s communication goals
most expeditiously.
I lead readers and listeners
down a cognitive, emotional, visual,
psychological, and behavioral path
that, if I’m successful,
inspires readers and listeners
to spring into action!
I do whatever I can to make it easy
for people who listen to what I write
and for people who read what I write
to take action
and achieve their goals.
I want listeners and readers to succeed!
Precise_writing_can_bump_up_your_energy_levelSubchapter
A culture of precise writing
can make your employees
more courageous and more outspoken.
When an organization’s employees
are informed, energized, and successful;
they discover their inner courage.
Courageous employees
express their points of view!
Courageous employees
share information and ideas
with colleagues!
Courageous employees
initiate collaborations
with people in the organization
outside their own silos!
Courageous employees
propose new ways for the organization
to achieve its goals!
If you think your organization’s employees
could use a boost
to their energy levels
and to their courage,
then maybe your organization
could use a Chief Writing Officer?
If you want to send my resume to HR
or to a colleague,
you can download a copy
from jerrymarlow.com/resume.
Precise_writing_can_make_you_more_courageousSubchapter
When precise writing is accessible,
your colleagues, clients, and customers
can comprehend your messages
quickly, easily, and accurately.
In data management,
accessible means
that the people who need data
can get that data
quickly, easily, cheaply,
and in a form that they can use efficiently.
In spoken and written communication,
accessible means
that people who need information
can understand that information
quickly, easily, and accurately.
To make information accessible,
I mostly write in sentences
that are short and easy to understand.
I do not create logical puzzles such as:
“Blah, blah, blah cannot be overstated.”
Logical puzzles slow readers down.
Logical puzzles squander readers’
attention, time, and energy.
(Though, I confess, I do love the song
“Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”)
In data processing, to interpret
what the value in a data field means,
the software may have to look up
the meaning of the value
in a lookup table.
In listening and reading,
you perform a mental or physical lookup
whenever you ask yourself:
“Who was the antecedent for that pronoun?”
“Which concept was the former concept?
Which concept was the latter concept?”
Performing mental and physical lookups
consumes both time and energy.
To make the sentences that I write
cognitively accessible and efficient,
I minimize the number
of mental lookups
that the reader’s brain
has to perform.
When communication calls
for a long, long sentence;
I organize the sentence
so that the meaning of the sentence emerges
as the sentence’s phrases cascade
from the beginning of the sentence
to the end of the sentence.
I do not want my reader
to have to lug a growing,
increasingly messy
cognitive load
as she or he waits
for connections to click into place.
Yuck!
The very thought of such a sentence
gives me the heebie-jeebies!
If your organization communicates
in writing with the public,
then you may want to keep in mind
that twenty percent of American adults
do not read proficiently.
If your organization’s writing
is easily accessible,
then your organization can reach more
of these often-neglected readers.
To make wasyourcartotaledorstolen.com
as efficiently accessible as possible,
I use a technique
that I developed for writing speeches.
When they read a speech to an audience,
many people sound terrible!
Their spoken words
do not flow in natural phrases.
Emphasis falls in weird places.
Intonation is either flat or sounds artificial.
In short, when many people
read a speech out loud,
they sound like they’re reading it.
Why do so many people sound so bad
when they read a speech out loud?
When we speak naturally,
we cluster words into meaningful phrases.
To let each phrase register with the listener,
we pause— however briefly—
before we speak the next phrase.
When a person reads a speech out loud,
to sound natural,
he or she has to sort
into meaningful phrases
words that, usually, are strung along
on paper pages,
on a screen,
or on a teleprompter
without any grouping
into meaningful phrases.
For many a speaker
who is reading a speech out loud,
from the instant
that the speaker’s eyes and brain
register the meaning
of a string of words
until the instant
that those words come out
of the speaker’s mouth,
the time interval
is not enough time
for the speaker’s brain
to group the words
into meaningful, natural-sounding phrases.
To make it easy
for people to sound natural
when they read
on paper pages,
on a screen,
or on a teleprompter
a speech that I have written;
I break the lines of the speech
into meaningful, natural phrases.
I display the speech
on paper pages,
on the screen,
or on the teleprompter
at the font size that,
for the speaker, produces
the most natural flow of speech.
I minimize the amount
of cognitive work
that the speaker has to do
to sound natural, brilliant, and charismatic.
If folks for whom I write speeches
do not speak with as much charisma
as they would like,
then I am happy to coach them
on how to develop
a powerful and charismatic speaking voice.
For several years,
I studied voice with Carl Stough,
a breathing and voice coach
who worked with Olympic athletes,
with opera singers, with pop singers,
with business leaders, and with musicians.
When a person speaks with a voice
that is weak, muffled,
grating, barely audible,
or otherwise less than fully charismatic;
most often, he or she,
consciously or subconsciously,
has an erroneous and counterproductive
mental model
of the physics and physiology
of speech.
If an uncharismatic speaker
learns an accurate and productive
mental model
of the physics and physiology
of speech
and does some exercises
to undo decades
of self-defeating
physiological speaking habits,
then greater speaking joy and charisma
are almost certain to emerge.
If your speaking voice
is not as charismatic
as you would like,
then we should talk.
I believe that the same technique
of semantic line breaks
that works so well for people
who are reading speeches out loud
also makes the written word
more accessible to all readers.
Semantic line breaks
minimize the amount of cognitive work
that any reader has to do—
even if he or she
is not communicating
his or her strategic vision
to thousands of employees,
but is reading to himself or herself
on his or her cellphone
messages such as
how to get a fair valuation
of his or her total-loss vehicle.
If I have successfully made
the concepts, information, and solutions
in wasyourcartotaledorstolen.com
efficiently accessible,
then you may even have found
reading wasyourcartotaledorstolen.com
to be a little spooky.
You zip right along with almost no effort.
Your brain is in cruise mode.
There are no traffic jams.
There are no obstacles in your path.
You are miraculously cruising down
the open highway
of an earlier America
in a 1966 Pontiac GTO convertible.
Your future is so bright
that you have to wear shades!
What do you think?
Have you found yourself zipping
through the writing
on wasyourcartotaledorstolen.com
with almost no effort?
Would you like for your organization’s writing to be equally precise and accessible?
If yes and yes, then
I can make that happen.
Readers_comprehend_accessible_messages_more_quickly_easily_and_accuratelySubchapter
High-quality data is useful
for the purpose at hand.
High-quality writing helps
members of your organization
accomplish their goals.
In the management and provisioning
of data flows,
every work unit
of every organization
faces multiple interrelated questions:
What decisions do members
of the work unit
need to make and implement?
What data do members
of the work unit
need to make those decisions
and to implement those decisions?
Are members of the work unit
getting that data?
What is the best format
in which to present that data?
Are members of the work unit
getting their data
in the best format?
How are the answers
to these questions
changing and evolving?
In sophisticated organizations,
to answer these questions
and to help data providers
provide data users
with increasingly useful data,
data-quality teams
routinely convene meetings
between data providers
and data users.
In the presence of the data providers,
data-quality team members
ask data users
questions such as these:
“Are you getting the data
that you need
to make good decisions
and to implement those decisions?”
“Could the data be presented
in more useful formats?”
“If yes, how so?”
“What additional data
that we could generate internally
would you find useful?”
“In what format or formats
would you like to receive
this internal data?”
“What additional data
that we could buy
or otherwise obtain externally
would you find useful?”
“In what format or formats
would you like to receive
that external data?”
These discussions allow data providers
to provide data users
with data
that is increasingly useful
for the data users’ purposes.
Likewise, if a Chief Writing Officer
initiates similar feedback conversations
between the intended readers
of written information
and the people who write that information,
then these conversations will allow writers
to provide their intended readers
with writing
that is increasingly useful
for the readers’ purposes.
High_quality_writing_helps_people_accomplish_their_goalsSubchapter
Many people appreciate the ways
in which I maximize
the efficiency, effectiveness,
and sheer enjoyment
of spoken and written communication.
Here is a small sampling
of responses and reactions
to my work.
For a major financial institution,
I wrote and produced
a multi-media presentation
that communicated to employees
the institution’s transaction flows,
senior management’s strategic vision,
and what the people
in the audience could do
to help the institution realize
senior management’s strategic vision.
At its climax,
in the name of senior management,
the presentation
challenged the people in the audience
to manage opportunity.
One employee later said to her manager,
“I went back to my office
and asked myself
what I could do differently.”
Another employee said to his manager,
“I never knew my job was so important.
I can’t wait to get back to work!”
To make Black-Scholes options‑pricing theory easy to understand
for the mathematically challenged,
I designed and programmed
an animated price-path simulator
that tabulates stock gains and losses
into histograms.
When you simulate
several thousand potential price paths,
the price-path simulator shows graphically,
among other things, that,
over a given time horizon,
every financial forecast,
is a probability distribution.
In Black-Scholes options‑pricing theory,
over a given time horizon,
stock-price gains and losses
create a histogram
that approximates a bell-shaped curve
drawn on a log-normal price axis.
The value of any financial asset
is the probability-weighted present value
of the asset’s potential payoffs or cash flows.
The Black-Scholes value
of a call option on a stock
is the probability‑weighted present value
of all the option’s potential payoffs
above the option’s strike price
in the probability distribution
of the underlying stock’s future prices.
To accompany the simulator,
I wrote a book.
Of the book, a sophomore
at Tsinghua University in China
wrote to me,
“Your book is friendly
and easy to understand.
I like your writing style.
You express complex ideas
in easy words.”
Of the simulator and book,
an accountant wrote in an amazon review:
“Having a degree in mathematics
and a professional accountancy qualification
did not prepare me for the explanations
of Black Scholes to be found
in most text books.
“They may have gotten a Nobel Prize
for their option-pricing model
but Black and Scholes
were never going to get an award
for clarity of explanation.
“Having grappled
with this area for a few months,
I decided I needed
a little more innovative help;
hence my purchase
of Jerry Marlow’s interactive tutorial.
“Two days later, I feel I could go
for the next Nobel Prize myself!
“So many things click into place
so quickly, it’s marvelous.”
A real estate broker asked me
to write a speech
for him to give
at a real estate convention.
In the speech, I explained
how the brokers and agents
in the audience could best tap
into the global market
for luxury residential properties.
The day after he gave the speech,
I asked my client,
“How did it go?”
“Standing ovation!”
A year later, my client told me
that brokers who were in the audience
were still telling him
that his speech changed
how they sell luxury residential properties
to high‑net‑worth individuals
and families around the globe.
Through a tech contracting agency,
Citi hired me to create PowerPoint guides
to the tools, data flows,
and data-management capabilities
of Citi’s relational database
that stores trading and reference data
on Citi’s three-million-plus
capital-markets trades a day.
Systems managers and developers
were to write drafts.
I was to edit the drafts.
One systems manager dragged his feet
on sending me a draft.
To plead with this systems manager
to send me a draft,
my manager sent him this text message:
“Hari, I know you folks are drowned
in work to the head level every day.
“You don’t have much time
to spend on anything non-critical.
“The work Jerry does is marvelous.
“Users read the stuff and educate themselves.
“We don’t have to get on
to these stupid calls and explain
how our systems behave anymore.
“I feel it’s worth putting in
one extra weekend or night
and provide the documentation to Jerry.
“It pays every day on day to day basis.”
People_like_how_I_maximize_efficiency_and_effectiveness_of_writingSubchapter
Sometimes I can be helpful
even when I don’t know
what I’m talking about.
During my gig at Citi Capital Markets,
one interaction that I initiated
illuminates an unorthodox way
in which a Chief Writing Officer
can create value in your organization.
Another systems manager was tardy
in sending me a draft of an overview
of the entire Citi Capital Markets
data-management process.
What to do?
How could I be helpful?
I’m not terribly shy.
So I decided that I would imagine
how the whole
three-million-plus-trades-a-day
data-management process
probably works
and write a draft of an overview
on that basis.
I wrote the draft.
Wherever I knew I needed a number
but didn’t know what the number was,
I inserted a blank.
When I finished the draft,
I sent it to the senior manager
who initiated the writing project
and to whom both I
and the tardy systems manager
ultimately reported.
The senior manager, in turn,
sent the draft
to the tardy systems manager
who was supposed to write the draft.
After the tardy systems manager
had read my imagined draft,
I spoke with him.
Here, as best I can recollect,
is what he said:
“First off, I could not believe
that someone would circulate a draft
that had so many mistakes in it.
“Then, as I corrected the mistakes,
I suddenly realized
how to write the document
that I had been struggling
to write for years—
but couldn’t get started on.
“I realized
that I should begin the story
where you started it—
at the trading desks.
“I should use the flow
that you established
in your draft.
“I could realize the potential of that flow!”
I’ve seen this predicament more than once.
An expert knows so much
about his or her area of expertise
that he or she cannot find
the beginning of the story.
The expert cannot find the flow.
If I can help your organization’s experts
find the beginning
and find the flow
for the stories that they want to tell,
then your experts likely will be able
to quickly write their stories
in ways that are not only marvelous
but that, in their lucidity
and in their usefulness,
are almost miraculous.
I_help_experts_find_their_flowSubchapter
Would you like for your organization
to enjoy the benefits
of writing
that is more precise, more accessible,
and more useful for the purpose at hand?
Would you like
for your organization’s writing
to bump up your organization’s energy level
and to encourage your employees to be
more courageous and more outspoken?
Would you like
for your organization’s writing
to allow your colleagues,
clients, and customers
to comprehend
your organization’s messages
more quickly, more easily,
and more accurately?
Would you like
for your organization’s writing
to have a more powerful flow?
If you would,
then I would like to help you
achieve your goals.
For a given writing assignment,
I can help you
and others in your organization
define
your communication objectives:
Whom do you want to persuade
to do what?
Whom do you want to educate
how to do what?
To learn your organization’s subject matter,
I can review your organization’s
existing documentation.
I can interview your organization’s
in-house experts.
I can conduct additional research
on my own.
I can write a draft that plugs
into your intended readers’ knowledge level,
goals, objectives, concerns,
and decision criteria.
I can edit the writing of others
in ways that increase precision,
clarity, and energy.
I can manage drafts
through review and collaboration
in ways that are far more creative,
inspiring, productive, and audacious
than bogging people down
in “Track Changes.”
I can work with you
as a consultant,
on a project of multiple months duration,
or in a staff position.
Let me help you get
your colleagues, clients,
customers and investors
excited about your organization,
excited about your products,
excited about your services,
and excited about your mission.
If you are in a leadership position,
let’s get your audiences excited about you!
Let’s see if we can get you
a standing ovation!
Be in touch.
Or email jerrymarlow@jerrymarlow.com.
I look forward to speaking with you.
Jerry Marlow
Would_you_like_to_enjoy_the_benefits_of_high_quality_writingSubchapter
Nota bene
Jerry Marlow is not an attorney. Neither information nor opinions published on this site constitute legal advice. This site is not a lawyer referral service. No attorney‑client or confidential relationship is or will be formed by use of this site. Any attorney listings on this site are either paid attorney advertising or free-trial attorney advertising. In some states, the information on this website may be considered a lawyer referral service.
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