Shiny Green Button

Photo credit: Yogma on Flickr

In his discussion of the verbal challenges in communicating sustainability and describing people who practice it (are they sustainers? sustainabilitists?) Joel Makower addresses something we’ve discussed before here on Shiny Green Button: You can only use the word sustainability so many times before it starts to feel hollow.

Anyone who writes about corporate sustainability can feel the pain here. There just aren’t a lot of solid synonyms for the word. Sure, you can sprinkle in a few references to corporate responsibility, but that gets tired pretty quickly too, especially when you have to broaden it to corporate social responsibility. If only there were another single word that communicates the broader-than-the-environment spirit of sustainability.

Makower suggests we take another look at green. We’ve all heard warnings to steer clear of the term, for fear it will be met with green fatigue or, even worse, carry the stink of greenwashing.

But, isn’t that the term everyone is using anyway? Makower argues that green is commonplace in the business world and that it’s not much of a stretch to broaden its meaning to include more than environmentalism. That’s already happening in the political arena—the most obvious example being the U.S. Green Party, whose platform includes democracy, social justice and economic sustainability along with ecological sustainability.

So, what say you? Can we embrace green and broaden its scope? Or, are there still valid reasons to resist a meme that seems so firmly established?

About six minutes into his TED talk, Carl Safina takes confusing complexities about the use of dispersants to clean up the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico (Is it toxic? Does it work?)—and makes the whole thing crystal clear.

How? By comparing it to something we can all relate to: a sink full of greasy dishes. We all know that oil and water don’t mix, he says. Until you add a dispersant—a common form of which just happens to be soap. Add the soap, and what happens? The oil breaks up into little drops and mixes with the water, turning it into a cloudy soup.

He uses the simple comparison to wage a pretty serious accusation: that BP is using dispersant to cover up—not clean up—the oil spill. After all, there’s no drain in the bottom of the ocean ready to whisk that mix of oily water away.

It’s so hard for me to know what to believe. BP’s site dedicates an entire page to arguing the use of dispersants is effective in controlling oil spills, and it offers even more detailed FAQ. But—especially after seeing Safina’s example—I can’t help but notice that just a click away, BP also claims skimming is highly effective—a process by which oil floating on the surface of the water is collected. You can’t skim if oil is dispersed, right? So which is it, BP? (Plus, check out the BP’s odd use of a snake analogy to describe how dispersant works. How many times do you have to read the description to understand it?)

In the battle for hearts and minds, it seems simpler is better.  Safina’s example is not only relatable, it’s memorable, and more important—it’s something I can see with my own eyes.

Photo credit: Eva Blue on Flickr

This week, something I thought would never happen did. My email was hacked! Everyone in my contacts list received a stilted, poorly written message raving about the new iPad and pointing them to a website where they could get one on the cheap. The email appeared to come directly from me and even included my name at the end.

Almost everyone who received this message knew right away that it wasn’t really me. For most people, the spammy nature of the message itself was a dead giveaway. Others, mostly people I haven’t written or spoken to in months or even years, wrote back to say it didn’t “sound” like me, but they weren’t positive. Incredibly, a few people—all of them contacts I very rarely email—actually believed I sent it.

There’s a lesson here, well, a couple of them. For me: come up with a better password. For communicators: voice matters.

Even though you may have different individuals crafting communications for your business, they should be able to speak with one clear, consistent voice. If the voice is off, readers you’ve worked hard to build a relationship with will know. At best, they’ll be distracted by the dissonance. At worst, you’ll lose credibility.

Writers and editors have been salivating over this one for a while now, and the big day is almost here. On July 6, The Yahoo! Style Guide—billed as the style guide for the Internet age—will be available. For now, you can read bits and pieces online, including articles about writing for the web, optimizing for SEO and basic web coding. My favorite part so far is a helpful word list, with terms you probably won’t find in your standard Webster’s or American Heritage dictionary: mouse over, schwag and geolocation, for example.

Plenty of editors will turn their noses up and say they’re happy with their Chicago, and their AP, and their Strunk and White, and their Bryan Garner, thank you very much. But, there’s no denying that it’s high time for a resource like this. The time we spend trying to figure out if dropdown  should be one word or two or hyphenated (Y! says none of it. Use pull-down menu instead) could certainly be better spent.

In poking around the word list, I already see a couple spots in which Yahoo! is diverging from my precious dictionary (AmHer says username; Y! says user name) and even Mr. Garner himself (he says no hyphens  in up to date when it’s used as an adverb; Y! says put ‘em in). We’ll all have to decide whether to go all in or use the guide selectively, but none of us who write or edit for the web will be able to ignore it altogether.

Nor should we. Our beloved style guides will always be relevant and useful because the rules of good writing and grammar are solid. But, they don’t tell us how to woo search engines or how to avoid bias when writing for an international audience. My guess is this new style guide (all 528 pages of it!) will take its rightful place next to all of our others, and it will still be up to us to decide when and how to apply which style guidelines. It’s always nice to have one more tool in the little writing shed.