There Is No Crowd

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the whole lesson can be had by changing one word and deleting about forty others.

Two firms both write to say the same,
Same news, same month, same honest claim.
One writes to all: we are delighted.
One writes to her: you asked, I've sighted.
Same list, same day, same thing to sell.
Which one was read? And read how well?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the news, all together now, was equally good. Both had something worth telling their customers, and both sat down on the same Tuesday to tell them.

The first wrote to everybody, and you can hear it in the first four words. We are delighted to announce that we have expanded our range of services to better serve our valued clients.

Read that as the woman receiving it, who is one person, alone, holding a telephone in a kitchen. Nothing in it is addressed to her. It is a proclamation delivered to a square, and she is standing at the back of the square with nine other things to do, and a proclamation is not something you answer, it is something you overhear.

Notice also who the sentence is about: we are delighted, we have expanded, our range, our valued clients. Every noun belongs to the seller. She has appeared in it once, in the plural, as a category she does not think of herself as belonging to, since nobody has ever woken up feeling like a valued client.

It was accurate, it was professional, and it was deleted in the ordinary way, without malice or even much attention.

The second firm wrote to one person. Not to a segment: to a particular customer she could actually picture, a woman she had dealt with in March who had a specific problem with a specific date attached.

You mentioned in March that the invoicing eats your Tuesdays. We have started doing that part for people, and I thought of you. It runs to about sixty pounds a month and takes an hour to set up. Shall I send you the details, or would you rather I rang?

She sent it to four hundred people, and here is the part that surprises everybody the first time: it did not read as impersonal to the other three hundred and ninety-nine. Written to one, it reads as human to all, because the shape of a sentence written to a person survives being copied, whereas the shape of a proclamation cannot be repaired by adding a name at the top.

Sixty-odd replied, several of them beginning with the words "how did you know".

And mark the small mechanical differences, since they are learnable and none of them is talent. She wrote you rather than our customers. She used verbs a person would say aloud, so nothing was expanded, leveraged or delivered. She said the price. She asked one question with two easy answers instead of inviting the reader to get in touch, which is a request to organise something. And her whole message was ninety words, because a letter to one person does not need a preamble explaining who is writing.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nobody has ever read anything in a crowd. Every letter you send is opened by one person, alone, who is slightly busy. That is true whether it goes to four hundred people or forty thousand, and it is the fact almost all business writing forgets the moment it addresses more than one reader at a time. The audience is a fiction of the sender's; the reader is always singular, and writes back, or does not, entirely on her own account.

So the discipline is to have one actual person in mind and write to them by name, then remove the name. Not a persona built out of categories, which produces categorical prose: a real customer with a real complaint and a real month attached. What you write to her will be specific enough to be believed and human enough to be answered, and both of those qualities survive being sent to hundreds.

The tells of the crowd voice are easy to spot once you look for them, and they cluster at the beginning. Any sentence starting with we are pleased or we are delighted, which announces that the news is chiefly interesting to the sender. The plural customer, valued client, businesses like yours. Words nobody says in a kitchen. And the closing invitation to get in touch, which hands the reader a task instead of a question, when the whole point of the demonstration was that a willing person still needs telling exactly what to do.

And there is a reason the proclamation persists, which is worth naming because it is not stupidity. It feels safer. Writing to one person means choosing that person, saying a price out loud, and being specific enough to be wrong, whereas the plural voice cannot offend, cannot be checked and cannot fail visibly. It also cannot work, which is the trade you are making without noticing it.

Three questions, and use the last thing you actually sent out:

1. Who were you writing to? If you cannot name a real person, that is the whole problem. Pick one from your own book, with their situation in front of you, and rewrite the same message to them alone.
2. How many sentences begin with we? Count them, then count the ones beginning with you. If the first number is larger, your reader has been sitting in the audience of a speech about somebody else's achievements.
3. Would you say it in a kitchen? Read it aloud as if to one customer standing there. Every phrase you would never say to her face is a phrase to cut, and there will be more of them than you expect.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one was read?

The one that arrived as a letter rather than an announcement. Both went to the same four hundred people on the same Tuesday, and both were true. But one was written to an audience, and audiences do not exist; they are four hundred separate kitchens, each containing one person who is slightly busy and has never once thought of herself as a valued client. The other was written to a woman in March who had trouble with her Tuesdays, and three hundred and ninety-nine strangers read it and felt spoken to, because that is what happens when a sentence is built for one pair of eyes.

The verse:

There is no crowd. There never was.
There's her, the kettle, and the clock.
Write her the letter, name the cost,
And she will write you back, or knock.

Until next time. Go and rewrite your next message to one named customer from your own book, then take the name off and send it to everybody.

P.S. You may object that this is a great deal of intimacy for a business message, and I would answer that you are already writing to individuals; you have simply been doing it in the voice of a committee. Nobody ever complained that a supplier wrote to them too much like a person.

Also in the archive: The Unsubscribe Button, The Bootmaker's Handbill and Crossing the Square.