Word for Word

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Not the old town this time but a town of your own century, where two bicycle repairers set out in the same February to put their trade into words.

Two bicycle repairers in one town, the same spoke key and the same trade counter.
Both wanted a page on the web and a monthly note to four hundred old customers.
Both bought the same machine that writes, in the same week of February.
One asked it for the words, read them over, thought them good, and sent them out.
One asked it for nothing, and gave it a notebook of what customers said at his counter.
Why could the first man's page have been sent by his rival word for word, and the second man's by nobody?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two bicycle repairers, in a town I have never named and a century I have never seen. A bench each, a wall of wheels, the smell of degreaser, the tick of a bent spoke going round in the truing stand. Both were good. Either could take a bicycle out of a six-winter shed and send it back on the road safe.

Both had the same writing to do and neither liked it: a page on the web, a monthly note to four hundred old customers, and the daily confirmations. In February both bought the same program, the sort you tell what you want written and it writes it. Better sentences than most men manage on a Sunday evening.

The first repairer used it as it invites you to be used. He asked for a page for a bicycle shop offering repairs, servicing and wheel building, friendly and professional. Six hundred words came back inside a minute, correctly spelled and sensibly ordered. He was passionate about cycling. Every bicycle was treated as his own. A quick turnaround came at competitive prices. He read it twice, thought it better than anything he would have written, and put it up that night.

Nothing went wrong, and that is the part worth attending to. Nothing was untrue, nobody complained, and enquiries did not fall. They did not rise either. In the autumn a woman telephoned to ask whether he was the shop by the station or the other one, and he had nothing to say that answered her, since all of it was true of both. His rival, four streets off, had asked the same machine nearly the same question that month, and neither man ever read the other's page.

The second repairer asked it for nothing. He put a cheap notebook under the counter and for a month wrote down what people said as they came in, in their words rather than his. It is not what you expect. One woman said it had been in the shed since the baby. A man did not know whether it was worth fixing. A mother asked twice whether it was safe for her girl to ride to school. Thirty-one sentences, most about wasted money or about the road, not one about a passion for cycling.

Then he took three facts out of his own books, none of them written down before: that a bicycle out of a shed needed, nine times in ten, under twenty pounds of parts; that a shelf of eleven hundred used but sound parts let him mend what the makers would have you replace; that he had built the wheels a man rode to Edinburgh on. He gave the machine the notebook and the facts and told it to put them in plain sentences. His page was not better written than his rival's. In places it was worse. But it said: if it has stood in the shed since the baby came, bring it in, because nine out of ten need less than twenty pounds of parts, and we will tell you before we start if yours is the tenth. No other shop in the county could have sent that page.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A machine that has read everything can only hand you back the middle of it, and the middle is precisely where no customer can tell you from the shop at the other end of the street. That is not a flaw in it. It is the whole of how it works.

It has been fed a vast quantity of what has already been written, and when you ask it for a page it supplies what most commonly follows what. Ask what a bicycle repairer ought to say of himself and it tells you, accurately, what bicycle repairers in general have said. It is an averaging engine, and very good at it. The trouble is that the average was never worth anything, since being chosen means being distinguishable from the man next door.

Now the part that makes this expensive rather than merely a pity. The writing is not bad. Bad writing you would notice and mend. What arrives is grammatical, warm and interchangeable, and offers you nothing to object to, so you send it. A fault gets corrected when it looks like a fault, and this one looks like a finished job. You have hired a faithful servant who does exactly as he is told, who cannot tell you that what he handed over could have gone to anybody.

So divide your writing in two, because half of it is not at risk. Confirmations, reminders, directions to the yard, opening hours over Christmas, the turning of notes into sentences: hand all that over gladly. Nobody ever chose a tradesman on the wording of a reminder. The other half is your page, your offer, the work you refuse, your guarantee, the monthly note. That half is the whole of your being choosable, and averaging it is a loss that shows on no invoice.

A second trap waits for the man who has understood the first. Ask for particulars and the machine supplies them, in the right shape, invented: years you have not traded, a promise you cannot keep. A false particular is worse than any generality, being the sort of thing a customer checks. Particulars come from your counter and your books, which is why the best line is found rather than thought up.

Two cautions. First, this is no argument for writing by hand out of principle. The man who refuses the machine for purity's sake pays in evenings and must still find his particulars, since the blank page never supplied one. Give it material. Second, do not mistake a particular for the quaint. A particular is a fact that could only come from your own trade: a figure out of your books, a sentence a customer said, a kind of work you will not take. It is not another paragraph on your love of the craft, which is the average wearing a hat.

Three questions, and the first wants doing before Friday:

1. Could your nearest rival have sent this word for word? Take the last three things you put in front of a customer and strike out every sentence equally true over his door. What survives is your advertising.
2. Which of your writing does nobody choose you on? List what you write in a month and mark each line chooses me or does not. Give the machine the second list and keep your hands for the first.
3. Where do you keep your customers' own words? Put a notebook where you take enquiries and write down the next thirty sentences people say, in their words and not your improvement of them. It is the only material the machine cannot get elsewhere.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why could the first man's page have been sent by his rival word for word, and the second man's by nobody? Because the first asked the machine for words and the second brought it some. It served both faithfully, arranging what it was given. The first man gave it a request, answerable only out of the common stock his rival drew on four streets away. The second gave it thirty-one sentences and three facts that existed nowhere else. Averaged, they came back his.

The verse:

The machine has read the world and hands the world back, neatly pressed,
And neat is not the same as yours, though neater than your own,
It cannot know the shed, the baby, nor the twenty pounds of parts,
So bring it what it cannot know, and let it set the tone.

Until next time. Go and put a notebook where you take your enquiries, and write down the next ten sentences a customer says to you in their own words.

P.S. Remember who else is at the keyboard. Your rival has the same machine and asks it nearly the same question, so the better these things become the more alike you will sound. That is no reason to leave it alone. It is a reason to notice that one true particular, a figure from your books or a sentence a customer said, is worth more this year than last. Scarcity sets the price of everything, facts included.

Also in the archive: The Words She Typed, Two Piles at Breakfast and The Book He Stopped Writing In.