Don’t cock a snook at the non-natives
Our recent blog sprayed references to Club Penguin, The Twelve Days of Christmas and Buzzfeed. Even as we posted it, we knew it broke the cardinal rule – core to the corporate writing trainings Stampa teaches – not to use terms that might escape non-native readers.
In my days as a foreign exchange reporter for Reuters, I was on a team that wrote umpteen updates a day on the dollar’s performance. Sometimes we fought the monotony with what you might call over-creativity. Headline imagery, for example, could betray the journalist’s state of mind at a particular time of day – Dollar hungry for more gains was a classic pre-lunch update, while Tiring dollar runs out of steam might signal it was nearly shift’s end.
More serious was when our battle against boredom made us reach for arcane references. Once – and it only happened once – I headlined my update Dollar cocks a snook at US data after the currency failed to react to the release of macroeconomic figures. A stern sub-editor called me to ask sarcastically: “Will they understand cock a snook* in Tokyo?”
He was right. I hadn’t considered that – an inexcusable blunder for a journalist writing for a worldwide audience of primarily non-native English speakers. But it’s a mistake corporate communicators can also easily make if they’re communicating in their native language.
And it’s a sign you’ve broken an even more fundamental rule of communication: identify your audience. Put yourself in their shoes. Know who they are, what they know, what they don’t know and what they need (and don’t need) to know.
For multinational companies, that means only the simplest, clearest language will do if you are to convey your message effectively and compellingly. But it goes far beyond language to the very heart of decisions on what, to whom, where, when, why and how to communicate.
In other words, never cock a snook at your audience.
*To cock a snook: openly show contempt or a lack of respect for something or someone (Oxford English Dictionary)
