You may think you feel nothing right now, but if I had written one of the following…

• The written word wends itself into the emotional world of even the most stoic reader (or)
• Writing is received by its recipient not only as data to be decoded, but as an emotional instigator determining her attitude toward the text (or)
• Words have an emotional valence

…you would feel something different. Differently toward me and the paragraphs that follow.

Tone tells you about a writer’s attitude, a legal team’s worries, a publication’s bent. Tone drives syntax and structure. It figures in what we like or hate because it is a proxy for personality.

Kneading the analogy: Pieces of writing—emails, blog posts, resumes, books, the content on a web app—are like little people. We raise and then push them into the world, where they interact with real people. They make real people happy, sad, angry, bored, excited or stressed out.

There’s a difference between well-written sentences that “purvey the requisite information” and those that get the point across. That difference is relatability.

I would trade a bookful of perfectly constructed sentences for a few with well-defined personalities.

After we graduated and turned into pseudo-adults, Matt and I made a pact to keep this tradition alive—to be brave and try new things, even with no GPA or course outline to guide us.

Our businesses, Things That Are Brown and Second & Park, were part of this plan. We started them because we love creative work, but also because being entrepreneurs was one of the most challenging things we could imagine doing.

We were right. There’s nothing quite like running your own business, which is somewhere between a carousel ride and Mr. Toad’s wild ride, depending on the day. It teaches you how to make tough decisions. It grants you loads of freedom, while forcing you to know that the dream of “having freedom” is a mixed bag. Entrepreneurship has people-growing machinery built into it.

It’s been a fantastic trip. But, like all proper semesters, this one has to end.

Recently, Facebook invited us to join their team as a Content Strategist and Communications Designer. The idea of upending our life and moving to San Francisco shocked us a little at first, but after some soul-searching it hit us that this, too, fits in with the plan.

So, come February 21st we’ll be full-time employees of Facebook who live and work in California. We’ll be collaborating with some of the most talented folks in our industry on projects that will force us, once again, to stretch and grow. We’ll still write on our blogs and go to conferences, but we won’t be taking on new client work.

I get teary thinking about leaving our friends in Seattle, but I couldn’t be more excited about Facebook. The bottom line is, when an opportunity makes you want to sprint and fist-pump, you sprint and fist-pump—even if it makes you dizzy. Especially if it makes you dizzy.

For now, it’s finals time. We have a week to pack our bags and point ourselves & cats in the direction of San Francisco. Onward.

What: Intro to Content Strategy (for the web, mostly, but we’ll dable outside the web too). You’ll learn the basics of planning, creating and tending to the content that drives you or your clients’ websites.

Who: Great for marcom managers, emerging content strategists, web writers, designers and information architects who want to improve their work with better content.

When: Wednesday, 3/2 from 9a-4p

Where: School of Visual Concepts

Price: $275.00

Check out additional SVC courses on copywriting, advertising, design, software and more here.

Like everyone else with a head and a heart, I love Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. I’ve read it a couple times, and return to it whenever I need reminding that our work is as much common sense as it is genius. It’s a classy, smart and grounding book.

Each time I go back, though, I’m struck by how much space is dedicated to content—the wording of buttons, the best approach to writing taglines, the tendency of readers to scan, using inverted hierarchies and what properly grouped information looks like.

There’s also an entire chapter dedicated to omitting needless words. Krug talks about killing happy talk and instructions, deleting mission statements and getting the 3-second gist of your website across with solid messaging. It’s wisdom straight from Strunk & White.

What I’m getting at is that the seminal book on usability & web design is also at least 50% about content. And I’m not just talking about web writing; I’m talking about planning for and sourcing content, too. There’s a chapter that urges designers to attend to and plan for designs for pages 3 or 4-levels deep instead of focusing on just the home page, for example. Krug is careful to note that these pages should be designed with real content in mind.

One lesson is, you can’t address usability without addressing content. Another is that content strategy & web design are inseparable. When you write & plan content, you design. And a designer’s job is to be logical, economical, simple, clear and user-focused—just like a writer.

Proving once again that CS and UX do their best work together.

Hugo House

The Hugo House is a crusty, inside-voices old house in Capitol Hill that teaches writing courses—flash fiction, poetry, journalism, etc. Last week I took a class called “Going Under: Successful Sumbersion in Journalism and Beyond.” Next week I’m taking “The Art of Interviewing.” You should too.

One-day courses cost about $94; 4-week courses are about $360.

http://hugohouse.org

School of Visual Concepts

If you want to learn anything about writing, designing or developing for the web (or print) and you’ve got limited time and budget, SVC is the place to go. All classes are taught by practicing pros, and the material is very practical and hands-on. I took a course called “Writing for the Web” a few years ago; I may be teaching a course this winter.

Prices range from $100 for a half-day workshop to $495 for a 10-wk course.

http://www.svcseattle.com/

Town Hall Seattle

I go to Town Hall for inspiration, and I regularly go by myself. I’ve seen Jonathon Saffron Foer, Ingrid Betancourt, Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem and more—at least one of these has cried on stage. One-hour lectures are held around 7pm in a grande roman-revival hall.

Lectures are 5 DOLLARS. Go support this awesome place.

http://www.townhallseattle.org/

Elliot Bay Books Events

The Elliot Bay Books Cafe is the only one in Seattle where I can work done, but I mostly go for the books and lectures. Famous writers are always giving intimate book readings in the basement.

FREE.

http://www.elliottbaybook.com/node/events/current

AIGA Seattle

The American Institute of Graphic Arts hosts studio tours, schmoozing parties, design contests, lectures by industry peeps, and more—all the time. I was a member for a while, and I liked the discounts and publications I got.

http://www.aigaseattle.org/

Seattle Arts & Lectures

I’ve never been, but their mission is to connect ‘people and ideas’ and folks like Jonathon Franzen and Wendell Berry show up there.

$15-70 for single tickets; much more than that for a subscription.

http://www.lectures.org/about_us/

Northwest Film Forum

I think I saw Art & Copy, Objectified and a handful of other internety movies there, but NWFF offers the best independent films and documentaries I have ever found in one place—the one where thousands of people get plastered on Willie Nelson’s lawn, for example.

Tickets are $9 and there’s cumin for your popcorn.

http://www.nwfilmforum.org/

In fact, back in the olden days, copy was considered so integral to the creation of a campaign that teams of people spent quality time working through words and concepts before they designed anything or chose the project’s medium.

This, at least, is the story told by ad veterans like George Lois and Phyllis K. Robinson in Doug Pray’s film, Art & Copy.

Whatever we want to call it—copywriting, the tail-end of content strategy—the writing we do should start before design. Then the copywriter and designer should work together to make the idea visual.

In any case, here’s more MBA bashing from today’s Business Insider.

My friends majored in subjects like spiritual eco-humanism and communications & culture—so it turns out I don’t know anyone who’s actually gone to business school. If you are one such person, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the MBA stomp du jour.

I was reminded of this while reading the introduction to Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field. I hate to pick on one part of this mostly helpful book, but I think it’s a good example of how reader-hostile writers can become when we try to communicate complex ideas.

Problem #1: Ambiguity

Here’s a quote from the book’s intro:

At the same time technology is empowering a new collectivity, it is also redefining universality.

An absence of definitions is the biggest problem here; multiple ideas and words whose meanings are unclear are packed into one sentence. How does technology empower a collectivity? What technologies do the empowering, and how? What does ‘collectivity’ mean? What does ‘universality’ mean?

Unless they’re clearly defined and integral to your piece (not the case above), I think it’s wise to avoid words like ‘collectivity’ and ‘universality’. Better to sub in concrete examples.

Problem #2: Fluff

Here’s another sentence from the intro:

Today, countless designers, named and unnamed, at work both inside and outside the profession, are contributing to a vast new visual commons, often using shared tools and technologies. Through this new “commonality” the paradigm of design is shifting.

This paragraph’s problem is fluff. You could edit it down to:

Today many designers are contributing to [new visual commons] using shared tools and technologies, such as X.

‘New visual commons’ still needs to be defined, but you get my idea. Clauses like ‘named and unnamed, at work both inside and outside the profession’ don’t contribute to the bottom line, so we may as well strike them.

The Reality of Editing

As I said, I hate to pick on this one introduction, because I run into sentences like these all the time. To phase them out completely involves a time-consuming editing process.

For practice, I decided to take an obsessive stab at editing the introduction, and managed to reduce the page count by more than half. I struck a truckload of sentences, removed ambiguous words and made the last paragraph the first. Here’s a picture:

Here’s some business advice I’ve recently gotten: Work hard, play hard. Never work with your family. Let the universe guide you. Early to bed, early to rise. Follow your passion. Find your true north. Maximize profit. Maximize freedom. Do what’s right.

Books and people are full of pithy nuggets like these, and the abundance can make you crazy—spit, and you’ll land on the best advice you’ve ever gotten. The problem is, everything you read is exactly right at the same time or exactly wrong, depending on the day.

But truly, the best advice I’ve gotten comes from my business partner and husband, who’s fond of saying things like: Ignore most advice, do good work, stay open and have fun and the rest will come. (How simple, the kind of quiet, independent thinking I married him for. Although it turns out there are plenty of books with this advice in them, too.)

So far in the life of our two businesses, this approach has worked. I don’t feel like I’m overworking, our clients seem to like us, we exceed our financial goals, and we’ve got free time left over to travel and enjoy ourselves. There are stressful days and nothing is perfect, but in general business-ing is one of the smoother adventures I’ve had.

And yet I find myself standing up abruptly every day or so, my eyes darting around in search of some impending danger or unspoken ‘right’ or more optimal way of doing things. Shouldn’t I be working at full-tilt, most the time? Am I missing something right under my nose? I have to pinch myself to come back to reality. Evidence points to nothing is wrong, OMGWTF.

You could call this a personal problem. Or you could blame it on training and culture, which is what I like to do.

Blame It On School

Especially in school, and then again as most of us begin our professional lives, we are encouraged to look alive, to get f*cking motivated, to embody the Protestant work ethic and get things done. In environments where the metrics for success are stone-etched and where not abiding by them comes at a price, optimizing in this way makes sense—most notably because it keeps us from getting fired.

But when you run your own business, particularly in the beginning when you have just a few employees or none at all, nothing is stone-etched. Within loosely-drawn bounds, you alone decide what matters. In this environment of (ahem) radical self-determination, one question you will constantly bump up against is: Do I just try to do everything right and hit it out of the park, or do I ignore everyone and do what I think is right?

Crush It or Ignore Everyone?

Where you fall along the Doer-of-Diligence/Iconoclast spectrum will differ according to your personality, but I will offer up my own experience for good measure.

In the past year, I’ve stopped trying to do everything right, systematically shaving to-do’s I used to be convinced were necessary and paring my work down to the most important tasks—the stuff that really matters, like creating good designs and dealing well with clients. Everything else I file under Bullshit. Can you guess what has happened? Just about nothing. Except I have more time on my hands and more clarity about what’s important to do, all while making more money.

Now, before I go encouraging everyone to quit their jobs and hop the magic bus, I will say this: Part of the reason we don’t freak is that Matt’s been doing design and web work for 12+ years, and we spent a lot of time thinking through our business up front to minimize risk. It’s easier to be choosy when the basics are taken care of.

Still, every day presents an opportunity to give 150% and to stress myself out, just like any other job. And my point is that the the way many of us have been trained to handle our jobs—a training in which unapologetic, realistic prioritization is often viewed as laziness and where questioning hard work amounts to mutiny—is often wrong. I, at least, have been wrong about that in the past.

In Which I Break Up With My Own Dogma

I’ve now tried two approaches to business: One in which I keep my nose to the ground at all times, and one in which I go my own way, so to speak, and make tough decisions about when the nose goes down. Without a doubt, the latter has been more productive and personally fulfilling, though it has forced me to re-evaluate my most deeply rooted beliefs about work. It’s also forced me to purge much of the accepted wisdom I’ve internalized over the years.

I’ll admit that ‘bucking your own dogma’ in this way is not always possible. There are jobs to keep, mouths to feed and habits to support, after all. But until feces hits fan and failure proves me wrong, I’d argue that there are plenty of things we’re convinced are necessary, that actually aren’t. The challenge, especially for business owners, is keeping our eyes open so we can recognize what matters—and then being brave enough to take a definitive stance on what doesn’t.