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Consequences

How to Use Stories to Change the World

by Maggie Lemere and Zoë West on June 8, 2010

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If you have a blog, you tell stories.

You may have dealt with the frustration of not having very many people see your stories, of not having enough subscribers or readers.

Nevertheless, you keep on documenting your life in your blog posts, your Facebook status updates, your Twitter feed.

You tell your stories and hope people will hear you.

You’re lucky.

The majority of people in Burma — a country that is brutally ruled by a military dictatorship — have no electricity, let alone access to the Internet. Which means it’s difficult to widely share stories about what they experience there.

Right now, there are thousands of blogs detailing the difficulties of life as a single parent, but there aren’t many blogs describing what it’s like to live your entire life in a refugee camp or to survive a disaster like Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 138,000 people in Burma.

Those who manage to blog can suffer dire consequences for daring to do so. A 30-year-old blogger from Burma was sentenced to 20 years in prison for posting political satire.

Weaving narratives about our lives is one of the things that makes us human

The stories we tell are undeniably powerful. Stories allow us to connect with one another, to know each other as individuals rather than statistics.

Yet those who are living through human rights crises have their stories written from a distance, in news blurbs and legal briefs. These stories rarely become as compelling as the ones you tell on your own blog, simply because they often lack the intimacy of a much fuller first-person narrative.

Until now.

Putting the human back into human rights

My strategy to survive was to appease the soldiers and to make friends with them. I thought, if only we could make friends with these soldiers, then we would survive.

But porters can die at any time. For example, if a soldier got angry and just shot me with his gun, nothing would happen to him. I would just die, like a chicken or a rat. To Tanintharyi Division, they send 500 porters every year. Of the 500, only 72 porters make it back to the prison. If you survive, you survive.

I was a porter for nearly six months.

~ Lai Pa, 34-year-old man from Burma

Perhaps you’ve read about the severe crackdown on monks protesting in the Saffron Revolution, or the destruction wrought by Cyclone Nargis. Although Burma is a hotbed of human rights abuses and repression, it is also home to 50 million individuals and exponentially more stories.

This fall, Voice of Witness will release Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma’s Military Regime. The book will delve into the diverse lives of people who have lived under Burma’s military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).

Voice of Witness is a nonprofit book series that empowers the men and women who have lived through human rights crises by letting them tell their stories in their own words.

In Nowhere to Be Home, dozens of stories are told publically for the first time.

  • Lai Pa was studying to become a preacher when he was imprisoned and forced to work as a porter for the military.
  • Tang Mai, an LGBT rights activist talks about his strained relationship with his father, a famous ethnic Kachin rebel leader.
  • Ye Myint Win was a former army general who fought against those very same rebels; his story is told alongside Tang Mai’s.

You can read the short descriptions we’ve put here for you, but as you can see, they only scratch the surface as an introduction to the narrators.

(All of those names, as you can imagine, have been changed to protect these people.)

The book brings to light the voices of refugees, former political prisoners, migrant workers, farmers, artists, students, and activists. These vivid portraits do something that human rights reports don’t: they allow you to experience Burma through entire life stories of its people in their own words.

Calling all bloggers: how can we share these stories?

Bloggers are storytellers, and your stories give you power.

We’re asking you to share some of what you’ve learned from your own experiences of telling your story publically, to help us imagine ways this book can extend beyond the reach of print.

Tell us. How can we use the Internet to amplify the narratives in this book?

How can we make their words echo as far and as wide as any post here on Copyblogger?

We want to hear your thoughts about sharing stories, about how storytelling can change the world, and about how you would use social media to share these incredible stories collected from Burma. Please let us know in the comments!

About the Authors: Maggie Lemere and Zoë West are the editors of Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma’s Military Regime, the latest in the Voice of Witness book series. Voice of Witness was founded by author Dave Eggers and physician/human rights scholar Lola Vollen, and is the nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books.

If you’re inspired by the storytelling work done by the nonprofit book series Voice of Witness, you can make a donation here to support their work.

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11 Smart Tips for Brilliant Writing

by Dean Rieck on April 7, 2010

image of light bulb on fire

Do you sound smarter when you use big words?

According to a study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology , the answer is no.

In fact, complex writing makes you sound small-minded. Just consider the title of the study: Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly.

Wouldn’t it be better to title this study something like The effect of using big words when you don’t need them?

To sound smart, you must stop trying to sound smart. Brilliant writing is simple writing, a relevant idea delivered clearly and directly.

Here are 11 ways you can start sounding brilliant:

1. Have something to say

This makes writing easier and faster. When you have nothing to say, you are forced to write sentences that sound meaningful but deliver nothing.

Read widely. Take notes. Choose your subjects wisely. Then share your information with readers.

2. Be specific

Consider two sentences:

  • I grow lots of flowers in my back yard.
  • I grow 34 varieties of flowers in my back yard, including pink coneflowers, purple asters, yellow daylilies, Shasta daisies, and climbing clematis.

Which is more interesting? Which helps you see my back yard?

3. Choose simple words

Write use instead of utilize, near instead of close proximity, help instead of facilitate, for instead of in the amount of, start instead of commence.

Use longer words only if your meaning is so specific no other words will do.

4. Write short sentences

You should keep sentences short for the same reason you keep paragraphs short: they’re easier to read and understand.

Each sentence should have one simple thought. More than that creates complexity and invites confusion.

5. Use the active voice

In English, readers prefer the SVO sentence sequence: Subject, Verb, Object. This is the active voice.

For example:

Passive sentences bore people.

When you reverse the active sequence, you have the OVS or passive sequence: Object, Verb, Subject.

For example:

People are bored by passive sentences.

You can’t always use the active voice, but most writers should use it more often.

6. Keep paragraphs short

Look at any newspaper and notice the short paragraphs.

That’s done to make reading easier, because our brains take in information better when it’s broken into small chunks.

In academic writing, each paragraph develops one idea and often includes many sentences. But in casual, everyday writing, the style is less formal and paragraphs may be as short as a single sentence or even a single word.

See?

7. Eliminate fluff words

Qualifying words, such as very, little, and rather, add nothing to your meaning and suck the life out of your sentences.

For example:

It is very important to basically avoid fluff words because they are rather empty and sometimes a little distracting.

Mark Twain suggested that you should “Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

8. Don’t ramble

Rambling is a big problem for many writers. Not as big as some other problems, such as affordable health insurance or the Middle East, which has been a problem for many decades because of disputes over territory. Speaking of which, the word “territory” has an interesting word origin from terra, meaning earth.

But the point is, don’t ramble.

9. Don’t be redundant or repeat yourself

Also, don’t keep writing the same thing over and over and over. In other words, say something once rather than several times. Because when you repeat yourself or keep writing the same thing, your readers go to sleep.

10. Don’t over write

This is a symptom of having too little to say or too much ego.

Put your reader first. Put yourself in the background. Focus on the message.

For example:

You can instantly and dramatically improve your blog writing skills and immediately explode your profits and skyrocket your online success by following the spectacular, simple, and practical tips found in this groundbreaking new free blog post.

11. Edit ruthlessly

Shorten, delete, and rewrite anything that does not add to the meaning. It’s okay to write in a casual style, but don’t inject extra words without good reason.

To make this easier, break your writing into three steps: 1) Write the entire text. 2) Set your text aside for a few hours or days. 3) Return to your text fresh and edit.

None of us can ever be perfect writers, and no one expects us to be. However, we can all improve our style and sound smarter by following these tips and writing naturally.

About the Author: Dean Rieck delivers brilliant writing to his clients and shares copywriting tips for smart copywriters like you at Pro Copy Tips.

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5 Essential Blogging Tips from the Father of Chinese Philosophy

by Michael Aagaard on December 8, 2009

image of Chinese calligraphy

Confucius, the father of Confucianism, died more than 2500 years ago, but his teachings are still relevant — not least when it comes to blogging.

Here are five classic Confucian quotes that are vital to remember if you want a successful blog.

1. The essence of knowledge is having it, to apply it

Information and knowledge sharing are the main driving forces behind the web. If you want people to read your blog and follow it loyally, you can’t be greedy with your knowledge.

You need to give your readers something that will make their lives better — every time they visit your blog. When you feel you’re giving too much away for free, you’re on the right track.

2. Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it

You can’t satisfy everyone with every single blog post. There’s no way of knowing beforehand what the reaction will be.

Some posts you really put effort into and truly believe in might go unnoticed, while other posts you didn’t spend much time on can be the ones that set off an explosion of comments, tweets and links.

3. When anger rises, think of the consequences

Negative comments are a natural part of blogging. Sooner or later some clown is going to fry you, and although your first reaction might be to let the person taste his own medicine, you’ll want to think twice.

You’re much better off giving a rational and careful response. That way you show that you‘re the “adult” and that you aren’t easily provoked.

Moreover, many of your visitors will read your comments, and a crossfire of verbal abuse doesn’t leave a good impression on potential followers.

4. Respect yourself and others will respect you

Your blog is a personal expression of you and your expertise. Your knowledge makes the blog relevant, and your authority “sells” the blog and gives it credibility.

You don’t want to be smug or arrogant, but it’s important to be confident and to show that you know what you’re talking about. Nobody wants to read a half-baked blog post.

5. What you do not want done to yourself, do not to others

The web is a social medium — and we all play an important part in the big picture. Its easy to complain but much more constructive to try and make a difference.

Remember the things that tick you off on other sites, and don’t repeat them. Write every single post like you’re talking to your best friend.

Okay — so those were the five essential blogging tips from Confucius, but I’m just going to give you one for the road, and this might even be the most important:

6. I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand

You can get tons of tips and advice along the way, but dedication and hard work are the key components of a successful blog.

Theory only becomes really useful once you get your hands dirty and gain your own experience about what does (and doesn’t) work for you personally.

About the Author: Michael Aagaard is something so rare as a serious Danish online copywriter. In fact, he has just launched the very first Danish blog dedicated to the fine art of online copywriting.

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