By Joe Diorio
I’m writing a new edition of A Few Words About Words. Here’s why.
Joe Marshall was a lifelong corporate communications professional who loved the written word. He first worked as a newspaper reporter in Poughkeepsie, New York; then later with the International News Service, Newsweek magazine, and the legendary New York Herald Tribune daily newspaper. In those jobs, and later as a communications manager with IBM, he was renowned for producing the clearest and easiest to read prose. His fixation on letter perfect copy also drove more than a few people who worked with or for him crazy.
Imagine being a low- to mid-level corporate communications professional tasked with writing and producing a brochure or newsletter on some new tech IBM was about to introduce to the market. This always was a huge undertaking at IBM. Creating the newsletter or brochure or even the basic press release announcing the new widget was an experience tantamount to jumping through hoops of fire and landing barefoot on shards of glass. Honest, you were trying to get product managers to talk to you in non-jargon terms, then tell you why their latest and greatest product mattered and differed from its predecessor and similar products from the competition, explaining everything in layman terms (it would have been easier to ask them to stop breathing), then write something in Associated Press style (not heavily laden with jargon and at a ninth grade reading level) and get it ready for design.
After doing all that you had to repeat the whole process – only this time you also feel like you are a clay pigeon at a skeet shooting center – in order to get what you wrote approved, develop a design for the brochure everyone agrees on (this often involved keeping graphic designers awake all night to make last-minute changes), and doing it all within a prescribed budget and deadline.
When you finished going through this communications torture chamber, when you are just about to let the printer start the presses, Joe Marshall would say in his high-pitched raspy voice, “Can I have a look at what ya got?”
Those nine words would make you tense up and grit your teeth. But because he was your boss, you’d hand Joe the work you have literally been bleeding at the fingertips to produce and waited. Five minutes later (Or less, he was a quick read.) Joe would come back to you and say, “Ya know what this needs?” Typically, that “need” required a wholesale rewrite of everything. It meant you were once again going through the torture chamber of approvals.
You would gnash your teeth. You would resist the urge to strangle him. (Which at times was tempting; Joe wasn’t a physically big or imposing man.) But then you would stop yourself, look at his notes and think about what he was asking you to do, and you would realize: He’s right. If I don’t do what he’s asking, then I’m settling.
Joe didn’t want you to settle. In his mind, “good enough” never was good enough. And, when all was said and done, you didn’t want “good enough,” either.
It’s been nearly 40 years since I worked with Joe. I realize his changes – often the wholesale rewrites he made you do – always made my work better. I wasn’t settling for good enough.
I thought of Joe when I set about creating this new edition of A Few Words About Words. Yes, the first edition was good. But as I said more than once in that book, language is a forever evolving thing. We didn’t have artificial intelligence producing copy for us when AFWAW was published, we found emojis were increasingly becoming a permanent part of our communications toolbox, phrases and terms that were so much a part of the COVID-19 pandemic did not stick around (some did; for example, we now Zoom all the time), and there were questions about punctuation and word usage that more than a few readers of A Few Words About Words say they were looking for.
We work with the written word even more today than we did just three years ago. So, a second edition – not one that just has some additional material tossed in – made sense.
In doing another edition I committed myself to Joe’s prodding and refused to settle. Getting it right is worth the effort. And today I’m the only one making myself jump through hoops and walk barefoot on shards of glass. It still hurts, but it is worth the effort.
Joe passed away in 2018 at the age of 91. Somewhere, he’s looking down at me – probably in between suggesting to Saint Peter that parts of the Bible could use some editorial “massaging” – and he’s smiling.
Thanks, Joe, for making sure I never settle for good enough.
Joe Diorio is the author of A Few Words About Words: A common-sense look at writing and grammar (Beaufort Books, 2021) and the forthcoming Crisis Communications and the Art of Making Nothing Happen (Beaufort Books, January 2025).
Joe Diorio Writer, editor. 