In comparison to
official style, plain style illustrates a rather simple and more understandable
way to convey information, which unarguably helps reach a larger audience.
However, to discuss its effectiveness justly, we need to examine plain style
from its textual and contextual aspects thoroughly. Therefore, I chose the
article “The First Step to Building a Brand Called You” on the Forbes website.
It is an article that offers suggestions for employees to build their personal
brands in order to attain more confidence in themselves and to achieve career
success. The contributor of this article is The Muse, a platform that provides
job opportunities and expert advice to nationwide readers. In this sense, the
source of the article has certain credibility. It uses a plain style for
readers to understand The Muse’s ideas better; at the same time, I think it also
loses its effectiveness in conveying the message because of its
oversimplification and reduction of the complexity of building up people’s
personal brands. The language style makes the content seem simple or easy, when
in fact it is complicated.
The whole article
is comparatively short—only two pages and the bold font for the subtitles and
the usage of ballpoints contribute to a friendly, easy environment for mass
audience to read, especially for busy readers. Now I will excerpt the four
steps to build one’s personal brand in his/her career as my illustration of its
usage of plain style.
1. Determine Your
Emotional Appeal
For starters,
think broadly about your personality and how it affects the experience
someone will have with you. Are you insanely organized? Do people love working with you for your killer sense of
humor?
Make a list of
words that best describe these features of your personality. These words are
known as emotional modifiers. Hint: They can be as simple as
Disney’s “fun.”
2. Determine Your
Description
Your next step is
coming up with a descriptive modifier that brings clarity to the
emotional modifier, identifying what or who your brand is for. In Disney’s
case, it’s “family.” In Nike’s mantra, “authentic
athletic performance,” “authentic” is the
emotional appeal, while “athletic” tells you what the brand is for. As an
individual, yours might be an industry (“healthcare” or “education”), or it
might be a tangible skill (“creative” or “strategic”).
3. Determine Your
Function
Lastly, write down
what, exactly, you do (or will do). It might be something that
directly relates to your career: writing, graphic design, or financial planning, for example. Or, it might be something more
broad, like Disney’s “entertainment.” Are you
a manager, a creator, an organizer? A connector of people?”
4. Pull It All
Together
Finally,
look at your three lists of words, and see how you can combine them into a
short sentence or phrase—no more than five words. Your brand mantra should
communicate clearly who you are, it should be simple and memorable, and it should
feel inspiring to you. You might be a “dependable, strategic planner” or “a
creative professional connector.” Or, your mantra might be something like,
“motivating others to do their best.”
As we can observe
from the above, these four steps are well organized in four paragraphs with a
larger bold font. These details definitely create an easy reading opportunity
for the people who want to grasp the main points at first sight and then have the
interest to keep reading. Putting the form aside, let’s look at the content.
According to Readability-Score, the four little paragraphs’ flesch-kincaid
reading ease is 60, the average grade is 9.4, and words per sentence is 12.2.
Its reading ease is quite high and its reading average grade level is low, so
that it is easy and understandable for most of the readers. Looking through
Step 1 to Step 4, we can discover that the article contributor makes his
arguments straight and to the point at the beginning of each paragraph and uses
logical words like “for starters,” “your next step,” “lastly,” and “finally” to
link each paragraph. He also uses a very conversational tone and adopts the
second person point of view in telling the audiences what to do and how to do
it. For instance, the writer uses some declarative sentences to make the whole
article sound very conversational and daily, like “for starters, think broadly
about...” The usage of second person point of view like “look at your three
lists of words, and...” makes the article sound more casual, just like you are
giving advice to your friends. The usage of these techniques makes the article
familiar to the readers and lets them become more than willing to follow and
take the advice.
The writer also
applies other plain style strategies to make his article more acceptable for
the readers. Parallelism is shown in the very beginning sentence in these four
steps, putting these equally important suggestions into similar grammatical
structure. It helps the readers find the main information immediately and
understand it without any difficulties. Also, the usage of Exemplum contributes
to the construction of plain style in the article. Although the examples are
quite short, they are already what we are familiar with (Disney’s and Nike’s) and
are added behind every statement in each step to deepen the reader's’
understanding of how to build their personal brand through these examples.
Knowing the plain
style strategies that the writer uses in the article, we also need to know the
contextual meaning of why he chose to write like that. As I’ve stated in the
intro paragraph, the aim of this article is to help more employees to find out
what personalities they have and combine them with their own working positions
in order to create more passion, energy, and success in their career.
Therefore, the language use should be written in a comparatively plain way, since not every employee has a very high educational
level. The Harvard, Yale graduates after all are only a very small proportion
in American work force. Thus, it is considerably necessary and important
for the writer to use a plainer and easier style to reach more ordinary people
who are still confused about their future. However, in my opinion, though this
article adopts plain style and is indeed very easy to read and understand, it
is not as effective as it should be. Since it is written by a credible platform
and posted on Forbes website and since the content is actually more
complicated than it appears, it should combine with a
little official style to make it more professional and credible.
In my opinion,
this article oversimplifies and reduces the complexity of building one’s
personal brand and achieving career success. It simply tells the readers that
just by combining your emotional appeal, your description and function, and by
memorizing your “mantra,” you can build your personal brand. But is that really
all it takes? What effect will the “mantra” have, and will it be effective and
credible? Or is it just a psychological implication that we can remind
ourselves every day? We don’t know, because the article doesn’t tell us. To me,
I just take it as a piece of reading entertainment, because it doesn’t tell me
how effective the “mantra” will be and to what degree can I trust it.
Nowadays, using plain style in
business (and also other areas) articles becomes a new trend and convention. As
we are embracing a FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) era, people have a large
demand of consuming novel things, and hope the information and technology can
be updated as fast as possible. People have less and less patience in waiting. Thus,
articles online (no matter in what area) are written in an increasingly plain
way in order to attract the readers’ attention. Many writers or contributors
make the message appear simple, even though it should be more complicated. While
the use of plain style attracts a large group of audience, it can also result
in people thinking that something might be too easy or not require a lot of
effort when in actuality it might take a lot of work.
While at the same time, we
should consider the intention of writing this article. Forbes is a professional
business website, and it publish its magazines twice a month, which indeed
needs a lot of new information and articles to fill in the vacancies in its
website in order to provide readers with freshness and to keep its activeness. The
topic “building up your personal brand” is indeed a hot issue in the modern
workplace, but the oversimplification and reduction of its actual
practicability and operability make its content questionable. Furthermore, Forbes’
speed of updating posts is striking: thirteen posts are created within one hour
on its website when I randomly look through its homepage. These phenomenons
inevitably lead us to consider its intention. By scratching these ideas in a
quite general way, it seems that Forbes is just generating this content only to
meet the readers’ expectation of solving problems easily. In my opinion, though
people have the need of receiving information fast and of reading plain text, the
writer and the website should still have the responsibility to ensure the
effectiveness and credibility through using their language. The writer can use
a little bit of official and professional style and add more details of its
effectiveness in what kind of situation and to what kind of profession. In this
way, it can at least make sure that the article won’t mislead the vast audience
that the way to build up personal brand and the benefits it will bring are as
easy as it tells in the content.
Lingyuan Xiong
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