The story – a happily ever-after tale that Ms Tallett has spent the week penning – marks the end of a week’s residential course in the heather-strewn countryside in Invernesshire, Scotland. Yet she is not on a retreat for budding poets and novelists. Rather, her storytelling is being funded by her employer, Innocent. The UK smoothie drinks company hopes the course will help her improve the writing skills she uses in her marketing job.
The Dark Angels creative writing course, which teaches storytelling techniques as well as how to translate unintelligible management speak into plain English, encourages students to scrutinise the writing they do at work. The blue chips and small companies sending employees from their communications, corporate affairs and marketing departments hope it will enhance their writing for websites, company speeches, press releases and annual reports.
When Kirsty Regan, director of Newsdirect, a Scottish parliamentary monitoring service, announced that she was going on the course, colleagues teased her, saying she would learn to pen fairytales about banks. But Jamie Jauncey, a course tutor and novelist with more than 20 years’ business experience, says the course benefits companies because it encourages employees “to think about writing in a different way. Once they have crossed the line [with their writing] they can’t go back.”
Some of the course’s exercises are directly applicable to business. In one session, participants rewrite a corporate mission statement, turning “unsubstantiated assertions” and “meaningless words” such as “good practice” and “deliverables” into good English.
Mark Watkins, director of corporate communications at Nycomed, the Danish pharmaceuticals company, explains he was attracted to the course because he felt weighed down by impenetrable corporate writing: “When people go into communications they don’t set off to write in management speak but they get lost. No one wants to produce something unintelligible and uninspiring. But it happens.”
He says the exercise reinforced the need to use clear, engaging language and to substantiate assertions with concrete examples. Stuart Delves, a course tutor who writes for business and the theatre, says: “People get jaded about language in corporations. We hope to light their enthusiasm for language and make them think how they use it.”
The case for nurturing creative writing in business has evangelists beyond Dark Angels. Arts and Business, an organisation that helps build partnerships between the arts and business, is launching a training programme, Impact Unleashed, next year to encourage industry executives to be creative. It will have a written communication module taught by poet Jackie Wills.
It is not just the courses’ participants and tutors who espouse the importance of creative writing techniques in business. Debra Raine, head of global sales and marketing at communications company Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, believes businesses that dismiss creative writing lose out: “People often think [it] is too flowery and fictitious for business. It’s not. It can help bring to life dry data. Businesses have protagonists and struggles just like fiction.”
Another advocate of storytelling in business is Jean-Michel Cossery, chief marketing officer of GE Healthcare: “As soon as you start telling a story, you can feel the audience engaging with you. We are all hardwired to listen to stories because we want to see what happens; stories help deliver a message.”
Citing Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics and chairman of the judges of the Man Booker literary prize, who complained that there was a dearth of British novelists showing any interest in business, Mr Jauncey reflects on a secret daydream: “Maybe the course will produce a great business novel?”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007