The customer is always right?

This guy hasn't learned yet that customers are usually right...

Have you ever written something, and then stood back from it later, thinking ‘I am amazing’? It doesn’t happen very often, but just sometimes the words flow out of the pen and something miraculous happens. Usually after a couple of glasses of wine.

The thing is, nearly every time I’ve done that, my customer has turned around and said they wanted it changing. It’s tough to deconstruct a lovely piece of writing, knowing that you would have preferred to leave it as is was, but it comes down to the old adage ‘the customer is always right’.

Ultimately, if you are getting paid for a piece of work, then it isn’t good until the customer thinks it is. You can use your powers of persuasion to explain why you write the way you did, but sometimes it’s best to walk away from it, and take satisfaction that the work you’ve done has served its purpose.

I’ve had conscientious customers who have sat down and painstakingly corrected all my grammar in to mistakes. I’ve had to be as gentle as I can and explain that there is more than one way to do things, and perhaps it may be best to abide by standard protocol. NLP has a great little technique for this. You say “I really understand where you are coming from, AND I have learned this…” instead of saying “You’re wrong.”

There are times when this just won’t work. For example, if someone is adamant they want to use certain phrases, then that’s what we have to include. Even if the phrases jar with us, or make us cringe. The only time you really have to assert your knowledge is when the customer is at risk of a) Looking like a total prat, or b) being sued. These circumstances are few and far between.

Writing is a subjective craft. There are two words or more for everything that needs to be said, so it stands to reason that you won’t always hit the mark first time. And then you have to consider style, tone, dialect, audience…the list goes on. One of the things that is both frustrating and intriguing about doing English in academia is that there is NO RIGHT ANSWER. I once argued that Sylvia Plath had no choice but to die, because she wrote about suicide so much she backed herself in to a corner. I handed my paper in and failed. It turned out my supervisor was writing a book about Plath, saying how brilliant she was, and how her confessional style was fully informed by her personal circumstances.

I learned to research my audience a little better after that, but the point remains that you can’t nail it every single time. When I write proposals I have to remember which organisation I am writing for, because each person likes things doing a certain way. It makes no difference if I feel the proposal is not compliant, or has no chance of winning – it still has to be done to the standards set by the person who has commissioned the work.

If we writers were engineers, or plasterers, or even mathematicians, we could sit back safe in the knowledge that we had a single way of doing things, and abide by it. This will never happen, which is why we need to adapt to our audience, grit our teeth and bite our tongue when we’re asked to change things. When TS Eliot wrote The Wasteland, that classic piece of beautiful poetry, his work was ripped apart and put together again by Ezra Pound. Charlotte Bronte was turned away again and again by potential publishers. These are the things that give us hope that, as long as we acknowledge there is no right or wrong way of doing things, we’re probably doing a superb job.