If I see more of this, I will scream.

Alright, faithful reader. We’re about to get UNCIVILIZED up in here.

Stella’s about to get UNCORKED.

Grab your bucket of popcorn and sense of schadenfreude.

I just got a Facebook message from a woman I adore. She does INCREDIBLE work in the world. She is an AMAZING person. I would drag myself over hot coals in a swimsuit to help her succeed.

But not only that. She has an AWESOME personality. This woman lights up the room. She’s running one of those businesses where her clients seek HER out.

But when I read her message, I was crestfallen.

Totally bummed out.

And as her friendly neighborhood wordsmith, I didn’t know what to do.

So I’m writing about it. That’s what we wordsmiths do, after all.

In a nutshell, she was inviting friends and family to “like” her business fan page.

Okay, so we all do that, right? It’s step one: start with your inner circle.

But here’s what steams my clams: her “message” to us was totally impersonal and “boilerplate.”

In fact, if I recall correctly, she didn’t even say Hello.

It was just a bunch of paragraphs describing the work she does. And there were too many words, too many concepts, and it wasn’t fun to read. At all.

Here’s how it left me feeling: meh.

And here’s what I suspect is going on… as business owners, we move through our days with our task lists dangling out in front of us. We get to the task that says: “invite friends and family to ‘like’ Facebook fan page” and so we go do THAT.

I applaud the action. I just can’t STAND the STYLE of it. Makes me feel like she sent me a line item from her “to do” list. Bleh. No, thank you.

When Stella was younger, she loved the quirky and irreverent novelist Tom Robbins, who once wrote some of the best marketing advice since Emily Dickinson: It is content, or rather the consciousness of content, that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us, to move us; it is style that makes us care.”

Ah, there’s the rub. It is STYLE that gives content the capacity to absorb us, to move us; it is style that makes us care.

Amen to that.

The next time you find yourself with a writing task on YOUR “to do” list, Stella wants you to stop, drop, and roll.

STOP what you’re doing. DROP into who you are when you are connecting with people face to face. And ROLL that into the style of your writing.

Which means: lighten up. Put down the marketing megaphone. Write TO one person in your email or message. Think about how you open a live conversation with human beings when you are together in person. And then do THAT.

Know what Stella does when she’s tasked with writing an email, website, or sales page? She imagines she’s writing a letter to one person on the other end, who really needs to hear what Stella has to say. So my advice? Don’t write marketing. Write love letters.

Many thanks to Brent Schneeman for the Flickr Photostream of Things That Pop