On the show, the presenters talk to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life. They hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language centre of your brain wiped out by a stroke. And they look at the story of a group of children who invented an entirely new language in Nicaragua during the 1970s.

There’s also a fabulous film to accompany the show, which we’ve embedded above. In it, filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante bandy visual wordplay into a moving exploration of language set to an original score by Keith Kenniff.

Anyone for a game of travel scrabble? Photo: Lachlan Hardy

Here are our top three things to do with words this summer:

1. Carve a haiku in the sand on the beach

Building sandcastles is great for budding architects. But what are potential poets supposed to do at the beach? Why not free your creativity and carve out a haiku in the sand?

A lovely hot day
I’m having fun on the beach
Read my great haiku

Use your finger, a spade or driftwood. And when you’re done, sit back and watch the tide take your words away again. Pure poetry.

2. Use a kite to write in the sky

Grab a kite with a long tail and head for a beach, field or open park (keeping well away from roads, trees and power lines). Then turn the kite into the wind, let out some line and away you go.

Once you’ve mastered flying and manoeuvring the kite, see if your friends can guess what words you’re writing. If you’re looking for airborne inspiration, you could check out the Bristol Kite Festival on 4-5 September.

3. Exchange postcards with a stranger

If you always send a couple of holiday postcards back to the in-laws and or dog-sitters, it’s time to step out of your comfort zone. The postcard crossing project means you can exchange postcards with anyone, anywhere in the world.

Simply visit postcrossing.com, log on, and request an address and postcard ID. Then write your postcard and wait to see where in the world you receive a card from in return.

You can write anything you like on the card: give a snapshot of your life, describe an unusual hobby or simply write about the picture on the front. You never know what you’ll discover in return.

More fun with words

What else could you do? We might try spelling out a message with a daisy chain. We’re tempted to have a go at mowing a message into a lawn (if someone will let us). And we might try writing a limerick in pebbles.

Finally, as the days get shorter, we’ll retreat inside for a game of Scrabble. And because we’re traditionalists, we won’t be allowing any proper nouns.

Adrian Oldman, Head of Marketing, Unity Trust Bank

From television adverts to leaflets in branches, suddenly every high street bank seems desperate to earn back our trust. But Unity has long enjoyed the trust of its customers. In fact, it’s been rated Best for Banking Services by the readers of Charity Finance magazine for six years in a row. So what does trust mean for Unity’s team?

“We call our approach social trust,” says Adrian. “For us, business is about more than just the bottom line. We offer banking that’s based on an open and honest relationship. And we’re committed to our customers and to our sector. Last year our 90 staff gave 1,600 hours of volunteering back to the community.”

Known as Unity in the Community, the volunteering scheme is a long-standing initiative. It’s this commitment which is key to earning real trust – and not just claiming to be trustworthy, believes Adrian.

“We’ve always done what’s right rather than just what’s likely to earn us the most money,” says Adrian. “For example, we abolished penalty charges. And we don’t tempt people in with attractive rates only to change them later.”

Unity’s approach is paying off, as customers and potential staff seek out banks they can trust. “It’s helped us recruit the best people – those who want to work for a bank where they can focus on meeting customers’ needs, not selling them products they don’t want,” he says.

After the days of too-good-to-be-true interest rates and no-questions-asked mortgages, it seems trust is a word that’s back on people’s minds. And that’s good news if, like Unity, you walk the talk when it comes to an ethical approach to business.

Great for learning, the school design uses sustainable local materials like bamboo and coconut husks. And it was built with the help of volunteers from two big companies working together with the local community. A series of interviews gave us such great content that writing the story was a pleasure.

My Twitter community

Where do you consider your community to be? These days it is far less likely to be the traditional idea of the street, neighbourhood or town that you live in. Instead, your virtual community could comprise tens, hundreds or even thousands of people from all over the world.

This certainly describes my world since I started blogging about my experiences as a cancer patient. I get up, log on, and immerse myself in my virtual community. And it seems I’m not alone. Last week Facebook announced it had registered its 500 millionth member.

That means one in 13 people on the planet are using the social networking site to build their own virtual community. Of course, that doesn’t even start to take into account the number of people using Twitter, MySpace, Bebo or any of the many hundreds of thousands of blogs, forums and chat rooms all over the internet.

Are these communities more important than the traditional community just outside my door? They certainly offer at least every bit as much: you can chat, argue, share and even date in your online world. Virtual communities can also generate ideas, disseminate information, influence and stimulate, often far more effectively than real-world networks.

My online world will always be my true community, the one made up only of people I want to communicate with. Having said that, I’m still going to make an effort with the neighbours so I can borrow the odd cup of sugar.

We wrote a while ago about why climate change communications should lighten up. In that post, we highlighted Volkswagen’s Fun Factory videos — now they’ve made another. This one involves bunch of commuters, a giant slide and a load of smiles. 

It’s common for adverts to feature fun in this way, but why can’t more business writing be just a tiny bit playful? Even chief executives have fun sometimes, don’t they?

We’re thinking of starting a campaign. Will you join us?

The recent Act on CO2 advertising campaign showed how not to persuade people to be more sustainable. Over the years, we’ve picked up some green writing tips that work.

Writing persuasively about sustainability

We’ve written copy for businesses like employee-owned design and engineering firm Arup, mobile phone manufacturer Nokia, and trade union backed bank Unity Trust. When we write for sustainability communications for clients like these, we do four things:

1. Tell big, bold stories with everyday heroes and happy endings

Unlike the doom and gloom of the apocalyptic government ad above, great stories capture people’s imaginations. And, as we explored in this post, they work really well if they feature everyday green heroes — people and communities that are just like the reader.

2. Write narratives that are inspirational and aspirational

Designers talk about the need for their work to delight, and sustainability stories should do the same. We really like the these Volkswagen virals because they have the fun factor. (Read our previous post about why climate change communications should lighten up). Simple, fun and achievable are key features of successful green marketing copy.

3. Make people feel part of something amazing

If you’re encouraging people to do the right thing, it’s important to let them know they’re not alone. In fact, show them they’re part of something big. It’s what we did when we wrote web copy for Nokia’s award-winning we: campaign. And it’s what drives the work of people like Do The Green Thing and We Will If You Will

4. Earn trust by being transparent and technically correct

Of course, all your efforts are wasted if you don’t explain the science of sustainability without dumbing it down or using jargon. You also need to back up your claims with credible proof. That way you’ll create a strong piece of writing that avoids greenwash.

The climategate email scandal has undermined the work of low-carbon campaigners because it suggested that the scientists weren’t being transparent and might not be technically correct. To earn trust, you need to mention any uncertainties and be careful not to distort or exaggerate facts. Then you can inspire.

The value of green words

Is it worth it? The Carbon Trust estimates that tackling climate change could create opportunities for a company to increase its value by up to 80%. Now that’s a powerful story.

Calverts has been going for 32 years as a common ownership co-operative, but we were taken completely by surprise when David Cameron said he wanted to turn chunks of the public sector into worker co-ops. A few hours after the policy announcement, a Channel 4 News crew turned up on our doorstep, wanting to know what these worker co-op things were all about.  Don’t know if they left much the wiser.

We know that all the major challenges facing our society — reducing inequality, mitigating climate change, implementing a Green New Deal, democratising the digital economy — will require a major dose of human co-operation, a lot of dog-helps-dog. And of course, the best way to deliver co-operation is through co-operatives.

I’d be less sceptical of the Cameron conversion to co-operativism, however, if he was advocating it for private industry or core operations of the state, and urging his people to make themselves eligible for .coop (instead of .gov and .com) top level domain names. Cops.coop, anyone?

Let’s lose lorem ipsum

Are you wondering what lorem ipsum is? It’s a piece of Latin text used to test the layout of a document or web page because it looks like normal copy. (Find out more and generate your own lorem ipsum.)

So what’s wrong with a bit of dummy copy? Nothing, according to user experience designer and content strategist Karen McGrane, who writes here that lorem ipsum is ‘an occasionally useful tool that, used intentionally, may help solve some problems’. Karen argues that using lorem ipsum helps clients focus and feed back on a design without getting distracted by draft copy that’s going to change anyway.

At Polon, we’re not so sure. In an interview for Adaptive Path that Karen quotes in her post, fellow content strategist Kristina Halvorson counters this argument. She says: “What kills me here is that we’re talking about creating a user experience that will (whether we like it or not) be DRIVEN by words. The entire structure of the page or app flow is FOR THE WORDS.”

We’re with Kristina on this one. And it seems the folks at 37 Signals — who know a thing or two about creating effective web applications — agree. Not only do they know that copywriting is interface design, they also urge you to use real words, not lorem ipsum. Why? Because ‘dummy text is a veil between you and reality’.

They argue that ‘you need real copy to know how long certain fields should be. You need real copy to see how tables will expand or contract. You need real copy to know what your app truly looks like’.

We couldn’t agree more. Write for real people and use real words.

Microcopy on the Dogs Trust website

Recently, we’ve written about why microcopy matters and about how copywriting is interface design. This search button labelled as “fetch” is a great example of both. Best in show, you might say.

The search function is where you’d expect to find it (in the top right of the site). And it looks familiar. The microcopy in the box makes it clear what it’s for (to “search the site”). So there’s room to have a little fun with the words on the button. By labelling it “fetch” instead of “search” the function is still clear but you also reinforce your brand’s tone of voice.

Everyone writes “search”. Only the Dogs Trust write “fetch”. Great stuff.