No, no, no, no, no, no…
You and I might speak to one another for an hour and communicate little. Communication doesn’t take place without meaning.
Meaning is information that enriches or expands a basic message. It is a layer of communication, adding dimensions beyond the basic message. Successive layers of meaning go from the concrete to the abstract and often from the universal to the personal, the objective to the subjective.
Everything you write, from a laundry list to an inaugural address, has at least three dimensions of meaning: (a) what it means to you, (b) what it means to your principal audience, and (c) what it means to disinterested bystanders or secondary audiences—your coworkers, for example.
Disinterested, by the way, is not synonymous with uninterested. Disinterested means “neutral” or “uninvolved,” “impartial,” “unbiased.” If you’re a defendant in a jury trial, you want jurors who are disinterested but certainly not uninterested.
Your meaning can be straightforward or complex, but finding the relationship between (a) and (b), with a nod to (c), provides structure and direction as you write.
Remember to aim
The careless writers we’re discussing probably don’t intend to shoot themselves in the foot. Some might start out organized and sensible but become impatient and a little scared, so they rush the process. Maybe they have a hidden agenda. For whatever reason, they lose sight of the audience; they forget to serve.
Don’t make the same mistake. In a matter of minutes you can put your writing project in perspective, giving it the proper weight and emphasis and improving the odds that your message will be
- read
- understood
- believed
- persuasive
Maintain that perspective as your work progresses, checking now and then to ensure that your prose is
- clear and concise
- free of jargon, convoluted phrases, verbal showing-off
- consistent with your brand
Use the Writing Wheel
As you prepare to write, put yourself in the proper frame of mind.
- Know what you want to say and why. Develop a clear idea of your purpose, and make sure it’s consistent with your USP or UIS.
- Determine who your audiences are and how your writing will serve them—even if you’re writing to criticize or complain.
- Unfailingly address your audiences with respect.
- Be honest and transparent. Don’t use language to conceal the truth.
- When writing a first draft, let your writing flow freely. It’s okay—even desirable—to write a “shitty first draft” (see page 23). When you edit, choose your words carefully.
- Less is usually more—short words, short sentences, short paragraphs show respect for your readers and their attention spans.
Wait! Stop! Back up!
As you were preparing to write, was your message in focus? Did you understand…
- what you wanted or needed to say [= your meaning]?
- how your message was relevant to your principal audience [=audience meaning]?
- whether there were important secondary audiences (colleagues, critics, or competitors, for example) who might construe additional or conflicting meanings?
Ideally, once you’ve decided (a) that you have something worthwhile to say and (b) how and to whom you want to say it, you’ll take whatever time is necessary to determine (c) what it means to your audiences.
Exercise
Read the following scenario and then prepare a message to convey the necessary information. Indicate the medium (or media), delivery methods, transmission schedule, and other details.
Scenario. You’re an elementary-school principal and your message
- deals with next Wednesday’s early school closing—ninety minutes before the usual bell—due to maintenance requiring that the water be shut off. (Today is Thursday.)
- must be conveyed to students, parents, teachers and other staff, district administrators, bus drivers, child-care facilities, and all others with a need to know.
What does it mean?
To you, it’s of minor administrative importance, but it could turn into a major bureaucratic headache if not everyone is informed. The meaning from your perspective is initially a matter of penetration.
You’ve identified numerous audiences and you address the matter of perception. Within each audience there might be dozens of interpretations buzzing around. No audience will interpret your message uniformly, but there might be one or two prevalent understandings.
For example—
Students will be thrilled at the prospect of a shorter school day, you think, before it occurs to you that there are a number of kids for whom school is safer and more hospitable than home.
Some parents will enjoy a little extra time with their kids; other parents will have to scramble for child-care arrangements; still others will shrug it off since their children are latchkey kids no matter when the bell rings.
Teachers will have to adjust lesson plans and, if the hour and a half isn’t made up, cram a little more learning into a little less time.
Transportation planners and drivers will have to change bus schedules with an eye to factors such as hour-to-hour traffic patterns and the possibility that some parents will forget to meet the bus ninety minutes earlier.
Just a brief mental scan of students’, parents’, and staff’s attitudes toward school-closing time reminds you that your announcement is far from trivial. Feelings of sympathy might tug at you as you’re drafting the announcement, and your tone becomes softer, less abrupt.
When you see how an apparently simple message can be understood in dozens of ways (not all of which you can realistically consider), accounting for a reasonable variety of interpretations will automatically become part of your writing process.
Getting their attention
There will be other times when some or all of your message will be of scant interest to your audience. Be prepared to improve your communication or, starting from scratch, to rethink the relevance of your message. To do neither is a declaration of war.
Maybe you’re required by law to inform parents about school-board meetings. Maybe half of them don’t care. You can’t make them care, but you can (a) embed the meeting details in announcements of popular sports events and concerts; (b) place relevant topics on the board’s agenda; or (c) format the school-board notice like an ad, keeping it brief and eye-catching… among other creative approaches.
If you mean to be understood, your writing will address the various levels of interest and understanding among your audiences.
If you have communicated clearly and respectfully, and your audience understands but rejects your message, don’t blame your writing. Knowing about a particular audience’s distaste for your point of view doesn’t obligate you to satisfy that audience’s appetite.
You don’t have to do all the work. Your readers can be expected to meet you partway. It’s your job to figure out how far they’ll advance and on which path.
Good writing is the truth as you know it that communicates as intended. It’s as much a matter of how it’s received as how it’s delivered. Whether your writing is “correct” in terms of grammar and mechanics, whether it’s clever, whether it’s lyrical… these are secondary considerations, less important than clarity, respect, and honesty.
Postscript
Consider nonverbal factors in written and public forums. There are dozens of potential sources of interference that can weaken your message. A few examples:
- the paper you print on
- the delivery method
- parking availability at your venue
- your fragrance
- a preexisting relationship with your audience; in particular,
- a hostile audience (a situation that might require your defusing of the situation ahead of time)
Early-closing announcement
Do you need to prepare more than one announcement? If so, how many, and to whom will you address your messages?
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What media will you use? (Letter, convocation, school PA system, weekly newsletter, and so on)
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How will you transmit your message or messages? (Send home with students, U.S. mail, broadcast, and so forth)
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When will you transmit your message or messages? (For example, send first announcement immediately with reminder the day before the early closing.)
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Text
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How well does your audience know you?
Apart from the content of your message, being liked and respected by a large and expanding audience will contribute to your persuasiveness and further your objectives.
You might make any number of assumptions, correct or otherwise, about me and my spoken message based on, for example,
- eye contact and other body language
- the site I choose—meeting you for coffee or treating you to lunch at a swank restaurant
- my slovenly appearance or expensive manicure and wardrobe
- my age, gender, cultural background, accent
These factors are differently understood across cultures and send unintended messages, only some of which I can control.
In written communication, examples of nonverbal cues about me and my message include:
- communication medium—text message, email, snail mail
- type of paper
- visual presentation—design, illustrations
A note about nonprofits: I am often perplexed by fundraisers’ lavish appeals, and am less likely to be persuaded by slick, expensive-looking pamphlets than by well-written, -designed, and -presented one-color appeals on, say, matte recycled 24-pound stock.
Fundraising professionals have told me that their wealthy target donors expect, and respond more favorably to, slick, glossy, full-color pamphlets. I believe, however, that creative, resourceful writers and designers get the job done without appearing to waste money better spent on the charitable cause they represent.
A positive relationship with your audience has impact at many levels and over time and is a huge factor in how well you communicate. Remember that when it comes to your audience, there is no hard line between your public self and your private self. If you are well known, a public figure, perhaps, and are observed manhandling your weeping toddler in public, it can undo much of your good communication work.
Be accessible and transparent. Your reputation matters. Your secrets matter even more.
“Wait a minute!” you might be thinking. “Are you trying to tell me that my personal life and emotional stability have an effect on how well I write a business letter or an instruction manual?”
You bet. I’m telling you that your attitude toward other people—those you know and those you don’t—shows up loud and clear in what you write and how you write it. Those classified ads on page 11 and page 39 might have been written by bullies, deeply insecure individuals who get a power jab by throwing jargon around like dice on a Monopoly board.
“But… but… but…” (that’s you, spluttering), “my personal life is nobody’s business.”
That might very well be true, in principle. But many experienced CEOs have set up employee assistance plans and offer other fringe benefits geared toward helping staff with financial and mental-health issues. They know how personal problems affect employee performance.
Happy, healthy employees are better workers in all areas of their jobs, but their attitudes are especially evident in their writing because it reveals so much to so many, and also because it’s on the record. So, yes, the quickest way to improve an employee’s writing might be to arrange for marriage counseling.
How well do you know your audience?
It’s my belief that the best writers and speakers know (at least via research and personal knowledge of representative populations), respect, even love their audiences. With some exceptions, they don’t brandish their bylines or trumpet their credentials. First-class public speaking and writing invite civilized human interaction, not armed conflict.
Let’s work with the assumption that the better you know your audience and consciously use that knowledge in developing your message, the more effective your communication will be… and vice versa.
In January 1999, at city hall in Washington, D.C., this incident took place (as reported in the Christian Science Monitor, February 2, 1999):
David Howard, the mayor’s white ombudsman, said he would have to be “niggardly” with the scarce funds in the department’s budget. One of his two interlocutors, Marshall Brown, who is black, left the room in anger. Mr. Howard offered his resignation, and Mayor Anthony Williams accepted it.
Niggardly means “stingy,” but what it very likely meant to Marshall Brown is that his colleague lacked the character and the class to avoid using a word that sounds like a racial slur. That particular word sears the air like a lightning strike when used unexpectedly and publicly.
An example of the opposite approach—hypersensitivity to cultural identity—was hilariously portrayed on the immortal Jimmy Smits Saturday Night Live sketch “Enchilada” (season 16, 1990), in which NBC News employees (played by Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and Julia Sweeney) overenunciate Spanish words such as enchilada in the presence of the new Hispanic economics correspondent (Jimmy Smits), who speaks… well, like the Anglo guy next door.
You don’t have to be your audience to know your audience. Oscar Wilde had it on the nose when he said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
No, no, no, no, no…
When the powerful are addressing the comparatively powerless, they would do well to study their audience exhaustively. A wealthy politician talking to or about the poor is entering a mine field, as Mitt Romney discovered during his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2012.
“I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien during a February 1 interview.
“I’m not concerned about the very poor—we have a safety net there,” he said. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich—they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
Whatever came after “I’m not concerned about the very poor” was lost in the booming echo of that thoughtless statement. Apart from the obvious—if the “safety net” were working, there would be no “very poor”—Romney required less than ten seconds to disenfranchise nearly 50 million food-bank-dependent Americans by excluding them from “the very heart of America”—whatever that means.
Later that day, Romney told reporters on his campaign plane that the statement about his lack of concern for the very poor was taken out of context.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I — no, no,” he said. “You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying, and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different. I’ve said throughout the campaign my focus, my concern, my energy is gonna be devoted to helping middle-income people, all right?”
Oh, dear. Romney doesn’t come off well here. He entered a mine field without sweeping it first. He’d forgotten a key rule of communication—respect. An honest admission—”I have no idea what it’s like to be poor, but I intend to find out”—would have served him better, though it would backfire if he didn’t follow through.
Contrast Romney’s credibility among the poor with that of President Jimmy Carter. According to the organization Habitat for Humanity,
[President and Mrs. Carter]… have seen firsthand the effects of poor living conditions….Throughout their involvement with the Carter Work Project, President and Mrs. Carter have become tireless advocates, active fundraisers, and some of our best hands-on construction volunteers…. To date, President and Mrs. Carter have served with over 92,260 volunteers in 14 countries to build, renovate and repair 3,944 homes. They have also made quite an impression on thousands of Habitat homeowners and volunteers.
—www.habitat.org
You don’t have to be elected president or build four thousand houses to gain credibility among the disadvantaged. You do need to know enough about any audience to address its members with respect. That might mean becoming familiar with intricacies of culture, environment, needs, and interests.
Addressing a hostile audience
If you are a chief of police speaking to the black community after a racially charged incident, nonverbal factors are as important as what is said, maybe more so. If you have scheduled a news conference, for example…
First, seek to serve. Open your mind and be willing to learn. No matter what your position, don’t insult your audience by riding on your stature.
Defuse the situation in advance, if possible. Lay the groundwork ahead of time through small meetings at schools and churches. Go to them; don’t make them come to you. Ideally, you will already have strong relationships with community leaders.
Blur the line between “us” and “them.”
- Be transparent; toss out your hidden agenda, if you have one. Be generous with information.
- Recruit respected individuals from the black community to support your intention to reach consensus.
- Ask them to write even-handed op-ed pieces for local media. Messages from different sources will resonate differently.
- At meetings and news conferences, don’t stand, figuratively or literally, at a pulpit, and don’t insulate yourself with your cronies.
- Distribute an agenda (the printed kind, not the hidden kind) and include contact information.
Your starting place should be how the audience feels right now. Articulate their position as you understand it. Then move with them, step by step, to consensus. Try to reach agreement on each step before moving to the next. You might move through the steps with statements like these:
- Of course you’re angry. Decent human beings are right to oppose injustice.
- We can’t undo what has happened. We can take action to see that it doesn’t happen again.
- We all want to feel safe in our environment.
- What needs to happen for you to feel that justice has been done?
- What needs to happen for you to feel safe in your community?
Continue in this vein, using “active listening,” validating people’s feelings even if you disagree with their opinions, and showing willingness to compromise. Keep moving through the agenda, offering opportunities for future communication in writing or at additional meetings.
Depending on the setting, you might want to use the brainstorming technique of recording all ideas on a flip pad without comment, no matter how impractical or absurd some of them might be.
Record, transcribe, and distribute proceedings of meetings; include assignments, action steps, and contact information.
More nonverbal ways to respect your audience:
- If at all possible, avoid conducting meetings on stormy nights or during the Super Bowl.
- Ensure adequate parking and seating.
- Keep the venue at a comfortable room temperature.
- Use a wireless microphone with someone to carry it to those who wish to speak. It keeps things orderly and discourages outbursts.
- You’ll need more elaborate arrangements for larger meetings; for example, collect names before the meeting starts, have speakers step up to a stationary microphone, limit speaking time.
To be continued…
From Annagrammatica’s Little Book of Practical Writing
Show Up, Not Off
I and Thou
You can write with joy, efficiency, clarity, kindness, and style… while you support your organization’s image and reinforce its brand… or you can bumble along, communicating awkwardly, putting off writing tasks or paying people like me $60 an hour or more to do them for you.
Whether you are writing to
- tell a story,
- answer a question, or
- solve a problem,
if you begin with respect for your reader (or listener), the job is half done. It really is that simple.
The flip side of helping is hostile. I’m not going to use this space to explain why we don’t need more hostility in the world or why companies perceived as hostile tend not to thrive. Let’s agree to agree on those points and move on.
You keep your readers at arm’s length—or worse, put them off altogether—by being
- untruthful
- secretive
- unavailable
- incoherent
- unfocused
I have been asked, as a marketer, to be all these things—to concoct a stew of jargon, half-truths, smoke, and superlatives and feed it to a skeptical public—usually to sell a product or service that was touted as “exciting” but barely achieved “ordinary.” In my experience, through dozens of marketing campaigns, we were more successful when our promises were realistic and our products were outstanding.
Tell the truth
I have sat in on a least a dozen meetings whose purpose was to design the message that callers hear when they are placed on HOLD. In these meetings, very little attention was given to the text. We spent much more time listening to different speakers and registering our opinions: Should the voice be masculine or feminine? High or low? Soothing or animated? How many different messages should we record? Should there be music between them? What genre? Jazz? What sort of jazz? Be-bop? Cool jazz? Swing?
While we were parked in meetings, minutely critiquing various voices (Too squeaky. Sounds angry. Slight lisp), we failed to notice that the message itself was plainly, obviously, patently a lie. We knew it was a lie, because if it were not a lie there would be no need for it, no justification for its existence, no meetings to evaluate tonal qualities and calculate the optimal length of time between repetitions.
What was that message?
Your call is important to us
I heard this message at least thirty times just this morning, during two calls to the optical department at Shopko. A few months ago I got a new prescription for bifocals. Last week I received the frames I ordered from eBay. I called my regular eye clinic about filling the prescription, but the optician told me that my insurance is no longer accepted there. “Try Shopko,” he suggested.
Called Shopko, spoke with Stacey, and learned that Shopko would indeed fill my prescription, at no charge. Hurray. Open seven days a week. Hallelujah.
Darn! Forgot to ask whether I needed an appointment. Called back. Stacey must have gone to lunch and everyone else was evidently “busy helping other customers,” because I was placed on HOLD. Not to worry, though. My call was important to them.
My call was, in fact, so significant that they felt compelled to tell me so every ten or twelve seconds. Due to a glitch in the recording, sometimes two voices at once told me how much they cared. Call me cranky, but after five or six repetitions, the more times they told me I was important, the less important I felt.
The missing link
After all, I thought my call was important to CenturyLink last week, when I reported that my Internet connection wasn’t working. I spent the better part of four days on HOLD with CenturyLink, and they told me my call was important to them, too—although they wouldn’t mind at all if I were to hang up and conduct my business online. I’d still be important.
The first automated voice you hear when you call CenturyLink is probably familiar to anyone who has had a “land line” in the past twenty years. I call the voice “Kirk,” because he sounds like someone whose name might be “Kirk”—wholesome fellow, crew cut, recent college graduate who was vice president of his fraternity and the one male cheerleader on the squad. When I call CenturyLink, Kirk always answers, just as he did when I called Century Link’s predecessors, Qwest and US West.
Kirk is on duty 24/7, and I think the long hours are taking their toll, because when I finally get through to a human representative and my call gets dropped—which happens fairly often—and then I call back, Kirk remembers nothing from our earlier conversation and I have to start at the beginning.
Even though I pushed “2” for “internet repair” as instructed, Kirk urged me to take advantage of CenturyLink’s “automated options” available at centurylink.com, replete with advantages, such as (a) no waiting, and also (b) no waiting. “Kirk,” I say, a little sternly, “you’re not paying attention.”
In the course of more than two dozen phone calls over four days, I was given these assurances:
Statement / Repetitions
Your call is important to us / 96
We’re sorry you’re having this problem / 21
We’ll solve the problem immediately / 10
They threw thousands of words at me, with content meant to reassure, but the context said otherwise. Eventually I got connected to Sean, and my call was important enough to him that when we got disconnected he called me back, and he had excellent news: A human repair person would come to my home the very next morning.
As kind and helpful as Sean was, I was not inclined to believe him, but I got up early, dusted the modem and the shelf it sits on, and cleaned the bathroom, just in case. At 10:30, just as I was calling CenturyLink to report a no-show, there was a knock at the door. Could it be…? It was! CenturyLink Human Repair Guy Mike was standing in the hall, brandishing his tools and looking competent. Within ten minutes, the problem was solved and I was back online, nominating Mike for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Twitter: Nobody home
Companies such as CenturyLink pay marketing firms great sums of money in an exercise called branding. They develop graphics, taking great care with fonts and logos, labels and emblems, ads and promotions. They want to be perceived as sleek and modern, high-tech, state-of-the-art, competent, efficient… or warm and friendly, accessible, “service-oriented.” Whatever style they want to project is incorporated in their visuals… but all it takes is one customer’s experience with a disgruntled employee to erase the desired perception and replace it with “snarly.” Brand identity is reinforced or undermined not only by how customers are treated but also by employee satisfaction and the company’s relationships with its vendors and strategic partners.
As damaging to your brand as an owlish employee can be, even worse is no interaction at all. If a company makes no one accessible to outsiders, that company is making a statement: We don’t like you, we don’t care about you, now go away and let us get back to our geekery.
Mark my words
I want to go on record with my prediction that the social-media phenomenon Twitter is not long for this world. The folks at Twitter have better things to do than talking to you about their screw-up with your account. If you’re going to have a problem with Twitter, it had better slide neatly into one of six or seven common categories, such as “can’t log in” or “forgot my username.” Otherwise, Twitter customer service consists of a very short loop. If your question isn’t answered on the page you’re routed to, they send you back to the list of ordinary problems that aren’t yours.
If, out of desperation, you choose “my hashtags aren’t working”—just so they’ll give you space amounting to one hundred and forty characters to explain that hashtags aren’t really your problem, it’s that your account has gotten tangled up with someone else’s and when you post to Twitter your tweets show up on the other person’s Twitter feed—then Twitter emails you instructions for the proper use of hashtags.
In more than an hour spent scouring the Web for advice from people with a similar dilemma—and they are legion—I learned that it is virtually impossible to talk to or even chat online with an actual Twitter representative. There is, however, a small industry developing around Twitter’s arrogant unhelpfulness: Starting at $20, some enterprising individual, presumably with inside information, will try to get Twitter’s attention. It strikes me as being a little like asking one of the lesser-known saints to intercede for you because God’s busy elsewhere. Twitter, are you listening?
Seek to Serve
If you want to…
- write joyfully and efficiently, and
- write in a way that is readable, informative, and engaging, and that supports your brand
…you do not need mastery of the English language and its mechanics. You don’t even have to know how to spell. (If you are, however, hopeless when it comes to spelling, punctuation, grammar, and such, you probably need a good editor.)
Write for a better world
To write well requires five things:
- a clear purpose
- an honest message
- respect for the reader or audience
- respect for the language
- enjoyment of the task
Writing becomes an act of war…
- when writing is an ordeal, a burden, or a bore
- when the writing distances readers and hearers—through boredom, obfuscation, or intimidation
Obfuscation is not a well-known word, but it is the best term for “lack of clarity” when the murkiness is deliberate. Dictionary.com defines obfuscation as “making something obscure, dark, or difficult to understand.” Wikipedia takes it a bit deeper: “the willful obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language.” Think Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is.”
Written language has the potential not only to build goodwill, promote understanding, and facilitate communication… but also to heal breaches planetwide and advance the cause of peace and prosperity. As the shadow side of that power, language can also be divisive, distancing, and inflammatory.
When words are a call to arms, there is a price to pay, and not just in lost sales and disgruntled employees. Hostility in the air has social costs.
It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the person who has learned to write with candor, clarity, and pleasure can be a healer of the planet. With more than four billion web pages at our fingertips, language is ubiquitous.* “Let peace begin with me” ceases to be an idealistic bit of fluff and becomes an inspiring possibility.
You will hate writing it you make it about “the rules”—grammar, syntax, punctuation, and spelling. Instead, first communicate with respect; then enjoy the motion—rhythm, flow, and cadence. The best way to learn these traits is by reading good writing and experimenting with them in your own writing.
The habit of helping
All writers would do well to cultivate the habit of curiosity, particularly when the object is “What can I do to serve you?” Do you know a better way to begin or energize a relationship than to hold in thought the question “How can I make your life better?”
Let’s set aside for now the distinctions among types of relationships—personal, social, familial, business, professional, and any others that are based on roles. The Golden Rule doesn’t stipulate status, age, or gender. It doesn’t counsel us to “do unto other English-speaking American males above the age of 12 as you would have other English-speaking American males above the age of 12 do unto you.”
And we are, after all, talking about habits, which are so much easier to form if the behavior always applies. I recently overheard a discussion about whether you need to use your turn signal if yours is the only car in the intersection or if you’re in a left-turn-only lane. Is it really necessary to signal a turn if nobody’s watching, or if it’s obvious that you’re turning? On the other hand, it’s not exactly a hardship to press down on the turn-signal lever. Making a habit of something sets you free from the need to make a decision. Do you honestly want to have to decide whether or not to use the turn signal every time it might or might not be helpful, based on the lane you’re in or, perhaps, the presence of pedestrians in the crosswalk?
Seek to serve. Cultivate the habit of helping. It will magically improve your writing, even if you do nothing else.
Studies consistently show that human happiness has large and positive… effects on productivity. Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings. —fastcompany.com
When smart people can’t write
In over forty years as a writer, editor, and instructor, I’ve worked with men and women in the public and private sectors; small, midsize, and large companies; federal agencies and public universities; and a score of industries and professions, from architecture and broadcasting to science and technology. I’m still not sure why many intelligent, articulate people—strong leaders who are brilliant in their fields—communicate so clumsily in writing. I have a few theories, however.
Each industry and profession has its peculiar jargon, some of which is necessary—it’s the language that colleagues and clients understand. But that doesn’t explain why media releases, annual reports, newsletters, and even advertisements are unfriendly and distancing, often in direct contrast to branding efforts meant to portray an organization as warm, caring, and trustworthy.
Smart people sometimes defend their poor writing by saying that they were too busy becoming experts in their particular disciplines to learn the discipline of writing. But if that were really the problem, these smart people would also be mute, rendered unable to speak by the same preoccupation.
Nonwriters naturally make mistakes in grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation—the mechanics of writing. That’s why God made editors. But when writing fails to communicate, the cause goes deeper. It might signify
- lack of focus or disorganization. When writers aren’t sure what they mean to say, they lose sight of the document’s purpose and message.
- lack of concern for the audience—readers or listeners—who, for one reason or another, are being deceived or misled.
There’s little I can do for the writer who has no message or whose motive in writing is something other than to serve (inform, inspire, comfort, or entertain) readers. Fortunately, about eighty percent of the time, the problem with poor writing is one I can solve:
Writers who don’t like to write
Many unskillful writers believe that writing is fundamentally different from speaking. One of the most strikingly intelligent people I’ve had the pleasure to know—an architect with a warm manner and a ready wit—goes into an altered state when he has to write something. One minute we’re talking, the next minute we’re disintermediating, and it’s all downhill from there. Whatever the topic, it inevitably involves “harnessing relevant data, addressing critical elements, strategizing broad-based solutions, and optimizing tailored interactions.”
The sort of unwieldy writing we’re talking about—the basic flaw being too many words—is said to have originated back in the day when lawyers were paid by the word. Legal documents do tend to be long-winded, often as an attempt to leave no loopholes unplugged—the CYA excuse. But this sort of overexplaining has splashed over into everyday writing, where it’s really not necessary unless you think that everyone is out to sue you. They’re not. If you believe that they are, you have a bigger problem than poor writing skills.
The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don’t do what I say. —Martin Buber
Can you speak?
One of the great fallacies about writing is that it is essentially different from talking. Perhaps you sit at the computer, hands poised above the keyboard, and your mind signals, “I am writing,” as if you are wearing the Hogwarts Sorting Hat. Your brain goes into overdrive. Gears and pulleys clank into place, lumber into motion, and produce ponderous phrases and paragraphs you have no memory of composing:
The state-of-the-art virtuosity of Jumbo-Omni Systems’ advance-intelligence meta-solution integrative strategies reconfigure the clients’ multidimensional objective into positions compatible with fixed and liquid assets, human-resources skill sets, machine autonomy….
I’ve wondered if there’s a virus—maybe originating in Washington, D. C.—carried by a mosquito that flies around offices looking for people who are about to write something. Maybe these people release an enzyme that makes the mosquito think “Dessert!” The virus’s telltale symptom is a writing style that you’d expect from someone who was raised by a pack of patent attorneys. No one, as far as I know, has died from this virus—which doesn’t mean that their colleagues or readers haven’t wanted to poison them. In any case, writing to serve is a remarkably effective cure.
What are you waiting for?
If you want to start writing better right now, take these simple steps:
- Start reading the work of writers you admire. You don’t need to study it; just read a lot of it. Their style will rub off on you with no effort on your part.
- Lighten up. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Unless you’re writing to communicate genuinely terrible news, don’t take your topic too seriously either.
- For every writing assignment, define your role; that is, ask yourself how you can serve your audience.
- Clarify your purpose. You can make an outline if you want, although it’s easy to get bogged down in an outline and sabotage your own progress.
- Have fun writing your first draft. Let loose. Play with the language. Use interesting words and colorful phrases that occur to you, but don’t force them. Do not edit as you go. Just write what you want to say, then set it aside for a while.
- With a fresh eye, edit for content and style. Is your message clear? Crystal?
- Proofread for mechanical errors—grammar, spelling, punctuation, and so forth.
- If there’s time, ask someone else to read your draft for content as well as correctness.
- Write final copy and distribute.
Shitty first drafts
It’s said that writing and editing are antagonistic processes using different parts of the brain. The right-brain/left-brain theory has fallen out of favor, but, for whatever reason, stopping often to analyze your work interrupts the creative flow. Write now, edit later.
Author Anne Lamott, a novelist and Christian writer who is celebrated for her irreverence, is a proponent of “shitty first drafts…. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.” (Bird by Bird, 1994)
The point here is not that you try to write badly but rather that you write freely, without evaluating as you go. Stay focused on your purpose. When you’ve finished your shitty first draft, you can pretty it up and make it more palatable.
Exercise
Write a brief biological sketch for yourself.
Hyphenatic
Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
♦
Forty years ago, I signed on as a part-time editorial assistant at the University of Arizona. The mother of three, I preferred short workdays and made a little money on the side writing poems, stories, and essays. Literary journals usually paid in copies, but I won contests now and then, earning as much as a hundred dollars for a sonnet or story. Still, even with my husband’s income as a country-club golf pro, money was tight, so when I was offered a full-time-editor job, I jumped on it.
At the U of A, I was responsible for production of the general catalog. I spent about half my time processing new academic programs and trimming the fat from hundreds of bloated course descriptions that landed in my IN box—unofficial carbon copies followed weeks later by the “originals.” The process gobbled up paper and time, requiring arbitrary and redundant levels of approval befitting the secession of four or five states from the union. The truth is, nobody ever read the stuff before it reached my desk, arriving in pristine condition except for assorted stamps and signatures… no bite marks, no sign of having been stapled, mutilated, or spindled.
I tried and failed to eliminate the carbon-copy component of the process. The carbons were supposed to hurry things along, on the assumption that we could do the editing and data entry while waiting for the official approvals. Our doing so, however, only brought battalions of outraged department heads and deans to our office, miffed that we were undercutting their authority… even though most of the documents dealt with minor changes to course descriptions, not counting a protracted debate over the heady issue of ground water versus groundwater, with the “ground water” proponents arguing for consistency with the parallel phrase surface water.
The work could have been tedious, especially in certain abstruse disciplines where a hot topic might involve “Backus normal form and metalanguages of metalinguistic formulas.” Even basic proofreading can be troublesome when you’re not familiar with a subject’s quirky vocabulary. Sometimes I suspected that it was all a joke and “Backus Normal Form” was an overcoat outlet for Big & Tall Men.
On the other hand, a few of the biggest bigwigs in U of A administration were committed to Catalog Excellence. These men (there being no female V.I.P.s at that time) weren’t satisfied with mere accuracy, clarity, and consistency. They wanted the catalog to sing. Every program description should flow with lyrical prose. Ours should be the King Lear of university catalogs, elegant throughout in style and tone. Until you’ve tried it, you can’t know how difficult it is to apply the same degree of authenticity and cadence to courses on (a) Emily Dickinson, (b) Materials Science of Art and Archaeological Objects, and (c) the Honeybee.
Eventually I mastered the art of creating small literary masterpieces, lucid yet scholarly-sounding enough to satisfy sensitive egos, out of academic raw material, whether it came to me dry and sparse and bullet-pointed or lavishly embellished with strings of modifiers derived from French and Latin. A stem or leaf that you and I might describe as “green” was rendered “verdant” in course-descriptionese. My colleague Mary Lindley or I promptly made it green again. If anyone complained, we could always cite the inflated cost of printers’ ink.
Mary was cheerful, capable, dependable, and ludicrously overqualified. She and I ended up rewriting most of the course descriptions and offending half of the faculty, who tended to express themselves like this:
History of the English Language (3) I II The student will be required to present evidence of a mastery of knowledge and understanding of the introduction, expansion, progression, transformation, and, where relevant, decline of English-identified sounds, English inflections, and English vocabulary. The time period studied by the student will encompass the era of the earliest identification of a meta-dialect which was spontaneously organizing itself into a distinctive language group, through the intervening iterations of the language, until the present day. The student will be responsible for full and complete comprehension of the influence of cultural, sociological, and historical events and conditions upon the evolution of the language in its original regions and specific locales as well as in its export to English-controlled colonies and other areas of influence.
Dash it all!
I’m not proud of the person I became during my four years as catalog Nazi. My predecessor had marked up the documents with a discreet blue pencil. I, on the other hand, acquired Big Red, the William Howard Taft of markers. I wielded it with glee, drunk with power (or high on marker fumes), eager to find innocuous typos, sentence fragments, pronouns with dubious antecedents, and call attention to them with obscene circles and accusatory arrows, praying that someone would invent sticky tape with flashing red lights. Sirens would have been helpful, too. I’d forgotten the purpose of language—to communicate, solecisms be damned.
Over time I learned to pick my battles on the principle that sometimes it’s better to be happy than right. Meanwhile, my work was useful not only in humiliating the most pompous assistant professors but also in taming runaway clauses. To my credit, I was almost always right—tediously so.
I was particularly obsessed with the correct placement of hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, and commas. I could and did cite chapter and verse from no fewer than four authoritative style manuals.
Early on, I had identified two types of hyphen abusers: PAG (point-and-guess) and EOW (every other word). When writing anything at all, PAG-type abusers have an inner monologue like a broken record: “Must be ’bout time for another hyphen. Must be ’bout time for another hyphen. Must be ’bout time…,” although people who are clueless about hyphens usually call them “dashes.”
(For you youngsters: Once upon a time, “broken record” was a metaphor for saying the same thing over and over. Vinyl records, when chipped or scratched, often snagged the phonograph needle, causing a little section of the record to repeat, and repeat, and repeat, until someone lifted the needle arm and advanced it past the scratch, often creating another scratch in the process.)
Very special education
Once I accidentally renamed a special-education course via the substitution of a D for an F, so that the course title became “Reading and Study Skills for the Dead.” Mary, who was proofreading my document, laughed so violently that she concussed. A week later, fully recovered, she resumed proofing with the same course, and I thought she was going to require medical attention again, but she calmed down, and the two of us contemplated “overlooking” the mistake, reasoning that as typos go it was pretty cute and might improve employee morale.
Instead we decided to be grownups. It was a matter of catalog integrity. Besides, the special-education folks wouldn’t have been amused. Some of the newer faculty were already insecure in their academic stature and became noisily defensive if they suspected they were being made fun of.
For the most part, though, I wielded Big Red with a heavy hand. It didn’t make me any friends, but I had the consolation of feeling superior to people who made gobs more money than I did.
The new rules
I no longer believe that “bad writing” breaks the rules of grammar and syntax. Bad writing disturbs the peace. Its opposite is eloquence, which—according to Ralph Waldo Emerson—”is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.”
Written materials produced by organizations are too often not intelligible. The “truth” they purport to convey gets lost in a jumble of jargon and a labyrinth of verbosity. I have come to see these shortcomings as going beyond communication failures. They reflect self-importance, intimidation, even outright hostility. I can fix spelling; I can’t fix a snarky attitude… but I hope I can prove that it damages your writing.
Expressions that confuse and distance readers have infiltrated business, professional, and academic writing so thoroughly that plain writing can seem gaunt and awkward. Even the humblest message has a chip on its shoulder, as illustrated by this classified ad placed by a large medical center in search of a building mechanic:
Position description: Under general supervision, the Building Mechanic II position exists to maintain and address the air quality needs of our customer base as it pertains to air filtration and preventative maintenance of major and minor air handling and building mechanical systems. Our customer base includes but is not limited to patients, visitors, staff, researchers, administrators, and coworkers. Areas of responsibility include all building mechanical systems (AHU’s, pumps, exhaust fans, med gas, etc.). Building Mechanic I responsibilities are inclusive to this position. Position is dedicated to achieving excellence through the accomplishment of the medical center’s mission/goals & objectives especially as they relate to customer service. Refer to Required Education and Experience. Refer to Preferred Education and Experience.
The medical-center maintenance managers are looking for someone who can maintain air-handling equipment. Why don’t they just say so? Because “Wanted: Someone to maintain air-handling equipment” sounds flat and unimpressive. But bare-bones writing is easily mended when writers learn to replace obfuscation with grace and courtesy.
Social intelligence
Over time, this ad and its brothers, sisters, cousins, and sundry other relatives online, in print, and in broadcast media got under my skin and wouldn’t crawl back out and skitter away. I sensed that I was dealing with something more malevolent than sloppy writing.
After years of research and reading weighty, lifeless prose, I began preparing a revised edition of my 2007 business-writer’s manual emphasizing clarity versus jargon in writing and public speaking. My research indicated that the biggest problem in what I refer to as “communication with a public audience” (any form of public speaking, business writing, journalism, and so forth) goes beyond lack of clarity to subtle hostility, an almost feral show of power, with ramifications at every level and in every sector of society.
My new book addresses writing as a form of personal interaction to which the principles of “social intelligence” (as set forth in Daniel Goleman’s excellent book by that title) should apply, as well as the ideals in Martin Buber’s 1923 book I and Thou. A key principle in social intelligence is to increase the number of people you categorize as “us” and decrease the number you regard as “them.”
Of particular concern to me are memes that slide into public consciousness due to the prevalence of “sweeping generalizations” and the abandonment of other journalism standards. But rather than wagging a finger at communicators and invoking their “responsibility,” I suggest that the public interest and their own would be better served by an inoculation of truth and clarity, which might also allay the antagonism and polarity between groups who disagree so violently that they’ve given up even trying to reach consensus.
Grammarwise, you’re safe with me
This book will not scold you about grammar, syntax, pronunciation, spelling, and so forth. This book might gently suggest—if, say, the word adventuresome is part of your vocabulary—that “careful speakers or writers prefer adventurous or venturesome.” This book will whisper such admonitions so as to convey sensitivity to your inalienable right to use adventuresome just for a lark or, alternatively, having given the matter a great deal of consideration and possibly prayer and contemplation, to be a whimsical, spontaneous, devil-may-care sort of speaker or writer… indeed, to be flat-out wrong if that’s what you want and it’s been one of those days and you might just drink a glass of strong ale and begin spewing double negatives in clauses containing the word ain’t and even do something shocking with fricatives if you can recall what they are and isn’t it something to do with Flanders, or are you thinking of frangibles or Frigidaire? …because I now view other people’s writing and public speaking as methods of communicating—not as canvases where I can show off my own writing-and-editing virtuosity—and I evaluate writing according to how well it communicates rather than by its adherence to the old rules of writing that I once took such pains to learn.
Welcome to the new rules of writing:
- honesty
- purpose
- respect
- clarity
- enjoyment
How may I serve you?
To be continued….
Mary and I entered catalog data on CRT terminals connected with a computer like this DECsystem 10. Since the entire University of Arizona shared time on the computer, during busy weeks such as registration we arrived at work before 7 a.m. to avoid horrific login queues.
The DEC 10’s original processor, the KA10, had a maximum main memory capacity of 256 kilowords, equivalent to 1152 kilobytes. Today’s Galaxy C8 phone has memory capacity expandable to 256 gigabytes—more than 220,000 times greater than the KA10’s.
Photo: Joe Mabel
From Annagrammatica’s Little Book of Practical Writing
Thank YOU
Queen Elizabeth I addressing the troops at Tilbury
The correct response to ‘Thank you’ is ‘You’re welcome’
SpC 103—Introduction to Speech Communication—was a required course for my English-lit major. I thought it would be about giving speeches, like Toastmasters. I was young. What did I know?
What the course was “about” was never entirely clear—mostly, as I recall, the sins of Richard Nixon, who was at that time the President of the United States. The instructor did, however, teach a public-speaking unit from the textbook, and we spent a few weeks researching, composing, and presenting speeches. For my oratorical debut, I chose to defend Richard Nixon—I couldn’t stand the guy, but I liked my instructor even less. His name was Edgar, and he told us—as if he were doing us a big, juicy favor—that we could call him Edgar.
Apart from thoroughly discomfiting Edgar, I actually learned something useful about public speaking—several things, actually, but one bit of guidance stands out; it has served me well when talking to groups or interviewers. If Edgar and the textbook had been the only sources of this instruction, I probably would have disregarded it because it goes against common practice. But further research, experience, and my mom convinced me that it’s sound advice for speakers. Here it is:
Don’t say “Thank you.” In particular, don’t open or close with “Thank you.”
My mother raised me to say “Thank you” to my friends’ parents when leaving after having been their guest. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but by fourth grade I could be counted on to mumble “Thank you for the nice time, Mrs. Goldberg” after a sleepover at Judy’s. By fifth grade I could carry it off with a semblance of sincerity if not with gusto, à la Eddie Haskell.
Mom also trained me to say “Thank you” when receiving a gift, a compliment, or some form of help. But there is no reason, she explained, to say “Thank you” when giving gifts, compliments, et cetera. “When somebody says ‘Thank you’ to you,” Mom told me, “don’t say ‘Oh, thank you,’ as some people do, because it’s like you’re throwing the thanks back in their face… like you’re arguing with them or showing them up.” Mom called the behavior “ungracious” and compared it to the pseudo-polite comment “Oh, you shouldn’t have” when you receive a present. If I’d understood the vocabulary of bridge, she might have said “It’s like trumping their good manners.”
According to Edgar, the textbook, and other authorities, as a speaker or an interviewee you’re conferring your knowledge or wisdom upon your audience. It’s for the hosts to thank you and is as inappropriate for you to return their thanks as it would be to hand back their fees, if money is involved. Further, as an opener or closer, “Thank you” is just plain weak.
“Referred to as a haymaker, your closing statement should be a knockout punch that drives home the entire presentation,” writes communication expert Stephanie Scotti for Ragan.com. “The final blow reminds listeners of the core message that you want them to remember long after the presentation has ended.”
It’s true that closing with “Thank you” seems natural and certainly preferable to saying “The end” or “Okay, I’m done” or some other clunky word or phrase to signify that your speech has ended. If you don’t have a haymaker at hand, you can pause for a few seconds and then tell the audience you have a few minutes to answer questions.
When you’re being interviewed, the interviewer will take care of the opening and closing, probably by thanking you. Resist the temptation to thank him or her back. The correct response to “Thank you” is “You’re welcome.” If that seems abrupt, say “It’s a pleasure,” even if it’s not. At least that way it doesn’t turn into a courtesy contest, as if you’re trying to out-thank your thanker.
Next time you listen to a radio interview, notice how the interviewee responds to the host’s introductory expression of thanks. The often-heard reply “Thank you for having me” always makes me think of fourth grade and Judy Goldberg. A simple “You’re welcome” is, by contrast, elegant and well bred… and sufficient.
Okay, I’m done. The end.
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