Are you sure it’s not brain surgery?

by Jack Posted on July 28, 2012

Some years back, I met an All Blacks selector at a conference.

When he discovered that I was a writer he said: ‘You and I have something in common.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep.  Pretty much everyone thinks that they can do my job at least as well as I can, and I’d guess that pretty much everyone thinks they can do your job at least as well as you can.’

He had a point.  In the minds of many people, picking a national sports team or writing something like a newsletter or a business proposal requires little more than a dash of common sense.  It doesn’t take real skill.  It’s not brain surgery.

The boss of a well-known real estate firm certainly wouldn’t let any old bloke with a box of spanners loose on his $350,000 Porsche.  But he’s quite happy to leave the writing of his firm’s newsletter to someone with no evident notion of grammar and no sense of style.

‘Five hundred bucks for a couple of pages of words?  Don’t be ridiculous.  Kev’ll do it for free.’

It has been estimated that the average adult reads or hears well in excess of 100,000 words each and every day.  For many people, the total is more than 150,000.  And for some it is closer to 200,000.

If you want your words to be among the very few that will make a lasting impression, it pays to get someone who knows what they are doing to help you to select, arrange, and polish those words.  And, if you’re worried about the cost, you can probably save a few bucks on your vehicle maintenance.

I know a bloke who will work on your Porsche for just $15 an hour.  Of course he doesn’t know a lot about Porsches.  But then, judging from your latest newsletter, Kev doesn’t know a lot about words.  And that doesn’t seem to bother you.

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Blah blah something important

by Jack Posted on July 17, 2012

For several years, I had a cartoon pinned to the cork board beside my desk.

It showed a dog listening to his master.  From the dog’s point of view, the man appeared to be saying: ‘Blah blah blah biscuit.  Blah blah blah walkies.  Blah blah good boy!’

I am often reminded of this cartoon when I hear politicians holding forth.

‘Blah blah blah better outcomes.  Blah blah blah blah sustainable economic benefits.  Blah blah blah protection of the most vulnerable members of society.’

In his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell suggested that language which is misused and badly presented obfuscates thinking and reasoning.  Without clear language we can’t hope for clear thinking.  He particularly disliked the habit that many politicians have of stringing together several impressive-sounding-but-meaningless phrases rather than constructing a simple sentence with a strong verb and a concrete noun.

Recently, I heard one politician saying: ‘I think that I can safely say without fear of contradiction that we are now at a point in time when it is critically essential that the appropriate information is captured in an appropriate and timely manner.’

I have no idea what she meant.  What is more worrying, I don’t think she did either.

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The cat sat on the mat

by Jack Posted on July 8, 2012

The cat sat on the mat.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that, in six simple words, is what happened.  The cat sat on the mat.  But that’s not what you expect to read when you pick up an ‘important report’, is it?  For your many pieces of gold, you expect rather more than six single-syllable words.

You expect substance.  You expect evidence of industry and erudition.  You expect, well, words, polysyllabic words, and lots of them.

And so … by all accounts, the small fur-covered quadrupedal mammal, described by an eye witness (whose veracity is not, in this particular instance, to be doubted) as feline (Felis catus or Felis silvestris catus, and informally, Felis domesticus), reportedly chose to adopt a semi-recumbent position on top of a rectangular-shaped portion of textile-based floor covering which, for the record, we will categorise as a mat.

There.  Is that better?

No, I didn’t think so either.  As simple, as basic, as childlike as it may seem, ‘The cat sat on the mat’ pretty much says it all.

Next time you sit down to write an important document, it might be an idea to remember that cat.

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Shorter is usually better

by Jack Posted on July 2, 2012

I recently read a document that ran to more than 50 pages.  In fact I read it twice.  I thought that on the first occasion I must have missed some important points.

But, after reading it a second time, I am pretty sure that there were only three important points – and one of those was not that important.

The points were covered in the first couple of paragraphs on page three and then repeated towards the end of page 51.  The rest was just padding.  Inelegant padding.  The kind of padding that inclines the reader to skip a few words here and there, maybe to skip a few sentences, or paragraphs, or even whole pages.

I can picture the author sitting down to write the document.  My guess is that he thought he had something important to say.  So he said it.

But then he realised that what he had said took up only about a third of a page, fewer than a couple of hundred words.  And somehow that didn’t seem important enough.

So he wrote a few more words.  And a few more after that.  And, before he knew it, he had written almost 10,000 words, many of them long important-looking words.  But most of these words were just waffle.

I can picture the author printing out the 50-something pages of waffle.  I can picture him holding the wad of wordy pages in his hand and then enjoying the satisfying thud as he slapped the pages down onto his desk.  Job done.

But the job wasn’t done.  The author’s job was to make it as easy as possible for his reader (or readers) to take in those two or three key points, digest them, consider them, and then to think or act in the way in which the author wanted the reader to think or act.  And all of the superfluous wordy waffle just made that more difficult and more unlikely.

If, rather than spewing out thousands of largely irrelevant waffle words, the author had put his effort into crafting half a dozen clear, concise, easy-to-read paragraphs, he would have increased his chances of success many fold.

When you are writing a document with the intention of making something happen, shorter is usually better.  If a page or two is sufficient to make your argument, clearly and convincingly, then a page or two will suffice.  As George Eliot put it in her essay collection Impressions of Theophrastus Such: ‘Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.’

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An artist says …

by Jack Posted on June 27, 2012

‘An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way.  And artist says a hard thing in a simple way.’ – Charles Bukowski

Well, some intellectuals still say simple things in a hard way.  But, over the past few years, more and more of them seem to have learned from the artists – which is good for all of us.

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Truley [sic] confusing

by Jack Posted on June 18, 2012

There is an interesting debate going on in the world of words.  On one side of the table there are those who believe that standardised spelling and a few basic rules of grammar are essential to effective communication.  On the other side of the table is a group that believes that ‘variants’ of spelling and grammar are perfectly acceptable.

This second group maintains that whether it’s truly, truely or truley, the reader knows what the writer means.  Or, at the very least, the reader can work out what the writer means.

This second group also believes that, by insisting on truly, the first group is discriminating against those who have perhaps not benefitted from their encounter with the school system.  By insisting on truly (says the second group), the first group is making life even more difficult for those for whom life is already difficult enough.

There is even a sub-group of this second group that believes that the use of truley (or perhaps even trooli) is evidence of creativity.  Spelling truly as truley is not wrong; it’s clever and imaginative.

I can see that this might be a valid argument if the writer of truley is aware of what he or she is doing – if they are aware that the standard spelling is truly, and if their use of the variant is intentional and for a purpose.  But, when it’s just because they know no better, I can’t see that it’s either clever or imaginative.

James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov were able to do some very clever and imaginative things with the English language – in part because they had a very good understanding of standardised spelling and the basic rules of grammar.  To defend Shandrelle’s and Troyetta’s use of truley on the grounds that they were away from school on the day that the teacher covered the spelling of truly makes no sense at all.  And to dress it up as clever and imaginative is just encouraging the proliferation of gobbledygook.

Roll on Tower of Babel two-point-zero.

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A helping hand

by Jack Posted on June 11, 2012

A couple of years ago, one of my colleagues was hired by a research agency to help add a bit of clarity and style to their reports.

‘I want our reports to be reports that our clients really want to read,’ the MD said.  ‘Every section.  Every sentence.  Every last word.’

The plan was for each research director to write his or her report as usual and then, once they were happy with the content, they were to send the report to my colleague for a vigorous polish.  My colleague was to be given two clear days for each report.  And the whole process was to be coordinated by an enthusiastic young woman who was the agency’s in-house publisher.

The first report sent for polishing was, my colleague says, gook of the very gobbledy-est kind.  And, to make matters worse, he had only a day to turn it around.  But he did his best.

A couple of days later he called the MD.  Had he seen the report?

Yes he had.

And was he happy with the result?

After a long pause, the MD acknowledged that the structure was definitely an improvement.  But the language still seemed, well, rather stilted.  Also, he was surprised and disappointed by the number of typos.

My colleague, too, was surprised.  He thought he’d done a pretty good job – especially considering the limited time.  So he asked the MD if he would mind highlighting the bits that concerned him.  ‘It’ll help us next time,’ my colleague said.

When the MD’s file arrived, my colleague was perplexed to say the least.  There were indeed typos.  There were also misspellings.  And, in places, there were some very strange sentence structures.  Little wonder the MD had not been happy with the result.

After much thought, my colleague decided there could be only one explanation.  He called the in-house publisher and asked her if the original author had perhaps made a few last-minute amendments.

No, she said, the research director in question had left for a conference in Amsterdam.  He hadn’t even seen the polished version.

Then was it possible that someone else had made some last-minute changes?

No, she assured him.  No one had made any last-minute changes.  The finished report was just as she had received it.  ‘Although I did have to fix some of your grammar and spelling,’ she added.

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Big is not a big word

by Jack Posted on June 4, 2012

To me, fat has always looked and sounded like a fat word while thin has always seemed appropriately thin.

But big is not a big word.  In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s a very small word.  And monosyllabic is definitely not monosyllabic.  It’s polysyllabic.

Some words seem to fit their meanings better than others.  Take, for example, pugnacious.  Pugnacious sounds … well, pugnacious.  If you saw a pugnacious coming down the street, I think you’d try to stay out of its way.  Pugnacious just sounds ‘quarrelsome’ and ‘belligerent’.

Rambunctious is another word that sounds as if it means what it says – ‘exuberant’ or ‘unruly’.  But does pulchritudinous sound pulchritudinous?  Pulchritudinous can sometimes be a very useful word, but does it sound ‘beautiful’?  Hmm … probably not.

Earlier today, I heard a chap on the radio speaking – appreciatively – of having received ‘a fulsome apology’.  I can only assume that he was unaware of the fact that, strictly speaking, fulsome has quite a negative connotation.  The dictionary definition is ‘disgusting by excess of flattery; excessive’.  If the chap really did think that he had received an apology that was disgusting by its excess of flattery, I don’t think that he would have sounded quite so appreciative.  I think he might even have sounded a little crestfallen.

Crestfallen (‘dejected’ or ‘dispirited’), now there’s a word that definitely looks and sounds crestfallen.

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The problem with newsletters

by Jack Posted on May 27, 2012

I recently tried to read an article written by a woman who apparently regards herself as something of a communications guru.

Unfortunately, the first (short) paragraph was a bit of a disaster.  After reading it through slowly two or three times, I think I managed to work out what she was trying to say.  However, what I think she was trying to say and what she was actually saying were two entirely different things.

The second paragraph was no better.  And after that it just got worse.  Serious grammatical errors, mixed metaphors, and random punctuation ensured that anything good that she had to say was well and truly lost.

The gist of her article seemed to be that email newsletters no longer work.  Her conclusion was based not on the newsletters that she had received but on the lack of response to the newsletters that she had sent out.

Her newsletters, she suggested, ‘though still effective, have significant barriers’.  And then she listed some of these supposed barriers.  But nowhere in the list was there any mention of the fundamental barrier: poorly punctuated gobbledygook.

My inbox, like the inboxes of many people I know, gets inundated with newsletters.  Some get scanned and trashed within a second or two.  Some get a more considered perusal.  And there are some that I actually look forward to reading.

The newsletters that fall into this third category are, without exception, newsletters that, first, have something to say and, second, say what they have to say with style and simplicity.  But that is something which I would have expected a woman who regards herself as a communications guru to have already known.

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An eagerly-anticipated loss

by Jack Posted on May 22, 2012

Back in the dim distant days of the fifth form, we had an English teacher who insisted that nice – in the sense of ‘pleasant or agreeable’ – could only apply to food.  A ‘nice day’ or ‘a nice broad-brimmed hat’ was sure to lower the A-minus your essay might otherwise have warranted to a B-plus.

I’m not sure where this exclusive association with food originated.  At various points in history, nice has meant ‘foolish’, ‘stupid’, and ‘loose-mannered’ (among other things).  And the pleasant-agreeable usage has been around for at least 100 years.  But, if you didn’t want to be docked much-needed marks, you quickly learned to serve nice only with food – at least until you were safely through to the lower sixth.

There were a number of other words about which Sir had strong feelings.  Utilise was one.  Utilise (we were told) meant to put to use something which might otherwise be discarded.  A builder could utilise old bricks; but, if the bricks were new, he simply used them.  ‘Utilise is not just a posh synonym for use.’

Sir was also most particular about the use of anticipate – ‘to be aware of something in advance and take steps to deal with it’.  Anticipate was not a synonym for expect or await.  But, unfortunately, that is what it seems to have become.

Just a few days ago, the business desk of a well-respected news organisation said that ‘Facebook priced its initial public offering at $US38 per share ahead of one of the most eagerly-anticipated share flotations in recent stock market history.’  And the sports desk of the same organisation talked about ‘the much-anticipated match-up’ between two leading rugby halfbacks.

It’s probably too late to turn back the tide.  Anticipate has already become a synonym for expect or await.  But, in allowing that to happen, we have deprived ourselves of a perfectly good single word meaning ‘to be aware of something in advance and take steps to deal with it’.  It seems that too few of us had anticipated this.

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