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After 15 or 20 minutes spent reading the comments under the op-ed pieces in my local online newspapers I am surprised that there are any unsolved problems left in the world.

There are just so many experts out there.  And each is ready and willing to give us the benefit of their, umm, wisdom.

Forget all of the carefully researched, considered, and crafted arguments of the paid (or sometimes unpaid) hacks.  The dash-it-off readers have the real answers.  They don’t need research.  They don’t need time for careful consideration.  And they certainly don’t need time to craft their responses.  (Hey, what’s the problem with a bit of approximate spelling and innovative grammar?  It’s the Internet, for goodness sake!  Time is of the essence.  Get with the programme.)

Of course a sprinkling of the op-ed authors have an agenda.  Well, many of them do.  I guess that’s why many of them took to their keyboards in the first place.  And some can be pretty selective in their use of ‘facts’.  But even an occasional reader must quickly grasp that Heather is left leaning and Gus has rightist tendencies.  And responding to every proposal or suggestion with a general tirade against whichever politician or political party you didn’t vote for takes the argument nowhere.

If you feel the urge to join the commentariat, to add your opinion, please do.  But please think.  Please focus.  And please make an effort to use language that encourages a rational consideration of your ideas.  After all, if you are just going to have a mad, semi-literate rant, why should anyone bother to consider your point of view seriously?

Although I was once a pretty decent tennis player, I have always thought that the game suffers from being too simple. I have similar feelings about golf.  Whack, whack, whack, from the tee to the hole, and then on to next tee and do it all over again.  No, if I’m going to spend a serious chunk of time taking part in or watching a contest, I prefer a sport with a bit more complexity.

Rugby Union is a pretty good candidate.  At its highest level it has become so complex that even the ‘expert’ commentators are frequently at a loss to explain what is happening and why.

And then there is cricket.  For a lover of complexity, test cricket, a game which, weather permitting, is usually played for 30 hours over five days and offers no fewer that twelve different ways for a batsman to be adjudged ‘out’, is pure delight.

But my love of complexity and (some would say) arcane rules does not extend to grammar.  When it comes to grammar – English grammar anyway – I believe that simple is best.

Recently, a friend and I clashed over the use – and misuse – of ‘whom’.  My friend considered the proper use of whom to be one of the hallmarks of a careful writer.  ‘It’s really quite simple,’ he said.  ‘Who is subjective and whom is objective.  Or who is nominative and whom is accusative.’

Technically, he is right.  But the ‘correct’ use is not at all simple.  Even Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which normally takes a few lines to explain each entry, finds it necessary to devote two whole pages to the use of who and whom.

These days, most of the better writers I know seem to use whom only after a preposition (of whom, with whom, by whom) and sometimes not even then.  Otherwise they tend to use who.  Indeed, the technically correct use of whom can often make writing seem stilted and pompous.  ‘Whom do you wish to speak to, my good man?’

My bet is that the trend towards simplicity will continue and, within 50 or 60 years, whom – like hath and ye – will have become a quaint historical footnote.

In what now seems like another life, I used to write copy for a number of internationally advertised brands and products.  One of my favourite products in the early days was Volkswagen – in particular, the ‘ugly duckling’ that was the VW Beetle.

By the time I got involved with VW, the look and tone of the brand’s advertising had been pretty well established by the legendary Doyle, Dane, Bernbach creative team of Gene Case and Helmut Krone.

Some of my colleagues found this unwritten prescription quite irksome.  But I always found it strangely liberating.  You already had a good idea of what the ad was going to look and feel like, from there it was just a matter of working out what the ad was going to say, and then saying it with the style, sophistication, and humour that was the VW way.

I was so comfortable with the Case-Krone approach that I sent Gene Case a note asking if he had any tips he’d like to share.  His reply was brief and to the point: First write the billboard.  And if the campaign doesn’t call for a billboard, write one anyway.

It was good advice.  There is nothing quite like getting your message down in a single sentence – one that both says what you need to say and says it with the desired tone and style – to sort out your thinking.  It works for advertising.  It also works for just about any other piece of written communication.

Try it next time you sit down to write a report or a proposal.  Or even next time you need to write an important email.  I think you will find that it makes writing the full version of whatever it is that you are writing very much easier.

A friend of ours reckons that he has yet to meet a man who does not consider himself to be a better than average driver and a better than average lover.

I sometimes feel that my own experience of would-be writers in the corporate world is somewhat similar.  Not only does the vast majority consider themselves to be better than average writers – often way better than average – they also consider themselves to be faster than average writers.

‘Well, I can type at about 60 words a minute, so that’s something north of 3,000 words an hour,’ one manager said recently.  It was his rationale for allowing only 30 minutes to prepare a board paper.

Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge and the writer of a very readable blog for the Times Literary Supplement, recently invited writers to ‘fess up’ to what they considered to be a satisfactory day’s work.

Some thought that as few as 500 finished words was a respectable effort.  (That was Graham Greene’s daily quota.)  Most aimed for somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 words.  And a few ambitious souls aimed for 3,000 or more.  But that was 3,000 words a day, not 3,000 words an hour.  And these were professional writers.

Effective writing involves thinking, writing, and revising.  (One writer we know cheerfully admits to ‘throwing away’ at least two-thirds of the words from every first draft she has ever written.)

When you sit down to prepare a board paper or something similar, you have probably already done quite a bit of the thinking.  But it is almost inevitable that more thinking will be required.  And then there’s the writing: selecting just the right words and putting them into just the right order to achieve just the right effect.  Finally, there’s the revising – which may well take longer that the initial writing.

So, if it takes you half a day or more to write a thousand or so well-chosen words, don’t feel that you are slacking.  That’s still less time than many professional writers would require to complete the same task.

Back in the days when all good ‘newspapermen’ carried a stenographers’ pad, several sharp pencils, and an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter, one of my cousins spent her days asking who, what, where, when, and why, and writing up the answers for the readers of a substantial provincial daily.

Chris was on the paper’s news team.  Her job was to report the news.  There were two or three other people whose job it was to offer opinions.  And the newspaper’s editor went to great trouble to ensure that readers were in no doubt as to whether they were reading news or opinions.

While Chris was reporting the news in the newspaper, my sister was reading the six o’clock news on TV.  That too was largely about who, what, where, when, and – where it was possible to deduce – why.  Most of the opinions and all the fluffier ‘human interest’ stuff were confined to the magazine programme that followed the news.

But all that has changed.  Today, it seems that 90 percent of what is presented as news is, in fact, comment or opinion or simply fluff.

On TV, we now have the people in the studio ‘crossing’ to a reporter ‘somewhere’, often in front of some sort of landmark, to get the reporter’s opinion on something that they often know little or nothing about.

‘Well, Patrick, the Minister has made this big announcement.  How will the Opposition react?’  And Patrick spends the next one-and-a-half minutes speculating and  pontificating, and saying next to nothing.

Newspapers, too, have fallen into the habit of lumping hard news in with questionable comment.

Once upon a time, we might have read:

Shortly before ten o’clock this morning, a cheese sandwich was burning out of control at the corner of State and Great Streets.  Police closed the lower part of Great Street to traffic while fire fighters attempted to deal with the blaze.  At this stage, the cause of the fire is not known.

But now we are more likely to be told:

Nineteen-year-old mother of three, Maureen Frogworthy, has slammed the Government’s slow response to a blazing cheese sandwich less than two kilometres from the daycare centre attended by her three-year-old son, Shicayne.

‘It’s disgusting,’ Ms Frogworthy said.  ‘My kid could have been trying to eat that sandwich at the time.’

Ms Frogworthy says that the fire was the direct result of Government cuts in grants to the local Mothers with Two Left Feet support network.

No Opposition spokesman was available for comment, but Ms Frogworthy’s neighbour, Doris Nogood, has called for the Minister to resign.

Human interest?  I can tell you that Ms Frogworthy’s take on events is of no interest whatsoever to this particular human.

Now … can we please get back to news that is news?

It never ceases to surprise me just how many smart, intelligent people hold the same views as me.  I am equally surprised by just how many stupid, misguided people hold contrary views.

Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that, while most of us like to think that we make decisions and reach conclusions based on the best available evidence, we are rather more likely to take up a position and then look for evidence to support our choice.

We also tend to avoid or discount any evidence that does not support our choice.

(If you agree with this, you are probably nodding your head.  If you don’t, you are probably thinking: What the hell does this guy know about anything anyway?)

I think it may have been A S Byatt who said that in some ways fiction writers have it easy.  They can create reality as they go along.  Non-fiction writers have to work within the reader’s reality – however unreal that reality may be.

Unfortunately, many non-fiction writers seem to believe that the facts will speak for themselves.

‘Here’s why our product is best.’

‘Here’s why you should choose us as your preferred supplier.’

Just tell the reader what is what and it will be ‘job done’.

But unless the writer’s version of reality matches the reader’s version, the simple facts may not be enough.  Indeed, the reader may well consider your facts to be far from factual.  (Look at the global warming debate.)

One very successful copywriter with whom I used to work reckoned that the most useful piece of information he could have before he put pen to paper was a clear understanding of how the intended reader already thought about what he was going to write about.  What did she know?  What did she believe?  What did she feel?

‘If I know where she’s coming from, I can probably start a conversation,’ he used to say.  ‘If I don’t, I’m just shooting in the dark.’  And to remind him what it took to start a conversation, he had on his wall three words of advice: Know thy Reader.