Writing, Clear and Simple

It isn’t a “method” or “tool” for good writing, but gratitude is an essential mindset for writers.

People have a myriad of activities competing for their time and attention, even when they choose to read, they have endless choices of what to read. Each year, thousands of new books are published. Each month, new magazines hit the newsstands, and each day new newspapers are published. As if that isn’t enough, each moment someone somewhere updates a website with new articles, or new blog posts.

What we write doesn’t matter—novels, articles, essays, whitepapers, corporate reports, or email messages explaining the new vacation policy. People are free to choose whether to read what we write, read something else, or not read anything at all.

Given that, we should be grateful that any reader chooses to spend a bit if time reading something that we wrote, grateful that they’re giving their attention—however fleeting—to our words, to our ideas and thoughts.

And this gratitude should inspire us to do the best we can to convey our ideas and thoughts with grace and clarity. We should be inspired to do the work of writing and rewriting, scrutinizing words, sentences, and paragraphs, striving to make the meaning as clear as spring water.

I’m grateful for each reader who comes here to read my blog, and especially for those who respond in the comments or by email. The fact that you’ve chosen to come here, that you take the time to read my posts and respond helps motivate me to keep on writing, and to do my best to make the time you spend here worthwhile.

Thank you.

A pleasant surprise showed up in my mailbox the other day: a review copy of Scott Berkun’s Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management. I’ll post a review as soon as I can, because it seems a logical topic for Writing, Clear and Simple. After all, we need to manage our writing projects, do we not?

If the members of the U.S. Senate join their colleagues in the House of Representatives, plain language may soon become the law of the land. The House recently passed H.R. 3548, the Plain Language in Government Communications Act, which would require Federal agencies to use plain language in new or revised documents (letters, publications, forms, notices, or instructions) intended for public consumption.

Congressman Bruce Braley made the following comments about H.R. 3548 on the floor of the House of Representatives:

Anyone who’s done their own taxes knows the headache of trying to understand pages and pages of confusing forms and instructions.  There is no reason why the federal government can’t write tax documents and other public documents in language we can all understand.

Writing government documents in plain language will increase government accountability and will save Americans time and money.  Plain, straightforward language makes it easy for taxpayers to understand what the federal government is doing and what services it is offering.

What a concept: Government documents that are easy to understand.

I guess it made sense in Congress.  H.R. 3548 passed 376 to 1. (I wonder who voted against it, and why?)

A companion bill, S. 2291, has gone to the full Senate for a vote. Contact your senators and encourage them to support this bill.

Here’s a quiz for you. Who said this?

So if you speak in a way no one can understand, what’s the point of opening your mouth?

Sounds like someone asking people to use plain language, doesn’t it?

Hint: This quotation was translated to English from another language.

Metaphors are powerful tools that can help you clarify abstract ideas for your audience (as I pointed out in “Dealing with abstractions? Try metaphors.”). Just remember that you don’t have to limit yourself to words when you’re creating a metaphor.

Recently I gave a presentation about intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks, and suchlike). I wanted to introduce the idea with an image that would give the audience a basic understanding that was based on their experiences, so I used this image:

No Trespassing sign

Signs like this are familiar to my audience here in the upper midwestern part of the United States. I figured that this image would help them grasp some of the ideas associated with intellectual property law: that is, just as you have to put these signs up on your property to protect it from trespassers, you have to take steps to protect your trademarks, copyrights, and patents.

Here’s another image I used for a different presentation, when I was talking about the consequences of losing control of a project. Here, the intent was to make a connection between the potentially catastrophic results of losing control of a car, with the potentially catastrophic results of losing control of a project.

A word of caution: Keep your audience’s cultural background in mind when selecting images. Any given image might have different connotations and associations for people from different countries. If the audience for the intellectual property presentation had been from a different culture, they might not have understood the significance of a bright yellow sign with the word “POSTED” in big bold letters. In that case, I might have used a different image I had, in which the sign said “NO TRESPASSING.”

Use your imagination when choosing metaphoric images for a document or a presentation. Where do you look for good images? I found the two photos in this post on Stock.XCHNG, which offers thousands of free images.