Writing, Clear and Simple

I’m guessing that more than a few of you are either thinking about writing a book, or you’ve actually started. In either case, Scott Berkun has some thoughts for you to consider.

 You see, he’s had a lot of people ask him “How do you write a book?” But when you probe into it a bit, they’re asking about a few different things. For example, there are those who want to know if there’s some secret to the process of writing. There isn’t.

If you want to write, kill the magic: a book is just a bunch of writing. Anyone can write a book. It might suck or be incomprehensible, but so what: it’s still a book. Nothing is stopping you right now from collecting all of your elementary school book reports, or drunken napkin scribbles, binding them together at kinkos for $20, slapping a title on the cover, and qualifying as an author. Want to write a good book? Ok, But get in line. Most pro authors are trying to figure that out too.

Then there are those who are really asking about how to get your book published.

30% of the time the real thing people are asking is how do you find a publisher. As if there wasn’t a phone book or, say, an Internet-thingy where you can look this stuff up. Writers-market is literally begging to help writers find publishers. Many publishers, being positive on the whole idea of communication, put information on how to submit material on their website. And so do agents. The grand comedy of this is how few writers follow the instructions. That’s what pisses off all the editors: few writers do their homework.

Go check it out. Scott’s written a couple of best-sellers, so his advice is worth reading. 

By way of The (New) Legal Writer blog, two ways to do a better job of editing your own writing:

1. Step away from the document. Give yourself a bit of a break from looking at it. When you come back, with fresh eyes, you’ll see things that you didn’t notice before.
2. If you’re going to review the document on paper, print it in a different font. I’m with Ray on this one: I’ve never used this trick, so I’m going to give it a try the next time I’m reviewing one of my own pieces. I’ll let you know how it works.

Here’s another trick for self-editing: Read the piece out loud. When you hear something, you’re using a different part of your brain. If you hear something that doesn’t sound quite right, take a closer look. Chances are it’s something that you need to improve or correct.

I’ve been on a tear about abstractions lately, so it shouldn’t be surprising that this article by David Scott caught my eye: The Gobbledygook Manifesto — Cutting Edge! Mission Critical! An analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006.

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I’m gonna puke! Just like with a teenager’s use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in Web sites and news releases—so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people’s, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don’t communicate very well, you know?

Many of the thousands of Web sites I’ve analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook adjectives. So I wanted to see exactly how many of these words are being used and created an analysis to do so.

Scott, with the help of Factiva, analyzed just over 388,000 company press releases, and the results are fun to read. The “winner” in the “Most Overused Gobbledygook Word” contest was “next generation.”

Part of the problem with the terms Scott is talking about here is that they’re abstractions. It’s their vagueness and fuzzy, shifting definitions that leads him to call them “meaningless.”

When I see words like “flexible,” “scalable,” “groundbreaking,” “industry standard,” or “cutting-edge,” my eyes glaze over. What, I ask myself, is this supposed to mean? Just saying your widget is “industry standard” means nothing unless some aspect of that standardization is important to your buyers. In the next sentence, I want to know what you mean by “industry standard,” and I also want you to tell my why that standard matters and give me some proof that what you say is indeed true.

They other problem with these words and phrases is that they’re worn out. People have read “cutting edge,” “scalable,” and “interoperable” too many times. We’re sick of the whole mess.

Don’t let your writing succumb to TAS.

Delivering bad news is a tough job all around. We frequently struggle to find the right words to say. (Each week, at least a dozen people find my article, “Delivering bad news,” using some variation of “bad news” as a search term.) Then we have to scrape up the courage to come out and say it. And then there’s the question of what medium to use.

Well, according to a Harris Interactive poll sponsored by WhitePages.com, most people say they’d rather deliver bad news face-to-face, rather than use e-mail, instant messaging, or even the telephone.

According to the online poll of 2,395 U.S. adults 18 and older, a majority of people prefer talking in person when it comes to giving and getting bad news, expressing anger or admitting a mistake.

The reason? Etiquette, for one thing. But most said face-to-face conversation is the most direct. And the hardest to mess up. On the other hand, 80 percent described e-mail as easy to misinterpret. (Who among us hasn’t erroneously used the CAPS LOCK function? Or gone a little heavy on the exclamation points!!!!)

I have to question whether the number of people who say they prefer face-to-face conversation for bad news stays as high when they actually have to do it. Like I said, it’s tough to “screw your courage to the sticking point” and do the deed. Still, given the overwhelming preference to giving and receiving bad news in person, it makes the choice easier, and it will help the message go over a bit better.

An amusing aphorism tells us that, “to a child with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Such is the way of some beginning writers when they pick up a thesaurus, as Michael Leddy tells us over at lifehack.org:

Reading an essay from a college freshman many years ago, I came across a sentence that baffled me — it referred to “ingesting an orange.” I crossed out “ingest,” wrote “eat,” and wondered why anyone would’ve written otherwise. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that my student had very likely started with “eat,” only to cross it out and substitute a word that seemed somehow better — lofty, less plain, more imposing.

Since then I’ve taught many students who seek to improve their writing by using “better” words. Their revision strategies focus on replacing plain words with big, shiny ones. Such students usually rely on a thesaurus, now more available to a writer than ever before as a tool in many word-processing programs.

Actually, you can have some fun with a document by using something like Word’s thesaurus feature to replace words with Word’s suggestions. Like this:

In point of fact, you can experience particular merriment by way of a manuscript by utilizing something like Word’s lexicon feature to interchange terminology with Word’s propositions.

But that should be just an after-hours diversion, unless you want to sound pompous, puffed-up, and lacking in anything substantive to say.

As Leddy points out, you shouldn’t use a thesaurus to try to “dress up” your writing. By all means, use it, in conjunction along with a good dictionary, when you find yourself questioning whether you’re using the word you really need.