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.

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.

Cultivate observation and reflection, a pair of habits that will help add life—zip, zing, music, poetry, and Pow!—to your writing.

As I was dressing one morning, I began musing on an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies that I saw recently. Jed Clampett’s nephew, Jethro, had been thinking about what profession he wanted to pursue, when he met a magician. He was enthralled by the magician’s tricks—pulling coins out of thin air and making them disappear, or magically baking a cake in a top hat—so he decided that he was going to be a magician.

Naturally, this being Jethro Bodine, he thought that all he needed to do was buy the magician’s equipment and clothing, and he too would be a magician. Even if you’ve never seen the show, you can guess how well that idea worked out: Just as well as his attempt to become a “double-nought spy” a la James Bond.

It struck me then that Jethro isn’t all that different from many people we meet every day. For example, Steve Farber has talked about how the fashion of wearing baggy pants got started among skateboarding enthusiasts, not because they thought it looked cool, but because they usually wore knee-pads beneath their pants. It was initially a functional choice; they had to wear baggy pants to fit them over the knee pads.

But then the guys who hung out with the real skateboarders decided they wanted to look like the cool guys they were hanging out with, so they started wearing big baggy pants too. They wanted to look like skateboarders, without actually doing the work of becoming skateboarders. And the word for this kind of person is “poser.”

All this—thinking about Jethro wanting to be a magician, to thinking about Steve Farber’s story about posers dressing like skateboarders, to thinking about how people often try, like Jethro, to become something by taking on the appearance but not doing the work required to really be that thing—happened within a few moments while I was getting dressed. But none of it would have happened if I hadn’t been engaged in those two habits: observation and reflection.

I was observing what was going on around me. I saw the television show, I heard Steve Farber’s story, and I see examples of posers all round, both in the media and a few examples in my own life. The key here is that I see these things and take note of them. And I hould emphasize here that I’m trying to build the habit of literally taking note. Watch what goes on around you and write things down. If you don’t write things down, you will not remember more than a tiny fraction of your observations. (Unless you’re some sort of Rainman-type savant who remembers everything.)

Then reflect on what you’ve observed. Ask yourself questions about things. How is a sitcom episode like something you’ve experienced? Why do some stores have handles on the doors that look like you should push them, when you really need to pull them, or vice-versa? Why is this thing the same as or different from that thing? How do they make these? Who decided this? Where? How? When? What if?

There’s no way of knowing when or how you’ll use these observations to make or reinforce a point in your writing. But you will use them, if you cultivate the habit.

Last night, I was chatting with my friends Kip and Bob, and the topic veered to the weather. Specifically, to the temperature.

We’re in the middle of a “wind chill warning” (that’s what the National Weather Service calls it) because of sub-zero temperatures coupled with high winds. 

I mentioned that I thought the sub-zero conditions wouldn’t actually be all that bad if it weren’t for the wind. “One year, when I was in college, my brother and I went to Colorado during Christmas break” I said. “We ended up staying at a place high in the Rockies, at almost, but not quite, Pike’s Peak altitude. And it was cold—well below zero a lot of the time, but it wasn’t windy, and the air was dry. You obviously didn’t want to just stand around outside, but it wasn’t all that bad when we were outside.”

Kip (who happens to be the meteorologist for one of the local television stations) agreed, and said “Yeah, one time I was ice fishing on Lake of the Woods, and it got down to -30 during the night.” (He was staying in an ice house, in case you’re wondering.)

“My pickup wouldn’t start in the morning, because it was just too darn cold, but there wasn’t any wind. It was dead still. So there I was, trying to fix my pickup, not wearing a coat, but just an insulated flannel shirt, and it didn’t feel all that bad.”

Bob then chimed in with his story. “The coldest I have ever been in my life was when I was in Washington, D.C. in December. It wasn’t that cold, but it rained every day, and the cold just cuts to the bone when you’re damp.”

Nobody talked about the physics of what happens when you combine cold with wind, or with humidity. We didn’t need to. We told our stories, and we understood each other. (Yeah, I’m using a story about some guys telling stories to illustrate the utility and power of stories. A meta-story, if you will.)

Notice that these stories weren’t deep, dramatic, or drawn out. A story doesn’t need to be a big thing, scripted by a Pulitzer Prize winner.

We use stories all the time in our conversations with each other. Why not add them to your writing?  

Before you set pen to paper, or put your fingers on the keyboard, ask yourself: Do I have a clear idea of my goal for what I’m about to write?

A couple of days ago, I bought a copy of There’s No Such Thing as Public Speaking, by Jeannette and Roy Henderson. Yes, it’s about speaking, but many of the ideas cross over into the world of writing as well.

At the very beginning, the authors say that Newton’s Third Law of Motion—”For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”—can be applied to human interaction, albeit not as mathematically.

Whenever we give, we expect someone to take; whenever we teach, we expect someone to learn; and whenever we speak, we expect someone to listen.

Because of this Cause and Effect relationship, we must never view a listener as passive or uninvolved just because they are “simply” listening. The listener is active. The listener is responsive. The listener will react to whatever stimuli we choose to use.

(Substitute reader for listener in the above paragraphs, and you’ll see why I think we writers have something to learn here.)

Because the principle of Cause and Effect influences every human interaction, the Hendersons tell us that by choosing and controlling our actions, we can have a greater influence over the reactions that our listeners (or readers) have.

Our first obligation, then—as speakers or as writers—is to be sure we know what Effect we want bring about.

Why are you writing what you’re writing?