Writing, Clear and Simple

The “I” of the Storm: The simple secrets of writing & speaking (almost) like a professional

by Philip Yaffe (ISBN: 9789087640019)

The thing that sets a writer apart from someone who just writes is more than knowing correct grammar and spelling, how to construct a sentence or a paragraph, or the difference between passive and active voice and when to choose one or the other. According to Philip Yaffe, author of The “I” of the Storm, what sets a writer apart is how they “go about their work—their attitudes, methods, practices and procedures.” And his book is Yaffe’s attempt to show everyone who needs to write how to adopt those attitudes, methods, practices, and procedures.

Yaffe, a professional writer and writing instructor, makes it clear early on that there are two different types of writing, creative and expository, and that you must approach these two types with the different attitudes. Because the purpose of creative writing is to amuse and entertain, the attitude is “Everyone wants to read what you are going to write.”

On the other hand, with expository writing (the focus of the book), the purpose is to inform and instruct, and the corresponding attitude is “Nobody wants to read what you are going to write.” That statement is basically what I have long held to be the “dirty little secret” (although it’s surely not a secret) of technical writing people don’t want to read user’s guides or online help, and will only do so as a last resort.

According to Yaffe, when you’re writing to instruct or inform, starting with that attitude ensures that you work to organize and present your information in a way that helps stimulates interest.

I appreciated the time Yaffe spends defining of what good writing is. By establishing with almost mathematical rigor what the elements of good expository writing are—clarity, conciseness, and density—he makes it easier to analyze any given text and give it a more-or-less objective grade, and to see what we could do to improve it.

I feel that I’m forced into the wishy-washy language of saying we can give a “more-or-less objective grade,” because even with Yaffe’s detailed definitions of clarity, conciseness, and density, there are still areas of subjective judgment involved. For example, in his definition of clarity, Yaffe says we must do three things:

1. Emphasize what is of key importance.
2. De-emphasize what is of secondary importance.
3. Eliminate what is of no importance.

However, no two people will always completely agree about what information falls into these three categories; thus, all of these judgments will be subjective to some degree. Nonetheless, spelling out these definitions as clearly as Yaffe has gives us some effective tools we can use in on-the-job writing.

After defining what makes writing good, Yaffe describes a number of techniques we can use, including lessons from journalism like the Inverted Pyramid, and the 5 Ws + H (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How), plus a number of general writing tips.

Yaffe also spends a large chunk of his book on oral presentations, explaining the similarities to expository writing, but also clearly stating the differences. For example, he points out that readers have the luxury of stopping to think about something they’ve just read, or skimming over things they aren’t interested in. Listeners don’t have that option. They have to try to absorb and filter the information at the pace set by the speaker. He also has some good advice on how to create a slide presentation that supports your speech, and how to avoid “death by PowerPoint.”

I felt that Yaffe fell just short of his goal in a couple of areas. For example, when he first described the mind-set needed for expository writing, he provided a few examples of why it was so important. However, I didn’t feel that his examples provided sufficient detail to show just how the “expository writing attitude” was applied.

On the whole, though, this slim book provides valuable guidance business professionals can use immediately.

After reading the book, I asked Yaffe if I could interview him, and he kindly agreed. Here’s our conversation:

WC&S: Tell me a bit about your background. You mention in your book that you studied science and math; how did you get from that background to teaching business professionals about writing? Have you had any journalism training or experience?

PY: How I went from math and science to writing is a rather long story. However, in a nutshell, I was a very good student in high school and therefore put into an accelerated college prep stream. This involved a lot of essay writing, literary critiques, etc. I had developed a complex writing style, i.e. long, convoluted sentences with sophisticated vocabulary, which I considered to be good writing.

I always got “A’s” on my papers and laudatory comments about the structure and content. During my last year in high school, I submitted one of these elaborate masterpieces, which came back with the traditional “A”, but also a note saying: “Philip, You have such interesting, original ideas. Why do you bury them under such complex language? Next year when you go to university, I suggest that you take a one-term course in basic journalism and learn how to simplify your writing.” I had no particular interest in journalism, or even in writing. However, I had particular respect for this teacher, so I followed his advice.

At university, I enrolled in a first-term journalism class. After some initial resistance, I realised that writing clearly and concisely was much more of a challenge that what I had been doing. As an extra-curricular activity, I joined the student newspaper (UCLA Daily Bruin) and rose through the ranks to become editor-in-chief (1964-65). Then, after a stint in the Peace Corps (Tanzania, 1965-67), I returned to Los Angeles and got a job as a reporter/feature writer on The Wall Street Journal, which lead me into marketing communication (Burson-Marsteller) and transfer to Brussels (1974). The rest, as the say, is history.

WC&S: When you make the distinction between Creative and Expository writing, I’m a bit surprised that you never call special attention to writing to persuade. It seems to me to be a significant area of Expository writing. Is that something that people mention during your training courses?

PY: There are two reasons for this.

1. The objective of my course and book is to convey fundamental principles that people can apply wherever they choose.

2. Unless one is appealing largely to emotion, I believe persuasive writing intimately depends on adopting the expository writing attitude (no one want to read what you are going to write, so give them reasons), and conscientiously applying the concepts of clarity, conciseness, and density. No one has ever asked me specifically about persuasive writing because once they get into the course, I think they come to the same conclusion.

A couple of anecdotes may be useful.

A. I used to write and/or edit speeches for top executives of Toyota Europe. One day I was revising a speech at the company when the author began watching over my shoulder. I changed a couple of words around in a paragraph and he gasped: “But that’s so much better than the way I wrote it! Why didn’t I see that?”

Why, indeed? I asked myself the same question that night and concluded that he hadn’t seen it because he wasn’t looking for it. He was concentrating so much on trying to be persuasive that he gave short shrift to the fundamentals. This was true throughout the entire speech, and the speeches of the other Toyota executives.

This event was perhaps the prime impetus for me to develop my course and subsequently to write the book.

B. A Spanish friend was following a “good writing” course in English, which was mainly advanced grammar, vocabulary, diction, idioms, etc. He felt that he really wasn’t getting very much from it. I mentioned some of my ideas about writing. His response: “I have just learned more about good writing in 10 minutes than I have in that course in 10 weeks.”

This was a second major impetus for the book. Carlos, my friend, in fact helped me put it together

WC&S: When writing, you can use structural or typographic elements—bold, italic, bullet points, tables—to call attention to and emphasize specific things. What are the comparable elements of speaking?

PY: You can call attention and emphasise specific things by all the classic means such as vocal variety, facial expression, stance, movement, eye contact, gestures, body language, etc. These are very well known and I didn’t feel that I had anything original to add on the subject. For anyone who wants to learn and polish such skills, I could offer no better advice than joining Toastmasters International (I presume you are familiar with the organisation).

Visual aids are quite a different story.

Too many otherwise good speakers seem to think that showing something—anything—will advance their cause. By causing distraction and confusion, ill-conceived visual aids can in fact do a lot of damage. This is why I spend several pages in the book talking about the use and abuse of slides. PowerPoint today makes producing slides so easy, it is almost impossible to imagine a “professional” presentation without them. However, in my experience, they are often so poorly conceived and used that they are a disservice both to the speaker and the audience. The presentation would be better off without them.

So the message is: Either use visual aids correctly or don’t use them at all.

WC&S: What resources (on your bookshelf or in your Favorites list in your web browser) do you find yourself consulting over and over?

PY: I am a very eclectic reader. The only resources I find myself using over and over are:

* A dictionary, to confirm that certain words really mean what I think they mean. It is so easy to fall into bad habits.

* A thesaurus, because I firmly believe in Mark Twain’s adage: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

* Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. I seldom quote from the book, but I often find that Bierce’s pithy definitions inspire me. One of my favourite definitions, which I did recently quote in a speech, concerns hypocrisy. Hypocrisy (n): prejudice with a halo

For general reading, there are four books that I regularly revisit (about every 2-3 years), because they present important theses in such an easy, palatable manner. They are:

• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Candide by Voltaire
• Marco Polo by Viktor Shkovski
• Up the Organisation by Robert Townsend

Editor’s note: The “I” of the Storm can be ordered directly from Story Publishing. Yaffe let me know that it will also be available through Barnes and Noble or Amazon by the end of this month.

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Reader’s Digest version: If you want to learn how to write e-mail messages that get the job done effectively, manage your inbox more efficiently, present a polished and professional image through your use of e-mail, and avoid the common pitfalls of this ubiquitous medium, E-mail: A Write It Well Guide will help.

E-mail has usurped the role of the inter-office memo and the business letter as the medium for written business communication. It’s fast, inexpensive, and reduces paper clutter. But while it may be easy to dash off a message and send it on its way, that does not mean that it’s easy to write a message that gets results, one that communicates its key message clearly, informing the reader of some pertinent information, or persuading them to take some action.

And because it’s so easy to dash of a message and send it on its way, most of us have to deal with a daily onslaught, an electronic horde that fills our inbox with dozens or hundreds of messages clamoring for our attention, stealing away productive time and wasting our attention and energy.

And a poorly or hastily written e-mail message can have damaging, and sometimes disastrous, consequences. It can leave you, looking foolish and unprofessional at best, and at worst, shredding your reputation and your company’s image, or leading to litigation.

Enter Janis Fisher Chan’s book, E-mail: A Write It Well Guide. The first two chapters of this slim volume walk the reader through the process of identifying the purpose of your e-mail message, composing it, and sending it to the right people. It also includes a chapter on managing your own inbox, one on basic good writing principles, and a final chapter of “Cautionary Tales,” illustrating the many reasons why you must treat your e-mail messages with care, and providing some good guidelines for creating a corporate e-mail policy.

The book is well organized and broken into chunks nicely sized for a quick read. It’s clear that the author has done a lot of training; each chapter includes questions that help keep your mind engaged and thinking about how you can apply the ideas to your own situation, and exercises featuring concrete, real-world scenarios. There are also several sidebars that provide helpful hints or answers to questions, and a number of checklists you can use if you need reminders about specific topics covered, such as managing your e-mail habit or things to check before you click Send.

While the book seems to be designed primarily as a workbook—and I think most people would benefit most using it as such—you can also use it as a reference, or you can just read it through. It makes no assumptions about the e-mail application you use; rather, the focus is totally on the medium itself.

I have almost no complaints about this book. I spotted one factual error: in a sidebar about attachments, it states that “Creating and viewing PDF files requires Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software,” which isn’t quite correct. You use Reader to view PDFs, but you can’t use it to create them. (Given the strengths of this book, I was surprised that this mistake slipped through.)

I enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone who uses e-mail, professionally or personally, and I give it five out of five stars. You can order E-mail: A Write It Well Guide from Barnes and Noble.

Have you ever arrived at the office on Monday morning and gotten all excited when you saw the new strategy memo in your inbox? Did you ever sit through a meeting and afterward say “That was the BEST employee benefits presentation I’ve ever been to! Those slides were fantastic!”? Did you ever read a corporate press release laced with words and phrases like “paradigm shift,” “leading edge,” “empower,” and “value proposition,” and understand a word of it?

I didn’t think so.

On the other hand, have you ever been bored to tears by a presentation that included slides you couldn’t read, about a topic you didn’t care about, read by a speaker who was either gushing with phony enthusiasm or seemed like he’d rather be having a root canal? Did you ever get corporate report that you read two or three times, and you still had no idea what it said? Did you ever sit through a meeting pretending to pay attention, while really wondering to yourself "Will they ever shut up?"

That’s what I thought.

Most people can carry on perfectly ordinary and human conversations outside of the office. For some reason, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., they undergo a change. They become incapable of saying or writing something without sounding like some kind of mind-numbed android. It goes by many labels: corporate-speak, jargon, gobbledygook. The book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots uses a well-known (and more descriptive) term for this phenomenon, saying “Bull has become the language of business.”

The authors, Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and Jon Warshawsky admit to contributing their share of bull—“jargon, empty hype, fact-free updates and dull presentations delivered on autopilot”—during their consulting careers, but became frustrated by the bull, especially when they began to figure out that bull doesn’t work.

So they began a campaign against bull. At first it was subversive: they quit using PowerPoint (gasp!), they stopped using buzz words and jargon and used plain English, they told stories instead of reciting statistics. As they found people actually began paying attention to what they were saying, the got more and more blatant. They started a “Serious Bull” jargon contest, and they developed an application called Bullfighter, which works with Word and PowerPoint. When you click the button on the toolbar, Bullfighter scans your document or slide deck for the meaningless jargon, the “jibba-jabba” (as Mr. T called it). Download it. Install it. Use it. It’s free, and it’s a great way to de-bull your writing.

And now they’ve expanded the Battle of the Bull with their book. Why Business People Speak Like Idiots is a fun, energetic book, with a very clear personality, and that’s one of the things the authors keep coming back to: using your personality, your voice, and your passions to connect with others, rather than falling back on the washed-out, dehumanized, corporate personality and voice (there’s no passion in it) that infects business communication.

If bull is so bad (and I don’t know anyone who’ll dispute that), then why is there so much of it? The authors identify four traps people fall into in business communication.

1. The Obscurity Trap: Here, people who are trying to sound smart, prove their worth, or avoid responsibility throw out long strings of jargon, evasiveness, and acronyms, rather like a squid squirting ink. What does it all mean? I don’t know, but it sounds impressive, doesn’t it? No, not really.
2. The Anonymity Trap: For some reason, corporations tend to stamp out personality. There are a number of reasons for this, including fear of risk, fear of offending someone (aka Political Correctness), fear of liability. Also, it’s easy for businesses to treat their employees the same (same training, same management, same evaluations, same pay). When they do, people start acting the same, using the same templates to produce documents, e-mails, voicemails, and presentations that look and sound the same—boring.
3. The Hard-Sell Trap: This happens when we adapt the approach of the used-car salesman to every message we deliver. That’s when you end up with corporate messages that sound like this: “We deliver best-in-class, value-added solutions that transform global enterprises into market leaders.” Bleagh.
4. The Tedium Trap: We forget how much people love to be entertained, and so drone on and on about the third-quarter earnings report, and how the new strategy will drive more deals during the fourth quarter, and blah-blah-blah. We assume that our message is interesting, rather than beginning with the idea that we have to capture our audience’s attention, to give them a reason to give a rip.

After helping us identifying the traps, the book gives us several chapters describing ways to avoid falling into them. For example, in “You’ve Been Templatized,” they advise avoiding templates, especially PowerPoint templates, to keep out of the Anonymity trap. Templates lead to mass-produced, boring and predictable business communication; they often remove thought from the process of creating content. Another defense against this trap is summarized nicely in the chapter title “Pick Up the Damn Phone.”

Again and again this book encourages us to be authentic, to speak from your heart, to show your human side. In the chapter “The Power of Imperfection,” they tell about when Walter Cronkite announced the death of President Kennedy. When the story was handed to him, he paused for a long moment, reading it to himself. Then he said “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m., Central Standard Time, two o’clock Eastern Standard Time.” He looked at the studio clock and said “Some thirty-eight minutes ago,” and then momentarily lost his composure. He winced, removed his eyeglasses, and cleared his throat before continuing.

That has been called the “most moving and historic” moment in broadcast history and the authors argue that much of its emotional impact came because Cronkite showed his imperfection, his humanity. Much of getting rid of the bull in our speech and writing has to do with exactly that: our willingness to let down our guard, to show that we’re human, and to connect with our audience.

To be sure, bull is a problem in other realms besides business, most notably in academia and politics. The ideas and examples in this book focus on the world of business, but they can be applied almost everywhere the bulls are herding. I highly recommend Why Business People Speak Like Idiots to anyone who’s had enough bull and wants to fight back.

Why Business People Speak like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White (of Charlotte’s Web fame) is one of the most popular books on writing in the US. This slim volume (a mere 92 pages in the 3rd edition that’s on my bookshelf) has been around in various incarnations for about 100 years, and in it’s original form was William Strunk’s attempt “to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.” So said E.B. White in the introduction to his revision of Professor Strunk’s original work, and I think he succeeded, for the most part.

The Elements of Style (or Strunk and White, as my first college English professor called it) is organized in five chapters, so my review will follow that organization:

I. ELEMENTARY RULES OF USAGE: This chapter lists several useful guidelines (not rules) for some of the punctuation and grammar people tend to stumble over, such as how to use commas in lists and with parenthetic information, and how to choose the correct personal pronoun. You may find yourself stumbling over some of the terms used if your grammar lessons are only a dim memory, but the examples usually make things clear.

II. ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION: The majority of the principles in this section offer useful advice, especially to those engaged in “practical” writing, such as “Use the active voice,” and “Put statements in positive form.” However, a few of them sound good on first reading, but don’t hold up to close scrutiny. For example, number 12 states emphatically “Choose a suitable design and hold to it.” That’s all well and good, but the following paragraphs of explanatory text don’t offer much concrete guidance about what a suitable design looks like.

III. A FEW MATTERS OF FORM: This chapter is a bit of a stew of mechanical advice (how to use exclamations, page formatting advice, handling quotations). While the information is fundamentally sound, it seems like this chapter was a bit of a dumping ground for bits of information that Strunk and White couldn’t fit in elsewhere.

IV. WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS COMMONLY MISUSED: Again, most of the advice here is quite good, but in some cases it seems like the authors’ personal preferences are intruding (for example, they don’t like starting sentences with “However”), and in others, common usage has overtaken the grammar purists. I, for one, have reluctantly given up the fight to keep “hopefully” from being used to mean “I hope.” In this case, the battle is over, and the purists have lost.

V. AN APPROACH TO STYLE: Here the emphasis shifts from the accepted rules of grammar and usage to the more subjective matter of style. “Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind?” If I knew the answer to that, I’d bottle it and make a fortune. But even in this more subjective arena, Strunk and White attempt to offer some advice, and for the most part, it is good. “…the first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by affecting none—that is, place yourself in the background.” In other words, don’t spend nearly as much time worrying about your “style” as you do about your content. Be sure you’re writing as clearly, correctly, and concisely as you can, and your style will take care of itself. Also, keep in mind that “revising is part of writing… . Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery.” As Hemingway more bluntly put it, “The first draft of anything is shit.”

Conclusion and recommendation: As much as some revere The Elements of Style, I recommend it with a few reservations. It’s a good, non-threatening resource to have on the bookshelf; my battered copy of the 3rd edition is frequently the first authority I turn to when seeking answers to grammar, usage, and style questions. (I should probably upgrade to the newer 4th edition.) While it’s worth having around, the shortcomings I mentioned above keep it from being the be-all-and-end-all of writer’s references. I give it a 4 out of 5.

Purchase The Elements of Style online at Barnes and Noble.
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