Writing, Clear and Simple

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.

So you want to get started on some writing project—doesn’t matter what kind: essay, memoir, book, article, whitepaper, whatever. You know that you need to, or want to, write about some topic.

How do you begin?

There’s no single “right” way to begin; there are at least as many ways to begin as there are writers (and possibly as many ways as there are writing projects). For example, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley likes to use a journal to get started:

Some days journal writing is a kick-start. I circle around a subject, working out what it is that I actually want to say. My ideas do a freefall on paper—quotes, concepts, opinion. Usually at some point it’ll start to come together and I’ll find that I have a starting point (and if I’m really lucky, I might even have an idea for an end point).

I know that half the battle is just getting my butt in that chair—getting started. Part of it is working through the angles until I have some specific viewpoint that I can run with. I’ve been known to write as if it were a letter to a friend—I know I’ve found my subject when I suddenly resent the slowness of the pen. Nothing is fast enough to grab these ideas. That’s when I start to type.

Here are some more ideas to help you make that first step:

• Do a brain dump. Take a blank piece of paper and just start writing down everything you know about the topic. Grammar doesn’t matter, spelling doesn’t matter, organization doesn’t matter. At this point, all that matters is capturing whatever you have in your head on the topic. (This is much like Wrigley’s journal method.)
• Write down all of the questions you can think of. Ask all of the Whos, Whats, Wheres, Whens, Whys, and Hows. Don’t worry about the answers at this point. You may know them, or you may know where to find the answers. That’s great, but come back later to begin filling them in.
• Create a mind map. A mind map is a diagram of an idea and all of the words, ideas, concepts, and so forth, that are related to that idea. (See this Wikipedia article on mind maps for more information.) Take another blank piece of paper and write your central topic in the middle of the page. Condense it down to as few words as possible. Put a circle (or square) around it. Then write down the first related concept, topic, word, or idea that pops into your mind in another, smaller circle, and connect the two with a line. If there’s a word to explain the relationship between the main topic and the related topic, label the line with that word. Continue adding ideas radially around the central topic, and add sub-topics to the sub-topics wherever they seem to fit. Don’t judge or evaluate; just toss it all out there as fast as you can.
• Think about the structure. Forget about the content for a moment, and ask yourself how you could structure the writing. When you boil it all down, there are only a few basic organizing principles for any type of information, which you can remember using the mnemonic LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy. (See my post “Structure: Choosing a different viewpoint” for more information.) When you’ve got your structure figured out, then you can begin filling things in.

What are your favorite methods for starting a writing project? Add them to the Comments.

Sometimes, you can say the most with the fewest words. Counterintuitive, perhaps, but bear with me.

Several years ago, my wife and I were enjoying a slow cruise on the lake with her brother’s family. A young man zoomed by on a personal water craft.

This was several years ago, and these mini-speedboats were a much less common sight than they are now, much more worthy of note. We watched this young hot-shot zip around the lake for a few minutes. I commented to my brother-in-law that I thought it would be fun to ride one of those things.

He nodded and said, “Yeah. I tried it once.” He paused for a moment. “Looks easy.”

That was all he said, and that was all that he needed to say.

He could have gone on in great detail about how personal water craft were not very stable (early models were far less stable than they are now, and prone to tipping over), and an inexperienced rider could easily be dumped off. He could have gone into detail about his his attempts to mount one.

But all of that detail would have taken away from the impact, and humor, of “Looks easy.”

Leaving a single phrase to stand alone is like putting a nice wide mat around a picture. The white space around the picture reduces distraction and helps your eye focus on the picture. Your goal is to help the audience focus their attention on a carefully selected detail.

But  my brother-in-law’s simple phrase, “Looks easy,” doesn’t just tell you a lot about his experience trying to ride a personal water craft. It tells you a lot about him.

The fact that he doesn’t feel that it’s necessary to go into more detail, that he can leave it at those two little words, gives you a snapshot of his laconic personality, and his sense of humor.

 If you use boilerplate text or documents in your work, here’s something to consider: Put an expiration date on your boilerplate.

Boilerplate refers to blocks of text that are used repeatedly in documents. For example, lawyers frequently (constantly) use the same basic sentences and paragraphs in the documents they create. In many cases, they have entire documents that are boilerplate. Or they take a similar document, or last year’s version, and copy it. Then they make the changes required by the situation, and voila! A new document. Sort of.

Boilerplate is a great time-saver, and it helps ensure that you include all of the elements that you need in a document. For example, you could create a boilerplate letter that you use when you respond to customer inquiries. It can include a placeholder that you replace with a response to their question, along with standard components like a sentence thanking them for contacting your company, and the contact information you want them to use if they have more questions.

There’s a problem with boilerplate, though. All to often, it just gets passed along from year to year, and nobody asks whether it’s written well, whether it conveys the message well, or even whether it conveys the right message to begin with.

For example, in comments of the “In class exercise” post  from a couple of weeks ago, Tom pointed out that the writer of the letter may simply have pasted text from the pertinent government regulations into the letter. In other words, he or she used boilerplate. And this was probably the same letter they used last year, and the year before that, et cetera. When it came time to send out this year’s letter, nobody stopped to ask “Does this letter get the results we want?”

Go ahead and use boilerplate. Take the time to write it well, and it will serve you well. But put an expiration date on all of your boilerplate. When it reaches that date, stop using it. Take a long hard look at it and ask yourself if it needs cleaning up or revising. And maybe  you’ll decide that you should toss it in the dustbin and start fresh.

Your readers will thank you. 

As much as I love words, there are times when you really need a picture. For example, when you’re trying to explain how to use some software feature, it really helps to show a screenshot, with arrows pointing at things.

There are plenty of applications that help you create screenshots—I’m particularly fond of SnagIt—but TechSmith (the people who created SnagIt) are working on something they hope will make it easier and faster for everyone to take screenshots and share them with others. It’s called the Jing Project.

You download and install Jing, and it adds a little widget to your desktop. When you want to take a picture of something on your screen—or a video; you can make a video of your on-screen actions, complete with sound—you launch Jing, take your picture or make your video, and then decide if you want to save a local copy, or share it. Sharing it saves the image or video on Techsmith’s Screencast website, and copies the URL of the file onto your clipboard.

Here’s a sample screenshot I took with Jing:

It’s really easy to use. Not as powerful as SnagIt, but this might just do what you need. Check it out at www.jingproject.com.

Disclaimer: Other than being a satisfied user of SnagIt, and a new user of Jing, I have no connection to TechSmith.