Writing, Clear and Simple

Time to get back to my notes from The Elements of International English Style. We left off partway through the chapter on Clarity.

Tactic 16: Form words in standard ways. While new words are constantly being formed from existing ones, don’t make a practice of it in writing intended for E2 and E3 readers. Keep a good dictionary at hand to check yourself, and don’t adopt the latest buzzwords, which are often corruptions of others. For example, some think that what an administrator does is administrate. Sorry, but administrators administer. Here’s another one that rang in my ears like nails on a chalkboard: one of the HR staff at a workplace was explaining a facet of our compensation plan by saying it was intended "to incent" us to do something or other. (She apparently thought that incent was the root of the word incentive.)

Tactic 17: Use standard spellings. That means stay away from those constructions so beloved by advertisers and marketers: lite, nite, creme, and so on. (I’ve often wondered at the attraction of some business owners to spellings like olde and shoppe. Then there are the tanning booth operators in my town who seem to think that tan looks better as tann.)

Also, you should try to find out if your audience prefers British or American English, and adjust your spelling accordingly. 

Tactic 18: Avoid converting nouns into verbs. This includes tacking verb endings onto nouns, as in incentivize, or just using the noun, unchanged, as a verb, as in mentor or source.

Tactic 19: Be aware of the several Englishes. Spelling, punctuation, grammar, and idiom vary—sometimes slightly and sometimes greatly—depending on which English-speaking country you visit. In the US, company is treated as a singular, but it’s plural in the UK. Ask an American and a Briton what presently means, and you’ll get two different answers. One that makes me chuckle every time I hear it on a British television program is pavement. In the US, we drive on pavement, in the UK, pedestrians walk on it.

Tactic 20: Be careful with money and dates. (I’d add "and numbers in general.) Dates can be particularly problematic, if in XX/XX/XXX form. In the US, we put the month first, but elswhere it’s the day. Thus 5/7/2006 could mean May 7 or June July 5.

The separator for thousands and decimals is different in other parts of the world as well. In the US, we’d write one million as 1,000,000; elsewhere it might be 1.000.000. And an American billion is not necessarily equal to a British billion.

A while back I mentioned that I was going to be trying out an online backup service called Mozy. I’ve been using it (well, it’s far more accurate to say that it’s been running while I’ve mostly been ignoring it) since then, so I figured it’s time for an update.

 It works. You install it, tell it which files you want it to back up, and then leave it to work its magic. Granted, there was a two-week span during which it could never successfully back up the files (it kept losing the connection to the Mozy servers). But a new release seems to have cured that problem.

Let me be perfectly clear about one thing: I haven’t had to use it to restore any files, so I have no idea how well that part of it works.  I’ll have to give that a try some time, but I’ve been swamped with a few projects, and haven’t felt like mucking around with that. I’ll let y’all know when I do.

In the meantime, click here if you’re interested in giving it a shot. (Full disclosure: That link is for Mozy’s referral program; for every four people who click that link and sign up, I get an additional gigabyte of storage. If you’d rather not use that link, here’s a naked one to the Mozy site.)

I also have an external hard drive I use for weekly backups, but having a backup off-site is an extra bit of comfort. I hate the notion of losing any of my work to a disk crash. 

Never underestimate the power of a simple, hand-written Thank You note. Or a hand-written note of any sort. The authors of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots put it this way:

Unless you’re getting married, who writes letters or invitations by hand anymore?

Almost no one, but admit it: a hand-written—or even a typed but hand-signed—letter is something special. Who’s worth a stamp anymore? What could be so important that it has to be printed on paper?

Well, a Thank You note, for one. And here’s some advice on how to craft a good Thank You.

I assure you, writing thank-yous is easier than you remember. Get yourself some stationery, plain note cards or a selection of attractive postcards (yes, postcards are perfectly acceptable!), and proper postage. Avoid the pre-inscribed ‘Thank you!’ cards in loopy script, as there are times you’ll want to write notes where that aesthetic feels all wrong. Better to choose paper you like. Stay away from full-size sheets – note cards are best, as your message will be brief, and would look silly swimming around on a page that large.

Besides the fact that it’s the right thing to do, it’ll give you a chance to demonstrate that nifty italic script you’ve been practicing. (You have been practicing, haven’t you?) 

Everybody has legible writing until they take their fingers off the keyboard and pick up a pen or pencil. From there, things can go downhill. The Rocky Mountain News tells about two handwriting experts who have made it their mission to teach people how to write legibly.

"We have a national affliction, and it’s called cacography - that means ‘illegible handwriting,’ " says Barbara Getty, handwriting expert, former elementary-school teacher and co-creator of a method she believes can solve the problem. "That’s why we’re a ‘Please print’ nation. Nobody says, ‘Please write in your lovely cursive handwriting.’ "

Getty and her partner Inga Dubay have built a business around teaching the italic method of handwriting. Among their biggest clients are doctors.

"The hospital staff calls it a miracle," wrote Dr. Stephen Caplan, who won an award for having the "most improved legibility" after taking the Getty-Dubay course.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California kept a record of the 63 doctors who attended the Getty-Dubay seminar and found that calls for clarification were cut in half afterward, says Getty, who has co-written with Dubay Rx for Handwriting Success and WRITE NOW: A Complete Self-teaching Program for Better Handwriting, both published by Portland State University.

Well worth looking into if you’re dissatisfied with your current scrawl. Go check out their books and seminars.

Moving on to the principles of clarity in Edmond Weiss’s book, The Elements of International English Style:

Weiss opens this chapter with the observation “Writers can never be entirely sure that their writing is clear and unambiguous. Our own writing is nearly always clear to us.” I can certainly testify to that. I usually have a pretty clear idea of what I’m trying to say, but there have been plenty of times that it hasn’t been at all clear to my readers.

Even words that are clear by themselves can become unclear in certain combinations. For example, in the song Monday, Monday by the Mommas and the Poppas, the line “Every other day of the week is fine,” seems perfectly clear, right? Monday is bad, but all the other days are OK.

But the phrase “every other” has another, different meaning in English. “We meet on every other Tuesday.” In this case, it doesn’t mean “all others” in means “alternating.”

This example illustrates a phenomenon called “Clear Only If Known.” If you already know what a sentence means, you can figure out the correct meaning of the ambiguous phrase. But if you don’t, looking each word up in the dictionary isn’t going to give you enough information to figure it out.

Principle #13: Be careful of loosely connected words and phrases. English is a relatively uninflected language; it doesn’t rely on word endings to determine grammatical meaning (and most of us have trouble remembering the few inflections we do have, such as knowing when to use who and whom). Instead of inflections, we rely on word order to determine meaning, which is why you’ll hear grammarians and editors complain about such things as “dangling modifiers.”

E1 readers know enough to compensate for a less-than-ideal word order, but E2 readers aren’t as successful. Therefore, keep descriptive words and phrases as close as possible to the words they modify.

Principle #14: Be aware of frequently misplaced descriptive words. This is closely related to the previous principle, but it calls attention to the words that we frequently misplace, such as only, almost, and nearly. The example Weiss gives is the sentence The inspectors will only leave the site after all five tests. The modifier only is nearest to leave, but what does only leave mean? (I’ve written about the importance of modifier placement here.)

Principle #15: Do not confuse frequently confused terms. Affect and effect; lie and lay; they’re, their, and there … these are some of the words that we mix up when we become careless. For the sake of your E2 readers, don’t.