Writing, Clear and Simple

Writing, Clear and Simple has been selected as a “Blog du jour” over at the Visual Thesaurus! Although I was brought up not to brag, I can’t help but think that’s pretty cool.

Here’s a nice collection of the stupid words and phrases that so easily worm their way into our vocabulary: the Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary.

Some of the clichés—like “herding cats”—might have been amusing the first few times they were used, but the humor is wearing thin.

In many cases—such as with “at this juncture” for “now,” or “interface” for “talk”—they’re over-inflated, trying to make something sound more important than it is.

Some are nasty euphemisms—like “involuntary reduction in force.” Just say you’re firing a bunch of people and get it over with. You won’t make friends, but at least you’ll gain some grudging respect for your honesty.

I don’t agree with some of the words they’ve added to their list. For example, “unceremoniously” is a perfectly useful word; I haven’t heard it used in a way that suggests it’s becoming jargon. Although this list isn’t a killer app, at the end of the day, learning to avoid phrases that have jumped the shark is a best practice.

I just discovered a blog called Textbook Evaluator, in which Mark Montgomery, an educational consultant, reviews textbooks. He seems to have a visceral dislike for writers who use big words used to try to dress up their ideas. Here’s an excerpt from one of his reviews:

Marzano, being the academic he is, differentiates between two types of intelligence: “crystallized” intelligence and “fluid” intelligence. Without following him through the scholarly gymnastics, suffice it to say that “crystallized intelligence” is simply the “stuff you know”. Or knowledge, to use my old-fashioned definition. “Fluid intelligence” is the process of gaining knowledge, of cramming knowledge into that long-term memory for later recall and application. Some people are better processors than others. I would say the better processors (the ones who have better abstract reasoning ability, working memory capacity, and working memory efficiency) have better aptitudes than others.

Anyway, all this discussion of convoluted defintions [sic] is starting to drive me crazy. The point that Marzano makes is this (drum roll, please): those kids who know more (who possess more “crystalized [sic] intelligence”, as he confusingly calls it) display higher academic achievement.

Let me state it again.

Students who know more are higher academic achievers.

Whoa. Blinding Flash of the Obvious.

A man after my own heart! Later in the review, Montgomery says:

… it irks me no end when people like Marzano have to invent new phrases and concepts. They end up obscuring the true power of words, even as they argue that our children should receive more vocabulary instruction. Even as I agreed with every word Marzano wrote, I became more and more irritated by his verbal obfuscation. Can’t academics use normal words–even if they are big ones?

“Crystallized intelligence”? Please.

There’s nothing wrong with using plain words to express your ideas. If your ideas are good ones, they’ll stand on their own, without being gilded with highfalutin language.

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.

I learned to use the computer back in the days of MS-DOS*. There was no mouse, there were no windows, no menus, no toolbars, palettes or buttons. Just you, your keyboard, and that blinking cursor.

I learned how to use WordPerfect’s keyboard commands to format text, select margins, tab settings, and so on. With practice, you got to be pretty speedy at hitting the right Alt+ or Ctrl+ keystrokes, and you could do it without losing your momentum.

And then along came the mouse. The mouse is a great tool for many things; image manipulation, for example. But I always feel as though I lose some momentum when I have to take my hands off the keyboard to launch a program, open a file, navigate to a file folder or an internet site. I’ve learned a lot of keyboard shortcuts for things over the years, but some of them—launching programs, for example—aren’t that much quicker than using the mouse.

Then I started hearing about an application called Quicksilver. Merlin Mann, of 43folders, is one who frequently lauds the speed and power that this deceptively simple little application gives to the keyboard. It sounds great, but that door is closed to me; it’s Mac only.

Someone commenting on a Lifehacker article mentioned Keybreeze as a Quicksilver-almost-clone for those of us who use Windows, so I downloaded it and am giving it a try. So far, I like what I see, although I’m currently at the point of having to remind myself that it’s there, that I don’t have to grab the mouse all the time.

The free versions of Keybreeze will launch applications, record and run macros (any series of mouse clicks and keyboard input), and insert text strings when you trigger it with a keystroke or two (you can configure the trigger) and type a keyword. It also includes some built-in commands to perform internet searches (for instance, the keyword “movies” will show you local movie show times), look up words in online dictionaries, search Wikipedia, and launch Skype calls to a specific person on your contact list. There’s also a paid version that adds some features like desktop notes and reminders.

Does it have all the features of Quicksilver? Judging from the info on the Quicksilver site, no. But what it does give me is pretty slick, in my opinion.

There are other applications that perform similar functions: ActiveWords, Launchy, Colibri, and Slickrun are a few. (ActiveWords has a free trial, but isn’t free; I believe the others are all free or have free versions.) Right now, it looks like Keybreeze is what I’ve been looking for: Something that helps me keep my hands on the keyboard.

*Actually, the very first computer I used (in college) was a Commodore PET with the “chicklet” keyboard. It used a built-in cassette drive for data storage. Yeah, and the dorm was a cave, and I rode a wooly mammoth to class.