Writing, Clear and Simple

Lynn Gaertner-Johnston (of the Business Writing blog) was recently asked to participate in a medical research study. That’s about the only thing that was really clear in the letter she received:

I received a letter from my health plan yesterday. It began this way:

We would like to ask you for your help with a vaccine research study. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the immune response to an investigational 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine …

(I worry a bit about people who toss out phrases like “13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine” in letters to the general public.)

Lynn dissects the letter, and offers a proposed rewrite that begins with the reader’s point of view in mind, which the original almost, but not quite, entirely failed to do.

How do you sharpen a knife? By using a whetstone to take excess metal away from the edge. How do you sharpen your writing? Ken Davis offers this advice—some that I need to pay more attention to:

This week, erase (on paper or on computer screen) at least three words from everything you write. When you see the improvement, I bet you’ll erase more.

It’s a short but sharp post. (I’m sure he followed his own advice.)

“We should write, above all, because we are writers whether we call ourselves writers or not.”

Juxtapose: To place side by side, especially for comparison or contrast.

It’s the literary trick that Charles Dickens used in the opening of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

It’s a device that you can use as well, although you’d best not ape Dickens’ distinctive phrases. But think about ways you can put things together in surprising ways, like this example, from a local strip mall:

(The contrast of a weight-loss franchise next to a candy store seemed deliciously subversive to me.)

You don’t always have to contrast the items or ideas that you juxtapose. You can also compare them, exploring their similarities. For example, rather than focusing on the differences between the two stores in the picture, what are their similarities? They’re both catering to people’s desires, they both offer gratification of appetites, they were both started by entrepreneurs.

Compare and contrast are both useful tools, especially if you aim for the unpredictable, the surprising. When you surprise your reader, you capture their attention.

The PDF version of the business jargon article seems to be a hit, so I’m going to start converting other articles into PDF files that you can download, starting with the article “Plain Language in the Federal Government.”

I’ll release these articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, which means that  you are free to give copies of the article to your family, friends, co-workers, and perfect strangers. You can send them via e-mail or distribute them on your website. You can print it out and give copies away in your office, in your neighborhood, or on the street corner. But you may not change the article in any way, or charge a fee for it. Share and enjoy!