Writing, Clear and Simple

You may not realize it, but you use rhetoric every day. (Whether you use it well or not is another question.) Simply stated, rhetoric is the art of using words to communicate and persuade.

The study of rhetoric has a long and storied history, going back at least to Aristotle. Beth Agnew has created an excellent resource on rhetoric over at Squidoo; I recommend that you check it out and bookmark it. For more, you can try Dr. Gideon Burton’s Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric.

Need to write something — a report, a memo, a proposal, whatever — and not sure how to start? Try this: Just start. Plant your butt in your chair, pick up your pen or pencil, or put your hands on the keyboard, and start writing. Retired teacher and business owner David Richards puts it like this:

So what does one do when they are confronted with a mission to write something and they are unprepared? I recommend the well known Nike motto - “just do it”. I can hear the reader thinking now - “yeah sure – fine for you to say, but I don’t know what I’m doing.” Wrong! If you can read, you can write. There are only two obstacles to successful writing. They are fear and lack of desire. Fear can be overcome. Lack of desire is a terminal affliction.

(There’s more, of course, and it’s good stuff. Go read it all.)

Action is a wonderful antidote for many things, including writer’s block. Quit agonizing over the fact that you don’t know how to start. Start by starting.

Previously, I summarized the first three Principles of Simplicity that Edmond Weiss outlined in his book, The Elements of International English Style. Here are the rest:

Tactic #4: Choose words with one or few meanings. The German/English dictionary Weiss has lists six German words for fix, and eleven for mind. Limit each word you use to a single meaning and part of speech. Consult a bilingual dictionary in your target language to be sure you’re using the best word for your intended meaning.

Tactic #5: Avoid phrasal verbs. For example, say examine instead of look at, and continue instead of carry on. (You can find more examples of phrasal verbs, plus single-word equivalents on the Phrasal Verb Page.)

Tactic #6: Use the simplest verb forms. Try to stick with active voice and indicative mood. I’ve written about active voice here, as well as here. Just about everything you need to know about indicative mood is encapsulated in this: It’s the verb form used to make statements. (The other two verb moods in English are imperative, which is used to issue commands, and subjunctive, which is used to indicate doubt.)

Tactic #7: Define many terms in a glossary. Terms that you include in a glossary should be indicated in the text (such as bold or italic). Define the term in context the first time you use it, or use footnotes or hypertext to provide definitions.

Tactic #8: Choose words that are pronounceable. Readers subvocalize when they read, therefore hard-to-pronounce words are hard to read. (Trivia: In Japan, the iconic character for McDonald’s restaurants is called Donald McDonald, because Japanese speakers typically have difficulty pronouncing r.)

Tactic #9: Do not coin words that are not needed. If there’s a perfectly good English word, use it. Weiss decries inventions such as mentee (for the person being mentored). Avoid trendy words.

Tactic #10: Avoid redundant and wordy expressions for time and place. For example: don’t say at this point in time when all you mean is now.

Tactic #11: Avoid unhelpful redundancies. Sometimes it’s a good thing to repeat something for emphasis. For example, beginning a report with a summary if its contents helps any reader. But why say completely finished when either either completed or finished does the job?

Tactic #12: Avoid nominalizations. These are verbs that masquerade as nouns. Frequently they have –tion or –ment endings. Instead of conduct an investigation, use investigate; instead of movement, use move.

Coming up: Principles of Clarity.

Jakob Nielsen is widely respected as a guru (if not The Guru^TM) of Web usability. So what, in his opinion, is one of the "Top Three Design Priorities" for Websites?

Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don’t use things they don’t understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users.

—Jakob Nielsen 

We’ve all heard, in one context or another, the acronym K.I.S.S., standing for Keep It Simple and Straightforward, (or the definition I prefer, Keep It Simple, Stupid). The principle applies in many endeavors, but especially in writing for an international audience. Simplifying your prose has long been one of the cardinal principles of good writing because it reduces the burden on the reader. And as I mentioned in yesterday’s entry about Edmond Weiss’s book, The Elements of International English Style, one of the key precepts underlying International English Style is "reduce the burden on the E2 reader in every way possible, but without condescending or ‘writing down.’"

Simplicity is so important for E2 and E3 readers because very few words have single meanings. For example, the Encarta Dictionary offers 14 definitions of walk when it’s used as a verb, and another 13 noun definitions. Readers are active participants in the process of deciphering what each word in a sentence means, based on the context of the surrounding words. That process can be easy or hard, depending on how well the writer did his job.

 Weiss says that one common approach to simplify things is to adopt some type of controlled vocabulary and grammar, which can be formal or informal. From here he begins describing several specific tactics to support the "Principle of Simplicity."

Tactic 1: Locally Invented Controlled English.  Many companies with international audiences—including Caterpillar, Kodak, IBM, General Motors, and Sun—have adopted formal, strictly controlled vocabularies of 1,000 to 3,000 words, with limited sentence patterns. Guidelines like this are inconvenient for writers, but they have successfully reduced the burden on international readers for several years now.

Tactic 2: Reduced Dictionary. Instead of limiting the word choice as drastically as with Tactic 1, you could decide to use only the words in a limited dictionary, such as the Beginner’s Dictionary of American English Usage.

Tactic 3: Industry-Standard Controlled English. Simplified English was developed within the aerospace industry so maintenance manuals and other technical documentation could be understood, and even written by, non-native English speakers.

Note that with these three controlled language tactics, any word can be included in a document (and not just those included in the limited vocabulary), as long as it is clearly defined in a glossary that you deliver along with the document.

Coming up: more simplification tactics.