Writing, Clear and Simple

Because my post, “How to Write E-mail that Sucks,” garnered several comments, I thought we could discuss another e-mail issue. Over on the Business Writing blog, Lynn Gaertner-Johnston raises the question of whether subject-only e-mails are good or bad. She had someone write to her complaining about this practice, but she doesn’t think they’re necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve gotten them before, and they don’t usually bother me. For example, I had one co-worker who would send out messages withe subjects like “I’ll be out of the office this afternoon” and nothing in the body. After all, there wasn’t much more to say; the subject let me know all I needed. (She did usually append “[EOM]” to the subject to indicate that that was the end of the message.)

Of course, like all other things, they could be abused. For example, some messages can’t be condensed into a single line, but you can bet someone will try in a vain attempt to gain some sort of false economy. 

What do you think? Good, bad, or indifferent? 

Matthew Stibbe points out this passage from a review of Carly Fiorina’s book, Tough Choices:

Her bigger theme is leadership, and this is where Ms Fiorina fails. Again and again, she interrupts a good narrative with vain and verbose harangues about corporate strategy. From one paragraph to the next, her language becomes wooden and cliched as she descends into meaningless jargon. Things such as “frameworks” are constantly being “leveraged”, usually “proactively” and “going forward”. Like most former chiefs in search of redemption, Ms Fiorina wants to be remembered as a corporate philosopher. She won’t be.

Any sort of jargon is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Any specialty area will develop its own vocabulary, its own set of terms that have special meanings within that discipline.

But all to often, they’re used to give an aura of importance to rather plain ideas. What does leverage mean, outside of the context of discussing levers, or high finance? Most often, it means little more than “use.” “We’ll leverage our core competencies…” But the polysyllabic (which is just a big word for big word) leverage sounds more impressive, doesn’t it?

As my eldest daughter likes to say, “Um, yeah, no.”

A story in today’s newspaper told of a Bismarck, ND, man, Chester Nelson, who had the good fortune of spotting a couple of whooping cranes while he had his camera along.

The 67-year-old Nelson was duck hunting Oct. 1 on land he has hunted since 1951. In the rolling Coteau Hills 14 miles southwest of Kenmare, N.D., Nelson spotted the cranes feeding in a durham field.

One word in that paragraph just jumped out at this farmboy: durham.

Durham is a county in England, a city in North Carolina, or a breed of cattle. I’m 99 and 44/100 percent sure that the field these cranes were spotted in was a durum field—durum being a type of hard wheat used to make pasta.

Spell-checking software is a wonderful thing; I use it constantly. But I don’t rely on it without question, because it doesn’t know when you’ve used the wrong word entirely. Durham sounds like the right word for that article, and they spelled it correctly, but it was not the right word, and I couldn’t help groaning when I saw it.

While we’re on the subject, keep in mind that you can’t always trust the judgement of grammar-checking software either. Microsoft Word’s grammar checker lets some extraordinary gaffes slip through. Here’s some example text you can use to check this yourself. Copy the following text into a new Word document and launch the spelling and grammar check:

Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image bad for processes in one company and many companies.

According to Word, nothing is wrong with that paragraph, which is taken from a longer document that demonstrates how bad Word’s grammar checker is. (That document (available here) was created by Sandeep Krishnamurthy, a teacher at the University of Washington.)

It comes down to this: Go ahead and use the tools, but you have to be aware of their limitations. They can help, but there is no replacement for learning how to spell, and what the rules of English grammar are. 

If you want people to think you’re intelligent, write simply. It’s not as contradictory as it sounds, and there’s evidence to support it. Prize-winning evidence, in fact.

Dr. Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University has won the Ig Nobel Prize in Literature for his study, “Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly.” Here’s a bit from the abstract:

Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1-3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence.

That last sentence means “when the words and sentences got bigger, readers thought the writer was dumber.” 

(I’m afraid I can’t find the article online, only the abstract linked above. I need to get over to the library and find out if they have that journal.)

 Hat tip to Ray Ward.

Here’s an observation on passive voice by Michael Rubin:

A writer with whom I spoke about two weeks ago pointed out a very interesting trend in the press reporting and political commentary about the war on terrorism.  All too often, reporters and politicians use the passive voice.  Take British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in yesterday’s USA Today: “”It’s widely argued now that the existence of the camp is as much a radicalizing and discrediting influence as it is a safeguard for security.”  Well, who argues? A McClatchy story yesterday read, “Nearly 2,700 Iraqi civilians were killed in the city in September.”  Well, who killed them?  Baathist insurgents or Iranian-backed militias?  If the public read that Iranian-backed militias killed nearly 2700 civilians, we might be less willing to reward their murderers.  From today’s New York Times: “Most of the 500 municipal workers who have been killed here since 2005 have been trash collectors.”  Again, someone did the killing.  Why hide it?  It’s important to know what we are up against.  I’d submit two conclusions:  Journalists do not use the active voice because they do not know the subject of the action—in which case their editors should send them back to ask tough questions—or the editors wish to absolve the subjects for political reasons.  Either way, it’s poor journalism and irresponsible punditry.

I hate flogging this, but this horse ain’t dead: Watch out for passive voice. Yes, there are times when it’s perfectly appropriate for what you’re trying to say. But much of the time, it’s a cop-out.

Related posts:

Passive-agressive, Part 1

Passive-agressive, Part 2