Writing, Clear and Simple

…but I’ve been a bad blog host. Projects and real life have had a way of pulling me away from this blog recently, and for the few of you who do read Writing, Clear and Simple, I apologize. I do have a couple of posts in the works, and I need to reply to J’s last comment on the use and misuse of crisis (but that’s going to turn into a bit of a dissertation on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, so that might take a bit).

I was going to point you all to an interesting article that Seth Godin linked to: In “The Secret of Writing to be Read”, Godin linked to something that author Steven Johnson wrote, and said that “short, simple sentences not only sell more books, but spread ideas farther and faster.”

Now I agree with that idea, that short, simple sentences are a good thing. However, when you read Johnson’s piece—which describes some interesting analysis that Johnson did—that conclusion isn’t explicitly stated. Still, both Godin’s bit (and it really is a bit) and Johnson’s longer post are worth checking out.

Anyway, all this to say, I’m back, and plan on resuming our regularly scheduled irregular blogging. Thanks for sticking around! 

It’s another Inigo Montoya moment, and again, it’s about the use and misuse of the word crisis. From the BBC:

The public health threat posed by obesity in the UK is a “potential crisis on the scale of climate change”, the health secretary has warned.

Maybe I should cut  the health secretary a bit of slack, because he did say obesity was a “potential crisis,” and not an out-and-out crisis. But it’s still a misuse of the word, in my opinion. To quote myself:

Crisis is not a synonym for bad situation.

Here are a couple of good definitions of crisis: 

A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point.

An unstable condition, as in political, social, or economic affairs, involving an impending abrupt or decisive change.

You’d have to work pretty hard to convince me that obesity is even potentially at “a crucial or decisive point,” or that it is potentially “an unstable condition,…involving an impending abrupt or decisive change.” It seems to me that if the current situation with obesity goes on the way it is, it will go on the way it is.

 If you use boilerplate text or documents in your work, here’s something to consider: Put an expiration date on your boilerplate.

Boilerplate refers to blocks of text that are used repeatedly in documents. For example, lawyers frequently (constantly) use the same basic sentences and paragraphs in the documents they create. In many cases, they have entire documents that are boilerplate. Or they take a similar document, or last year’s version, and copy it. Then they make the changes required by the situation, and voila! A new document. Sort of.

Boilerplate is a great time-saver, and it helps ensure that you include all of the elements that you need in a document. For example, you could create a boilerplate letter that you use when you respond to customer inquiries. It can include a placeholder that you replace with a response to their question, along with standard components like a sentence thanking them for contacting your company, and the contact information you want them to use if they have more questions.

There’s a problem with boilerplate, though. All to often, it just gets passed along from year to year, and nobody asks whether it’s written well, whether it conveys the message well, or even whether it conveys the right message to begin with.

For example, in comments of the “In class exercise” post  from a couple of weeks ago, Tom pointed out that the writer of the letter may simply have pasted text from the pertinent government regulations into the letter. In other words, he or she used boilerplate. And this was probably the same letter they used last year, and the year before that, et cetera. When it came time to send out this year’s letter, nobody stopped to ask “Does this letter get the results we want?”

Go ahead and use boilerplate. Take the time to write it well, and it will serve you well. But put an expiration date on all of your boilerplate. When it reaches that date, stop using it. Take a long hard look at it and ask yourself if it needs cleaning up or revising. And maybe  you’ll decide that you should toss it in the dustbin and start fresh.

Your readers will thank you.