Writing, Clear and Simple

In an otherwise fine article about the nature of genius, Wired writer Daniel Pink tosses in this:

 Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process.

Not only is the “[A] are from Mars, [B] are from Venus” trope a cliché, it doesn’t really work here. Why associate conceptualists with Mars and experimentalists with Venus? What’s the connection? None that I can see.

What do you think? Am I making too much of it? Does this image help or hinder Pink’s article?

For more on clichés, see my previous entry here.

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E-mail is an essential part of the modern communications toolkit. If you want your e-mail messages to almost-but-not-quite-completely fail to live up to their potential, here are some tips you can follow at your own peril:

1. Don’t bother with a meaningful subject line. Don’t write a subject like “Here’s the contract information you asked for,” “Agenda for staff meeting,” or “I need you to review the attached document.” Write a subject line like “Hi!”, or “Wazzup?” Even better, leave it blank. People love mysteries.
2. Meander around for a while, telling some amusing anecdotes, or offering your thoughts on the performance of the team in the big game, or asking if the recipient saw Desperate Housewives last night, before getting to the point of your message.
3. email is informal, so, like, things like speling punctuation grammer and standard english usage dont matter, you know?
4. IF YOUR MESSAGE IS VERY IMPORTANT, PUT IT IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS SO YOUR RECIPIENT WILL FEEL LIKE YOU’RE STANDING INCHES AWAY, SHOUTING, WITH YOUR SPITTLE SPLATTERING HIS OR HER FACE. BECAUSE YOU DO THAT IN REAL LIFE, DON’T YOU?
5. If you’re not sure how… I don’t know… maybe if you… those dot-dot-dot thingies… they’re called ellipses… anyway, you can use them instead of doing the work of figuring out the best way to say what you want to say.
6. Structure of any sort—paragraphs, bulleted lists, numbered lists, headings and subheadings—is overrated. Just dump everything into one big glob of text.
7. Throw in lots of big, obscure words like obfuscation, disintermediation, and penultimate. Big words are a great way impress—nay, intimidate—people with your smartness. And they’re a lot less likely to question you if they can’t figure out what the hell it is you’re saying.
8. If you’re replying to a number of questions, be sure to answer only a few of them. Leave the rest for people to figure out on their own. It’s good for them, the lazy slackers.
   

Your turn, dear readers. What are your favorite ingredients for sucky e-mails?

Matthew Stibbe has a post categorizing the seven types of bad writing he’s seen coming out of businesses. These inlcude:

1. Thinks too much of itself. The UK satirical magazine, Private Eye runs a regular column lampooning the abuse of the word ‘solution.’ For example, Dow Corning’s “Innovative solutions for wound management,” which means “bandages.” This kind of word inflation devalues meaning and arouses the scepticism of readers.

 Amen. Call a spade a spade, and not a “human-powered soil relocation solution.”

When I learned that the people at Factiva (a company that maintains a searchable database of news articles) have been tracking the most used clichés in journalism, I said to myself, “That is SO going on my blog.”

What’s a cliché? According to TheFreeDictionary.com, it’s a “trite or overused expression or idea.”

Like “Don’t go there.” Or “That is SO going on my blog.” 

I’m not going to say “Never use clichés,” because there are times when you will decide that, yes, that overused expression is actually the way you want to say something. For humorous effect, perhaps.

But be aware of how easily they can sneak into your writing. They come from many sources, such as movies (“Show me the money!”), television (“Is that your final answer?”), sports (sports metaphors can easily become hackneyed, like “hitting a home run” applied to a major non-baseball achievement), and the internet, of course.

The best defense against clichés is to ask yourself, “Are those my words, my thoughts? Or am I just parroting a cool phrase I picked up somewhere?” 

Over on the Writing Tools blog, Roy Peter Clark has a blog entry that shows two ways to lighten up dense prose. First, look for ways to keep the subject and the verb close to each other. The second is to beware of strings of prepositional phrases. Go check out his before and after example to see what I mean.