Focus. Be specific. Prune. And kill the jargon - Tips on writing

Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

Focus. Be specific. Prune. And kill the jargon
Tips on writing

I’ve been reading the Roman orator and politician Cicero, and although I studied Latin for years, I had forgotten how lovely and clear his language is. I could give many examples, but here is a paragraph so filled with insight that reading it and rereading it would be worth your time:

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

It’s not the old guys who wrote garbled, tangled-up sentences; it’s the new ones. There are philosophers who have taken a hundred pages to make the points that Cicero made in a paragraph. Simplicity is deceptive. It looks easy. Sometimes I think we all just know too much, and we try to show off to the reader. But instead of attracting attention, the result is often the opposite.

Maybe that’s why people avoid short sentences. They worry that if their sentences are simple, it will look like they didn’t work hard enough or that their thoughts aren’t deep enough. But that’s not the case. Crafting simple sentences is tough. Ideas have to be crystallized. Sometimes, complex sentences are just evidence that the writer doesn’t understand the subject well enough to explain it. Other times, the writer is convinced that sentences with long words will make him look smart—an idea that Professor Daniel Oppenheimer charmingly debunked in an article titled, “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”

Most writing is too wordy. Most articles are too long—unless they’re not long enough. That’s the dirty little secret of all this agonizing among media types about how many words people are willing to read, how much attention they will pay and for how long. At the Times, that conversation has been going on for decades. There’s one big problem with saying how long or how short articles should be: it just depends. You know how long you can keep readers? Until they’re bored. Sometimes they’re bored before the end of the first sentence. Sometimes they read three thousand words and wish there were more. It’s all about pulling along your readers. If you’re not telling a story with all the classic ingredients that hold people: love, war, sex, conflict, tragedy—then keep it short. Make sure each word helps the sentence and moves the idea forward.

Here’s a sample of wordy writing:

The small flames sparked in Northern California prove volatile and unpredictable as they continue to develop into monstrous conflagrations. After a major wildfire, the disastrous consequences cause great disturbances in the humanitarian supply chain, but companies like Brand X strive to restore that disruption and provide an efficient chain of command. While cargo ships, trucks, and planes transport food and water to areas of disaster, sites of distribution are set up to mitigate chaos and competition for supplies. Promoting the fire relief efforts even further, Brand X identifies the unique needs of each individual and provides customary medicinal aid amongst families threatened by the fire.

(From a freelance, unpublished submission to Longneck & Thunderfoot, a digital marketing company headquartered in New York.)

Here it is after being simplified:

In California, where small fires can quickly grow and become out of control, it is tough to get the necessary help to people where and when they need it. Brand X software helps create an efficient communication system so that the help goes where it is needed, on time.

These are the four most common mistakes I see when I am editing:

✵People try to cover too much ground in short pieces, and their writing ends up being too general and sweeping. It is so comprehensive that it says nothing. So: Focus on one or two big ideas and get to your point quickly.

✵They write in generalities that end up numbing the reader. So: Be specific. Use details that illuminate.

✵They write complicated sentences that are hard to follow, or they just go on and on. So: Prune!

✵Finally, people use so much jargon that their work is unintelligible to anyone outside their field. Not matter how complex, ideas can be made coherent to the general reader. So: Kill the jargon.

Readers tend to have short attention spans. We aren’t able to take in multiple points simultaneously. When a lot of information is thrown at us, with little air and space between thoughts, we have trouble assessing it. In op-ed pieces, it’s best to write about just one or two things and dig into them. When you have strong feelings about something—say, how to make renewable energy profitable—you’ll probably be tempted to write a sweeping piece that demonstrates the breadth of your knowledge. But if you’re trying to persuade someone of something, you’ll do better focusing on one aspect that might be surprising to the reader, perhaps that California already gets more than 30 percent of its power from renewable energy. Maybe you can write about whether other states can use the same tactics—or maybe your conclusion is that they cannot, and California is unusual in this way.

Use your knowledge as a foundation for your specific points. I recently edited an op-ed for a client who hoped to see his work in a publication with a national audience. I thought the writer had tossed too many thoughts into the first paragraph, taking way too long to get to his smart and surprising point: that the “old” media companies should be allowed to band together to make demands of the social media platforms without risking antitrust consequences.

I suggested that he get to the point faster. With a new first paragraph explaining that social media gets the advertising benefit of news content but bears none of the cost of producing it, he could move to the main point quickly.

Next, consider the importance of being specific. It is vital to be concrete, to come up with memorable images. When you give specifics in your writing, you will allow your readers to experience what you are writing about. When I was a young stringer for the Associated Press while a student at Berkeley, I covered a lot of news. I ran to a pay phone and called in whatever was happening that day, which usually included police, students, and tear gas. But once I wrote a feature story for the AP about D’Army Bailey, a new, radical member of the Berkeley City Council. After I turned in my piece, the editor asked for more color. Being a news reporter and young, I didn’t know what that meant. I do remember I rewrote the lead to say, “From a pea green office in Berkeley.” I took the request literally and added color. Not the worst idea, but probably not the kind of detail the editor had in mind.

Far more memorable was the detail that Times critic Dwight Garner used in his review of Bob Woodward’s book about the Trump White House:

We knew things were bad. Woodward is here, like a state trooper knocking on the door at 3 a.m., to update the sorry details.

That image of the trooper elevates Garner’s review, making it visual and vivid by referencing an experience we all emotionally relate to.

The power of detail paired with simple language was illustrated by a series of widely shared tweets in 2016 by twenty-two-year-old Nafisa Rawji. In her series, she took on the question of sex and consent by comparing it to something we all understand: money and robbery.

Here are a few of her tweets:

If you ask me for $5, and I’m too drunk to say yes or no, it’s not okay to then go take $5 out of my purse.

If I let YOU borrow $5, that doesn’t give the right for your FRIEND to take $5 out of my purse. “But you gave him some, why can’t I?”

If you steal $5 and I can’t prove it in court, that does NOT mean you didn’t steal $5. Just because I gave you $5 in the past, doesn’t mean I have to give you $5 in the future.

And to think a man said “Well she sat on his lap & went to his house.” Okay, if I ask you to hold my purse, does that mean you can take $?

By using the analogy of a purse and money, Rawji helped her audience see the question of consent in a new way. If she had just said that sex without consent is rape, her tweets would have been lost in hordes of others. By coming up with a specific way to portray the experience, she got attention and probably managed to persuade at least a few people to look at the issue of consent in a more nuanced way.

Here’s a sample in need of a pruning:

In an announcement yesterday, the company said that it would terminate 100 people in order to maximize profits from its expansion into the packaged snacks business. It is reducing its footprint in the drinks industry as that proves to be less profitable than in the past.

Here it is after the edit:

The company said it fired 100 people because it was focusing on snacks rather than its less-profitable soda business.

She also made her point with few words. None were extraneous. She didn’t write any longer than she had to write—helped along by Twitter’s word limit.

In whatever forum, write to the appropriate length. If a teacher asks you to write ten pages on the history of Greeks in America, write ten pages. If an editor says she doesn’t want to see more than eight hundred words on how Brexit will be managed, don’t turn in four thousand words and say, “Well, I know it’s a little long, but I was hoping you could cut.” Believe me, I’ve gotten notes like that, and without even considering what I might be missing, I tap the Delete key. We all have to write to length, and that means pruning. Prune ruthlessly, because no one wants to spend time on words that are a waste.

While there has been a move toward simple language in legal documents, they are still daunting. Most of us toss aside warranties, insurance policies, even legal documents without reading them. Look at this warranty for my stove and tell me I won’t have to call a human being to find out what is covered:

This warranty does not cover any parts or labor to correct any defect caused by negligence, accident or improper use, maintenance, installation, service or repair. Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you. This warranty gives you specific legal rights and you may also have other legal rights that vary from state to state.

The best way to prevent misunderstanding is to write in conversational language. Abandon jargon, because it limits your audience. We all use jargon. Mostly we don’t know we’re using it, because it is the language of our group. You only realize you’re using insider expressions when you see the puzzled looks on peoples’ faces.

When I left the Wall Street Journal for The New York Times to become a food writer, I was mystified by some of the words I heard—kind of surprising given that both places were in the same business. The first day I walked into the headquarters on West 43rd Street, I was shown to my desk on the fourth floor in the Style department, told to come up with a story for that week’s cover of what was then called the Living section, and informed that a backfielder would handle my piece.

What was a backfielder?

I was afraid to ask. I didn’t want to sound stupid. (The fear of sounding stupid keeps a lot of us from learning things we need to know.)

These days, new reporters at the Times will not hear the word backfielder, but instead will be greeted with the phrase strong editor. Which is weird, because it makes you immediately wonder, what do they do with the weak editors?

Every industry, every company, every town, even families have their own ways of talking, their own shorthand for communicating. When my husband answers the phone by saying, “Heddo,” I know it’s either his brother or sister. He is using a word that goes back to a subtle mockery of a cousin whose version of “Hello” became part of the siblings’ private language. Jargon and shorthand can be fun in conversation, and a way to define group identity. It’s fair to use it in talking with people who presumably know that same language.

A friend who reported for the Journal sometimes recounts her rocky history of writing about commodities. She remembers being brand new to the beat, put in with no time to prepare, and having to call analysts for their take on the day’s events. When she asked why the cocoa market was “limit up,” the analyst said, “Everyone was out there covering their shorts!” She immediately imagined a bunch of guys in white boxers racing around trying to conceal their underwear. She had no idea what the guy was talking about. It took many questions for a novice to understand the phrase “covering your shorts.”

The world of business is drowning in jargon that’s used so often it becomes a cliché. I was in a meeting where a smart man actually said this:

We want to take a view and put a stake in the ground because we have some skin in the game.

Wow.

Jargon is efficient in its own context, but it’s mystifying when presented to the wider world. Nothing gets in the way of speaking like a human more than jargon does. To the person using it, it seems the natural way to talk. But it isn’t. It’s the language of science, or finance, or marketing; it is not conversational.

If words are so difficult to decode, there is no reason to wade through. The language of the financial, medical, and government worlds seems deliberately confusing. Bank accounts, mortgage statements, closing documents for house sales, insurance policies, health insurance rules—rarely are they in plain English. Paperwork is endless and confusing not because it has to be, but because it is usually written to satisfy lawyers or, more nefariously, to keep people from easily understanding their rights and responsibilities.

Legal jargon leaves people needing a lawyer to explain what should be a simple contract to buy a house or make a will. The tech industry has followed suit with agreements about the use of your information that no one can follow. When it turns out that your information is being used in ways you didn’t anticipate, it’s because those agreements are too daunting to approach.

Academic writing often suffers from jargon. This example was created by Andrew Kuhn, a psychotherapist, poet, and master mimic.

With respect to unpacking the cultural impacts of inequities, it is patent that everything from historical prevalences to metrics to semiotic valences of specific images and memes provide fodder for controversy. To take just one single instance, collective sensitivities to what the French would call a decalage between status and financial well-being do not necessarily correspond to available information about statistical disparities, let alone the “meanings” made of these. The very facticity of “facts” is at play here. While by the same token, disciplines may consider different realms of evidence under different lenses, or optics, making for a Tower of Babel of specialists speaking past each other, or out of one another’s earshot altogether, as they tend to attend different conferences, read different journals, attend different parties, etcetera—even at the same institution of so-called higher learning! And who should be allowed to speak, and to or for whom? Cultural appropriation, mansplaining, and the constant threat of real or perceived micro-aggressions can offer further impedances to a fruitful exchange of views. So how to even begin a conversation about this very important topic, or topics, is problematic.

I think that in translation, that says: Academics from different disciplines have trouble talking to one another.

The federal government has a smart and useful site on plain language. Here is a “before” of government wordiness:

If the State Secretary finds that an individual has received a payment to which the individual was not entitled, whether or not the payment was due to the individual’s fault or misrepresentation, the individual shall be liable to repay to State the total sum of the payment to which the individual was not entitled.

And here is the “after,” in plain language:

If the State agency finds that you received a payment that you weren’t entitled to, you must pay the entire sum back.

When I was editing opinion submissions, I saw pieces so loaded with jargon that they made sense only to people in that field. As Op-Ed editors, we shared our knowledge to translate jargon and figure out if a piece was worth saving. As one editor wrote about a submission,

I’d have to see it in plain English first. I mean, they had me at “The tax code’s prohibition of trading in tax attributes, meanwhile, precludes developers from simply selling off their tax credits.”

This is a made-up paragraph, but it’s similar to what you might find in a press release:

Companies are increasingly leveraging technology to engage with their stakeholders. They are innovating through data-driven insights, multimedia tactics and in so doing, leveraging print, electronic, and social media as critical components of their toolkit.

This is how a business editor might translate that paragraph:

The boring old annual report is dead. Now, companies are using social media to stay in touch with customers and shareholders.

Watch out for these overused words and phrases:

point in time

at the end of the day

it’s not rocket science

impactful

paradigm

bandwidth

on the same page

under the radar

innovate

influence

think outside the box

literally

These ideas could be expressed in just one word:

a total of

reverts back

free of charge

charged in connection with

fled the scene

arrived at the scene

at the end of the day

general public

Why do people use that kind of language in the first place? It is efficient when they are talking to their peers, and they all know their verbal shorthand. The mistake is when they use that private language to talk with people outside of that circle. They will get tuned out.

We didn’t end up using that particular piece, so I can’t show you the translation, but it would have been a simple edit to turn that sentence into this one:

Developers who cannot use their tax credits get no value from them because they are not allowed to sell them.

A small change, but it makes the idea understandable.

Financial articles were typically tough to decode and often left the editors in Op-Ed mystified. A piece sent to us by a well-known economist brought this comment from one of the editors:

Gurgle, gurgle. Could someone who understands this help me? Worth it, or impenetrable?

Some articles we received relied heavily on insider language, but I wanted to save and publish them because I found the ideas worth sharing. Often the editing was easy; it just involved trimming. Maybe that’s why I love both gardening and editing; I like to create a shape from something that looks blurry and a little confusing.

Theoretically, jargon should become less common as people communicate visually and through texting. Texting isn’t writing; it’s talking. And over time it will probably replace some of the old conventions of writing, because conversation is the more natural way to communicate and it predates writing.

In any attempt to persuade, be sure the flow of words is logical and that A definitely leads to B which leads to C. I remember a piece I was tempted to publish because it was emotional and about a subject that moved me. In the wake of her baby’s death at daycare, a woman was arguing for more family leave. She believed that if her time off work had been longer, her baby would have been spared. But the logical flaw in that claim was pointed out by one of the editors, who said the baby could have died even if the mother had been at home. Her desire for more maternity leave was a goal that made sense, but the two parts of her article weren’t really connected—“the baby died when she went to work, but not necessarily because she had to go to work.” I hated to reject it, but the logic didn’t hold.

To be sure that you have made your words simple, easy to follow, specific, and jargon free, you have to get some distance on your own writing. The best advice I can give you with that problem? Write something and go back to it the next day, first thing in the morning, before you have any other words or ideas in your head, and you will see it anew. When my own writing stumps me, when I know it’s out of order or otherwise not quite right, I’m able to figure out the next day how to fix it. It always shocks me that I couldn’t see it earlier.

Give your brain time to rest, and you can be your own editor.