Words Fail Me Part 3

Refreshing, isn't it?

If this were a better world, everyone would write and speak simply and clearly all the time. Unfortunately, we're not always comfortable with the audience or the subject. When we're insecure-perhaps we don't know enough, we don't trust our understanding, or we're trying to impress-we resort to pretentious language. We tart up our writing with authoritative-sounding twaddle: inflated words, jargon, the phrase of the moment. The way to sound authoritative is to know your subject (there I go again), not to camouflage your weaknesses with big words. It takes a knowledgeable writer to use simple language, to "eschew surplusage," as Mark Twain said.

Allow me, therefore, to suggest that hereafter you utilize the optimum downsizing in terminology. Translation: Use plain words. If you're a commodities trader and it's raining, say it's raining. Don't say that corn futures are up because predictions of increased precipitation have in the present instance proved accurate. If you're a teacher and little Jeremy can't add, tell his mom that he has trouble with arithmetic, not that his computational skills do not meet his age-expectancy level. Keep your words few and simple.

I'm not saying it's never appropriate to use heaps of big words, even extra-extra-large ones. But when simple English will do as well, why dress up an idea in ribbons and bows? They only obscure the message. If your object is to communicate, don't let anything come between you and the reader.

Sometimes it takes courage to drop our pretensions, to choose use instead of utilize, rain instead of precipitation, arithmetic instead of computational skills. An idea expressed in simple English has to stand on its own, naked and unadorned, while ostentatious words sound impressive even when they mean nothing.

Not all pompous writers are showing off or covering up their ignorance. Some are just timid, imagining that their ideas are flimsy or flawed or silly, even when they aren't. If you've done your homework, you shouldn't have to disguise your ideas with showy language. Be brave. Write plainly.

The truth about big, ostentatious words is that they don't work as well as simple ones. Here's why: * Pretentious words are mushy, because they're often more general and less specific than simple, concrete ones. Precipitation could mean snow or sleet as well as rain. Computational skills could mean addition or subtraction or the ability to use an abacus.

* Big words are less efficient than small ones. Why use a shotgun when a flyswatter will do?

* Bureaucratese is easier to misinterpret. Look at the problems diplomats and politicians have understanding one another. (Everyone who uses the word parameter, for example, seems to mean something different.) * Show-off words have a patronizing air, as if the writer were talking down to the reader. "My vocabulary is bigger than yours," the stuffed shirt might as well be saying. "I'm an insider and you're not."

All right, I wasn't born yesterday. I can hear the protests mounting, especially from the corridors of business and academia: "Are you nuts? If I use simple language, I'll sound like a blockhead. In my field, you have to use lots of jargon. Everyone does it."

True. At times we have to play the game, to use language that's stuffier than we'd like. Until we can make the rules ourselves, we play along. A marketing specialist might have to write: "Demographic data as well as experience with selective focus groups indicate that initial product response will be more favorable than the performance-based patterns demonstrated by recidivist consumers." The boss doesn't want the simple truth: "They'll buy it until they learn it doesn't work."

So what do you do? If you can't always cut the baloney and write in plain English, just do it whenever you can. Choose the simple, concrete word over the mushy, complicated one every chance you get. Believe me, ninety-nine readers out of a hundred are reasonable people who would rather be informed than impressed. They're grateful for clear, straightforward writing, and they'll remember it longer. Tell them what they need to know and let them get on with their lives.

Simplicity takes practice, oddly enough, because pretentiousness is contagious. We tend to absorb the words we hear around us, and many professions have become industries for cranking out flatulent language. A sociologist used to psychobabble (gender rea.s.signment, for instance) will find it hard to write plainly (s.e.x change). But simplicity is worth the effort, so here are some of the pretensions you should learn to recognize and avoid.

* Mushy words. Stay away from vague or evasive language, especially euphemisms such as technical adjustment instead of market drop, gaming instead of gambling, collateral damage instead of civilian casualties, pre-owned instead of used. Vague expressions like these blur meaning in hopes of making distasteful ideas more palatable.

* Windbaggery. Don't inflate your writing with bureaucratic hot air. A windbag uses a puffed-up phrase like ongoing highway maintenance program when he means roadwork. He says recreation specialist when he means gym teacher.

* Artificial sweeteners. Avoid officialese that hides or sweetens an unpleasant reality. It may be good public relations to say fatalities instead of deaths, or terminated instead of fired, but it's wishy-washy English. And let's not forget plausible deniability, from the days before spin control.

* Cool words. If you expect your writing to outlast yesterday's mashed potatoes, try not to use the fashionable word, the cool expression that's on everybody's lips. Like last year's hemlines, they get old fast. Trendy expressions ("Get out of my face"; "Quit busting my chops") don't wear well, but plain language ("Go away"; "Don't bother me") has staying power. Be warned that hip terms are contagious. They sneak up on you. Before you know it, you're using them, too. That's not cool.

* Affectations. Steer clear of foreign, technical, or scientific terms if you don't need them. Unless it's appropriate to do otherwise, use simple English. Instead of comme il faut, try proper; instead of potable, try drinkable; instead of Rana catesbeiana, try bullfrog. Between us-not entre nous-plain English is better.

* Empty words. Beware of meaningless phrases that cover up a naked fact-the Emperor has no clothes. That is, the writer just doesn't know. Often the unintelligible hides behind the unp.r.o.nounceable. A puzzled art history major might write: "Within the parameters of his creative dynamic, the artist has achieved a plangent chiaroscuro that is as inchoate as it is palpable, suffusing the observer with mystery." That sounds more self-a.s.sured than "Beats me." Unless you're hiding the fact that you don't know what's going on, write plainly.

* Stretch limos. Don't use words that are longer than they have to be. Shorter is usually better. Some writers(among them lawyers, doctors, and scientists) may need long words to be precise. But others (academics, politicians) often seem to use them just to make an impression. A scholar recently had this to say about Freud's writing habits: "Drafts embody the second stage of the dynamic that characterizes the genesis of Freud's texts." In other words, "The second thing he did was make a draft." Unless your audience absolutely demands big words, have the courage not to use them.

Not long ago, Alan D. Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, showed that even the most absurd statements will be swallowed whole if they're concealed in obscure and pretentious language. He wrote an article, published as serious scholarship by an academic journal, in which he said: "It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific 'knowledge,' far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot a.s.sert a privileged epidemiological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities."

Pretty impressive! But what did he mean? Simply that there's no real world. We made it up. Yet no one realized this preposterous article was a gag until Sokal himself fessed up.

The most essential gift for a good writer, Hemingway wrote, is a built-in, shock-proof baloney detector. (No, he didn't use the word "baloney.") So develop a detector of your own and keep it in good working order. Know wind-baggery and artificial sweeteners and all the rest when you see them. Then write without them.

7. The Life of the Party.

VERBS THAT ZING.

Here's to the verb! It works harder than any other part of the sentence. The verb is the word that gets things done. Without a verb, there's nothing happening and you don't really need a sentence at all. So when you go shopping for a verb, don't be cheap. Splurge.

Because verbs are such dynamos, writers often take them for granted, concentrating their creativity on the nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. This is a big mistake. Find an interesting verb and the rest of the sentence will practically take care of itself. Controlled studies have shown conclusively that a creative verb generates twice the energy of a noun of equal weight and density, and three times that of an adjective or adverb. Trust me. I've got the figures here somewhere.

Learn to spot provocative verbs. Newspapers are a good source. A friend of mine is a particularly colorful writer, and I often wondered how she came up with such sparklers. One day she told me. "I read the sports pages and collect interesting verbs like 'pummel' and 'clobber' that I religiously copy into a little notebook." She reconsiders every verb she's written, then replaces the dull ones.

How can you detect a dull verb? Your nose knows. Take a whiff. If a sentence has a musty smell, there's a stale verb lurking somewhere-in a cliche (Intel plays hardball ), in a predictable or routine phrase (A shot rang out), or maybe in a pa.s.sive guise (He was given an A instead of the active and more forceful He got an A). Pa.s.sive verbs, by the way, are often a symptom of indirect writing. There's more about how to protect yourself from this highly communicable disease in chapter 21.

English is a vast, rich language, packed with interesting verbs. Use them. I'm not saying you should sit with Roget's Thesaurus at your side, plucking out wacky, eccentric verbs and shoehorning them into every one of your sentences. Just try a juicy verb once in a while.

Interesting verbs are easy to recognize: they're fresh or unusual; a small surprise now and then grabs the reader's attention. They're active (I'll talk about the exceptions later). And they're strong.

The strong ones are more than interesting-they're economical. They don't need to be propped up with extra words. Weak verbs need help (The stockholders asked insistently; The detective walked with a swagger), but strong ones support themselves ( The stockholders insisted; The detective swaggered). So if you spot too many props in your writing-adverbs like insistently and prepositional phrases like with a swagger-replace them with stronger verbs.

Rooting out wussy verbs is an excellent way to start revising your work. (There's more about revision in chapter 30.) For instance, it's been my experience that experience is a mighty weak verb. Replace it if you can-and you nearly always can. In the handwritten draft of one of his lectures on literature, Vladimir Nabokov crossed out the word, changing "experience that magic" to "bask in that magic." Notice how the stronger verb illuminates the phrase.

As for pa.s.sive verbs, before condemning them I'll offer a word or two in their defense. You might prefer them in these situations: * When it's not important to say who did something: The merchandise was stowed in the cargo hold.

* When you'd rather not say who's responsible: My homework has been lost.

* When you don't know whodunit: Norman's ma.n.u.script was stolen.

* When you want to delay the punch line: Julia was done in by a spinach souffle.

In most cases, though, a pa.s.sive verb sits there like a plaster Buddha, one step removed from the action. The sentence Their meal was eaten in three hours is a snooze. You can hear the clock slowly ticking.

An active verb has more energy, more buzz; it gets to the point sooner and with fewer words. The sentence They ate for three hours has blood in its veins, not embalming fluid. You can imagine hungry people gobbling and snarfing. Life, my dear, is being lived, if I may be allowed a pa.s.sive verb.

8. Call Waiting.

PUTTING THE SUBJECT ON HOLD.

I can't stand call waiting, an annoying necessity at our house. I get dis...o...b..bulated when I have to interrupt one conversation and start another, and maybe even another, then try to pick up where I left off.

Sentences can be confusing and disorienting, too. The subject is mentioned early on, then comes some other stuff, and maybe some other stuff, and by the time the verb shows up we've forgotten who's on hold. Putting a subject too far from the verb is asking the reader to take another call in mid-sentence.

Here's what happens when a verb falls too far behind: Taking up his meerschaum, Holmes, secure in the knowledge that Moriarty's goose was cooked, popped it into his mouth. That's a confusing sentence, and not because it's too long. It's disorienting because the subject (Holmes)in too far from the verb (popped). What did Holmes do? We a.s.sume he put the pipe into his mouth, but for all we know, he might have popped the goose into Moriarty's.

The solution is to bring the actor (Holmes) and the action (popped) closer together: Taking up his meerschaum, Holmes popped it into his mouth, secure in the knowledge that Moriarty's goose was cooked. The sentence is just as long, yet there's no way to misread it.

If putting subject and verb close together is so easy and works so well, why do writers separate them? Perhaps they think it's less clunky to cram a lot of information in the middle of a sentence than to tack it on either end. Not true. Most of the time, it's smoother and clearer to put extra information at the front or the back than to lump it in the middle.

Even when we understand a sentence, we can often improve it by moving the subject and verb closer together. Keep your eye on the actor and the action in this example: Drew, seriously ticking off the personal trainer who was helping her drop twenty pounds for her role as a bulimic princess, ate a whole quart of Cherry Garcia.

If this sounds awkward, it's because we have to wait so long to find out what happened. There's too much information crammed in between the actor (Drew)and the action (ate). By the time we learn what Drew did that was so off-ticking, we've had a bit of a workout ourselves. Now let's put the doer next to what's being done: Drew ate a whole quart of Cherry Garcia, seriously ticking off the personal trainer who was helping her drop twenty pounds for her role as a bulimic princess.

That's still a mouthful, but isn't it better? By keeping subject and verb near each other, you're dealing with one idea at a time. You aren't asking the reader to take another call, to put a thought on hold while you interrupt with more information.

There's a bonus here that goes beyond the sentence. Once you get into the habit of avoiding digressions on a small scale, you'll be able to spot them in larger chunks of writing. Just as the parts of a sentence sometimes get separated or out of order, so do the ideas that hold together paragraphs, chapters, even whole books. Hold that thought.

9. Now, Where Were We?

A TIME AND A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING.

Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night, maybe while traveling or on vacation, and wonder where you were and what day it was? That's the feeling readers have when they can't tell where or when something is happening.

And when more than one thing is happening, the confusion multiplies. Take this sentence, please! The director of technology announced that several employees were abusing their Internet privileges Tuesday at the staff meeting.

Excuse me? Did the chief techie say this at the staff meeting? Or was that where the hanky-panky took place? And goodness, look at the time. What happened Tuesday? The cybercrime or the announcement?

When we write, we often take such details as time and place for granted because they're obvious to us. They won't be obvious to the reader, though. This version clears things up: At Tuesday's staff meeting, the director of technology announced that several employees were abusing their Internet privileges. Simply by moving the time and the place, we leave no doubt about what happened on Tuesday, and where.

The s.p.a.ceTime Conundrum.

Even when there's only one thing happening, a sentence can be confusing if the time or place is unclear. Readers won't know where is there and when is then. Here's an example of fuzzy timing that you might find in an investment newsletter: Our technical a.n.a.lysts predicted the stock market correction last week.

What happened last week, the prediction or the correction? Be clear. Make it: Last week our technical a.n.a.lysts predicted the stock market correction. Or: Our technical a.n.a.lysts predicted last week's stock market correction.

When a reader is lost in s.p.a.ce, a simple sentence can be simply maddening. What's the poor reader to make of this one? Buck lectured about the typhoon in Dublin.

Was the typhoon in Dublin, or is that where Buck gave the lecture? The last I heard, Ireland wasn't in the tropics, so make it: In Dublin, Buck lectured about the typhoon. Or: Buck lectured in Dublin about the typhoon.

The Misplaced Reader.

Words that help point us in the right direction (prepositions such as on, about, and around) sometimes give confusing signals. The reader might take an unnecessary detour or even a wrong turn. Notice how the preposition on can give a sentence two very different meanings: Jon wrote a book on Mount Everest.

Is Mount Everest the subject of the book? Or is that where Jon wrote it? You could clear up the confusion by using a clearer signal: Jon wrote a book about Mount Everest. Or if Jon likes to write in thin air, you could move the mountain: On Mount Everest, Jon wrote a book.

Here are two more examples of how crossed signals can send readers in the wrong direction: The mouse ran around the clock. If the mouse ran nonstop, say so. If the mouse circled the clock, write it that way.

There were rumors about the dormitory. Was the dorm the subject of the rumors? Or were the rumors spreading through the dorm? Say it one way or the other.

Infinitive Wisdom.

Time and place sometimes go astray when a sentence has two or more verbs and one of them is an infinitive (a verb that's usually preceded by to). This example could be read in two ways: Alec asked Kim to marry him in the Jacuzzi.

Did Alec propose in the Jacuzzi, or is that where he wants to get married? (Stranger things have happened.) Unless he wants a wedding in a whirlpool, make it: In the Jacuzzi, Alec asked Kim to marry him. Better yet: Alec proposed to Kim in the Jacuzzi.

This sentence could also be read in two ways: Aunt Agatha threatened to disinherit Bertie when she caught him gambling.

Did she threaten Bertie when she caught him? Or if she caught him? Make it: When Aunt Agatha caught Bertie gambling, she threatened to disinherit him. Or: Aunt Agatha threatened to disinherit Bertie if she caught him gambling.

Every Now and Then.

Some of the words we use to tell us when and where-here, there, now, then, this, and that-can leave readers scratching their heads. If these words are used carelessly, readers can't tell where is here and when is now.

In a letter to the local library board, you might find a sentence like this: Since the new branch is so popular and the main library is underused, it is here we should spend our resources. What does the writer mean? Should the bucks go to the new library, or the old one? In other words, where is here?

The writer might mean this: Since the new branch is so popular, it is here we should spend our resources, not on the underused main library. Or this: Since the main library is underused, it is here we should spend our resources, not on the popular new branch. Those sentences may not be graceful, but their meaning is obvious. When here or there could refer to more than one place, rearrange the sentence to make clear which place you mean. Otherwise the reader will be nowhere.

We can run into the same sort of trouble with now and then. Here's part of an e-mail that an insurance agent might receive after a fender bender: The roads were slippery even before the rain turned to sleet, and it was now the car began to skid. When is now? Did the car start to skid before or after the rain turned to sleet?