(This post is about 1,800 words. It will take about ten minutes to read.)
What if you asked someone the following question and got the following answer?
QUESTION:
How did the agency find out if participants in the program modified their vehicles during the review period?
ANSWER
In order to make a determination as to whether or not program participants made modifications to their vehicles during the period of review, agency officials instituted requirements that a limited number of controls be implemented by agency inspectors.
Huh?
This “answer” is one example among many billion of bad writing.
What’s odd to me is that many readers would consider it fairly standard writing, especially for a government report. It sounds official and substantive, though I’m not 100% sure it makes any sense.
But considered as a verbal response to a question asked out loud, face to face with another human being, it sounds incredibly stupid. Who talks that way? (ANSWER: Nobody!)
What I’ve realized about this kind of writing is that it comes from a writing habit pretty well establish by our valiant and well-meaning writing teachers throughout high school, college, and graduate school. It is writing we do (for teachers...for a grade) to nobody in particular, even though our writing teachers have pounded us with BE AWARE OF YOUR AUDIENCE AT ALL TIMES!
But what audience would that be? In reality, the only “audience” is the teacher who must grade our writing. But, in the imagination of the writing assignment, it amounts to some concocted fictional audience, or, to say it another way...NOBODY AT ALL.
It further occurred to me that the most important symptoms of bad writing are caused by not having a real person to write for, to have a (written) conversation with. In other words, for the most part, our writing instruction in school amounts to GIFNIP.
GIFNIP means we respond to writing assignments by producing General Information For Nobody In Particular. Thus, the symptoms of bad writing:
1) Content not tethered to a real person’s needs or interests about a specific issue they care about—information that is too general or too specific, too much or too little, in short, NOT USEFUL.
2) Organized with the main point at the end or stuck inconveniently in the middle someplace where its emphasis has been effaced.
3) Document design that looks like...well, a college essay: double spaced lines on an 8 1/5 by 11 sheet of paper (or its digital counterpart), indented 5 spaces at the start of each new paragraphs, no headings, no graphics.
4) Paragraphs that also bury the lede and meander down the page for a dozen or more lines.
5) Sentences that delight in piling on information for 50 or more words.
6) Sentences built with noun-based (instead of verb-based) phrasing...nominalizations instead of active verbs.
7) Word choices that seek to artificially raise the tone of the writing to make it sound more professional and substantive...usually more Latinate than Anglo-Saxon.
The antidote to GIFNIP—to writing that ignores any real-life, red-blooded reader who is actually trying to extract important answers from your prose—is simply plain English.
By plain English I do not mean writing meant to dumb-down information or to substitute simple-minded sentences for necessary nuance and complexity. I mean writing crafted to meet a real person’s needs concerning an issue/topic that reader is (or should be) interested in, writing that understands this reader’s appropriate questions about the issue in question and provides adequately supported answers to each as clearly as possible. You might think of it as radically reader-focused writing. You might think of it as “conversational,” not sloppy or chummy or unprofessional in any way, just clearly presented, useful information—what could be more professional than actually answering your customer’s/client’s/reader’s questions in a way they could easily understand? (How’s that for a 48-word sentence? Could you easily follow it?)
PLAIN ENGLISH DIRECTED AT A REAL PERSON WHO ACTUALLY NEEDS YOUR INFORMATION SOUNDS EASY, RIGHT? IT’S NOT. IT’S DIFFICULT AND REQUIRES MINDFUL ATTENTION TO CONTENT/ORGANIZATION/DESIGN/PARAGRAPHS/SENTENCES/WORD CHOICES/AND EVEN MECHANICS.
CONTENT
I describe “content” as a two-bubble Venn diagram. Bubble A contains all the reader’s appropriate questions about the issue in question. Bubble B contains all the answers provided in the document. Where Bubble A intersects with Bubble B is the sphere (it should be a complete circle, not a football-shaped, prolate spheroid). When Bubbles A & B overlap perfectly, you have content that’s fully successful.
ORGANIZATION
Neurolinguists and neuroscientists and the ancient document design specialists and the even more ancient geniuses who invented the newspaper headline agree: readability goes up when a reader is able to accurately predict what will come next in a piece of writing. Organization that provides previews of the information that will follow and places the most important information up front (in a document, in a section or sub-section, or in a paragraph) improves readability and emphasis.
DESIGN
Formats that welcome the reader’s eye, that visually highlight the most important information, direct readers using headings and graphics, and generate adequate white space as a result of these design decisions enhance readability and are just as much a part of plain English as content and style.
PARAGRAPHS
Building most paragraphs so the main point comes first and unifies the rest of the information and ensuring coherence by following the known/new contract, using sufficient transitional words and phrases (and other techniques) makes writing easier to follow.
I call this bottom-line up front (message first) writing “deductively organized” writing. While it can be difficult to make writing deductively organized, we do it, can I say, genetically when we talk to each other.
Here’s a quick conversation:
Q: What’s your favorite thing to eat for dinner?
A: A vegetable soup in kombu dashi with a little salad on the side, with maybe a small piece of fish.
Q: What is kombu dashi?
A: It’s a soup base usually made with seaweed, called kombu, and bonito flakes, and water of course. Q: Have you ever tried it?
A: I might have. I’ve eaten in a few Japanese restaurants.
More A: Yeah, sometimes they put miso in it and a dumpling.
Notice how every question is answered immediately and directly. Here’s that same conversation captured in GIFNIPese.
A: Dinner is probably everyone’s favorite meal of the day. Unfortunately, we’re so busy we rarely have time to make something we truly love to eat. Have you taken into consideration what foods are your favorite to eat, especially for dinner?
B: There are many kinds of food and food traditions around the world. Each of those traditions has a myriad array of possible dinner meals. If I had to pick just one, I’d say I like a vegetable soup in kombu dashi with a little salad on the side, with maybe a small piece of fish.
A: That sounds Asian. Within the vast realm of Asian food, each nation and each region within a nation usually has its own varieties of food and food preparation. Nobody could know all the possibilities. I’ve never encountered kombu dashi? I’d be interested to learn a little more about it.
B: There are several variations involving some different ingredients. Also, methods for making a dashi vary widely. Some cooks do a quick dashi, allowing the ingredients to soak for just a short time in cold or hot water. Others prefer to let the ingredients steep for more extended amounts of time. The simplest version of dashi consists of seaweed, most often kombu— kombu is edible kelp mostly from the family Laminariaceae and is widely eaten in East Asia. It may also be referred to as dasima or haidai. To this is added Katsuobushi, which is simmered, smoked and fermented skipjack tuna. It is also known as bonito flakes or broadly as okaka. Then, of course, there’s the water. Have you ever tried it?
You get the drift. When the “writer” forgets they’re having an actual conversation with a real person (who isn’t physically there), they spiral into unhelpful content, organization that’s no longer deductive, and, though the above example doesn’t illustrate this, paragraphs that go on and on and bury the main point, as well as sentences that are noun-based and artificially formal.
Q: What preference if your ultimate dinner choices were under consideration and you had a panoply of possible alternatives at your discretion would be selected by you?
A: Huh?
SO, WHAT CAN BE DONE TO FIX THE GIFNIP REFLEX?
I keep a small pixy doll next to my desk at all times when I write. I imagine this pixy doll is interested in the issue I’m writing about. I try to figure out all the questions this pixy doll has about the issue in question. Of course, the pixy doll is a stand-in for the actual person to whom I’m writing (YOU)!
I do my research, generate information and evidence. Then I think of the two-bubble Venn diagram. I try to make sure my writing (“answers” to my pixie doll’s appropriate questions), Bubble B, overlaps as completely as I can make it with Bubble A, all my reader’s questions.
I call this process QUESTION FACTORING—finding the most productive questions to probe the issue in question—and DESIGNING A READING EXPERIENCE for my reader—within the confines of the program I’m using (in this case it’s Squarespace, which greatly limits my document design choices), presenting the information has helpfully and as plainly as I can.
Why a pixie doll?
Simply because when we talk face to face with somebody, we remember the courtesies of clear, direct verbal communication. When we talk to co-workers, clients, customers, supervisors, subordinates, vendors, etc., at work, we use conversational language. If we need to explain a technical term, we stop and define it until our listener understands. If all else fails, we might even draw a picture. When they talk to us, the same applies.
Consider this scenario where plain English is used in a serious situation that calls for the utmost professionalism. A physician has gone to school for many years learning an incredibly technical body of important information. A patient has been examined and now the two talk. The doctor doesn’t say, “I wish I could explain to you what’s wrong, but you’d need to go to medical school, and then specialize in X for 8 years, before you could possibly understand what I have to tell you.”
THE MOST IMPORTANT BAD WRITING HABITS (remember GIFNIP) come from forgetting that writing is actually a conversation (with somebody who isn’t there right now). Speak to that person (pixie doll) as though they were very much there, right in front of you, face to face, asking you all the questions that fill Bubble A, waiting for you to fill Bubble B with answers stated as clearly and helpfully as possible.
KEEP IT REAL!