A clear piece of political writing (2)

The mayor of Seattle signs the city's minimum-wage ordinance.

Most people who write about politics use too many arcane words, long sentences, circumlocutions, and uninhabited clauses. They don’t use enough concrete examples. Usually they are careless with their sentence structure, the organization of their paragraphs, and the flow of their entire text. These vices make their writing difficult to read and understand.

Today I show you a nice exception: a brief political news item that is well written, readable and clear: “Labor Supporters Hail Seattle’s Landmark $15/hour wage,” written by Matthew Rothschild and published in The Progressive.

Mr. Rothschild has many virtues, as demonstrated in this news item. He uses a good mix of short and long sentences. His sentence structure and flow are good. He writes in a straightforward manner. The quotations are good. It is a smooth piece of political writing – smooth in the good sense, meaning that the reader glides right through it. (By the way, if you are a beginning writer, be aware that all this is harder than it looks.)

For the record, the article is 379 words long and merits a very good Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) score of 56.0, slightly more readable than Time magazine. Some details: words per sentence, 18.0; characters per word, 4.7; passive sentences, 4%.

I do not know or care whether the article is accurate or inaccurate, or even whether it is honest or dishonest; I am interested in the article only as an example of relatively clear writing.

The Takeaway: Whatever your opinions on the minimum wage, progressive politics or Seattle may be, temporarily turn off the political part of your mind (important) and just the read the article for its diction. If you have the time, read it twice. This kind of exercise helps you improve your writing.

See disclaimer.

The "Ten Best Sentences"

In case you missed it: The editors of The American Scholar selected the “Ten Best Sentences” in English-language literature and published their selections.

Writing teacher Roy Peter Clark wrote a blog post offering “brief interpretations... on how and why these sentences work.”

The Takeaway: Read the ten best sentences silently. Then read them aloud. Then read Mr. Clark’s interpretations. Keep the URLs handy and review the sentences and interpretations from time to time. This kind of reading will slowly and steadily make you a better writer.

See disclaimer.

A clear piece of political writing

I select many of my examples of unclear writing from political writing. Here’s why:

Most political writers prefer long words to short words, arcane words to common words, long sentences to short sentences, and circumlocutions to straightforward language. They also favor passive voice to active voice, uninhabited clauses to inhabited clauses, and abstract examples (or no examples) to concrete examples. Usually they are careless with their sentence structure, the organization of their paragraphs, and the flow of their entire text.

These vices make their writing difficult to read and understand.

Today I show you the opposite: a political article that is relatively easy to read and understand: “Just Another Narrative About Privilege,” by Rosslyn Smith. She has not done a perfect job (who does?) but she has taken pains to make her article readable and clear.

For the record, the article is 1,001 words long and its Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) score is 44.9, which is approximately as readable as The Wall Street Journal.

I do not know or care whether the article is accurate or inaccurate, or even whether it is honest or dishonest; I am interested in the article only as an example of fairly good writing.

The Takeaway: Whatever your opinions on class and politics may be, temporarily turn off the political part of your mind (important) and just the read the article for its diction. If you have the time, read it twice. This kind of exercise helps you improve your writing.

See disclaimer.

Poor composition

Poor composition almost always confuses readers. Here’s an example of poor composition:

In an article titled “How to De-Crapify Your Home: A Start-to-Finish Guide,” the writer uses these words to introduce four policies for avoiding the accumulation of new clutter after you have de-cluttered your home:

“You may have heard that you should toss it if you haven’t used it in the last year. This is true, but that’s a very reasonable attitude to take with your stuff. If you have a tendency to keep things you don’t need, you need policies a bit more strict and timely than that. Live by these instead: [then he lists his four policies]”

When the reader arrives at the end of the first sentence, he assumes that the sentence is a straw man that the writer will immediately refute. So, when the reader sees, “This is true, but that’s a very reasonable attitude,” he becomes confused, because:

• The writer has not clearly refuted the straw man;

• The pronouns “this” and “that” may refer to the same thing or two different things.

• It seems illogical that the clause “that’s a very reasonable attitude” is preceded by the conjunction “but.” Isn’t a reasonable attitude a good thing?

The reader silently asks, “Where is this writer going?”

If you click through to the article, you will see that it would read better if this introduction were entirely deleted.

The Takeaway: As a writer, you may know where you’re going, but your reader does not – unless you tell him. In good composition, you continually tell your reader where you’re going, via such techniques as logical sequence,* clear transitions, parallel construction, and consistent nomenclature. When your composition is good, your readers glide effortlessly through your writing and are surprised and delighted at how quickly they finish reading it.

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*For example, from the past to the present (chronological), from left to right, from top to bottom, from the general to the specific, and from the less important to the more important. There are many types of sequences to choose from; just make sure that you stick with the sequence you have chosen (the flashback is an allowable exception to this rule).

See disclaimer.

Don’t pad your copy (4)

Don’t pad (unnecessarily expand) your copy, especially if you are writing educational or instructional copy. Padding makes your copy less readable, less clear, and less credible. It makes you less credible.

Example of padded copy

A Writer’s Digest blog post titled “Subverting Adverbs and Clichés” starts with these 192 words of padding:

Writers constantly have rules thrown at them left, right, and center. Show, don’t tell! Stop using so many dialogue tags! More sensory detail! More tension! Speed up the pace! Yada yada yada … it can become overwhelming, yes? I used to feel overwhelmed by it all too. In fact, I still do sometimes. It’s hard enough to get the words on the page, let alone consider how to put them there.

In Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, she says that in order to not be overwhelmed, a writer needs to focus on short assignments. She refers to the one-inch picture frame on her desk and how that little picture frame reminds her to focus on bite-sized pieces of the whole story. Basically, if you focus on one small thing at a time, the story will eventually come together to create a whole. I believe the same applies to learning the craft of writing. If aspiring writers focus on one aspect of the craft at a time, the process will seem less daunting.

Today I’d like to draw your attention to one of the most common criticisms aspiring writers face, to “absolutely avoid... [192 words to here]

Analysis

Those 192 words of padding do not contain a single mention of adverbs or clichés. The article is 916 words long, so the the author has wasted 21 percent (192/916) of his words boring and teasing the reader.

The Takeaway: Whenever you are writing straightforward copy, such as educational or instructional copy, avoid padding. Most readers will not finish reading what you wrote.

See disclaimer.

Don’t pad your copy (3)

(This will be the last post on padding for several months.)

Don’t pad* your copy, especially if you are writing educational or instructional copy. Padding makes your copy less readable, less clear, and less credible. It makes you less credible. And heavy padding irritates and even repels readers.

Example of padded copy

A blog post about passive voice begins with these 108 words of padding:

Have you ever submitted a manuscript to an editor and one of the feedback lines, if you receive any, is that you need to remove most if not all passive voice sentences?

“Uh-hem.” Yes, that is me raising my hand, waving it in the air for all to take notice.

After doing some research, I found out that passive voice is the number one mistake new writers make.

“Well, gee, somebody should have told me that before I finished writing those 350 pages.”

Now you are sitting there on your sofa or in your desk chair wondering, “What is passive voice?”

Good question and here is the answer. (Emphasis in original.)

Analysis

When a reader sees the title, “Passive Voice - How to Bore Your Readers or Not,” and wants to learn about passive voice, he begins to read the text under the headline. He is soon slogging through poorly composed prose, lacking coherence. The reader has difficulty keeping track of who is saying what, to whom, under what circumstances.

In the first paragraph, the author of the blog post (hereinafter “the author”) rhetorically asks the reader if he ever submitted a manuscript and was told to remove passive-voice sentences.

In the second paragraph, the author changes the context: Presumably quoting herself (“Uh-hem”), she describes herself as raising her hand to answer the question asked in the first paragraph. The reader now thinks that in the first paragraph the author was trying to say that the question was asked by a teacher in a classroom or a leader in a seminar. Since there are no quotation marks in the first paragraph, the reader now suspects that the author is careless with her punctuation.

In the third paragraph, the author again changes the context; now she is describing some research that she did. It sounds like she is addressing the reader again, not anyone in the class or seminar.

In the fourth paragraph, the context changes again, back to the class or seminar. Who uttered that plaintive sentence (“Well, gee,...”)? What were the 350 pages – the pages of a manuscript? What manuscript?

In the fifth paragraph, the context changes again: the author tells the reader:

Now you are sitting there... wondering, "What is passive voice?”

Of course the reader is wondering what passive voice is; he started reading the post because the title promised he would learn about passive voice! Since then, he has been patiently slogging through the author’s padding – that is, if he hasn’t given up and sought the information elsewhere.

The Takeaway: Whenever you are writing straightforward copy, such as educational or instructional copy, avoid padding. It’s OK to use personal examples, so long as they are relevant and illustrative. A little humor (grown-up humor) is OK, too – but don’t let humor overwhelm the information that you are trying to deliver.

See disclaimer.

*“To lengthen or increase, especially with extraneous or false information: pad a lecture with jokes; pad an expense account.” (Source)

Sloppy writing is bad business

Sloppy writing can damage the company that allows it to reach the eyes of customers and prospects. Here’s a recent example:

The URL-shortening company bitly made a major change in its marketing strategy and thereby confused and irritated many of its customers.* The company not only made a confusing change, but also announced the change in sloppy, heavy-handed, arrogant language.

I was making a few notes for a blog post on this rich topic when I noticed that the prolific author Gary North had already published a piece on the topic. Dr. North describes bitly’s self-destructive behavior with his usual directness and thoroughness. Here’s a sample:

“Incoherent? Yes. That’s because a programmer wrote it. Obviously, no one beta-tested it with Ordinary Users.”

You can read the full article here.

The Takeaway: I recommend you read the article, especially if you are a programmer, engineer, or other technical person. You may not have the time to keep improving your writing; you have your own work to do. Of course. But please, at least test your writing on non-technical readers before you publish it.

See disclaimer.

*Disclosure: I am one those confused and irritated customers.

Ernest Hemingway on rewriting

During a 1958 interview by the Paris Review, Ernest Hemingway (pictured) made a now-famous comment about rewriting:

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.

Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

Hemingway: Getting the words right.

In the same spirit, E. B. White wrote: “You discover what you really think by hacking away at your first spontaneous utterance.”

The Takeaway: Good writing, if it occurs at all, occurs during the rewrites.

See disclaimer.

The readability of long paragraphs

Long paragraphs will have low readability and short paragraphs will have high readability, all other things being equal. But all other things do not have to be equal; if you need to write a very long paragraph in order to develop a topic, you can still make the paragraph comfortably readable.

For some time, I’ve been watching for a good example for you. I found this one:

Example of a very long but fairly readable paragraph

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing “alternative energy,” our ruling class created arguably the world’s biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a “green agenda,” because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in “climate change.” At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

That’s a 289-word paragraph, but it is fairly readable. On the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) test, it scores a good 38.9. FRE measures readability by the lengths of words and sentences. The shorter the words and sentences, the higher (better) the score.

Besides short words and short sentences, there are two other major reasons for the good readability of this paragraph:

The first major reason is that the paragraph has the three fundamentals of a good paragraph: unity, coherence, and a topic sentence.

It has unity; that is, it sticks to one topic.

It has coherence; that is, it helps the reader follow the development. For example, it includes transition words such as thus and similarly.

It has a topic sentence; that is, it has one sentence that tells the reader what the paragraph is about: “By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support.”

The second major reason is that the author has avoided overusing pronouns, passive voice, and periodic sentences. Overusing these makes a paragraph harder to read.

The Takeaway: If you want your writing to be highly readable: Try to use short words, short sentences, and short paragraphs. Strive for unity and coherence in every paragraph. Try to include a topic sentence in every paragraph. Try to avoid overusing pronouns, passive voice, and periodic sentences. That sounds like a lot to do, but you can do it. If you pay attention to your writing, you will eventually learn how to write almost effortlessly.

See disclaimer.

Coherence of paragraphs

Grammarians speak of the coherence of paragraphs. They call a paragraph coherent if a typical reader could easily recognize how all parts of the paragraph are connected. When a paragraph has coherence, reading it is like strolling through a park. When a paragraph lacks coherence, reading it is like slogging through ankle-deep mud.

Example of a paragraph that lacks coherence

Here’s an example of ankle-deep mud. It is the opening paragraph of an April 24, 2010 article opposing ObamaCare.*

“The American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association are both enamored of the Obama administration’s quest to socialize medicine. This position would seem curious, given the large majority of clinical physicians is strongly and vocally opposed. As the primarily academic and administrative members of these organizations might explain, it’s that they care primarily for patients, society, and the ‘greater good,’ while practicing physicians harbor impure motives. Narcissistic illusions of superior intellect and education are believed to bestow the right to rule others. After all, greedy clinician worker drones cannot be expected to understand the fantastic intricacies of their queen’s beloved policies. But as we subjects know all too well, the opposite is true. Isolation in palaces and ivory towers prevents accurate observation of the realities of the world outside. Instead these ‘leaders’ imagine the world as they wish it to be, scheming ever more elaborate strategies in a futile yet disastrous attempt to shape it to their will. The roots of this pathology can be traced to misguided belief in the good government fairy, insatiable lust for notoriety and power, and economic ignorance. Their most outrageous claim is the pronouncement that ObamaCare is going to be good for physicians and hospitals.” (202 words)

Critique of the paragraph

As I’m sure you noticed long before the end, the paragraph is confusing, tiring and irritating. It contains at least 27 errors of five types: circumlocution, faulty transition, abuse of the passive voice, elegant variation, and non-parallelism. Here is one example of each type:

Circumlocution: To say that people are “enamored of” something is a roundabout way of saying that they love it. Now, one circumlocution per paragraph won’t give readers too much trouble. But there are eleven in the example paragraph. Every few seconds the reader has to stop, decipher a circumlocution, and start reading again. These stops and starts cumulatively tire and irritate the reader.

Faulty transition: When the reader reaches the fourth sentence, “Narcissistic illusions of superior intellect and education are believed to bestow the right to rule others,” he does not easily recognize how this sentence relates to the previous three or the following six. He may eventually guess that the aforementioned academic and administrative members are the same people who have the narcissistic illusions. But non-fiction authors should not force their readers to guess.

Abuse of the passive voice: The passive construction “are believed to bestow” makes the fourth sentence even more confusing.

Elegant variation: Early in the paragraph, the author uses the phrase “clinical physicians.” Later, he uses “practicing physicians,” “clinician worker drones,” and “we subjects,” possibly as synonyms. Every time the reader encounters one of these possible synonyms, he has to stop reading, look back, and guess whether the author is still referring to the same people as before. Many readers resent the frequent use of elegant variation; they infer that the author wants to indulge his whims more than he wants to clarify his meaning.

Non-Parallelism: The author writes, “...they care primarily for patients, society, and the ‘greater good,’ while practicing physicians harbor impure motives.” Apparently he is trying to set up a direct contrast; if so, he should express the parts of the contrast in parallel form; for example, "care about patients, society, and the 'greater good' " vs. "care about profits." But he does not.

A clearer version

I rewrote** the example paragraph as two paragraphs and a numbered list:

Most practicing physicians (real doctors) oppose ObamaCare. Most academic and administrative physicians (paper doctors) support ObamaCare. Unfortunately, paper doctors dominate two powerful lobbies: the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association.

Paper doctors have five illusions:

1. That they care about patients, society, and the ‘greater good,’ whereas real doctors care about profits.

2. That they are smarter and better-educated than real doctors, who are too stupid to understand ObamaCare.

3. That smarter, better-educated people are entitled to rule.

4. That the federal government is a good fairy.

5. That ObamaCare will benefit physicians and hospitals.

Paper doctors have these illusions because they work in the isolated world of the hospital boardroom and the academic ivory tower. They know nothing about economics or the real world of doctors and patients. Nevertheless, they attempt to force the real world to conform to their illusions, while they feed their lust for power and fame. (153 words)

The Takeaway: Try to make every paragraph coherent. Your readers will notice and appreciate it. And they will be much more likely to understand, accept and remember your message.

See disclaimer.

*The popular nickname “ObamaCare” refers to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

**I did my best to guess the author's meaning.