More John Leo: good advice for young writers

Recently I recommended an essay by author John Leo, a man who has wisdom useful to young writers.

Here’s a longer piece by Mr. Leo. It’s a speech he delivered at Ursinus College in 2006. It combines good advice on the basics of writing and interesting background on how writing has changed over the last few generations.

As an example of change, the speech describes how the per-word pricing of telegrams inspired telegram senders to omit all unnecessary words. Occasionally, this “telegraphic” style caused amusing ambiguities, such as in this celebrated example:

When Cary Grant was abroad, a feature writer cabled him from New York to doublecheck his age. “How old Cary Grant?” asked the message. Grant cabled back, “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

The Takeaway: Read John Leo’s speech, “On Good Writing.” In only 3,250 words, it delivers a wealth of advice useful to young writers.

See disclaimer.

A readability example, before and after (1)

To produce clear writing, you need to produce readable writing. Readability is a prerequisite to clarity. Let’s take a look at a readability example: two difficult paragraphs and a rewrite of the same two paragraphs.

For the readability measurements, I used Flesch Reading Ease (FRE). FRE scores typically run from 0 (very low readability) to 100 (very high readability). Here are a few sample ranges of scores:

60s Reader’s Digest
50s Time magazine
40s The Wall Street Journal
30s Harvard Law Review; white papers
20s IRS forms; academic papers
10s Many high-tech web sites

Readability example: before

Here are two consecutive paragraphs from the web site of a technology company:

Maintaining compliance with the growing number of industry regulations can be an overwhelming, costly and time consuming effort for organizations. Additionally, the financial and legal ramifications of a regulatory violation could be enormous, not to mention the potential negative impact on an organization’s reputation. Assuring the integrity and privacy of financial and operational information is a necessity for an organization's risk mitigation and regulatory compliance strategy.

Today’s enterprise needs to comply with international, federal and state mandates, follow corporate best practices and maintain client and investor confidence, therefore organizations must have continuous auditing and compliance processes and controls in place to safeguard critical data.

The FRE score is 0.0 – harder to read than a tax form.

Readability example: after

Without losing any important content, you could quickly and easily revise it to this:

To comply with the growing number of industry regulations can be overwhelming, costly and time consuming. A single violation could be costly and legally complex. And it could damage your reputation. You must assure the integrity and privacy of financial and operational information. And you must make this assurance part of your risk mitigation and regulatory compliance strategy.

Today, you must comply with international, federal and state mandates. You must follow corporate best practices and maintain client and investor confidence. To achieve all that, you need to safeguard critical data. And to do that, you need to have continuous auditing and compliance processes and controls in place.

The FRE score is 40.5 – about as readable as The Wall Street Journal.

Whenever you write, be mindful of word length and sentence length. Whenever you edit, watch for long words that should be short words. And consider breaking up any sentences longer than 20 words.

For business writing, always try for a score above 50. Settle for 30 to 50 if the topic requires it (as I did here). But never go below 30. That’s where you start losing readers – and sales.

Readers of academic and scientific writing generally tolerate lower readability than readers of business writing. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should strive for a low score in academic and scientific writing. All readers appreciate high readability, often unconsciously.

The Takeaway: Get in the habit of checking readability as you check spelling. Aim high. With continued practice, you will be able to attain high scores almost effortlessly.

See Disclaimer.

The maniacal use of “issues” (4)

In earlier posts (1, 2, 3), I explained that the vague word issues had become a mania word. Many writers and speakers abuse this handy word in order to avoid speaking clearly or committing themselves; in short, they use it as a weasel word.

Here’s another example of the abuse of issues.

An article in Spiegel Online, titled “The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447: Reconstruction of 447’s Final Minutes Reveal Continuing Safety Problems in Civil Aviation” (February 26, 2010), contained these paragraphs:

Flying through thunderclouds over the Atlantic, more and more ice was hurled at the aircraft. In the process, it knocked out other, far more important, sensors: the pencil-shaped airspeed gauges known as pitot tubes.

One alarm after another lit up the cockpit monitors. One after another, the autopilot, the automatic engine control system, and the flight computers shut themselves off. “It was like the plane was having a stroke,” says Gérard Arnoux, the head of the French pilots union SPAF.

The final minutes of flight AF 447 had begun. Four minutes after the airspeed indicator failed, the plane plunged into the ocean, killing all 228 people on board.

…

Pitot tubes sometimes also fail on Boeing aircraft. When SPIEGEL contacted the American Federal Aviation Administration, the body which oversees civilian flight in the US, the FAA confirmed that there had been eight such incidents on a Boeing 777, three on a 767, and one each on a 757 and a Jumbo. Boeing is currently conducting a study on the safety effects of “high-altitude pitot icing on all models in its product line,” says FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette. The FAA did not, however, identify “any safety issues arising” during these incidents.

What did the FAA spokeswoman (or, if the reporter paraphrased her words, the reporter) mean by the vague phrase “safety issues”?

She (or he) may have meant to say that, during the 13 incidents studied by Boeing, the pitot tubes had not iced up;

Or the pitot tubes had iced up, but not enough to have affected the airspeed readings;

Or the pitot tubes had iced up and had affected the airspeed readings, but not by enough to shut down the autopilot;

Or the pitot tubes had iced up and had affected the airspeed readings and had shut down the autopilot, but not the automatic engine control system or the flight computers;

Or the pitot tubes had iced up and had affected the airspeed readings and had shut down the autopilot and automatic engine control system, but not the flight computers;

Or, the pitot tubes had iced up and had affected the airspeed readings and had shut down the autopilot, automatic engine control system and flight computers, as on the doomed Air France Flight 447, but the crews had overcome these problems and had landed safely.

Or one of many other possible meanings.

The Takeaway: Let others be maniacal; you be sober. Before you reach for the handy, vague word issues, ask yourself, “What is a clear way to make my point?” Don’t make your readers guess what you mean; if you do it frequently, your readers may become suspicious of your intentions.

See disclaimer.

A mixed metaphor in a book title

An amusing mixed metaphor appears on the cover of Creationism’s Trojan Horse, by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross; the book’s subtitle is The Wedge of Intelligent Design.

The Takeaway: Have a great day.

See disclaimer.

Bad diction: the uninhabited clause (11)

Overuse of the uninhabited clause is a form of bad diction. I use the phrase “uninhabited clause” to describe a main clause* with a subject that is a physical thing or a concept, as opposed to a person or group of persons.

I have selected two 200-word passages to highlight the difference between uninhabited clauses and inhabited clauses.

Passage 1: Mostly Uninhabited

Here are seven consecutive sentences, totaling 204 words, from Thomas L. Friedman:

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

There are seven subjects of main clauses. One subject is human; six are non-human:

NON-HUMAN - efforts remind
NON-HUMAN - it is
NON-HUMAN - invasions were
NON-HUMAN - which is
NON-HUMAN - getting was
NON-HUMAN - helicopter threaded
HUMAN - [you] imagine

Passage 2: Mostly inhabited

Here are nine consecutive sentences, a total of 199 words, from Malcolm Gladwell:

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed.

There are ten subjects of main clauses. Eight are human; two are non-human:

HUMAN - James Moroney told
NON-HUMAN - idea was
HUMAN - They want
HUMAN - I get
HUMAN - they get
HUMAN - they have said
NON-HUMAN - idea was
HUMAN - people valued
HUMAN - witness said
HUMAN - Moroney disagreed

In Mr. Friedman’s passage, 17 percent of subjects are human; In Mr. Gladwell’s sample, 80 percent are human. You can feel the difference. Generally speaking, the greater the percentage of human subjects, the more immediate the writing feels.

Please note: I have compared these two brief passages from two authors only to discuss a single point of diction. I have not implied a comparison of their overall writing styles.

The Takeaway: Whenever you feel that your prose sounds remote, conduct this test. Select a paragraph or two. Take out a pen and circle every non-human subject of every main clause. Then read aloud all those non-human subjects and their verbs, as in the list above. You will see, hear and feel the remoteness of your copy. Where possible, put in some people. It will make your prose feel more immediate to your reader.

*Also called primary clause, independent clause, and sentence.

See disclaimer.