The Sense of Style

I've lately finished reading The Sense of Style, the latest effort by Steven Pinker. I was already a big fan of his after getting through The Better Angels of Our Nature last year: at 1056 pages, it's perfect for caving your enemies' skulls in and chaining to the feet of their womenfolk to stop them escaping.

Seriously though, I'd rank Better Angels alongside The Selfish Gene as the non-fiction book that's most impressed me. Pinker's scholarly but stylish mix of hard evidence and illuminating examples from every cultural corner adds up to an overwhelming case for liberal institutions, democracy and the rule of law as the happiest alternative to religious, left- or right-wing forms of populist authoritarianism.

I also enjoyed his The Blank Slate, which I recently read on a long train journey around south-east Asia and which puts the noble savage – and other romantic, behaviourist or postmodern challenges to the idea of a common, underlying and inescapable human nature – to the overdue sword.

The Sense of Style is another impressive piece of work. Unless you always happen to have on hand an editor who prioritises clarity and concision over adherence to arbitrary rules (hem hem), you'll find it helpful if you're keen to sharpen your writing. Pinker explores many of the points I've pushed the writers in my team to pay attention to, including why and how to:

• repeatedly revise our writing, then get someone else to do so as well
• (generally) use active rather than passive sentences
• avoid nominalisations (turning simple verbs into complicated nouns)
• be wary of 'scare quotes', clichés and idioms (lest the reader get the wrong end of the stick)
• keep singular or plural subjects and verbs in agreement, and keep an eye on the structure of our sentences
• avoid jargon and make sure we don't assume too much knowledge on the part of the reader
• cut unnecessary words
• avoid convoluted sub-clauses and ambiguous phrases
• use prepositions to aid clarity
• order sentences into coherent paragraphs, and work out where to put paragraph breaks (often one of the tasks I find trickiest)
• be aware of which supposed grammatical rules we should follow, and which we can ignore

It's no coincidence that (following Helen Sword) an academic so good at cutting through fashionable bullshit in other people's writing has produced a style guide that helps us cut through the bullshit in our own. Pinker's guide is perhaps not always as entertaining to read as F. L. Lucas's Style, though it still has plenty of amusing examples of bad writing. Either way, those of us who have to write for our supper in business, academia or the public sector can do ourselves and our readers a service by studying it.

A bit of extra work

Happy rather belated new year. It's been quite an eventful one for your humble correspondent, as I've recently moved editorial roles from the public sector in Scotland to the private one in Singapore. I've been glad to move out of education and back into the political world: which, as regular readers have probably worked out, holds as much appeal for me as any other aspect of language and communication. Blogging has accordingly been light for the last month or four, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable.

Anyway, I thought I'd try to get back into it by passing on a message from Bertie Wooster in The Mating Season. It's a good piece of advice for just about anyone writing just about anything...

In dishing up this narrative for family consumption, it has been my constant aim throughout to get the right word in the right place and to avoid fobbing the customers off with something weak and inexpressive when they have a right to expect the telling phrase. It means a bit of extra work, but one has one's code.

D'you know what I mean?

In a slight departure from the usual fare, here's Noel Gallagher in GQ sharing his thoughts on all those titles of creative works that have nothing to do with their subject matter (a point I've put less persuasively). It made me laugh.

 

But... what f***ing winds me up about books... 

This is already the best sentence I've ever heard. 

...is, like... my missus will come in with a book and it will be titled - and there's a lot of these, you can substitute any word, it's like a Rubik's Cube of shit titles - it'll be entitled The Incontinence Of Elephants. And I'll say "What's that book about?" And she'll say, "Oh it's about a girl and this load of f***ing nutters..." Right... so it's not about elephants, then? Why the f*** is it called The Incontinence Of Elephants? Another one: The Tales Of The Clumsy Beekeeper. What's that about? "Oh it's about the French Revolution." Right, f*** off. If you're writing a book about a child who's locked in a f***ing cupboard during the f***ing Second World War... he's never seen an elephant. Never mind a f***ing giraffe.

Quite.

Rights of access

A recent article in Wired on fonts for readers with dyslexia caught my eye. I'm not dyslexic so have no way of judging this objectively, but I find the text in Dyslexie easier to read than, for example, this open source alternative.  

Accessibility is something that, by law, any public sector organisation involved in publishing must take seriously: and the rest of you certainly should too. You won't always have the resources to get all of your documents translated or turned into Braille, for instance, but if you're publishing for the general public there are some basic things you can do to make your documents more accessible for readers with additional needs like dyslexia, or with levels of literacy that aren't as high as your own. For example:

• For on-screen documents, if you're publishing PDFs, a clickable table of contents based on XML heading styles (easily created in Word) helps visually impaired users with screen readers to navigate your document. Make sure headings have meaningful titles and follow a logical sequence and hierarchy.
• For websites, publish transcripts of any videos and podcasts, and include alt text for images. More information is available at W3C, but the best bit of advice I can give is to carry out extensive, iterative user testing before launching a site.

Just as many of the principles of good web writing also apply to good writing generally, so a lot of the advice for readers with dyslexia is helpful for those of us who don't have. For instance, this style guide from the British Dyslexia Association recommends large sans serif fonts with bold headings, no block caps, left alignment, bullet points, the active voice, and clear instructions given in short sentences without too many abbreviations or too much jargon. All of this stuff is good practice for effective written communication the rest of the time.

Though this be madness, yet there is method innit

Radio 4 had a useful addition last night to the points made by David Foster Wallace on the necessity of teaching formalised standard English to children who otherwise won't be exposed to it.

Noting that brevity is the soul of wit, self-made south Londoner Lindsay Johns' 15-minute lecture bemoans our tolerance of ghetto language; its speakers must be taught how to communicate the way mainstream society does, so that they can fully participate in it. The argument goes: language is power, there is an existing power structure, it has an existing linguistic structure, so outsiders need to learn it to have any access to power. Have a listen and see what you think.

 

His view — far harder for those of us who aren't black or working-class to express — is that the 'soft bigotry of low expectations' is at best counterproductive and at worst actually more racist than demanding a more clear and consistent command of vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. I've no idea how much linguistic relativism there is in today's urban comprehensives: I would have thought its deficiencies were obvious enough by now, but perhaps the fact he still feels the need to give this talk suggests the mindset lingers.

 

One might also take arms against his insistence that a hip-hop version of Hamlet is 'evil': if it acts as a bridge between no Shakespeare and pure Shakespeare then isn't that better than nothing? I don't think it's culturally relativist to say that Hamlet, unadulterated, could on first reading be intimidating for a young person with low levels of literacy and no previous exposure to classical literature, whatever their ethnicity. So there's an argument for easing them into it. A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear and all that.

 

For the white middle-class liberals he criticises, the whole thing is of course an amusing parlour game. Whenever the possibility of teaching rules of language or grammar is raised, an army of clever clogs is on hand to point out that these rules are no such thing, that the idea of 'proper' English is a Victorian myth, and so on. At their own level of ability, they're right: but as Johns articulates, inner city kids need to be taught some rules before they can successfully break any of them. As the Prince of Denmark himself puts it: "Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."

Sword's mighty pen

"Writing is a central activity in higher education across disciplines", writes Helen Sword in an example of a boring opening sentence.

 

Her treatise on stylish academic writing is a few years old now, but it's very well judged: a sort of updated version of Orwell's modern translation of Ecclesiastes, also bringing to mind Alan Sokal's great skewering of meaningless postmodern jargon.

 

It doesn't surprise me that she was inspired to write her manifesto on style — which appeared in Studies in Higher Education and which she expanded into a book — by her experiences in education, which tends to be one of the most jargon-heavy, outsider-excluding disciplines. A lot of people in education — and not just higher education — would do well to study her wise witticisms like "The crucial question for academic writers is not how to avoid jargon altogether but how to keep language at once precise and rich", "The old myth that impersonal = objective = scientifically superior still holds firm in many social scientists' minds" and "Stylish prose favours the reader, whereas stodgy prose favours the writer".

 

Much of the text I now work with could best be described as defensive: everything is hedged with an 'and/or' or an 'if appropriate' or a 'while ensuring specified guidelines are followed at all times'. Writers of passive, bureaucratic stuff like this think they're covering their backs, but really they're just patronising and annoying their readers (not that we couldn't all do with losing a bit of flab).

 

Academic writing, like political communications, is fundamentally different from corporate or organisational material in that its main purpose is usually to persuade the reader of the value of an idea, rather than just to convey information. As such, it needs to be stylish as well as clear. Higher education is more competitive than ever: a huge amount of research is now published, and most of it is excruciatingly boring and narrow enough to interest only a very few readers, if any. To stand out, academics need to be able to produce original work that draws from all sorts of areas, and to sell it in an engaging way.

 

One of her complaints is how rarely academics with interesting personal stories to tell actually let their own views and experiences come through in their writing (not a problem many journalists have). This fine piece of Swordsmanship shows why it's worth putting the effort in to bring your own voice out, even if she gets a bit carried away sometimes (funky cowboy boots and purple hair, eh?).

 

Finally, note how often the names of superstar academics cropped up in the survey of stylish peers: Pinker, Schama, Dawkins. Do they, having won fame, feel less constrained by the rules (or myths) holding back other academics: or did their stylish, ranging writing win them a big audience in the first place?

His master's tone of voice

This recent Marketing Week post on corporate tone of voice caught my eye. This figure is particularly striking — "brands [globally] spend $13bn (£8.7bn) a year on visual identity and just $2bn on verbal identity" — but it's encouraging to read of brands like O2 and Nationwide taking the war on jargon more seriously (especially as I'm a customer of both).

I wouldn't say O2's 'be more dog' billboards tell us anything useful about the clarity of the company's communications, though: the test is how easily customers can read small print and speak to call centres, not what they take from an abstract ad campaign. Attending to those small details might not win many headlines or awards, but it will help a brand quietly build a good reputation. Equally, we shouldn't assume that because a company's outlook is irreverent and unfussy it necessarily produces clear, consistent messages or makes the most effective use of communication channels. Corporate mission statements that read like Facebook status updates tend to grate.

A common complaint is that the language organisations use is often shaped by backroom technicians rather than frontline communicators, who end up having to work as translators so the public can understand what their colleagues are on about. If it's not possible to involve sales and marketing staff in the terminology process from the start of a project, it can at least help to have a comprehensive style guide that acts as a jargon-to-plain English dictionary.

This is all particularly true on social media. Corporate communicators are nowadays encouraged to speak to customers in their own language online; this is sensible, but it requires a solid grasp of who those customers are and what their language is like. As with every other aspect of the internet, risks and potential rewards are both magnified.

A final related point is that marketing folk tend to be more aware of the need to avoid jargon than senior management, who often need to be persuaded of the value of both plain English and social media. The best managers are instinctively open to such developments, won't treat them as tick-box exercises and will both invest and take part in relevant training: but this is more proof that good external communication depends on good internal communication.

Brands that aren't aware of these issues often end up annoying the public and losing customers. Now, why not have a look at a fellow comms guru's advice on a few things firms can do to avoid annoying journalists and losing press coverage?

The next large scale innovator disruptor in the quickly dying education market?

A pal writes in:

"Not sure you'll get all this — you need to read the pompous piece it's responding to but I thought it was such a hilarious pricking of a balloon that I thought you should point to it in your blog."

Done!

Testing, testing

I see the grammar debate is back in the news.  Rather tediously, and like so many of these issues, the argument often collapses into two unappealing opposites, when a perfectly sensible and uncontroversial middle ground needn't be beyond our wit.

On the one hand, there is the view that there is no such thing as standard grammar (as argued, rather eliptically, by Michael Rosen) and that, as Charlie Higson puts it, "You can't teach English without teaching grammar, it's inherent."  On the other, there is the view that grammar does have fixed rules and that these need to be not just taught but regularly tested.

I argue that one need not be a linguistic prescriptivist with a sort of Euclidean belief in a set of immutable laws — arbitrary archaisms governing when to use 'shall' and when to use 'will', how to not split infinitives, and so on — to recognise the value of having a decent grasp of the forms of sentence structure and orthography commonly used in British English to facilitate clarity in written and spoken communication.  The sad reality is that many children will not be exposed to this outside the classroom and will not have them on hand when they first go for an interview.  The controversy seems to be about whether teaching critical analysis of Shakespeare, Burns, Orwell and the rest of them will automatically embed a working grasp of these useful conventions, or whether this needs to be done separately and explicitly.

Here comes the smug middle-ground bit, and the plug for my employers.  In Scotland, I think we've got the balance about right now.  At SQA we've recognised that this osmotic assumption is a bit out of date.  That's why we've taken advantage of a new, modular setup to include distinct units in Literacy that will be incorporated into English (and Gàidhlig) courses.  In much the same way, we've acknowledged that teaching the -ometries in Maths doesn't necessarily produce numerically competent and confident school-leavers, so we've done the same with Numeracy units.  We've also opted to combine continuous coursework with final exams, which again seems to me preferable to a system of assessment based entirely on one or the other.

(Perhaps this is all unnecessary though; the best argument we could present to teenage boys is that a good grasp of grammar will help you get not just jobs but girls.)

It's depressing that this gets hijacked into another interminable left/right argument.  By now, we really should be able to agree that if grammatical rules aid clarity and comprehension we should keep them, encourage them, and teach them to children; if not, we shouldn't bother with them.  Why we can't just accept this principle then work out the details, rather than turn it into a partisan political debate, is completely beyond me.  How many other countries do this?

Perhaps the reason is that, as Chris Cook puts it, "90% of education 'commentary' reflects the writer's own school neuroses."  I couldn't possibly comment...

How's that squirty inky stuff workin' out for ya?

I've written a lot in favour of the principles of plain English and Orwellian language generally, so I enjoyed Ed Smith's piece in the New Statesman challenging the ideas the great man laid out in Politics and the English Language. The penultimate paragraph was especially well put:

Orwell argues that the sins of obfuscation and euphemism followed inevitably from the brutalities of his political era. In the age of the atom bomb and the Gulag, politicians reached for words that hid unpalatable truths. By contrast, our era of vague political muddle and unclear dividing lines has inspired a snappy, gritty style of political language: the no-nonsense, evidence-backed, bullet-pointed road to nowhere.

 

It's very hard to disagree with that, particularly with the point about evidence-based policymaking, a phrase often used as a figleaf for policy-based evidencemaking. But I think the wider argument rests on something of a misreading of plain English; of when it needn't be used and when it must.

Any clear and honest communication of a political message is obviously a challenge both to bureaucratic or academic jargon that overcomplicates issues, but less obviously a challenge to the dumbing down that oversimplifies them (which seems often to be confused for plain English). Owen Jones is quite perceptive in noting that the left are particularly guilty on the former score, and the right on the latter: though we could hardly accuse Obama, say, of subxaggerating his backstory.

It's perfectly possible to be insincere with simple, straightforward language. Speaking honestly ought to be just as important as speaking plainly. Finally, it seems to be stating the obvious that plain English is necessary when the writer's primary purpose is to communicate clearly, but might not be when it isn't. A commentor on Stephen Poole's Guardian piece puts it perfectly:

I think you misunderstand the point of plain English a bit (but then in fairness, perhaps some of its adherents do as well). Most people wouldn't expect poetry to be written in plain English. But most people wouldn't expect poetry in a letter from the council, or a bank. Those are the kinds of communication plain English needs to be used in, so that everybody is able to easily understand information that directly affects their lives.

 

Frustrated narcissists in damp garrets are welcome to shovel as much allusion, amphibology and aureation into their fevered, ne'er-to-be-read ramblings and rants as they can manage: but please keep them away from writing letters for HMRC.

Nowt in front of the children

The story about a school in Middlesbrough taking a stern line on non-standard English caught my eye the other day, as did Tom Chivers' take on it.

I agree with Chivers and Wallace that the interests of the learner count most: rightly or wrongly, children will become adults who will be judged on how they speak, and anyone who claims not to judge others by what comes out of their mouths has lies coming out of their own. But I would add that clear communication demands quite a high degree of formalised English. I can (usually, pretty much) understand what any of my fellow Glaswegians are saying to me, but a non-native English-speaking visitor (or even a non-Glaswegian native English speaker) might find himself completely confused by the local vernacular — as when my guest from London was surprised to find two sausages in his 'single sausage' order. Expect plenty of similarly sidesplitting examples of native miscommunication when we host the Commonwealth Games next year.

It's both more considerate and more efficient to be able to speak and write in a recognised and clear form of English. That's not to deny the richness that regional language adds to British culture and the English language; it often saddens me to hear people in parts of East Anglia or the southwest speaking a homogenised estuary English when two generations ago they would have had a distinctly local accent and vocabulary. I don't envy teachers the task of finding the right balance between preserving this heritage while instilling a globally vital form of communication. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that, as English speakers, it's only local forms facing extinction, and not our whole language.

There's also a third category of people (usually politicians, academics or middle managers in large organisations) who think that because they don't use local slang they're in command of 'proper' English, but whose idea of communication is to stuff sentences with jargon, obfuscation and words that generally add nothing to the meaning. This often comes down to a lack of intellectual confidence: they imagine that plain English is somehow unsophisticated English, or try too hard to compensate for not having much of interest to say.

The sad truth is that this lack of confidence often stems from something missing in their own schooldays — so perhaps we should applaud anything to prevent the urchins of Middlesbrough becoming the bullshitters of tomorrow.

We are all liberals now

With the unsurprising re-election of President Obama, and with voters across the United States endorsing gay marriage and cannabis, we've heard a lot in the last week about the triumph of liberalism. What better time, then, to rid ourselves of an increasingly useless part of the political lexicon?

To a British politics 'n' history graduate like me, the word 'liberal' will always evoke John Stuart Mill's belief that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others". It also brings to mind the classical liberalism of political economy that began with Adam Smith and continued through Hayek and Friedman: the mantle that today would be claimed by libertarians.

At first, then, the L-word¹ meant 'being left alone by the government', as economic liberalism still does in Britain, or as neoliberalism now does around the world. Annoyingly, in many other cases it's often unclear whether it still means that or its opposite. We all like to consider ourselves liberal towards oppressive governments, but have very differing opinions on whether a particular government policy helps freedom (by freeing people from poverty, as the liberal left see it) or hinders it (by interfering in people's business, as the liberal right see it).

The waters got muddier after 1906, as Lloyd George's Liberal government introduced pensions and ramped up taxes on the wealth creators/parasites rich. Ever since then, it's been tricky to work out whether British Liberals and their successor parties are really on the left or the right — whether they want fairness or laissez-faireness — a fudge that recently helped get them back into government, but immediately became a problem again once they got there.

In the United States, 'liberal' is today almost entirely synonymous with 'left-wing'; when someone like Norman Mailer describes himself as a 'left conservative', we might take that to mean a Blue Labour-esque position that is conservative on social issues but left-leaning on the economy. I see no contradiction in that, but it strikes us as unusual because 'liberal' is now so often used to mean both left-wing (economically) and tolerant, permissive, etc (socially).

This also leaves us with the problem of why 'conservative' has become synonymous with right-leaning on the economy, particularly when conserving things is often the last thing on radical rightwing minds. I suppose this politico-linguistic problem really took off when the non-left, in Western countries, abandoned the Keynesian economic consensus in the 1970s.

In Australia, meanwhile, the Liberal Party is the equivalent of the US's Republicans (though they generally oppose a republic) or Britain's Conservatives (who are these days pretty liberal). They might be truest to the low church, small state origins of the idea, but we're left with a word that can mean its complete opposite, depending on the country, the context and no doubt the company.

Should we instead use 'progressive' to describe left-liberals, as many of them do? I would suggest not: any political idea to which no-one could reasonably object (in this case, 'progress') is not an idea at all. Similarly, the left in America seem to take offence at being accused (or take offence on Obama's behalf when he is accused) of 'socialism', a term many in Britain and Europe are still happy to use to describe their own set of beliefs. Might 'social democrat' (now a bit out of fashion in Britain) be less offensive, or does that suggest something more Mailer-ish; too much about responsibilities and not enough about rights? Would 'liberaltarian' be the most honest candidate, or is it just too much of a mouthful?

I suggest we seek guidance from the model offered by the excellent Political Compass, refining right and left economically into whether they are socially liberal or conservative (though even they use the rather loaded term 'authoritarian'; illiberalism and authoritarianism aren't quite the same thing, and there are plenty of constitutional conservatives who would pass as civil libertarians). The top left and bottom right of the compass have always seemed to me the most logical positions — either you accept government interference or social norms to constrain your behaviour or you don't — but that's for another post.

The point is that we have to use these terms with care, and should be quick to ditch them once they become interchangeable. Clarity in our political language might then become our best weapon against the lack of clarity in our political thinking.

^{1. [I've capped the L because so many sans serif fonts show a lower case l as indistinguishable from an upper case I: another serious failure of communications if you ask me.]↩}

Period drama

As our American cousins go to the polls, readers of this blog need not fear that important issues like full stops and exclamation marks have been overlooked in the campaign.

And yet, the best communicators are like field marshals, attending to the broad sweep of rhetorical strategy as well as the details of syntax and orthography. Obama was praised for just such 'soaring oratory' in 2008, though inevitably there's been less sign of that this time.

In the end, the result will probably come down to which candidate has done a better job of framing the language used to describe his policies, record and background — and surely no-one can seriously think that leaves us with Mitt '1%' Romney.

Arch language

The Olympics haven't officially started, but already we have a report of broken communications. The BBC has the story:

'Outside Lords this morning there are dozens of members of the public trying to get in to watch the archery. They are not being allowed in. This is the "ranking round" where archers attain a score which then leaves them in a certain seeding for the main event. Today's archery is taking place on the nursery ground, not in the main playing area.

But the London 2012 website advertised today's round as "unticketed". Many spectators interpreted that as open to the public and have arrived expecting to get in. One couple told me they had arrived having been told specifically by Locog they could bring their grandchild in.

There is a lot of ill will and bad feeling on the pavement.'

Why did the organisers describe the event as 'unticketed' rather than 'not open to the public'? It seems that even Locog staff, understandably, interpreted 'unticketed' as 'not requiring a ticket'.

This story illustrates perfectly how sloppy language can lead not only to widespread confusion, but also to bad public relations. Let's hope the people running the Games have now learned a lesson about the importance of plain English.

Good prose is like a windowpane

Welcome to my new blog about language and communications. If you don't know me, I'm Nicholas Mayes and I work as an editor in the education sector in Scotland (teaching those who teach how to teach how to write). My background is in journalism, public relations and parliamentary reporting.

There are already some excellent guides on how to use grammar and plain English online. I hope instead to use this blog as a space for exploring how we communicate: the ways we communicate well and the (often amusing, often annoying, and sometimes dangerous) things that happen when we don't. I plan to share any insights my day job offers, and to give my take on anything that catches my eye in the news. I hope you'll offer some thoughts of your own in the comments.

The title of this post, by the way, comes from a quote from my linguistic and political hero (the two overlap a lot), George Orwell:

'One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.'

We need not write with a political purpose to avoid these traps, but we do need to write with some sort of purpose. I would offer three simple rules before putting pen to paper:

• Decide what you want to say.
• Decide who you want to say it to.
• Decide the best way of saying it to them.

Once you've done this, you can go about following the advice Orwell offered in Politics and the English Language:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Follow these rules, and your communications will stand out from the meaningless, decorative, purple humbug that makes up so much of what we read and hear every day.