EXHIBIT A: Years ago, my father was rushed to Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock, B.C., with an urgent heart problem. His doctor told me they were going to give him an ACE inhibitor. I’m sure the cardiology nurses knew that ACE stands for angiotensin-converting enzyme, and that ACE inhibitors are used in certain cardio emergencies. I didn’t have a clue, however, so I asked.
“What’s an ACE inhibitor?”
“It’s a drug that works on his kidneys. It reduces the risk that he’ll die of a heart attack.”
Thank you. Once cardio shorthand was translated into plain language, I understood. The doctor just needed to be reminded that he was talking to a medical dimwit.
EXHIBIT B: After I did a Ross Rules presentation at an agency in Toronto some years ago, a young fellow introduced himself and said he was “Managing Director Digital.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means,” I said.
“I’m a digital and social-media strategist, delivering programs, products, and strategies to our corporate clients across the spectrum of communications functions.”
“Sorry to be a doofus, but pretend I’m in Grade 4. What do you actually do every day?”
“Mostly, I teach big companies how to use Facebook.”
Aha! Now I understood. He taught corporate clients about Facebook analytics, advertising, algorithms, contesting, and so forth.
EXHIBIT C: In an architecture magazine, I read the following description: “The building demonstrates the architect’s commitment to technical and programmatic innovation, sinuous formal repertoire, and unconventional urbanism.”
If I were an architecture critic, maybe I’d have known what that meant. But I’m not, so I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine the building at all. What did it look like? How many storeys? Did it have doors and windows and a flat roof? What were the building materials?
When you’re talking with someone face to face, it’s easy to confirm comprehension. The person’s facial expression, body language, and tone of voice let you know if you’re being understood. Or they can ask for clarification, as I did in two of the three instances above. I needed a simple explanation to grasp what was being said.
WRITING, HOWEVER, is different. You’re not in an instant-feedback loop. All those responsive nuances are gone. If you assume that readers share your basic store of information, as the architecture writer did, you run the risk of not being understood. The jargon, acronyms, or specialized terminology one person takes for granted—at the factory, the hospital, the tech company—may leave another scratching his head.
“Why are you dumbing this down?” a science writer once asked me, as we went through his (general-interest) magazine piece, seeking simpler ways of expressing complex information. “It’s not dumbing down,” I said. “It’s making what you’re saying accessible to more people.”
If you assume your reader knows what you do, says Stephen Pinker, it’s easy to be misunderstood
STEPHEN PINKER, the Harvard psycho-linguist and author, calls this problem “the curse of knowledge.” He says it’s the single leading cause of misunderstanding, and the best explanation of why many smart people sometimes write incomprehensible prose. They either fail to consider, or simply can’t conceive, what it’s like for their readers not to know what they know.
Take an Irishman, newly arrived in North America, to a baseball game, and you’ll see what Pinker means. The subtleties of the game, second nature to you, may be utterly foreign to your guest. You must explain, for example, what a bunt is, and when and why this batter might bunt instead of swing (ninth hitter, nobody out, runner on first, tie game, eighth inning), and why with two strikes he’s no longer likely to bunt (foul it off and he’s out), what a foul bunt is, why the runner might now try to steal, what stealing is, and on and on. It’s like dealing with a child whose reply to every answer is, “Why?”
All of these examples illustrate why—especially if you don’t know much about your reader—it’s best to use plain language in your writing. Little words instead of big ones. Short sentences. Brief paragraphs. “Second last” instead of “penultimate,” “use” instead of “utilize,” “pay” instead of “remunerate.”
Sesquipedalian words have no place in clear writing. Capeesh?
Really long, rarely used words have no place in clear writing.
IN THE U.S., the federal Plain Writing Act was signed in 2010. Its intent was “to enhance citizen access to Government information and services by establishing that Government documents issued to the public must be written clearly.” Admirable goal, certainly, but overhauling the conventions and abstractions of legalese and bureaucratese has proven to be a slow process.
In Canada, the government’s Directive on the Management of Communications similarly requires that “plain language is to be used in all communications with the public.” Again, all to the good. Here, too, the wheels are turning slowly, but help is at hand. One of the many promises of artificial intelligence, it seems to me, is that AI should expedite this process.
Here’s a joke: Asked if they’d benefitted from their ESL course, 8% of respondents said “yes” and 92% said they didn’t understand the question.
DURING A ROSS Rules workshop in Vancouver recently, I asked a group of 20 business people to decode a sentence I’d recently come across. I said, “Translate this corporate jargon into language a child would understand, write your version on a piece of paper, then I’ll read out the answers. What exactly do you think the person who wrote this was trying to say?”
In the last fiscal year we realized significant cost savings by using outside-the-box thinking to facilitate best practices and incorporate photo-sensitive timers into the programming of the building’s interior and exterior illumination systems.
Most of the attendees, given a bit of time, were able to grasp the message and rephrase it more simply. Several, however, could not. The answer I liked best was this:
Last year we saved money by turning off the lights.