How to Break Up a Noun Cluster

Bad Writing:
the setting of greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets

Revision 1:
set targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction

Revision 2:
set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Revision 3:
set targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions

Practicing What I Preach

Here’s a sentence I can’t believe I wrote this morning:

“The mindset of privileging the institution over the individual exemplifies an insidious form of insecurity.”

In rereading this, I immediately recognized how stilted it was, and so rewrote it as follows:

“When you value the institution over the individual, you betray your insecurity.”

The lesson? Write the way you speak, and embrace personal pronouns.

Teachers! Please don’t make your students use synonyms for “said,” he opined

Take it away, Gabriel Roth:

“Replacing the word ‘said’ with ‘colorful’ or ‘lively’ synonyms is a ubiquitous symptom of bad writing. Individual instances are usually redundancies: ‘I’ll never cheat again!’ is recognizable as a promise without ‘he vowed’ after it. But a procession of ‘she explained’ and ‘he chuckled’ and ‘I expostulated’ — the reporting verbs that clog your dialogue when you follow the ‘never say said’ rule — is worse, because they force the reader’s attention away from the content of the writing and onto the writer’s hunt for synonyms ... Successful writing modulates the lavishness of its diction for effect, rather than cranking the dial all the way to maximum floridity and leaving it there.”

Bad Writing Wastes Millions and Millions of Hours

“Thirty students send me attachments named ‘psych assignment.doc.’ I go to a website for a trusted-traveler program and have to decide whether to click on GOES, Nexus, GlobalEntry, Sentri, Flux or FAST—bureaucratic terms that mean nothing to me. My apartment is cluttered with gadgets that I can never remember how to use because of inscrutable buttons which may have to be held down for one, two or four seconds, sometimes two at a time, and which often do different things depending on invisible ‘modes’ toggled by still other buttons.”

—Steven Pinker

"By Writing Densely, I'll Impress Everybody"

Martin Wolf “is as grand and important as an economic journalist can ever become,” one pundit recently observed. In that light, consider this passage from Wolf’s new book:

“With the eurozone in internal and external balance and creditor eurozone seeking internal balance via ever-­larger external imbalances in the form of current-­account surpluses, debtor eurozone could only attain internal balance with ever-­larger external imbalances in the form of current-account deficits.”

If you understood this sentence on your first try, I’ll buy you a drink.

Here’s another typical sentence:

“If domestic output is to be sufficient to generate full utilization of capacity, aggregate demand must exceed domestic output by the size of the current-­account deficit, at full employment.”

Wolf may be brilliant, but he’s a lousy writer. As Felix Salmon puts it, “Given a choice between precision and ease of understanding, Wolf will always choose precision, talking about countries’ ‘net external liability position’ (instead of ‘national debt’) on one page, and their ‘real unit labor costs’ (instead of ‘wages’) on the next.”

My colleague Paul Stregevsky is less forgiving. Wolf, he’d argue, thinks that by writing densely, he’ll impress everyone.

Think again, sir. By writing densely, you come across as dense.

If JFK Had Been a CEO Instead of a President, Here’s How His Moon Speech Would Have Sounded

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued an immediately famous call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.”

As Chip and Dan Heath point out, had Kennedy been a CEO, his words would have become insufferably stilted and drained of their vitality. He would have said something like, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.”

Sounding Smart Is Not the Same Thing As Being Smart

“College students—and, after they graduate, many working adults—have been socialized to believe they must ‘sound smart’ when they write—that is, that their regular inner monologue is not smart enough. So when they read advanced, specialized writing and don’t understand it, they understandably equate completely incomprehensible with intelligent ... What they don’t realize is that the smartest people express difficult concepts in everyday prose ... None other than Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about mind-shreddingly difficult concepts in sparse, crystal-clear prose, and insisted: ‘Anything that can be said, can be said clearly.’”

—Rebecca Schuman

Related: Are Liberal Ideas Harder to Communicate?

Why Most Business Writing Is So Bad

Way back in 1946, George Orwell translated a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes into what he called “modern English.”

Here’s the original:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

And here’s the revision:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Is it me, or does the latter remind you of the jargon-laced drivel that increasingly emanates from every crevice of corporate America today?

Write to Be UBER

That’s

• Understood
• Believed
• Enjoyed
• Remembered

Why Is Academic Writing So Bad?

Stephen Walt:

“Many academics (and especially younger ones) tend to confuse incomprehensibility with profundity. If they write long and ponderous sentences and throw in lots of jargon, they assume that readers will be dazzled by their erudition and more likely to accept whatever it is they are saying uncritically. Moreover, jargon is a way for professional academics to remind ordinary people that they are part of a guild with specialized knowledge that outsiders lack, and younger scholars often fear that if they don’t sound like a professional scholar, then readers won’t believe what they are saying no matter how solid their arguments and evidence are.”