Chapter 8: Writing: Words, Flow and Storytelling

The only purpose for which cultures create language is to transport ideas. It is this simple, then: A society cannot function very well with a transportation system that damages its cargo in transit. Albert Joseph73

After you have planned your thought leadership material, decided on your content and sketched out a structure, you come to the nitty gritty of writing: the words and sentences you will use and the literary devices you will employ to turn the intangible ideas in your mind and factual points into concrete words on the page.

The challenge is to capture meaning accurately and convey your message while writing prose that appeals to your audience. This is the hallmark of great writers — you know exactly what they’re saying and, even if their topic is technical or outside your areas of interest, their copy is easy to follow and a pleasure to read. A good example is Bill Bryson, author of non-fiction books such as A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books, 2003) as well as numerous travel diaries and writing guides. Bryson writes so well and is such an acute observer that you could happily read him describe paint dry.

Another great model for thought leaders who are writing in the business or public policy spheres is Bloomberg News, which is primarily used by clients in the financial markets and by other media. Bloomberg’s focus on the high-speed, data-driven markets — combined with the influence of its founding editor Matthew Winkler — has given it a unique style and way of handling factual information that lends itself to thought leadership writing.

The most distinctive thing about Bloomberg copy is it is high on detailed facts and low on adjectives. In fact, one of the ‘Five Fs’ Bloomberg reporters receive in the Bloomberg style guide is called the ‘Factual word’. This says: ‘Be the most factual. Rely on nouns and verbs; they’re more precise than the adjectives and adverbs favored by many of our competitors. Strive for 100 per cent accuracy ... We want to impress readers with the quality of our information, rather than the intricacy of our prose.’

This is an approach any thought leader should follow in their writing. Focus on providing quality ideas, rather than ornate prose. But that doesn’t mean being simplistic. The Bloomberg guide also includes the edict that its news should be ‘Written in a style that a dope can understand and a professional can appreciate’.74

Word choice

The fundamental building blocks of your writing are the words you choose. Given that English has more than half a million words, I won’t discuss them all. However, there are a number of issues regarding words that crop up regularly in thought leadership writing.

Use short, simple words

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge. Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all. Winston Churchill75

Winston Churchill was renowned for his writing and speeches, in part because he tended to keep his writing lean and direct. As the quote above suggests, this usually meant using the shortest, most active versions of words — ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’, as opposed to flowery waffle like ‘our great nation will go forth and engage them fiercely on sandy shores’. Another example is Julius Caesar’s ‘We came, we saw, we conquered’, which has the added advantage of being memorable because it is parallel, meaning that the three elements in the sentence follow the same grammatical format, in this case pronoun (we) and then verb (came, saw, conquered).

The benefit of writing succinctly and directly is that you can convey more information and ideas in the same number of letters. It also makes your material easier to read. If language is the transport mechanism for ideas, then short, simple words are like the flat-back truck carrying the float display in a street parade — almost invisible but vital to the success of the whole enterprise.

Sir Gustav Nossal, the eminent scientist and successful public communicator (see profile in chapter 3), offers the following advice to experts writing for lay audiences.

I like to put things into fairly plain English, avoiding technical jargon. But I also like to write in what you might call a dense manner. I don’t use many adjectives and adverbs; I like to make sure that each sentence is conveying something, so you don’t pad it out with ‘public service’ speak, you know, with circumlocutions and various things like that …

If the subject matter is difficult, I will also search quite hard for homely analogies that will be familiar to the reader. You know, not to trivialise it too much, I’ll compare lymphocytes (that’s lymphocyte white cells in the blood — I won’t just say ‘lymph’) to a wrestler wrestling a foe to the ground.

Your thought leadership writing needn’t be completely spare, but try to use just enough letters to do the job. The question to ask yourself is whether the long version of a term or phrase adds anything significant beyond a shorter alternative. Here are some unnecessarily long words that crop up regularly and shorter forms you can consider.

Shorter alternatives for common words

Some of these reductions and many more can be found in Harold Evans’ Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers, a classic text first published in 1972.76 Another good book for anyone wanting to write more succinctly is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.77

Watch out for absolute terms

Absolute terms are ‘-est’ words such as ‘best’, ‘fastest’, ‘biggest’ and also words such as ‘most’, ‘unique’ and ‘ultimate’. Absolute terms are useful for describing things that really are the best or unique but are often used inappropriately. In thought leadership writing, absolute terms should only be used when they are accurate. The problem with using absolute terms inaccurately is your material loses credibility and can be easily dismissed as propaganda. Here, at the level of individual words, you can see what thought leadership writing is all about and how it differs from the hyperbolic language often found in advertising and marketing writing.

Avoid overused and debatable terms

You should also be careful when choosing words and phrases that are used so regularly they are dull or clichéd, or terms which could be questioned. This includes words such as ‘key’, ‘competitive’, ‘innovative’, ‘smart’, ‘global’ and ‘increasingly’. Improve the clarity and robustness of sentences by deleting excess adjectives and replacing often indefensible terms such as ‘exponential’ with similarly positive but more accurate terms such as ‘rapid’. As Mark Twain said, ‘When you catch an adjective, kill it.’78

Use jargon with care

As the specialist terminology used within groups such as the members of a profession or industry, jargon is a convenient way to capture complex concepts in short words or phrases. However, if you use terms that require specialist knowledge, you will lose the understanding of non-specialists. This means it’s wise to avoid jargon when writing for wide audiences, or to at least explain jargon terms if you use them.

Another reason to avoid jargon is that these terms are often subject to debate within fields. In other words, your understanding of the term might be different even to that of other specialists. For example, at the time of writing the IT industry was actively using, yet vigorously arguing about, the meaning of the term ‘cloud computing’. This meant that using the term made any related material as cloudy as the concept itself. Where you want to avoid jargon, explain concepts in full using simple, widely understood words.

Use some rich and colourful language

While it is good to keep your writing clear and concise, you don’t want to veer into the ditch of dullness. Look for ways to add flair and clarity with interesting and surprising words. These can make your expression more precise and engaging, add nuance and help highlight points. Using richer language can achieve other goals as well, such as making your writing funny, poetic or appropriate to a technical or other niche audience.

London Mayor Boris Johnson is a brilliant writer who takes an obvious pleasure in using interesting and unusual words. In this extract he uses colourful language to introduce a family that lets their young children walk or cycle to school in London. The full column argues that London has become safer in recent years.

Every so often I find a new hero. I read in the papers of some individual who is managing to swim against the glutinous tide of political correctness. In this age of air-bagged, mollycoddled, infantilised over-regulation it can make my spirits soar to discover there is still some freedom fighter who is putting up resistance against the encroachments of the state.79

Consider search engines

It is also important to consider the internet when choosing your words. If you want your thought leadership to be easily found by people using search engines like Bing or Google, you should consider which key words to include in the title and body of your material. If your area of expertise is desalination systems to make water for cities, you will need to make sure your piece is peppered with key words such as ‘desalination’, ‘water’, ‘city’ and ‘urban’. This task can be made easier by using online tools to look up which words and phrases people commonly type into search engines. Some of the best of these tools can be found within Google’s website.

Write in concise, active sentences

The difference between active and passive sentences is hard to describe but easy to spot. You’ll find plenty of active writing in tabloid newspapers, for instance, and plenty of passive writing in ponderous government reports.

From a grammatical point of view, the way to write actively is to ensure you include the most important actors in the early part of your sentence. That actor should be the antagonist, the one driving any verbs that follow. So, while a government official might write a passive sentence such as ‘The man was bitten by a dog’, a tabloid newspaper editor would make it active by saying, ‘Dog bites man’.

Here is another example:

Passive: An assessment was conducted by the company and a report will be presented by Jim Smith.

Active: The company conducted an assessment and Jim Smith will present a report.

If you find the grammatical discussion confusing, just focus on writing succinct sentences and trying to use the shorter versions of verbs (for example, ‘bit’ instead of ‘bitten’). Doing this will also usually make your writing livelier.

Metaphors, similes and analogies

Why are some writers so entertaining? It’s often the way they compare one thing to another, or describe something as being something else, with humorous or instructive effect. This is the land of metaphors and similes, and it’s a great place for thought leadership writers to visit.

You are using a metaphor when you say something is something else — ‘the bank is a rock’. Similes compare two distinct items by using the words ‘like’, ‘as’ or ‘than’, such as ‘the bank is like a rock’ or ‘the bank is solid as a rock’. Politicians and journalists regularly use these devices. Among the most dangerous is former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, who once belittled the opposition treasurer Peter Costello by saying, ‘The thing about poor old Costello is he is all tip and no iceberg’.80

Metaphors, similes and their close cousin analogies — drawing a comparison between two things that might seem different — are useful when you want to describe complex ideas to non-specialists. Here, George Friedman describes America as analogous to a teenager in his book The Next 100 Years:

Psychologically, the United States is a bizarre mixture of overconfidence and insecurity. Interestingly, this is the precise description of the adolescent mind, and that is exactly the American condition in the twenty-first century.81

Where the image created is strong enough it can become integral to the message, such as the notion of a ‘golden parachute’ for departing executives, the ‘green shoots’ of economic recovery or Edward de Bono’s ‘thinking hats’.

Rhythm and flow

The rhythm and flow of writing comes from the words you choose and the order in which you place them. The issue — and the heart of poetry — is how they sound and what sort of tempo you create as you use them in groups. Good writing is like music, with which you might create slow, moody passages or fast, staccato sequences with dramatic high notes. This can come from mixing long sentences with short ones. Or you can use devices like repetition to set up an obvious meter, such as Barack Obama’s ‘Yes we can’.

Whether you love or hate the Australian businessman-turned-politician Malcolm Turnbull, there is no denying he can write beautifully and has a sharp eye for detail. The following passage is from an opinion article published the day after former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was sacked by his party. In just 82 words, Turnbull demonstrates pathos, alliteration, short sentences, an unusual turn of phrase (‘crack hardy’), balanced sentences and rhetorical devices such as the use of questions and repetition.

Axed and humiliated: someone should give this poor bastard a hug

All eyes were focused on Kevin Rudd as he gave his last press conference as prime minister. We saw him try to crack hardy with a little laugh, the false laughter that comes from a heart that only wants to scream and rage against the world. We saw him cry. The tears were genuine but inscrutable. Was he crying in self-pity, or was it rage? Was it disappointment or just the whole horror of the moment; as unspeakable as it is incomprehensible?82

You can find many examples of thought leadership writing that draw on these same techniques. One is the following passage from the Climate Change Review written by the Australian economist and business leader Ross Garnaut. Take note of the short sentences, rich vocabulary and repetition of expressions such as ‘It is’, which come together to give the piece rhetorical power.

A diabolical problem and a saving grace

Climate change is a diabolical policy problem. It is harder than any other issue of high importance that has come before our polity in living memory. Climate change presents a new kind of challenge. It is uncertain in its form and extent, rather than drawn in clear lines. It is insidious rather than (as yet) directly confrontational. It is long term rather than immediate, in both its impacts and its remedies. Any effective remedies lie beyond any act of national will, requiring international cooperation of unprecedented dimension and complexity.83

Presenting figures and acronyms

One of the challenges of thought leadership writing, especially in a business or scientific context, is weaving numbers and acronyms into sentences while maintaining the sort of rhythm and flow that a master writer like Ernest Hemingway might have found appealing. The solution typically lies in simplifying your copy by finding elegant ways to express points, and in reading sentences aloud and then adjusting them to hear how they flow. The result will be material that is easier to read, comprehend and remember.

Acronyms

Acronyms are sets of initials that stand in for a term, such as CEO for chief executive officer or UN for the United Nations. They’re a type of abbreviation that condenses any word or term into a set of initials or a new, shorter word. Acronyms are helpful because using them helps to reduce the length of your copy, especially when you’re writing for an audience that will know the acronym in question. However, you need to be careful acronyms don’t make your sentences incomprehensible or ugly.

The general rule is to spell out a term the first time you use it, then put the acronym in brackets. For example, write ‘United States (US)’ first, then use ‘US’.

Acronyms can undermine rhythm or make sentences difficult to read, so you may need to make some judgments based on how you think your audience will approach them. The big question here is whether people will read an acronym as it is or whether they’ll sound it out in their heads. In the sentence ‘He withdrew cash from the ATM’, will the reader see the ‘ATM’ as three letters or will they expand it to ‘automatic teller machine’ in their mind? Suddenly your short sentence becomes long and the rhythm changes.

The situation becomes more complicated when you have multiple acronyms in a sentence, which can happen when writing about topics such as medicine or information technology. But what can you do? Consider one or more of the following solutions.

• Use a term in full, even if you’ve already set up its acronym earlier in your copy, if that will make your sentence easier to read and/or ensure the reader understands what the acronym stands for. For example, I spelled out ‘information technology’ above because it looks nicer than IT and it’s been many pages since I defined the term.

• Use the acronym first, then put its longer form in the brackets. This technique is unconventional so use it with care, but this setup lets an expert reader see the acronym, know what it means, then skip the definition. However, the lay reader will be able to immediately see what the term means rather than needing to refer to a glossary or find an external explanation.

• Avoid acronyms altogether by finding plain English alternatives. This can be particularly beneficial when using clichéd acronyms. For example, ROI could be spelled out in full as ‘return on investment’ or replaced by ‘gain’, ‘benefit’ or ‘investment return’.

Be mindful of whether an acronym is close to a normal-sounding word and will therefore work in most sentences, such as UNESCO. Or whether it’s a difficult one like FaHCSIA, the name of the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. The more hideous the abbreviation, the less you should use it.

When you use an acronym in a sentence it’s important to know how it is pronounced so you know whether to put ‘a’ or ‘an’ in front of it. The rule is that you follow the sound, so it would be ‘a UNESCO plan’ because the pronunciation starts with a ‘y’ (a consonant), but ‘an NGN’ because the first sound is ‘en’ (a vowel).

Numbers

It’s important to see numbers as words. They might look like numbers on the page, but like acronyms they will be enunciated in someone’s head or spoken on a podium. This means you need to consider how they’ll affect the rhythm and flow of your writing. This matters in thought leadership because you’re seeking to persuade somebody of an argument, so you need to keep them reading and engaged so you can keep convincing.

Also think about what numbers really mean. A common issue is whether to include decimal points with a number and, if so, how many. For example, it is oxymoronic to say, ‘There were approximately 5.98 million people in Kansas when Dorothy landed’. If you’re being approximate then say ‘about 6 million’. A caveat here is that the way numbers are expressed can have a precise meaning in areas such as science, where the number of decimal places will indicate the accuracy of the figures. So, ensure your material reads well but also confirm it’s correct within your field.

Percentages

The main issue regarding percentages is whether to use ‘per cent’ or the symbol ‘%’. This is simply a question of style, so you have discretion provided you’re then consistent throughout your document. You might also be directed by your organisation’s style guide. However, there are some points to keep in mind. The percentage symbol is well understood, keeps your copy short, works well in tables, captions and other tight spaces, and has the helpful habit of staying with its number at the end of lines (i.e. ‘9%’ will all be taken to a new line but ‘9 per cent’ can be broken in two places unless you use non-breaking spaces). On the other hand, using the full words can make documents more readable, particularly in a speech where it’s important not to trip yourself.

Word repetition

You can liven up your writing by varying the words you use to refer to the same things. This will make your prose more interesting and add information. So instead of writing ‘Bill Clinton likes pink apples; Clinton was among the first to discover pink apples’, you might write, ‘Bill Clinton likes pink apples; the former president was among the first to discover this novel fruit’.

There have been long and vigorous debates among writers about how much to do this. Almost a hundred years ago the legendary British lexicographer and grammarian Henry Watson Fowler coined the term ‘elegant variation’ to describe what he saw as people trying so hard to find synonyms that they wound up with overly flowery prose and ambiguity. For this reason, some writers prefer to be clear and continue using the same word to describe something, even if it means saying ‘bridge’ six times rather than using alternatives like ‘structure’, ‘span’ and ‘link’.

A lot of business writing screams out for authors to pay attention to repetition, for two reasons. The first is that commercial writing employs a very narrow band of words, which can easily become overused. These are terms like ‘key’, ‘better’, ‘leading’, ‘improve’ and ‘ensure’. One trick is to search for these terms in your document. If you’ve used the same words often, consider swapping some of them for a synonym.

The second reason to hunt down and kill overused words is they’re often nonsensical in the context of a particular sentence. If you stop and ask yourself what words like ‘ensure’, ‘key’ or ‘today’ mean — or if they add any meaning — you usually end up deleting them, finding a better word or rewriting the whole sentence to make it more precise.

Humour

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you. Oscar Wilde84

Have you ever wondered why Michael Moore films are sold as comedies? It’s because even the most well-intentioned audience member likes to be entertained as they digest critical material. Moore in particular has a good eye for the ridiculous, such as featuring an American bank that offered guns and shooting lessons to customers in its basement in his documentary Bowling for Columbine.

Humour is the sugar coating on the pill of a bitter truth and is particularly important in speeches. Thought leaders needn’t be stand-up comedians, but it certainly helps when you can break the ice with an audience and show some wit, even if you’re discussing a dry or highly technical topic. You can add humour to your writing by highlighting absurdity or contradictions, telling stories, and using outlandish metaphors and lively phrasing.

Example: Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive who publishes a regular column in The Spectator magazine. This excerpt blends humour with commentary on consumerism in America to make a lively read with a point, while building Sutherland’s profile and that of his advertising agency.

How do you define communists and capitalists?

If the definition of a true communist is someone who would willingly live for a month in 1970s Poland, the definition of a true capitalist should be anyone who could spend a month in Las Vegas while reading nothing but Hammacher Schlemmer mail order catalogues.

Even hardened materialists can find American consumerism a little much. A bizarre-looking $300 item I once saw turned out to be an oriel window for your cat. (The idea is that you fix this to your window frame so it protrudes through the sash window of your 32nd floor apartment, allowing your pet a 180° view of the outside world.)

But there is a good side to this. The sheer size of the American market makes it profitable to serve fantastically obscure needs — so, however bizarre your problem, you can solve it with a few minutes online trawling American retailers.

Last month at Heathrow I decided to search for braces which did not set off the X-ray machine at airport security. To my surprise I couldn’t find them anywhere. Then I remembered that Americans don’t call them braces but suspenders. Sure enough, a few Googles later I had found www.suspenderstore.com (a much less erotic site than it sounds to British ears) and had ordered my ‘BuzzNot Airport-Friendly Travel Suspenders’ for $19.95.85

Storytelling

Another core device for sweetening the medicine of a worthwhile argument is storytelling. Stories are a powerful way to convey information because they are entertaining and engaging and, at a psychological level, map the way our memory and reasoning functions work. This makes them easy to understand and remember.

In particular, we like the idea of cause and effect — that someone does something and something predictable follows. An example is the book Slow Death by Rubber Duck86, by Canadians Dr Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, which focuses on the health impact of plastics. The book delivers a serious and technical message in a digestible way by making the authors part of the story. In the book, Smith and Lourie subject themselves to various experiments involving everyday plastics and chemicals then report on the effect on their own bodies.

Slow Death by Rubber Duck was not the first book to point out that plastic might be dangerous. Indeed, there are many reports and studies that prove the point. What set this book apart and fired the public imagination is that the authors embedded their argument in a story. That story was the impact of the problem on the authors’ bodies, which made the issue real, memorable and credible in a way that more scientifically valid studies involving large sample sizes and long periods of time had failed to achieve.

Another example is a book called Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.87 As the title suggests, the book’s thesis is that we, as Homo sapiens, were born to run — and that we should run a lot. A sub-theme for people who try but find it painful is that cushy running shoes are bad for our feet and legs. McDougall, a journalist who writes for popular magazines such as Men’s Health, conveys a large amount of technical information about running and our evolution as a species by using two primary stories. The first is that McDougall personally struggled to run until he changed his technique — the Rubber Duck immersive approach. The second is the story of a running race that unfolds throughout the book and provides a compelling reason to read to the end.

In fact, almost every paragraph McDougall writes is handled as a story. Even when he wants to convey scientific findings about running, he incorporates the facts into the narrative — complete with dialogue and quotes from interviews or published material — of how the facts were discovered by the researchers involved.

Here is an extract from Born to Run.

When E.C. Frederick, then the director of Nike Sports Research Lab, arrived at the 1986 meeting of the American Society of Biomechanics, he was packing a bombshell. ‘When subjects were tested with soft versus hard shoes,’ he said, ‘no difference in impact force was found.’ No difference! ‘And curiously,’ he added, ‘the second propulsive peak in the vertical ground reaction force was actually higher with soft shoes.’

Stories have certain characteristics that you’ll need to master if you plan to use storytelling as a device. Most importantly, stories have a start, middle and end and they typically centre on a problem or crisis that is eventually resolved. This is the structure followed by almost any fiction book, film or TV drama. It’s also how life often works, which is why storytelling is such a good device. However, it’s not always easy to apply.

For example, I was once given an assignment by a company that wanted me to use storytelling to summarise a half-day workshop. The workshop involved more than 30 staff discussing strategy for the next five years through speeches and breakout sessions. The goal was to create a single story to give to the group as a summary of the day and to send to others who couldn’t attend. The story also had to be finished about two hours after the end of the session! I was genuinely stumped as to how to draw a story from such a mishmash of material so I started by doing what most ‘scribes’ would do and spent the session jotting down interesting points as they came up. The result was pages of somewhat random factoids like ‘Resources sector to grow strongly – attractive’ and ‘Will be the leading employer’. How on earth was I meant to make all this into The Sound of Music or at least Wall Street?

The solution, it turned out, was to play it chronologically and to blend the factual outcomes with the human drama of the day. This resulted in a four-page document that described how the group came together on the day; how they proposed, debated and revised ideas; and the conclusions they reached. On this narrative rack, I was able to hang the most interesting and important facts and figures that had arisen during the day. The result was a more digestible and memorable document than a random summary or list of bullets. It was also proof to me of the power of storytelling.

Finally, stories often provide good leads for columns, speeches, books and other thought leadership material, especially when they serve to introduce the subject of your piece. Economist Paul Krugman, for example, started a column about China’s dangerous dominance of rare earth minerals with the following story:

Last month a Chinese trawler operating in Japanese-controlled waters collided with two vessels of Japan’s coast guard. Japan detained the trawler’s captain; China responded by cutting off Japan’s access to crucial raw materials.

And there was nowhere else to turn: China accounts for 97 per cent of the world’s supply of rare earths, minerals that play an essential role in many high-technology products. Sure enough, Japan soon let the captain go.

I find this story disturbing, both for what it says about China and what it says about us.88

The story is short and spare yet provides a clear snapshot of the situation. It’s put forward as proof of the wider problem Krugman goes on to describe. And it’s certainly an attention-grabbing way to start an argument.

Know your field’s specific language and style

Each technical field has its own terminology, rules and writing conventions, ranging from the strict disciplines of academic publishing to the unwritten rules of real-estate advertising. Many fields also have rules for how to cite material, such as how to format the titles of books or list authors’ names, and advice on handling items such as long quotes in copy. Journals and specialist magazines often provide advice on writing and referencing styles for contributors.

I encourage you to find writing guides specific to your own field for in-depth advice on word use, structure, presentation and wider issues. An example is Michèle Asprey’s Plain Language for Lawyers, which includes the following advice for lawyers:

Words might not be ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ in themselves, but choosing the right words does present a real problem for lawyers. We have to write words which will mean what we want them to mean not only now, when our clients are signing the contract we’ve just drafted for their new business enterprise, but also tomorrow when they open for business, next week when the first orders come in, next year when they have their first major disagreement and perhaps even in the next decade when the business collapses and they sue each other.89

Another example of a specialist language guide is The Chemist’s English by Robert Schoenfeld.90 As the name suggests, this book advises chemistry students and professionals on how to write scientific material. Here is a short passage:

Very often the resultant R-ic-S phrase will be quite correct: spectrometric means ‘spectrum measuring’ or ‘pertaining to a measurement of spectra’, hence it is all right to talk of a spectrometric determination. Over the phrase ‘the spectrometric behaviour of examplitol’, however, flutters the banner of Genghis Khan.

This passage will be meaningless to anyone but chemists (and even they might be curious about Genghis) but that’s the point; each profession has its own specialist language and conventions. While it’s important for even the biggest boffin to use common language in something like a opinion article for a newspaper or a radio interview, thought leaders should also have a deep grasp of the craft of writing for other experts within their field.

An online search or review of university course reading lists will reveal writing guides for most professions and economic sectors. The OnlineStylebooks.com website provides links to writing style guides for groups as diverse as the American Institute of Physics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the IEEE Computer Society. It also lists The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual, which sounds like it might be a joke but is in fact a dead serious, 100-page guide published by the International Game Journalists Association for writers covering the world’s multi-billion dollar computer games sector. Here’s a note from the foreword that could be used as an argument for the proper use of terminology in any profession:

Why does it matter? After all, we’re talking about videogames – kids’ stuff, right? Little Billy Pokégamer doesn’t care whether it’s GameCube, Gamecube, or Game Cube. He knows what it is, and isn’t that enough?

Except that it’s not just Little Billy Pokégamer who’s reading about videogames. The average age of my magazine’s readers is over 21 years old. Heck, the average age of gamers in the U.S. is over 29 years old. And for videogame writing to be taken seriously by adults, it has to be written for adults. That doesn’t just mean correct grammar and spelling (though those are musts, obviously). It also means a level of consistency that shows writers aren’t just pulling industry terms out of their asses (or worse, Wikipedia).91

Organisations also produce style guides specific to their situation and needs for the reference of staff and suppliers. These typically combine advice on general language usage and tone with points specific to the organisation’s technical field.

Case study: Nouriel Roubini

The American professor and consultant Nouriel Roubini — aka Dr Doom — has firmly established himself as one of the world’s leading economic researchers and commentators. His reputation skyrocketed after 2005 when he was among the first to predict the US subprime housing crisis. His status has been confirmed in a range of recent accolades, such as being named in Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Part of the reason for Roubini’s success is his ability to convey challenging and radical economic views in lively, often funny prose, for a global audience. Here is an example of one of his columns. I have included it in full as it shows many of the writing techniques discussed throughout this chapter.92

Another BRIC in the Wall?

NEW YORK — Conventional wisdom rarely survives a good stress test, and few tests have been as stressful as that which the global economy has endured over the past 24 months. A healthy season of reappraisal has dawned, shining a new light on boom-time notions like the value of opaque markets, the untouchable status of the American consumer, or the wisdom of deregulation.

A colourful lead paragraph that starts with the assertion of a universal truth and then becomes more specific as Roubini sets markers for what his article will be about. Using the metaphorical ‘dawned’ and repeating ‘stress’ adds impact.

One piece of bubble wisdom that has escaped relatively unscathed, however, is the assumption that the ‘BRIC’ countries — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — will increasingly call the economic tune in years to come. The BRIC notion, coined in a 2003 Goldman Sachs report, is not all bad: at 75% correct, it scores a good deal better than most economic prognostications of the day.

Here he introduces his key point, defines BRIC and explains its heritage. Near the end, the word ‘prognostication’ sets a high tone while being subtly disparaging.

Yet the economic crisis that began in 2008 exposed one of the four as an impostor. Set the vital statistics of the BRIC economies side-by-side and it becomes painfully obvious that, in the words of the old Sesame Street game, ‘One of these things is not like the other’.

Uses strong language, then makes his key point with a light touch by citing the famous children’s TV show. Roubini also builds suspense by not yet naming his target.

The weakness of the Russian economy and its highly leveraged banks and corporations, in particular, which was masked in recent years by the windfall brought by spiking oil and gas prices, burst into full view as the global economy tumbled. Saddled with a rust-belt infrastructure, Russia further disqualifies itself with dysfunctional and revanchist politics and a demographic trend in near-terminal decline.

Finally names Russia and describes it in a lively way using common yet interesting words like ‘windfall’, ‘spiking’, ‘tumbled’ and ‘saddled’. Putting ‘disqualifies’ and ‘dysfunctional’ together is poetic and the jargon ‘revanchist’ shows the author’s subject matter expertise.

Even with the modest recovery in commodity prices over the past six months, Russia’s energy sector has experienced declining production in recent years, due in part to fears among foreign investors of expropriation. Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, integral in propping up an increasingly re-centralized economy, is being depleted fast. If negative trends continue, Russia’s reserve fund could eventually be exhausted.

‘Expropriation’ is a succinct, polite word for fraud and corruption.

Russia’s fall back to earth, meanwhile, spawned a kind of parlor game among academics, foreign-policy wonks, and educated investors, aimed at replacing the country in the club of major emerging-market economies. A variety of acronyms has been suggested, from the cutesy BRICET (adding Eastern Europe and Turkey) to BRICKETs (the former plus South Korea) and — an even greater stretch — BRIMC, which shoehorns Mexico into the mix.

Uses another metaphor in ‘fall back to earth’ and inserts ‘wonks’, again adding to the light, jibing tone. Delivers a series of acronyms but spaces them and adds opinion with his commentary.

In all of these revisions, Russia survives, despite the writing on its economic wall. While Russia retains the world’s largest (if somewhat aging) arsenal of nuclear weapons, as well as a permanent seat (and thus veto power) on the UN Security Council, it is more sick than BRIC.

Roubini returns to his key point and ends with a funny, memorable word play in ‘more sick than BRIC’.

Purely from the standpoint of economic potential and fundamentals, the case is far stronger for South Korea, a sophisticated economic power whose primary liability is the danger that the regime of its evil twin to the north will collapse and inundate it with hungry refugees.

The same is true of Turkey, with its robust banking sector, thriving domestic market, growing importance to Middle East and energy politics, NATO membership, European Union membership bid, and ties to ethnic cousins across Central Asia.

Perhaps the most compelling case of all is that of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim state, with a rapidly expanding middle class, relatively stable democratic politics, and an economy that has been a star performer in Asia despite the global recession. From an American perspective, Indonesia is an attractive alternative to Russia, which recently has vied with Venezuela for leadership of the ‘America in decline’ cheering section.

Indonesia, moreover, has shown resilience not only economically, but also as a nation. In spite of its diverse ethnic makeup and far-flung island territory, the country has made a quick transition from military dictatorship and has recovered from myriad challenges and setbacks, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the tsunami in 2004, the emergence of radical Islam, and domestic unrest. While Indonesia’s per capita GDP remains low, it is a country’s potential that matters in economic affairs, and here Indonesia shines.

Indonesia depends less on exports than its Asian peers (let alone Russia), and its asset markets (timber, palm oil, and coal, in

These three paragraphs outline alternatives, further building the case for Russia’s exclusion.

particular) have attracted major foreign investment. The government in Jakarta, meanwhile, has taken a strong stand against corruption and moved to address structural problems. Even demographic trends favor Indonesia, which, with 230 million people, is already the fourth largest country in the world by population — a full Germany (80-plus million) larger than Russia.

But catchy ideas die hard, and Russia has moved to cement the current concept of the BRICs into an irreversible reality. The ossification of the BRICs into a de facto global institution moved forward dramatically in June, when the four countries’ leaders met (in Russia, of course) for the first ‘BRIC Summit’.

Roubini changes direction sharply and continues his argument with ‘But’ and the snappy, dismissive ‘catchy ideas die hard’. He also uses the wonderful and apt word ‘ossification’.

That meeting produced a notable broadside against the United States, as each member declared its desire to unseat the dollar as the global reserve currency. A few months earlier, the four were moved to issue a joint communiqué ahead of the G-20 Summit in April noting their shared determination to change the rules of the global economic system.

Here he spells out the broader implications of this debate, linking the semantic discussion to real financial issues.

In the private sector, BRIC index funds have proliferated, though Goldman Sachs has radically hedged its own BRIC bet by introducing a second term — the ‘Next 11,’ or N-11 — to the debate. This grouping adds Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam to the economic radar, and, together with the four BRIC countries, probably comprises a more logical and defensible ‘first tier’ of emerging economies.

Roubini points to commercial trends, and a better approach. He switches efficiently from business to government by starting with ‘In the private sector’.

Russia sniffs at the idea of demotion, and American officials appear to have decided to steer clear of the semantic debate. Still, it should surprise no one that Russia lobbied hard for the Yekaterinburg BRIC summit, and footed the bill for much of it as well. Why risk exposure too soon?

‘Sniffs’ deftly captures the idea of Russian pride. Roubini closes with a floating question. There is no direct call to action but plenty for readers to think about.

Summary

Thought leadership should be accurate and succinct but also appealing. Use short and simple words, watch out for absolute terms and avoid clichés and excessive adjectives. It’s also important to write in active sentences; use metaphors and similes; consider the rhythm and flow of your writing; ensure any acronyms, numbers and statistics are easily digestible; avoid repetition; and use language that is appropriate for your field. Look for the opportunity to add colour and flair using storytelling, humour, interesting words and unexpected descriptions and characterisations.