Many years ago, I interviewed the writer Julian Barnes for my school magazine. Imagine an 18-year-old me, settling my tape recorder nervously on the North London coffee table of the great man. I was armed with a list of overwrought and pretentious questions. I was eager to please. But just as I set my tape recorder running, he said something that wrong-footed me completely. He said, with a Sphinxlike Barnesian smile, that he insisted on only one precondition for the interview. I was not to quote him verbatim.
I was confused: wasn’t being misquoted the complaint that every interviewee made of every journalist? Yet here was someone – who could see my tape recorder on the table as an earnest of my good intentions – positively insisting on inaccuracy. ‘You can make anybody look like an idiot by quoting them verbatim,’ he said.* And, of course, he was right. None of us speaks in complete and well-formed sentences.
What I have come to think of as the Barnes Principle is a good way to consider something that we don’t pay enough attention to. Speech and writing are different things; more different than we often notice. And reading is different, too, from either. In fact, the ways in which people read – on a computer screen, in a book, on a smartphone – are themselves different enough to need thinking about.
In this chapter I’d like to offer some hints as to how this might affect your practice.
One of the commonest pieces of advice you hear is: ‘Try to write as you speak.’ But it’s a piece of advice that needs to be treated with real caution. In one way, it’s sensible. All of us, in conversation, improvise fluently and grammatically. We speak with unthinking confidence – at least until we’re asked to do so in front of a room full of people, or to a stranger by whom we’re intimidated – and that confidence is the heart of effective communication. You can learn as a writer from the way you speak, and you can seek to capture your speaking voice on the page.
But to write as you speak is much more easily said than done. Speaking is natural; writing is artificial. You cannot write exactly as you speak, and nor should you. I just tried, for instance, to dictate the next paragraph without preparation into my iPhone.
The spoken language tends to be redundant. It tends to contain a whole lot of things that, um, that aren’t features of the written language. It’s much more freely and openly structured … you find that sentences run on into each other, a whole lot of little things like, voice, intruding, you’ll say a lot of things, fillers, filler phrases that will, um, interrupt and give the listener time to react and time to digest what you’ve already said. You’ll tend to find that you stop halfway through sentences and break off and, um, basically the spoken language is much more slippery than the written one and readers can go back in the written language which they can’t in the spoken language, so if you transcribe exactly how someone speaks, even if they speak, well, more eloquently than I’m doing now, um, you’ll still end up with something that in no way looks fit for the page.
Ending up with something in no way fit for the page is certainly what I’ve done (what was all that guff about ‘like, voice, intruding’?) by quoting myself verbatim.
What I was trying to get at in that ramble was that the written and spoken languages have different formal properties and slightly different grammars. There’s nothing in my spoken voice that tells me how to punctuate the above, for instance – already, I’ve started to tidy it up by inserting spaces and full stops and commas and dashes, according to the grammar of standard written English. But as phoneticians will tell you, the spoken voice doesn’t usually leave gaps between words – there’s no exact spoken equivalent to the semantic difference between a full stop, a colon, a comma or a dash. Already, I’m falsifying it for the page.
Accordingly, literary writers will often use non-standard style to capture a speaking voice. Here’s a bit from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, for instance:
I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I’ll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.
Grammar sticklers would probably allow the first sentence. They’d object to the lack of a main verb in the second and third, regarding them essentially as modifying clauses. They might tut-tut over the fourth, too: on the grounds either (if they were particular asses) that it begins a sentence with the word ‘and’, or that the comma after ‘frankly’ wants an opposite number to isolate the adverb as a parenthesis (‘I’ll tell you, frankly, that was wonderful’) or perhaps that the comma would be better as a colon (‘I’ll tell you frankly: that was wonderful’).
The sticklers would miss the point. Here the punctuation is being used not as a grammatical signpost, but solely as a score for the cadence. Read it aloud. It’s expressed perfectly. The full stops and the comma tell you exactly where the pauses in the spoken language come; and – though this isn’t a precise science, as I’ll discuss in more detail in the section on punctuation – those pauses are the length of a full stop where Robinson puts a full stop and the length of a comma where Robinson puts a comma.
Why the difference? Speech does not have to be learned in the same way as writing. A normal child, in its first six years of life, will acquire a full competence in the grammar of the language and a passive vocabulary (that is, a list of the words it understands) of something like 20,000 words. It does that with such miraculous speed and accuracy that for a long time it was thought there might be a ‘language organ’ in the brain. All you have to do is surround a baby with other language users and leave it to do its thing.
But forming letters, stringing those letters into words, and applying the rules of punctuation … these have to be painstakingly taught and practised. Writing is an arbitrary and artificial code for representing a natural behaviour. It assumes a theoretical or imaginary reader: when you write, you are creating a sort of message in a bottle. That’s odd. It’s not an intuitive thing to do. It’s a learned behaviour.
As I fumblingly put it in my straight-to-dictaphone paragraph above, the spoken language tends to be much more loosely packed and less structured than the written version. Sentences run together, break and change direction, or circle back. Speakers say ‘um’ and ‘er’, and insert empty phrases. This not only helps them catch up with themselves: it helps the listener digest what’s being said without suffering cognitive overload. For the same reason you’ll see much more repetition, too. To state the obvious, readers can go back and reread a sentence, or refer to an earlier paragraph. The listener can’t press rewind.
So writing and speech are profoundly different animals. There are several ramifications of this. One is that writing obeys more precise, conscious, man-made rules. There are conventions that apply to particular forms of writing, and those conventions are much of what those in the language wars fight about. So when you sit down to write, however well-trained you may be, you’re conscious of doing something artificial, something formal, something unnatural. And more often than not you stiffen up.
Take an extreme example: the stereotypical English blue-helmeted policeman. No real copper alive would, returning to the squad-room and being asked about his afternoon over a cup of tea and a fondant fancy, tell a colleague: ‘As I was proceeding in a westerly direction along Dock Green Road, I became aware of an altercation between two males. Upon their disregarding a verbal warning to desist, I proceeded to engage them. I apprehended one suspect. The other suspect escaped on foot and remains at large.’
He would be more likely to say something like: ‘I was walking down Dock Green Road and there were these two blokes having a scrap, so I told them to stop. They didn’t pay me a blind bit of notice, so I piled in, but by the time I got the cuffs on one little toe-rag the other guy had legged it.’
You can be sure, though, that it’s the first version that will be read out in court. The tone of formal notes for testimony in court should, of course, be different from the one that you’d use when telling the story to your colleague in the squad-room. But my imaginary plod is doing an extreme version of something that very many of us tend to do: he’s overcorrecting. He’s not just representing speech in a formal way: he’s representing a form of speech that never existed. Nobody, in any circumstances, needs to use the phrase ‘proceeding in a westerly direction’. And you’ll find cousins to this sort of thing in any amount of official and formal writing.
The question of what you might call tone of voice, of the right level of formality, is what’s known as decorum or, sometimes, register. Getting it right – finding a style appropriate to the communication – is at the very heart of effective writing. To get it wrong is to make the prose equivalent of messing up the dress code for a party. In the squad-room, you’re in jeans-and-trainer mode; in court, you’re aiming more for suit and tie. Our policeman has presented himself in an ill-fitting tuxedo with a badly knotted dickie-bow. This is one of the things behind that idea of writing as you speak: you’re trying to capture the spontaneity and directness of spoken communication on the page without sounding stiff or pompous.
But as I say, writing is a representation of speech, not a transcription of it. You’re translating something that lives in sound into something that lives on the page. That is a more radical transformation than we’re used to noticing. It’s not less of an illusion than the representation of a physical object in oil paint. You can tell the difference between a painting that looks like a pipe and one that doesn’t. We’re so used to assuming the equivalence between painting and subject that if someone shows you a painting of a briar pipe and asks you what it is, you’ll like as not say: ‘A pipe.’ But as Rene Magritte reminded us: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’).
When you’re writing you’re trying to produce the illusion of your best speaking voice, in the most apt register, in written form. As I’ve started to suggest, the way the spoken language works is shaped by the way in which it’s received: it adapts to its audience. The same is true of the written form. Reading and hearing are related, just as writing and speaking are related, but they are not the same thing.
One of the ways this manifests itself is pace: a fast writer will be able to knock out something between 500 and 1,000 words in an hour. A fast reader can take those words in in approximately a minute. We read tens of times as fast as we write, in other words. So we experience the text differently: hours of agonised concentration at the keyboard translates, at the other end of the process, into a few minutes of interested attention on the page. That means that the writer won’t have a natural sense of the pace of the finished product.
Imagine shooting a feature film in stop-motion: moving a plasticine model or redrawing a cel minutely differently, for each frame. In order to see how it’s going to flow for the viewer, you’ll need to run the rushes back at normal speed. So you’ll only really get a sense of the pace of your work on revising: you need to try to experience it as a reader, not as a writer. And in practice, this means rereading. Indeed, you’d be astonished by how different a text you’ve written feels when you experience it as a reader.
If you have time, leave it for a couple of days. When you reread something you’ve just written, you’re still bruised by the experience of composing it: you’ll be too aware of the joins, the awkward transitions, the hidden architecture. This paragraph or that paragraph will distract you because you’re conscious of the specific labour you spent composing it. Something that felt arduous to compose will feel heavier on the page; and, if you’ve been busy with cut-and-paste, you’ll have a sense that no reader would of how it used to connect to a separate part of the text altogether. Leave it a bit, and those scars heal. When you return to it as a reader you’ll have a much better sense of how it reads to someone coming to it cold. It may well read better than you imagined.
It’s worth thinking, too, about a third thing: what happens when we read? We learn a language, it is now generally accepted, in much the same way we learn anything else: our clever, super-adaptable neurons develop the tools to do the job as our brains develop in childhood. The idea of a special or innate ‘language organ’ in the brain, as originally proposed by Noam Chomsky, is generally discredited. If no such organ exists for the spoken language, you can be sure there won’t be one for the written language – which appeared only in the fourth millennium BC, not long ago at all in evolutionary terms.
Instead, the brain repurposes various other areas – those dedicated to the spoken language, to object recognition, motor coordination, sound and vision – to cobble together a set of reading circuits. As the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf puts it in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), the brain is able to learn to read because of ‘its […] capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes […] such as vision and spoken language’.
Quite how this happens, it should be said, is not known in very great detail. We all love neurosciency stuff – publishers most of all – but we’re still at a pretty rudimentary stage. You can use various devices to measure blood flow or electromagnetic impulses in the brain. Afterwards you can point to a bit of the brain and say: ‘Something’s definitely going on in there when X does Y, but we don’t have much of a clue what it is.’*
But this stuff at the very least offers hints and suggestions for the practical writer: you’re working with the reader’s brain, so a quick glance under the cranial bonnet has the potential to put you at an advantage.
By the time you’re a fully competent speaker of the language, two areas of the brain in particular will have developed language specialisms. There follows, duly, a massive but intriguing oversimplification. Broca’s area is associated with rhythm and syntax – with what you might call the structural features of the language. Wernicke’s area specialises in words and meaning – i.e. the content.*
When we process spoken language, these areas work in association with the parts of the brain that deal with auditory input. And when we process written language they also have to stir in the parts of our brain that deal with visual input. But it’s a complex transaction. You can’t just, as it were, unplug the input cable from the ears and replug it into your eyes when you stop listening and start reading.
Language is associated with the auditory centres of the brain – when you read silently, and particularly when you read an unfamiliar word that you are ‘sounding out’ in your head, something’s going on in the parts of your brain that usually govern hearing.
And our visual systems are not geared to abstraction, essentially abstract though words on the page may be. They are geared to recognising things in the world: telling the difference between a nice brown tree stump that would be comfy to lean against while we eat our lunch and an angry brown bear that would not. Early writing systems seem to have been pictographic in nature – and a series of leaps took us to systems representing sounds and abstract concepts.
All this means that the process of reading is not as abstract and cerebral as you might think. We do engage with letters and words as material objects in the world, and we do ‘hear’ the sounds they make in our heads. We live in bodies, and we experience the world, even the world of the imagination, through them. That, then, offers what looks to me like a neurological underpinning for two well-worn but useful pieces of advice to writers. You should prefer concrete language – visual images and real-world situations – to abstract language, because these ask less work of the read-er’s brain. And you should attend to the sound and rhythm of your words, because whether your reader reads aloud or not, sound and rhythm are a major presence in the way he or she takes in what you have written – which means, especially for less confident writers, reading your material aloud.
You also need to think not just about the concreteness of your language, but the physical format in which it will be read. A couple of stapled sheets of A4 will give one impression and invite one sort of attention; a text message on an iPhone will give and demand something different. Consider the physical differences. You experience a codex book – that is, the sort of book you’re reading now, in which a sheaf of paper is bound at one side to form a spine – as a series of two-page spreads. There’s a certain physical punctuation to the process of reading – even if you’re whipping through the continuous flow of Molly Bloom’s four-and-a-half-thousand-word unpunctuated monologue at the end of Ulysses. You’re turning the pages. You have a mental sense – even a physical sense, between your fingers – of how far through the text you are. In creating a mental map of the text you are able to locate passages with reference to left-hand page or right-hand page, and roughly where on that page it comes.
And that’s how you do it, right? Anybody who has ever studied a text for school, or who has wanted to read out a particular bit of a newspaper for someone, searches pretty efficiently by physical location. You will have a sense – even several hundred pages later – that this or that quotation is somewhere about a quarter of the way through the book, near the top of a left-hand page.
When I say ‘mental map’ it’s not an idle metaphor. You don’t just read a long text: you navigate through it. Professional mnemonists from the ancient world to the modern one have used the ‘method of loci’ – loci means places in Latin – to store memories: they create an imaginary architecture in their minds’ eyes and populate it with the things they want to remember. This seems to be based on sound science.
So the codex book makes mental map-making easier. Something similar applies for a set of sheets of paper – a presentation or a company report or a hand-out. You might not have those left-side, right-side markers to steer by, but you might (if it’s printed on both sides) have a sense of which side of the paper your quote is on. You’ll probably have oriented yourself with regard to one of the four corners of each page, too. And you’ll know roughly how far through the document your quote is.
Reading on an e-reader, things are a little different. You won’t have the physical sense of how far through you are. Some digital devices mimic the codex – presenting a set of double-page spreads. Others give you a continuous downward scroll of text. In both cases navigation is, you might say, lower-tech than with print: the reader has less control. You can flip backwards and forwards with more ease in a physical book than you can in a virtual one. The sense of how far through a digital text you are can be given by a percentage, or a progress bar – but it’s less readily, less physically, apprehended.
Does this matter? It seems to. A large number of studies over three decades have found that people reading on screens find the process more mentally taxing, and (perhaps consequently) that they less easily and less thoroughly remember what they have read. Some also suggest that the way in which we read on screen is different: that, essentially, we approach on-screen reading with less concentration than we do the dead-tree kind. We expect to be distracted; we expect to read less deeply – and so we do.
I don’t raise these findings to denigrate online or on-screen reading. In the first place, these young technologies are changing: some of the cognitive load involved in on-screen reading can be attributed to issues that aren’t necessarily intrinsic to the screen/page distinction. For instance e-ink, which reflects light like a paper-and-ink book, is known to be less taxing than a tablet or a phone, which shines light directly into the reader’s eyes.
The default mode of reading online has been given the name ‘continuous partial attention’. I’m fond of quoting the science fiction writer and blogger Cory Doctorow’s matchless description of the internet as ‘an ecosystem of interruption technologies’. We are used to seeing visual movement, pictures, embedded links, wobbly gifs and what have you – and the characteristic activity on the internet has been described as ‘wilfing’, from the acronym WWILF: ‘What was I looking for?’
There’s no reason to suppose that that can’t or won’t change. But we are where we are. And the smart writer will bear all this in mind when thinking about how a long text will go over. As I will discuss in later chapters, there are useful tricks you can use to direct that ‘continuous partial attention’, when writing for electronic media, to the important bits of your text.
‘When you go fishing you bait the hook, not with what you like, but with what the fish likes.’ This quote, variously attributed in various forms, captures the nub of what I want to get across in this book. There is no more important principle in practical writing. It governs everything from style and register, through vocabulary choice and decisions about ‘correctness’ to line-spacing and typography.
Day-to-day practical writing is not about making words look pretty on the page or showing stylistic sophistication or an impressive vocabulary. It’s about connecting with the reader. As the American political pollster Frank Luntz likes to put it: ‘It’s not what you say. It’s what people hear.’
The idea of putting yourself in the reader’s shoes is not a new one. You find it in almost every style guide ever put on paper. But what does it mean, why is it important, and how can it be achieved?
Aristotle, the first person to think systematically about rhetoric, identified three different ways that people are persuaded. He called them ethos, pathos and logos. Pathos is the way in which we are swayed by emotion. Logos is the intellectual shape of an argument. But ethos is more important than both of these two. It comes first. It describes the bond a speaker or writer forges with his or her audience.
That bond has to do with whether an audience warms to you, trusts your authority, and believes that whatever you’re selling will be in their interests. If an audience dislikes or mistrusts you, or is bored by you, you get nowhere. You won’t sway their emotions with pathos, and even if they can’t see the flaws in your argument they will resist it nevertheless.
Ethos, overwhelmingly often, boils down to the question: do they think of you as ‘one of us’? It has to do with how they see your identity in relation to their own. It’s not quite true to call human beings herd creatures. But we incessantly construct meaning in terms of communal identity; we think in sets and groups.
My identity is constructed out of a whole collection of commonalities I share with others of my species: ‘white’, ‘male’, ‘middle-aged’, ‘British’; ‘father’, ‘husband’, ‘member of Leith family’; ‘keen baker of bread’, ‘wearer of size nine Doc Marten boots’, ‘X-Men fan’. These commonalities will affect not only how other people see me, but how I see myself – and the two things are, of course, intimately linked.
That idea of bunching and grouping – what’s sometimes derisively called ‘pigeonholing’ – underpins the language itself. Nouns (with the exception of so-called proper nouns, such as ‘Fred’ or ‘Blenheim Palace’) don’t describe single things, they describe categories of things. Verbs don’t describe single actions, they describe categories of action. Even conjunctions or prepositions – words that signal the relationships between phrases, clauses and sentences – describe types of relationship: under, over, after, while and so on.
‘The man kicked the ball over the house.’ To understand that sentence you are marshalling not a particular image of a particular man kicking a particular ball over a particular house. You are marshalling a set of agreed ideas about what properties define ‘man’, ‘ball’ and ‘house’; what spatial relationship the word ‘over’ denotes; what physical gesture qualifies as a ‘kick’.
Your image and mine – if asked, say, to draw a picture – will not be identical. Is the man in your more or less hazy mental image black or white; short or tall; clothed or naked? Is the ball a football or a tennis ball or a beach ball? Is your house a North London semi or a bungalow in the Pasadena suburbs? Is the ball sailing high or skimming the roof? Is the man kicking the ball from his hands or from the ground or intercepting his six-year-old son’s throw-in? The answers to those questions will be rooted in your experience and therefore, to an extent, in your identity.
But the chances are that to start with you aren’t seeing the image with that sort of specificity – precisely because you know without really thinking about it consciously that those differences will exist. For the sentence to be meaningful, it relies on a common understanding of these definitions, and the awareness that until you hear different, it’s safest to keep your interpretive options open. You’re trying to tune in to the broad meaning of what the speaker is saying and not go beyond it. If you form a super-specific image right off the bat – and the next sentence makes clear that your image is wrong, you have to go back and unpick your assumptions and start from scratch. That involves cognitive work: it’s a waste of energy.
Your communication will of course be more meaningful – more instantly precise – if the shared references are stronger. You have to work harder to communicate exactly if the connotations of the words are likely to be different for your audience or absent altogether – but, fortunately, the language supplies the tools where context does not. In mental energy terms, the closer you are to the audience in the first place the easier your task will be; particle physicist speaks unto particle physicist more easily than particle physicist speaks unto six-year-old.
The point is that the successful communicator takes as much of the work of interpretation on him or herself as possible. If your frame of reference is different from your audience’s, you reach them faster by adopting theirs. You see people doing that all the time. When that particle physicist is speaking to that six-year-old, she’s more likely to prosper if she uses an analogy from the six-year-old’s world – explaining, say, the way that the universe is made up of little bits with reference to Lego bricks rather than plunging straight into the mathematics of subatomic particles.
These categories are not simply intellectual ones – they’re not just a filing system. We think in sets and groups but we also feel in sets and groups. Think of the emotional content of a political rally, a football crowd, a friendship group or membership of a family. We define ourselves in groups and against groups, and are in turn so defined.
Indeed, a whole category of language – so-called ‘phatic communication’* – is directed solely to establishing human, or tribal, commonality. This is the human, or at least the linguistic, equivalent of cattle rubbing flanks, monkeys picking fleas or dogs sniffing each-other’s bums. ‘How do you do?’ we ask, neither seeking nor overtly conveying information. ‘Hello!’ we exclaim, neither in surprise nor in alarm. ‘How ’bout them Dodgers?’ we wonder, not giving too much of a stuff about the Dodgers. We’re not communicating, there, so much as establishing that the line’s open. We’re tapping the mic and rumbling ‘one, two, three: testing’.
In this case I’m using examples of set phrases. But there’s a phatic, or tuning-in element, to all sorts of communication. Small-talk is primarily phatic. And, conversely, a number of other elements of language – from accent to dialect words to the formulaic exchange of courtesies – do what you could see as phatic work: they establish speech communities. When a native Scot finds her accent disappearing after a time living in the South of England, and returning when she goes back to Peebles to visit her elderly mum (a phenomenon linguists call ‘accommodation’), she’s not making some sort of social or linguistic mistake: she’s adjusting her language to suit her context. We all do it, all the time. None of us speaks a single English.
In practical terms, how can you apply this knowledge in your writing?
Socially or emotionally, it means working to pass the ethos sniff-test. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to sound exactly like your audience. It means that you sound as if you’re on their side, or as if you’re making an effort to see things from their point of view. You work on the common ground. The speech theorist Kenneth Burke said: ‘You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.’
Stylistically, it means trying to minimise ambiguity. It means being simple without being patronising, and clear without being obvious. And it means above all remembering that – now more than at any time in human history – you are competing for attention in a world of distractions and interruptions. As I said, take the work on yourself. The less work the reader has to do to understand what you are saying, the more readily he or she will read on, and the more favourably he or she will be disposed to receive it.
Audience-awareness also means knowing your genre. Genre – a term used by literary critics to describe a particular type of writing – is all about the expectations of your audience. If you take a sip from a mug containing tea, and you were expecting coffee, it’ll taste disgusting. Genre is pigeonholing applied to literary form.
A sentence of prose isn’t just a sentence of prose. It fits into a wider pattern. Later in this book I’ll be talking about different literary forms, from business letters to social media posts. Each form has its own requirements or expectations, not only in terms of the style used but in terms of where the white space goes and how the text is broken up by design features or paragraphing.
A newspaper report will have headlines, subheads, photographs and tint-panels or break-out boxes; company documents might have bullet points, infographics and so on. Some forms of writing ask for continuous prose. Some are more in the direction of a collection of numbered paragraphs. Get your genre features right and you’re on your way. Get them wrong, and you’re headed to an ABBA-themed fancydress party got up as Marilyn Manson.
Lots of style guides suggest using ‘Plain English’. There is even a ‘Plain English Campaign’ in the UK that pressures official bodies to adopt a simpler style of communication, and has done so over the years with some success.
But what do we mean by Plain English?
As an analogy, think of the iPhone. If you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs you’ll be flabbergasted by the technical difficulties that had to be overcome – the toughness of the glass, the design of the interface, the cramming of all those doohickeys and gizmos into that pocketsized device. The technical specifications for building an iPhone would run to thousands of pages.
But – which is what makes it the success story it is – here is a pocket computer that does everything, and yet which ships to the customer without a manual. It is designed to be so self-explanatory – so intuitive – that you can learn to use it simply by fiddling around with it.
Now compare the video recorder you had in the early 1990s (those of you who remember the early 1990s). The iPhone does much more than that video recorder ever did. But the video recorder came with a large, incomprehensible manual, and even then only your children could work out how to program it. Writing Plain English is being the iPhone rather than the video recorder.
So the test of Plain English is whether it works. There isn’t a scientific test for the plain style – though, as I’ll discuss later, there are some rules of thumb. In that sense it’s a negative quality: you can say of Plain English not that you know it when you see it, so much as that you notice like hell when it isn’t there. It’s the simplest language that the widest possible segment of your intended audience will understand.
Plain English, simply, makes the reader’s life easy. It minimises the cognitive work he or she has to put in. So as a writer, aspiring to produce Plain English, you need to put yourself constantly in the position of the reader.
And be aware that – as with building an iPhone – the contract isn’t symmetrical. Something that’s easy for the reader to consume isn’t necessarily easy for the writer to produce. You may sweat. You may labour. And if you get it right, all the hard work you’ve done will barely be noticed by the person on whose behalf you’ve done it.
In that sense, it might seem self-explanatory that you’d want to write Plain English. But it’s not quite that simple. There are all sorts of circumstances in which Plain English isn’t appropriate. If all we had was the plain style we’d have no rousing oratory, no poetry (or very little) – not much, in fact, to cause the heart to sing.
Take an example:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
In Plain English, the opening lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Wind-Hover’ could be rendered:
I got up early, went for a walk and saw a bird.
In other areas, sometimes a particular subject matter demands a particular language – not complexity for its own sake but because, say, scientists might need a specialist technical vocabulary to be exact. And that specialist language can, in effect, do for scientists what Plain English does for the general reader: minimise the cognitive work. If you already know what Planck’s Constant is, those two words will get the idea across instantly.
Plain English aims to be understood, then, by the maximum number of readers in any given audience with the maximum ease. It will usually draw from common vocabulary – and common vocabulary, even when unambiguous, can be imprecise. So it’s not as simple as choosing only short words, or only common words. It’s about considering the simplest words that will do the job.
This has immense practical advantages.
One: where writing is intended to be communication rather than performance, it needs to get through. And that means it needs to get through to the least linguistically able of its readers. According to the UK’s National Literacy Trust, the average reading age among adults in Britain is about 13. US figures show an approximate equivalence. That’s the average – and it’s three years below school leaving. From that it seems pretty clear to me that, even if most of your communications are in the white-collar world, you may need to pitch things a bit lower even than you’d expect.
Two: unclear writing wastes time and money. If you’re in the public sector, people’s access to public services depends on them understanding how to navigate the system – which means that the instructions need to be clear. In the private sector, leave alone the misunderstandings, the confusions, the follow-up phone calls to clarify what the blithering hell that email was all about, if you aren’t able to make what you are offering or accepting clear to a business partner at the least you will lose goodwill, and at the worst you will trigger lawsuits.
Not long ago, when my three-year-old was suffering from a pink and gunky eye, I bought him a bottle of Optrex eyedrops from the chemist. The side of the pack, under dosage, said: ‘Adults and children over two years of age – 1 drop every 2 hours for the first 48 hours and 4 hourly thereafter.’ Does that mean four drops every hour thereafter? Or one drop every four hours? The grammar of the sentence leads me to the first conclusion. Common sense leads me to the second. But if I’m squirting this stuff into my toddler’s eye, I’d really like to be sure.
Finally, clear, grammatical English helps your ethos appeal. People judge you on your language. When an employer gets a CV, a journalist a press release or a colleague a memo that’s obtuse, repetitive, misspelt or grammatically muddled, he or she will always think less of the sender. Your reader is always, always looking for an excuse to move on. You don’t stand to gain readers in the course of a given piece of writing, only to lose them – and making some of them struggle to understand you is a sure-fire way of doing it.
In this respect a piece of continuous prose follows the publishing model of those partwork magazines you used to see advertised on TV. Part One of Locomotives of the Golden Age of Steam, say, would be offered at the bargain price of £1.50, and bundled with a free binder and a cover-mounted toy locomotive. Maybe it would sell 10,000 copies. Two weeks later, Part Two would appear in the newsagent for £2.50. Inspired by the free binder – collect them all! – those who liked Part One would pick it up. Maybe you’d get 7,000 readers. A fortnight later, Part Three would come, and a fortnight later, Part Four, and so on. The best the publishers can hope for is a low attrition rate – but with each successive issue you lose readers to apathy, disorganisation or a sense that they are not getting value for money. By the time you get to Part Twelve, the hope is that a decent number of readers will still be with you – impressed by the quality of the product, the collector’s desire for completeness, or the sense of by this stage being already invested in the series. The business model is one of retaining readers, not gaining them. You never sell more of the last issue than you do of the first. You will never get more people reading the second half of your article than read the first.
This has implications for structure. Crudely, it says that the first few sentences really matter: that’s where you offer the free binder and the cover-mounted model engine. But it also makes the more basic point that for the writer, just as for the publisher of Locomotives of the Golden Age of Steam, you only retain as many readers as you keep engaged and offer – metaphorically – value for money. The writer who aims for the stupidest and least attentive person in his or her audience is not a stupid or inattentive writer.
There are a couple of rough tests, as I mentioned above, for the plain style. For many years, a number of mechanical ‘readability tests’ have been in circulation. The best known is probably the Flesch-Kincaid score – which now comes bundled with many word-processing programs.* Readability tests make an estimate of a text’s complexity based on the number of syllables per word and the number of words per sentence. Unhelpfully for English users, the Flesch-Kincaid score is given as a US school grade level. The lower the score, the easier the text is to read: a grade score of 8 or 9 indicates that an average teenager should be able to make sense of your work.
Politicians know instinctively that simple language reaches more people. In October 2015 the Boston Globe applied Flesch-Kincaid metrics to candidates in the US presidential elections.† The Republican candidates clustered around the middle of the 7th grade. Donald Trump – who, I feel sure, only uses the trisyllable ‘president’ because he can’t think of a way not to – had a Flesch-Kincaid score of 4.1: his speeches were pitched to be understood by nine-year-olds.
There’s no harm in using readability metrics as a ready reckoner. If your average sentence is much longer than 18–20 words, and your words are on average four or more syllables long, the chances are that your text will be trickier for a reader to digest than one whose sentences are ten words long and made of one-, two- or three-syllable words. But these tests are, by their nature, pretty unreliable. It’s the familiarity of a given word, rather than its syllabic length, that makes the main difference to a reader. And when it comes to sentences, syntactic structure is far more important to readability than bare length.
In other words, don’t treat these scores as anything more than a finger to the wind. Making something readable is work that needs to be done by the writer, sentence by sentence. It can’t be reliably subcontracted to a syllable-counting machine. I’ll go into this further in the chapters that follow.
Finally, I should mention the point that Plain English can help the writer. We’ve all encountered writing where it’s hard for the reader to understand what the author means. But what of writing where it’s clear that the author doesn’t know herself what she means. Muddled writing and muddled thought often go together. If you can write something clearly, it’s almost always a sign that you are thinking it clearly.
That said, there is no single plain style. Good writing is also about capturing a tone of voice. That tone of voice needs to be appropriate to the audience and to the occasion. Even within the plain style, you’ll want to make adjustments. Are you being mocking, celebratory, solemn, arch, austere or pragmatic? Are you looking to amuse your readers, or to persuade them of the importance of what you’re saying?
This is what in linguistics gets called register, and in rhetoric gets called decorum. It’s how language changes according to the particular social circumstance of its use: when it’s being used, who is hearing, who is overhearing and in what context. It will affect vocabulary choice, diction, mode of address and even typography.* Register is how you use style to position yourself with regard to your reader, and tell the reader about that positioning.
One sort of register is appropriate to a memo from manager to employee; another to an exchange of letters between friends; another to a letter of complaint written to a utility company. The degree of formality is the most obvious, but not the only, feature that marks out one register from another. An actual or implied power relationship often enters into it. That might affect how you cast sentences and whether you speak ‘I’ to ‘you’, about a ‘we’, or whether you select an impersonal construction: ‘we think we should do x’ as against ‘the circumstances mandate this course of action’.
Violations of decorum or register are, in effect, ways of getting the relationship between writer and reader wrong. They tell your audience to regard you or themselves in a way they will feel is inappropriate. Pomposity is one obvious example; it tells your audience that you have an unduly high opinion of yourself (though a more confident audience might diagnose the opposite: that you’re writing pompously because you’re nervous). To be patronising is to tell your audience that you have a low opinion of it. Other mistakes in register – overfamiliarity, say – don’t necessarily imply a boast or an insult, but they will still put an audience off.
When David Brent in The Office tells his staff to think of him not just as a boss (‘you’ll never have a boss like me’), but as a ‘chilled-out entertainer’, you see a pantomimic version of such a violation. Here is someone apparently attempting friendliness – but in context he’s underlining his role as boss and more or less commanding his staff to like him. The bossiness is up front – but so too is the pitiable need to be liked, and the failed attempt to set the terms of his relationship with his audience by dictation.
For instance, my writing in this book is conversational. That is a deliberate strategy. I’m attempting to put across some practical and technical ideas about writing in a way that will be accessible and, I hope, entertaining. So I’m giving myself licence to make silly jokes, to tell personal stories, to choose more or less playful examples – and to address you directly and pretty informally. That might not be how an otherwise very similar book would have been written 20 years ago.
This is a change you can see across the board. Particularly in the age of social media, the face that big companies present to their customers – often laddish, teasing and avuncular – is quite different to the face that they showed half a century or even a decade ago. Your bank, nowadays, wants to sound like your friend – at least until it comes to the fine-print legal boilerplate with which it actually defines your relationship.
Within my own profession, journalism, you have always found quite different registers in different parts of the paper. News reports tend to be more impersonal than features. The unsigned ‘leader’ representing the opinions of the newspaper will tend to be more formal than the bylined opinion columns. And those columns themselves are changing.
In 2011 the Times columnist Matthew Parris wrote about having been given the Columnist of the Year award at the Press Awards dinner. After making conventionally polite noises about the honour and those who better deserved it, he wrote:
I fell to thinking about the judges’ citation, which I seem to remember being about elegantly crafted prose, or ‘classy’ prose, or something like that.
Crafted? Classy? Well, maybe (I thought) sometimes – on a good day. This is what I aim for. I can spend hours trying to get a paragraph right, swapping words around, searching for the right adjective, avoiding repetition, thinking of fresh or felicitous ways of expressing things.
It’s been lovely while it lasted, but all this ‘fine writing’ stuff, all this palaver about the grand tradition of English essays, may be approaching some kind of a sunset. My generation of sonorous, careful-crafting newspaper columnist may be the last of our kind. I’m not sure if I regret it.
Parris noted that in an age in which comment is transmitted so quickly online, and so informally, a new style was emerging: one that showed its workings.
Where opinion, judgment and reflection are called for (and they always will be) the reader will increasingly feel he wants to be, as it were, with the columnist, alongside him, as he hums and hahs and feels his way to a response. His hesitations, his little internal jokes, his playfulness, his doubts, his half-hints and second thoughts – these will become part of the essay, deconstructed, exhibited, rather than part of its secret history.
Such writing will not – I stress this – be more superficial, more trashy or less intelligent than my kind of column; but it will have a lightness, directness and frankness, and, with all those things a sort of formlessness, a train-of-consciousness quality. We will write more as we think, or speak.
I think Mr Parris is dead right.* And he mentioned the names of a handful of younger colleagues who he saw as exemplars of this new sort of writing. Newspaper columnists, even in broadsheets, might now (it’s almost a cliché) begin a column: ‘So …’, and might pepper it with the slangy expression of annoyance or outrage. ‘Yeah, right.’ ‘WTF?’ Not long ago in a comment column for the London Evening Standard I found myself inviting a Prime Ministerial candidate to ‘do one’. That perhaps went too far.
All this is part of a general tendency in the culture for written communication to become more personal and more conversational. That’s in part because, as Mr Parris observes, everything is happening faster. We drink our writers, like our wines, younger.
It’s also in large part because the logic by which not only news but opinion and marketing travels is social. We get news through social media, and we decide what we think about it socially, and advertisers piggyback on all that and weave their tendrils through it. So when you get a much-shared list of ‘27 Amazing Facts About Angela Merkel That Will Make You Spit Your Cornflakes’, are you reading reporting, or commentary, or a joke, or bait for the pop-up on the side of the page, or a mixture of all these things that doesn’t mind much which it is?
The logic by which it reaches you is personal – it will have been ‘shared’ by a friend, or algorithmically served to you because a large number of people have already shared or ‘liked’ it. And a great deal in the way that these things proliferate is to do with their tone of voice.
The question of register – more, perhaps, than any other – is what will be the final arbiter of the issues I address in my discussion of ‘Perils and Pitfalls’. Correctness, you could say, is a feature of the written dialect we call standard English. Decorum asks you to use that dialect in most formal and semi-formal communications. If the mistake of the pedant is to mistake that dialect for the only dialect, it’s a mistake of the naive anything-goes relativist to think that ‘correctness’ doesn’t matter at all. It may be something that varies over time, and that admits of grey areas – but if a majority of formal users stick to a convention, that convention is worth knowing.
In his idiosyncratic and entertainingly splenetic treatise on the language, The King’s English, Kingsley Amis articulated in exact and vulgar terms a useful distinction. (He was writing mostly, here, about the spoken word, but with implications every bit as serious for the written.) The distinction is between berks and wankers:
Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own.* They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops, and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.
Wankers, on the other hand,
are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.
The task of the good writer, you could say, is to find a position in the happy middle ground between the berks and the wankers.
The late novelist David Foster Wallace was once asked about ‘genteelisms’ such as ‘prior to’ and ‘subsequent to’. He replied:
Well, I have trouble parsing your question. ‘Genteelisms’ seems to me to be an overly charitable way to characterise them. To me they’re like puff-words. They’re like using ‘utilise’ instead of ‘use’, which in 99 cases out of 100 is just stupid. Or ‘individual’ for ‘person’. Four syllables. It’s just puffed up. Why say ‘prior to’ rather than ‘before’? Everybody knows what ‘before’ means. It’s fewer words. And I think technically, given the Latin roots, it should be ‘posterior to’. So if you are saying ‘prior to’ and ‘subsequent to’ you are in fact in a very high-level way messing up grammatically. But would you ever want to say ‘posterior to’? But this is the downside of starting to pay attention. You start noticing all the people who say ‘at this time’ rather than ‘now’. Why did they just take up one third of a second of my lifetime making me parse ‘at this time’ rather than just saying ‘now’ to me? You start being bugged. But you get to be more attentive and careful in your own writing so you become an agent of light and goodness rather than evil …
I’m not sure he’s right about the Latin roots of ‘prior to’ – and in invoking them, in any case, he falls into the fallacy that etymology tells you what a word means now – but his basic premise is sound.
In some professional environments, however, you’ll be expected to use terms that to outsiders look like jargon. If you’re a banker and you start talking about ‘credit default swaps’ or ‘shorting gilts’ to a civilian, there’s a high chance they’ll look baffled or intimidated; whereas if you start explaining the terms to a fellow banker, they will like as not feel patronised. Within the trade those few syllables get the meaning across with maximum economy.
Most people will be familiar with the advice to keep words short and simple. A more interesting distinction between short and long words – a wrinkle, if you like, in the Plain English discussion – is the one between abstract and concrete words.
Abstraction is not, mind you, a bad thing in itself – quite the opposite. The progress of human language, be it in the language development of children, the elaboration of a spoken language or the history of writing, has always been towards greater abstraction. That is how we have gone as a species from crudely indicating the presence of something edible on the other side of that hill, to being able to describe the attributes of complex mathematical objects or theories of ethics and ontology.
Children learn to name objects – to point at a ball and say, ‘ball’ – before they learn to name ideas. But they soon pick up on the elaborate grammar and subtle system of tenses that allow us to talk not only about objects that are there, but objects that are not there, or have been there, or could never be there, and to articulate the relationships between these objects.
The earliest forms of writing were pictographic: they were pictures of what they denoted. These became more abstract as they became conventional. They became more abstract still as they started to stand in for sounds rather than objects; the development of alphabets severed a connection between the image on the page and a single thing it denoted.
So when I say abstraction makes the brain work harder, you could put it the other way round. You could say that as our brains get more powerful, we find it easier to handle abstraction. We have more capacity for it. And that capacity has brought huge benefits to us as a species. Consider it as a computing problem, then. It’s not a question of avoiding abstraction altogether, it’s a question of allocating resources sensibly.
The drivers’ training manual for a bus company said, for example:
Ensure location factors and conditions in which manoeuvres are to occur and are considered with regard to safety, minimal disruption to other road users, residents, legal constraints and regulatory requirements.
This was rightly amended to:
Look where you are going, check mirrors etc.
Or take this beauty from David Wolfe, who chairs the UK’s Press Recognition Panel:
The organisations have raised a concern that the indicative view on the interpretation of aspects of the charter which we expressed earlier in the summer after our second call for information might have prompted them or others to provide us with additional information about the Impress application had it been known at the time of our second call for information.
To quote the late Auberon Waugh: ‘I thought I understood the English language well enough, but just what the fucking, sodding, shitting hell is this idiotic sentence trying to tell us?’
Where you can make things concrete, do. We’ll get back to this, but just bear in mind that all else being equal the stronger the verb and more concrete the nouns you use the more impact and directness any given sentence will have.
* Well, he said something like that. Under other circumstances I’d hesitate to put that in quotes, but here …
* Apologies to neuroscientists if this explanation under-reads your good work. Consider it a corrective to the widespread tendency to over-read the same.
* These inferences have been made from observations of the behaviours of people who have been damaged in one or another of these areas. People with Broca’s aphasia will often be able to utter a series of individually meaningful words, but will be quite unable to turn them into a grammatical sentence; people with Wernicke’s aphasia, conversely, may spool out sentences of perfectly grammatical nonsense such as you might hear in an academic conference in the social sciences. That’s suggestive, but to identify one as a grammar machine and one as a vocabulary store is, as Harry Ritchie puts it in his English for the Natives (2013), not much better than ‘phrenology in a lab coat … language happens all over the brain’.
* The phrase was minted by an anthropologist called Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942).
* There’s also a decent online aggregator of these tests at www.checktext.org.
† https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2015/10/20/donald-trump-and-ben-carson-speak-grade-school-level-that-today-voters-can-quickly-grasp/LUCBY6uwQAxiLvvXbVTSUN/story.html.
* As a teenager, I wrote a letter to a girl with whom I was in the process of breaking up. It didn’t really matter very much, in the end, how carefully I expressed my feelings and thoughts. What really, really made her angry was that I composed it on a manual typewriter. A lesson learned.
* Also, sly. If you look at the register of that column, it much more closely exemplifies the talky, hesitant, train-of-consciousness style he looks forward to than the more formal one whose passing he laments.
* Note how, in both definitions, Amis emphasises (not without signalling some irony in ‘anybody would agree’) the social and class issues that play so big a part in the arguments over correctness.