Honor Truth (or What You Don’t Know That Can Hurt Your Career)
Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
— C.S. Lewis
The world is full of truths that can help you advance your career—yet often those truths aren’t taught in school. They may not have been taught at home, either, if the parents didn’t know these truths themselves. Tidbits such as how to have a perfect handshake or how to take a $99 jacket to a tailor to get a fit that makes it look like you spent $1000 are all but lost in the dust of today’s large corporations. Yet they still matter.
You can get all the grammar and goals right in your writing but still not convey the written professional polish that you want. Yet unless someone has taught you how to achieve that polish, chances are good you’ll never achieve it. That’s what this chapter is all about.
Basic Advice No One May Have Ever Told You: Keep It in Plain English
Have you ever heard someone say, “Tell me that again in plain English?” What they’re asking for is for you to clarify what you have said. But what is plain English?
Plain English is, in basic terms, close to the spoken English most of us use in our everyday transactions. Technically, linguists say that plain English is conversational word choice that most people with an 8th grade education can understand. The bad news is that studies such as the nation’s report card indicated that only 28 percent of our high school graduates are capable of writing in plain English. So what do we have to do?
Plain English means that you write the way you talk—when you are talking in your clearest and best fashion.
Note that plain English is not talking in your most “educated” fashion. An odd thing happens to people when they think that someone is going to judge their writing or speaking. They move from plain English into what they think they should sound like. As a result, their messages usually become very obtuse. This common phenomenon led to passage of the 2013 Plain Language Act that requires that all U.S. government documents be written in a style that can be read and understood at a first cursory glance.
Plain English does have some limitations. It does not, for instance, express deep emotions or dialect differences. But what it does do is provide a lingua franca for business and for general conversation. In the Southern U.S., we may say we are “fixing to” do something, meaning we are about to start something. While that is common plain English in the South, it is not mainstream plain English—and is therefore unacceptable in most professional communications.
Plain English used as a guideline keeps you from sounding pompous, overbearing, or generally clueless. Someone who is educated is someone who can express herself clearly, simply and well, whose message anyone can understand. That way you avoid such monstrosities as “the perpetrator of the misdemeanor was apprehended while absconding with a motorized vehicle in a public place of recreation.” Say what? As we discussed in an earlier chapter, if you go back and translate this sentence, what you wind up with is “the thief was caught while stealing a car in the park.” Isn’t that second one much easier to understand?
Mark Twain’s rule of thumb for writers to “never use a quarter word when a nickel word will do” doesn’t necessarily mean that one should never use a quarter word. (A quarter word, to Twain, was a word that was three or more syllables.). It meant not to use a big word when a small word would suffice. For instance, why should people try to facilitate something when they could say guide?
Being clear means being aware of all of the word’s meanings.
Remember that words have baggage. They have not only denotations, which is the dictionary definition of what the word means, but connotations. A connotation is the emotional overtone or the level of power that the word carries.
The word facilitate, for instance, comes from facile, or simple-minded; it means to make things easy for the simple-minded to understand. If I’m going to facilitate something, that denotation says I have superior knowledge or superior ability—and implied in that word is a sense, as we noted above, of condescension. But guide puts us on equal footing. Guide shows that I’m willing to become your partner and that I respect you and your; you just need help, as all of us do at one time or another. The one-syllable word is powerful in its simplicity, respect, positive impact, and of course clarity.
One may argue that in many of today’s business and legal documents, we don’t see plain English. We see instead large clumps of gobbledygook. That use of gobbledygook is deliberate. Some lawyers and some companies purposely choose to be so obtuse or confusing that they think they are keeping themselves and their clients out of court. However, an increasingly number of lawyers are finding plain English works better. Citibank, for instance, discovered after introducing a plain English promissory note that the number of collection lawsuits fell dramatically. Writing clearer instructions and details allowed those who were signing the promissory notes to understand what they were signing—and allowed them to keep their promise better.
This whole idea takes us back to what we have started with: how can I communicate if I don’t know what you mean and you don’t know what I mean? Communication is an agreement, a bond between two or more people, to share ideas. If we try to hide our ideas behind big words or a lot of verbiage, we don’t create that bond. A lack of plain language always catches up with you.
Keep It Parallel
Another way to give structure to your communication is to use parallel construction. Doing so is one of the simplest ways to add clarity to your writing. Based on the concept of parallel lines, this technique organizes your thoughts so that the reader can understand quickly and easily what you mean.
In math, two lines are considered parallel when they follow the same plane; that means that if you plot them on a graph, they never intersect. When one builds a building, for example, one uses parallel structure. Think about it; if you didn’t have two parallel posts, putting a roof on the building would be very hard to do. You may see some buildings where you do have slanted roofs or vaulted ceilings, but what holds them up is parallel. Even nature arranges things in parallel construction. Trees will grow in parallel form unless conditions and man and weather change those conditions.
Convinced? Let’s explore how you can make your writing parallel. First you have to understand what we mean we talk about the construction of a sentence. Basically, the construction of a sentence means how you build it. It means how you arrange the parts. Is your noun first? Or is the verb first, as in the way you would build a question? Let’s say that you have a couple of items that need to go together, such as items in a series or a list. To remain parallel, the structure of the first item determines the structure of the following items.
For example, look at the following sentence:
In order to increase our productivity, we need to buy some new software, invest in training, and we really need to hire some more people.
Read that sentence aloud. Do you hear how even though that last idea is sort of clear, it seems to jar and be disjointed and fuzzy? That’s because it’s not parallel. We started the first of the three items with a very simple construction, as in buy some new software. We started with a verb and ended with the direct object of that verb. (Remember that the direct object answers the question what? immediately after the verb. In this case you’re answering buy what?).
The second item you have is invest in some training. Invest is your verb; training is your direct object. Here these two items are parallel. They both start with a verb and they both end with a direct object. We have built them in the same construction. Now look at that third one: We really need to hire some more people. Well, we have a verb, but it comes after a noun. Did we have a noun in the first two? We did not. By starting with that pronoun we have broken parallel construction.
Human minds take in words that are written in parallel construction much more easily than they take in words that are written and nonparallel construction. And fixing nonparallel is very simple. The easiest way to fix this error is to look at how we built the first phrase, then make the second one match. In this case, all we need to do is cut the pronoun we in the phrase as well as cut the adverb really. We don’t have an adverb in the first two, so we can’t have an adverb in the third one. Now we are left with the verb hire. So our third item now becomes hire some more people.
Let’s look at the revised sentence:
To increase our efficiency, we need to buy some new software, invest in some training, and hire some new people.
The idea is the same, but by putting it in parallel construction we have made the idea easier to follow. We’ve made it easier for the reader to comprehend.
Watch the Emphasis
Another way to use sentence construction for clarity lies in the concept of emphasis. You can read a simple sentence such as “John told me to go to the store” in a variety of different ways, each of which gives the sentence a different meaning. You could emphasize the word John, indicating that it’s important that John told you to go to the store. You could also emphasize me, which means you are telling the reader that it is important that you were the one who went to the store. Or you could emphasize told, which gives an impression that some sort of friction is going on in the situation in which the sentence was spoken. Each varying placement of emphasis gives a whole different meaning to how the audience receives the message.
While we usually think of this emphasis as something that is spoken, you can use emphasis in writing as well. You don’t have to italicize a word in order to get its emphasis across. Using emphasis in writing is far deeper than that—but it isn’t any harder.
In writing emphasis, the sentence flows in a manner that creates a definite path. That path from one idea to the next makes the next idea connect so that it emphasizes the words you want emphasized.
To create the emphasis path, all you need are the rules—and they are simple. For instance a good sentence, like a good paragraph, is the opposite of a sandwich. In the sandwich, what is in the middle is what is important. You don’t go around saying, “I’m going to have a whole wheat sandwich today.” Instead, you say, “I’m going to have a BLT.” The important part is the middle of the two pieces of bread, or what you are going to have. That’s the first rule of the sandwich.
But in a sentence or in a paragraph, what’s in the middle is seen as not important. Most of us just skip right over what is in the middle. Only the beginning and middle register. So let’s look at the following sentence:
Each winter many people go to Colorado to ski.
Depending on how we structure the sentence, we send a message of what is important in that sentence. Take a look: in the sentence as it is written: the word Colorado is in the middle of the sentence. Because we skip right over the middle words, the word Colorado most likely won’t register as a concrete idea in our minds.
If, however, Colorado is the important word to the meaning we want to convey, we need to move it around. Observe: because people pay attention to the beginning, we know that their mind is caught by the idea of each winter. But then, by the construction of the sentence, we throw the idea of winter away and move on to other things. If we want the main idea of what we are talking about to focus on winter, we need to move it around.
Since we also know that people pay attention to what goes at the end of the sentence, we know that their mind is caught by the idea of skiing. The end, by the way, is known as the sweet spot, the part of the sentence that most people pay the most attention to. They do so simply because it is the end. Human minds are like that; instead of enjoying each piece in the journey, we can hardly wait to get to the end. So whatever word we put at the end of the sentence takes on greater importance. If we know that the word Colorado is what we want the reader to pay attention to, we need to move it to the end of the sentence.
How do you know whether to move it around? Or where to move it to? That’s where the rules of sentence emphasis come in:
Rule 1: What lies in the middle of the sentence isn’t important.
Rule 2: What comes first catches the reader’s attention.
Rule 3: The reader will forget what caught his attention by the time he gets to the end of the sentence. So don’t pick up the idea from the first part of the sentence in the following sentence; the reader will be confused.
Rule 4: The words at the end of the sentence usually are the ones the reader remembers the most.
So let’s go back to previous sentence. If the idea of winter is what the next sentence is going to be about, we need to move it to the end. Therefore, we now have:
Colorado is the destination for many skiers each winter.
We replaced the word Colorado in the middle with the word destination; it’s a throwaway word that we really don’t need except for making the sentence grammatically correct. What the reader comes away with, however, is that Colorado is the winter place to be if you are a skier, which is what we really want to convey in the sentence. We can also say:
Many skiers head to Colorado each winter.
In this form, we place Colorado in the background, catching the idea with a focus on skiers and then building up steam with the idea of each winter. We can also turn the sentences around even more; we can say:
Each winter skiers flock to Colorado.
By putting Colorado at the end of the sentence, we give it emphasis. We place the emphasis we want in the reader’s mind. And the idea is taut and clear. Without a taut and clear idea chain, you wind up with a loose lump of junk. Observe:
Many skiers head to Colorado each winter. These skiers are drawn by the lure of the Rockies and deep snow.
Do you hear how the reader has to head all the way back to the start of the previous sentence to continue the idea? Do you see how the chain is loose? The sentence, in fact, is so loose that the second sentence has to almost repeat the first one to build the idea. Sentence construction such as this one slows down the reader. He has to mentally go back several times, recalling and repeating ideas in his head even if the ideas aren’t repeated on the page. The reader forms an unconscious opinion that the person who wrote the sentence isn’t someone whose work is pleasant to read, even if the ideas in the writing are quite good.
The two-steps-forward-one-step-back construction is almost as bad. Take a look:
Many skiers head to Colorado each winter. The state has many different types of ski resorts, all with the lure of the Rockies and deep snow.
Here the reader doesn’t have to go back as far, so the chain is a little tighter than the first version. But the construction of the sentence slows everything down more than necessary. What would we do to make the sentence tight? Depends on what we want to emphasize and where we want to go next with the ideas:
Many skiers head to Colorado each winter. The deep snow, coupled with high slopes and icy majesty of the Rockies, makes the state a skiers’ paradise. Luxurious accommodations and a variety of non-skiing winter sports are almost impossible for serious skiers to resist.
or
Each winter, many skiers head to Colorado. But the state has much to offer in the summer as well. During June, the Rockies come alive with wild flowers; in July, rodeos and fly fishing abound.
Do you see how the word order creates the path to emphasis?
In Zen, when you set off in a destination, you must consider carefully what path you want the reader to take.
As a writer, you have to have both a clear path and a clear destination for your reader. Without it, your reader will wander.
Remember the conversation between Alice and the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland?
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where–”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
Emphasis is easy when you know where you want to go. Deciding that, however, may be the hardest part.
The word by is a preposition. Prepositions, you may recall, are small words that connect larger and more important parts of speech—which means that the preposition connects more important ideas. Although prepositions have their place, that place is never important, and never ever important enough to be the subject of a sentence.
You will never have a preposition as your subject for the sentence.
Therefore, you will never have by in the subject. Just think logically: a preposition is a preposition, and it isn’t a noun. Even when it dresses itself up as a prepositional phrase, it isn’t a noun, no matter how hard it may pretend to be one. If you try to make a preposition your subject, you will wind up with a mess of muddy communication that still needs a subject. Look, for example, at the following:
By communicating effectively with your employees, it helps lift morale.
If you look carefully, you will see that you have that indefinite it. You added that pronoun, weak and unclear as it is, to try to have a subject. But does the reader or listener truly know what you are talking about? No. This sentence lacks clarity. (Amazing how all these concepts intertwine, isn’t it?)
So how do you fix this mess?
Simple: Cut the by. And then cut the noun or pronoun you inserted because of the by.
By communicating effectively with your employees, it helps lift morale becomes
Communicating effectively with your employees helps lift morale.
Hacking away at verbosity and clutter that by brings will increase your image substantially.
Starting a sentence with the words being as or being that is a recipe for a pompous, unclear sentence. These are unnecessary starters designed to focus attention on the writer and not on the message of the sentence. You want your message to speak for you, not your self-importance. Consider this sentence:
Being that I am an English major, I have to spend a lot of time reading.
Such wording indicates that you really want the receiver to see you, the writer, rather than the message. To fix it, replace the being that with since. You can even cut further:
As an English major, I have to spend a lot of time reading.
Being as it is that we are meeting Friday, let’s cancel Thursday’s meeting.
now becomes
Since we’re meeting Friday, let’s cancel Thursday’s meeting.
Much better.
And the Ones I Hope You Know. . .
In business, communication should look like business. It shouldn’t look like a teenaged mall rat who wants to be cool. If your Great Aunt Maude wouldn’t understand your words, then write it in words that she would understand. Don’t use text shortcuts or text language in a business communication.
Texting is still communicating, and you need to adapt to your audience. If you want to text your BFF, it may be OK to write C u l8r. If you have an appropriate opportunity to text a colleague or your boss, write See you at the meeting tomorrow. Your image is at stake.
Also, use correct capitalization. While e.e. cummings could get away with writing with no capital letters, for anyone else, it is an affectation. You can have your freedom of speech—just know that your employer has the same freedom to fire you if your speech puts the organization in a bad light.
To Sum Up
These points are small. Yet they are all vital points. In professionalism as in writing—and in life—details make all the difference.