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Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters: A Practical Guide to Writing Well in the Modern Age
Harold Evans
By
Published: Jan 14, 2019
Category:
Non Fiction
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,” Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Bacon is wonderfully concise. Almost five centuries later, Sir Harry Evans agrees: “A concise sentence is more likely to be clear.” And clarity is the grail — in his classroom, an attainable grail.
“Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters: A Practical Guide to Writing Well in the Modern Age” fills 416 pages. For casual readers and would-be writers, it is to be tasted — that is, skimmed. For obsessive grammarians and dedicated writers, it’s homework, to be chewed and digested — and there will be a test.
Who is Harry Evans? Only the most famous newspaper editor of our time. And then a legendary publisher. And then a gifted non-fiction writer: They Made America From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovation. And for four decades, the husband of another legendary editor, Tina Brown, author of The Vanity Fair Diaries, 1983-1992 and The Diana Chronicles.
The idea of the book is: Think clearly. Say it clearly. Write it clearly. This is not just good communication. It is good politics. Even good morality. Like this:
Words have consequences. The bursting of the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession revealed that millions had signed agreements they hadn’t understood or had given up reading for fear of being impaled on a lien. But as the book and movie “The Big Short” make clear, the malefactors of the Great Recession hadn’t understood what they were doing either. This book on clear writing is as concerned with how words confuse and mislead, with or without malice aforethought, as it is with literary expression: in misunderstood mortgages; in the serpentine language of Social Security; in commands too vague for life-and-death military actions; in insurance policies that don’t cover what the buyers believe they cover; in instructions that don’t instruct; in warranties that prove worthless; in political campaigns erected on a tower of untruths.
What really matters: “Making your meaning clear beyond a doubt.” Which Evans does so effortlessly you want to try to do it too. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Evans thoughtfully offers a cheat sheet:
1. Get moving: avoid passive voice; cast sentences in the active voice.
2. Be specific: eschew abstract words in favor of specific words.
3. Ration adjectives, raze adverbs: ask yourself: is the adjective really necessary to define the subject of the sentence? Does the adverb really enhance the verb or adjective?
4. Cut the fat, check the figures: avoid verbosity; write as concisely as possible.
5. Organize for clarity: use parallel structure to put things that belong together.
6. Be positive: write assertive sentences; even a negative should be expressed in a positive form.
7. Don’t be a bore: eschew monotony by implementing different sentence structures.
8. Put people first: make sentence bear directly on the reader.
9. The pesky prepositions: use prepositions appropriately — they are the workhorses that link nouns; they tell us when, where, why, and how.
10. Down with monologophobia (fear of using the same word twice in a sentence or successive sentences): do not develop other nouns when a pronoun will work just fine.
His credentials for teaching good writing are impeccable. “In 1959, I was in a garden in India meeting with Pandit Nehru. The International Press Institute sent me to help modernize Indian newspapers. They were still stuck in the Victorian reporting style. Nehru asked me what I could do to make them more accessible to the masses. Out of that venture came ‘The Active Newsroom.’ Then Britain’s National Council for the Training of Journalists asked if I would write a similar thing for England, which became ‘Editing and Design [1973–1978]’ I was haunted, though. I always wanted to write more about English — about how we might make things clearer.” Now, he’s 90, still crisp and opinionated: “I mean, I’m a bloody menace. When I go in a café in the morning for breakfast and I’m reading the paper, I’m editing. I can’t help it. I can’t stop. I still go through the paper and mark it up as I read. It’s a compulsion actually.”
About those 416 pages…. Most of you won’t care about his “sentence clinic,” where he cites overstuffed writing and reduces it to its essence. He’s obsessed with clichés — and he makes a list of ones to avoid that fills six pages. And his analysis of a government report seems to go on as long as…. well, a government report.
There are many great stories along the way. A good idea for skimmers: As soon as you see a proper name, or a brief quote, stop skimming and read. And then there’s the unarguable fact that Sir Harry is a damn good writer, as here, where he echoes “Bleak House,” one of Dickens’ greatest novels:
Fog everywhere. Fog online and in print, fog exhaled in television studios where time is anyway too short for truth. Fog in the Wall Street executive suites. Fog in the regulating agencies that couldn’t see the signals flashing danger in shadow banking. Fog in the evasions in Flint, Michigan, while its citizens drank poisoned water. Fog in the ivory towers where the arbiters of academia all over the world are conned into publishing volumes of computer-generated garbage. Fog machines in Madison Avenue offices where marketers invent dictionaries of fluff so that a swimming cap is sold as a “hair management system.”1 Fog in pressure groups that camouflage their real purpose with euphemism; fog from vested interests aping the language of science to muddy the truth about climate change. Fog in the Affordable Care Act and in reporting so twisted at birth it might as well have been called the Affordable Scare Act. Fog in the U.S. Supreme Court, where five judges in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010) sanctified secret bribery as freedom of speech. But never come there fog too thick, never come there mud and mire too deep, never come there bureaucratic waffle so gross as to withstand the clean invigorating wind of a sound English sentence.
That last sentence — killer, don’t you think?
BONUS
That last paragraph is a gloss on one of the first paragraphs of “Bleak House, by Charles Dickens….
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
