Hello!

Welcome to my new website/blog.  First off , I wish to say a huge thank you to the creative and gifted Colleen Sheehan for her work on this site and for giving it its professional gloss.  Anyone who would like support in starting up a new website, or have their Facebook or Twitter pages redesigned, their ebooks formatted or any one of a number of excellent services, click on this link.  You will not regret it.  write.DREAM.repeat Book Design

Tuesday 21 June 2016



POST No. 2 on WRITING:


WRITE TO BE UNDERSTOOD; NOT TO IMPRESS


CLARITY IN WRITING
When I was a young lecturer I became involved in writing academic reports of various kinds for the Department of Education in Northern Ireland. I was chatting with a senior staff inspector at a course one time and I said, “Why did you pick me to write these reports?”
I was initially upset, almost insulted, by the answer. “We have had reports written by other people but much of it is jargonistic and confusing. Your stuff is dead easy to read.”

Dead easy to read? Did that mean that my writing was superficial? That it was simplistic? That it lacked depth? To be honest, for quite a while I felt genuinely aggrieved by his comment. ‘Dead easy to read’ seemed to me to detract for the depth of argument, the subtleties of meaning, that I knew were there. I wondered if people reading my stuff were missing the good that was in it. I said as much to the inspector and he laughed at my concerns. “Anyone,” he told me, “can discuss complex issues in complex terms, particularly using the jargon of the topic. It looks and sounds great but more often than not is confusing and confused. Sometimes it degenerates into gobbledegook. Your skill lies in the fact that you can deal with complex issues in a jargon free way that allows your reader to follow your arguments and still be with you when you arrive at your conclusions.”

I thought about it for a day or two and finally arrived at two conclusions.

ONE: that he had actually paid me a compliment and,

TWO: that I was going to have to radically examine my writing style and try to understand what it was that I had been doing so that I could do it as a deliberate process. And I determined that above all things, clarity would be the hallmark of anything I would write in the future.

I WOULD WRITE TO BE UNDERSTOOD, NOT TO IMPRESS

and if people wanted to call it ‘easy’ or ‘simple’, then I would accept that as a compliment.

So it is now my belief that writing styles can fall into 4 categories:

FOUR CATEGORIES OF WRITING STYLE

1. COMPLEX IDEAS
described using COMPLEX LANGUAGE (to impress, to blind, and ultimately to confuse … frequently degenerates into gobbledegook).

2. SUPERFICIAL IDEAS
using COMPLEX LANGUAGE (to give the ideas a veneer of intellectual worth that they do not have).

3. SUPERFICIAL IDEAS using simple or NAIVE LANGUAGE (the writing of the immature)

and

4. COMPLEX IDEAS, something with some depth to it expressed in CLEAR AND UNAMBIGUOUS  LANGUAGE  (Dead easy to read.)

NB: Always aim for Number 4.

No comments:

Post a Comment