Explaining Difficult Things, page 11

Style Matters, continued

In fact, this is Orwell’s translation into “beaurocratese” of the following passage from the Authorized [1611] version of the King James Bible:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Quite a difference! (By the way, one of the exercises in the Stretch Your Brain section at the end of this chapter is to create a sentence of less than eight words that preserves the meaning of the passage from Ecclesiastes.)

You probably were already in agreement that style matters, as a comparison of these two passages so amply confirms. But I’d like to go behind the scenes for a moment and examine why.

Writing is communication.

Good communication demands clarity.

Simplicity is more likely to produce clarity.

Pompous, long-winded, or obtuse wording will turn people off. It puts them to sleep. They won’t even take the time to read passages written in a poor style.

It’s not an issue of meaning. Simple words can have the same meaning as a façade of pompous rhetoric. It is more a matter of perception.

Readers don’t usually parse text. Unless they are very careful, readers are often guided by first impressions. Initial impressions--perception--may have more to do with the “meaning” we take home from a sentence or paragraph than the literal meaning of its words.

So style matters, primarily because sloppy writing style gets in the way of your ability to communicate.

A word here about email

As you probably know, a great deal of today’s written communication takes place in email.

I think this is a very good thing.

Email is quick, fast, cheap, and easy. It takes the place that a correspondence in letters did years ago. It also means that people write more than they did when quick communication was mostly accomplished using the telephone.

Continued next page

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