Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Clear and lively language
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Clear and lively language
Five experts on language and meaning talk about the ways in which how we write shapes our ideas and changes our reports.
TranscriptDavid Walker: This episode of Shorewalker On Reports takes a stab at answering an old
question: how do you write so that people will want to read what you have
written? This is, how do you write readably and memorably?
But first, let’s ask another, more specific question: for
reports, how much does memorable language matter?
And we can answer that second question right away: for
reports, clear and memorable language matters a lot. It matters not
just because it improves your communication, but also because it improves your
thinking. By aiming to write clearly and memorably, we can improve the entire
shape of reports. We can give reports more impact. In this episode, I aim to
show that’s true.
So in this episode we’ll hear from a world-famous academic
and writer, Deirdre McCloskey; from innovation expert Nicholas Gruen, from former
Productivity Commission chief Gary Banks, from journalist and editor Peter
Martin, and from well-known independent economist Saul Eslake.
All of them have the same message: if people are going to
take up your message, your first need to get their attention, and then to make
them remember some of what you’ve said.
Be lively
Now, getting people’s attention and having them remember
what you’ve said – that may not seem like a very high bar. And yet, in practice,
most people find it surprisingly hard. We mostly overestimate how much
attention people are paying to us, and we mostly overestimate how much they
remember of what we say to them.
Professor Deirdre McCloskey has been a professor of economics,
English, communication, philosophy, history and classics, at universities in
the United States and The Netherlands. And when I interviewed Deirdre McCloskey
recently, she reminded me of how hard it is to get people to remember what
you’re saying. In fact, when she writes for academic audiences, she tries first
just to keep readers awake.
Deirdre McCloskey: Just purely awake. I had a
wonderful colleague in the history department at the University of Iowa, Bill
Aydelotte. Like me he was a British economic, British historian. And Bill said:
The big thing in scholarship is to keep awake. He said: If you’re going to
be a scholar, you’re gonna have to read a lot of boring things. So you’ve gotta
learn how to stay awake. And so vice versa? You gotta – you can’t bore people.
You know, that seems an awfully harsh standard for some kid who doesn’t
know writing very well. But you got to keep them awake.
So try to write in the liveliest way you can find.
Be clear
Once you’re satisfied your audience won’t doze off, then
you need to try to say things in ways that they will understand.
Peter Martin is business and economics editor of the
online publication The Conversation, and a former
long-time ABC economics correspondent. Like Deirdre McCloskey, he is always
conscious of the need to make what he’s writing more interesting. But an even
more important task, Martin points out, is to help them to understand what’s
going on:
Peter Martin: Being boring isn’t the worst
crime. Actually, you could be boring because the material might be
intrinsically boring. And that’s fair enough. I think the crime is not making
it as clear as is possible. When I edit things for The
Conversation, I don’t change what people are saying, of course. But I
actually probably change every sentence – not even the words, in a sense, often
just the order the words are arranged in to sort of make a sentence sing. I was
doing something this morning, that referred to a decrease in interest rates, or
an increase in interest rates on the part of the Reserve Bank, and I changed it
to will cut interest rates or will increase them. It’s much more evocative,
and so on every in every occasion, you can not necessarily with changing the
content, you can make it clearer in the sense that it grabs people more. Anyone
who’s been to, you know, an English class or communication school knows that
active words – these are verbs – are much better than nouns. So you don’t say:
I have great affection for you. You say: I love you. So you should make
something as clear as you can. If it needs to include a lot of facts, well, it
just has to. People like me like reports that are boring; my job is translating
them into something that’s more interesting. But you often can improve the
words to make things clearer. And often, there’s a lot of stuff you can relegate
to footnotes or to links to something else.
To write like this requires not just a set of rules, but a
mindset. You need to start focusing, as often as you can, on how you can
simplify and clarify and make more vivid the things you want to say. Peter Martin
again:
Peter Martin: I’m an extremist on this. And I
realise not everyone is skilled in this area. It is a crime to communicate any
less clearly than is possible. When I was talking earlier about how you can
change sentences to make them clearer, for someone not to do that is really,
really bad. The year in a way that the most precious resource we’ve got is
time. Obviously, it takes time to do that. But I’m referring to the time of the
reader, I suppose you know, the other precious resources, you know, sort of
their mental load. So if you can ease their mental load, if you can make it
quicker and easier to absorb. You’re doing whatever it is you’re working for a
real service. My wife and I listen to the ABC News at night in bed at 10pm. We
both used to work for ABC News. And you should hear us. It’s hilarious. We’re
like, you know, those two pensioners in the balcony in the Muppets saying: Why
did they say it that way? They could have said it that way! It would have been
so much clearer! Who's working there these days? And why did they have that
story? And then that story, instead of that one, which could link to it? Can't
anyone do these things anymore? So I’m a bit of an extremist about this. But
you know, so long as you’ve got the time, there’s really no reason why you
can’t use it to make something clearer, because you’re doing the readers – even
if the readers are into the field – you’re doing them a service. And you might
get readers then who aren’t interested in the field. People who aren’t into astronomy
might then actually, who aren’t the intended audience, might then be able to
read it. And wouldn’t that be great? You might get a few more people interested
in the field!
Say what you mean
Economist and public policy expert Nicholas Gruen has a
slightly different obsession: saying what you mean to say. Nick has worked for
senior Australian federal government ministers under prime ministers Bob Hawke
and Paul Keating, as well as for the Productivity Commission and the Business
Council of Australia. He chaired the 2009 Web 2.0 Task Force and now runs an economics
consultancy, Lateral Economics. In all these roles and others, he has helped to
write quite a few reports.
David Walker: You’ve been very clear about
your guiding principles in writing reports. And perhaps most important of those
is to be clear, you quote Orwell – say things as simply as possible and strip
back the euphemism.
Nicholas Gruen:Yeah, yeah. Express yourself in the active tense. If
you say something is happening, if possible, say who’s making it happen. If
something is being done, be direct, and say who is doing it … This reads
better, it’s much easier to read, it goes into your brain much better. But
there’s another really big benefit – which is, as Orwell says, if you strip
your language, if you make your language direct and active, and you don’t allow
yourself to use cliches and euphemisms, you find that it’ s harder to talk
bullshit. And bullshit is a major problem. For reports everywhere, there is
bullshit, all over the place. And often we don’t know that we’re drifting into
it – when people say things like ’moving forward’ instead of ’in the future’.
There’s a very gentle slope into bullshit that begins with euphemisms and
phrases that people are starting to use right now for no apparent reason:
We’re going to sing from the same hymn sheet, all these kinds of things. They
don’t do any great harm, but they lull you into choosing words and ways of
putting things that are not your own. And that robs your thoughts of your own
agency in a very subtle way that’s quite hard to notice unless you make a point
of noticing.
Saul Eslake has worked as chief economist for companies
including National Mutual, the ANZ Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and
he now runs his own consultancy firm. Saul’s ability to speak clearly about
economics has made him a fixture in Australian media and the corporate world
for more than three decades. He believes very strongly that reports for public
consumption have to be able to be understood by a wide range of people. Here
Saul talks about the influence that good communicators can have – and gives his
take on where reports succeed in using clear and lively language.
Saul Eslake: Where they go well is where they
minimise the use of jargon. And complex unintelligible to ordinary folk, parrot
sentences and paragraphs that are hard not only for ordinary people to
understand, but hard for journalists to turn into language that ordinary people
can understand, which is, as I understand it, part of a journalist’s job –
maybe not the most important part of it, but part of what journalists do. And,
you know, while there will be instances where the use of, or reference to
complex work – you know, I think, for example, reports that the IPCC has
written about climate change issues, you know, are discussing very complex
matters, and to be credible with scientists, which is important, have to be
written in a way with all sorts of caveats and your standard deviations around
means and things like that, that can be very difficult for ordinary people to
understand – I think, in those circumstances where the use of complex technical
language and argument is unavoidable for reasons of credibility with other
experts, that that needs to be put in a separate volume or a separate part of
the report from those parts that are addressed to politicians, members of
parliament, journalists and the general public. And that isn’t always done. I
think reports that are written by judges usually manage to do that fairly well.
Reports that are written by lawyers who are not judges don’t always succeed in
doing that. And reports that are written by other experts who are not
necessarily accustomed to defending their opinions in the face of challenges
from others – which, you know, barristers do for a living – sometimes they
struggle with it, sometimes they don’t. I mean, one of the other really well-
written reports, incidentally, that I, I could have mentioned before is an
example of someone writing in the field that’s not their primary expertise was
the report that John Niewenhuysen wrote to the Cain government about liquor
law, deregulation, licensing deregulation. Now, this was about the law. And
Niewenhuysen was an economist. But that was, as I recollect a report that was
about law reform, not written by a lawyer, that was written incredibly
persuasively and ultimately did a great deal of good in terms of reform,
reforming Victoria’s extraordinarily arcane and complex liquor licensing rules
in the late 1980s. So it can be done. But I think it takes people with particular
talent and determination in order to do it.
Saul’s clearly right here: not every expert has the talent
and determination to make their writing clear and lively. And that matters even
to other experts. A shrewd economist called Ian MacFarlane ended up running
Australia’s central bank for a decade. Macfarlane once admitted to me that he
didn’t read the middle sections of most economic research, because he could no
longer follow the mathematics. At the time he told me that, he was research
manager of the Reserve Bank. It underlines the point that even people with
formal training and professional responsibilities don’t necessarily want to
struggle through unclear explanations.
Saul Eslake: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I really
struggle to read a lot of academic economic research in, say, the premier
journal of the Economic Society of Australia, the Economic Record. I mean, I
can’t understand more than half the articles. And that’s partly because I don’t
have the training in econometrics that enables me to understand a lot of what
passes for pathbreaking academic economic research these days. Quite often,
it’s on topics in which I have no interest as well. But a lot of it’s just
really poorly written from the point of view of reaching a wide audience. Now,
in many cases, of course, academic economists are not writing for a wide
audience. They’re writing for other academic economists, which is a very narrow
audience. And you know, I often when I was asked by people studying economics,
or having just graduated in economics, what they should do and could they come
and work for me when I was working brains, it also I would often say to them,
that during your university degree, you are taught how to write about economics
for academic economists, because they’re the people who mark your exams. But
unless you want to be an academic economist yourself, that’s a skill you will
never need again.
Saul Eslake has spent much of his life communicating with
the public almost daily. But he still values precision in writing, just as he clearly
values precision in speaking. He has quoted the Financial
Times’ Michael Skapinder writing that a communicator who does
not know where an apostrophe goes is like a racing driver who does not know
what a dipstick is. The racing driver can still do the job without that
knowledge. But it’s kind of embarrassing, and you start to wonder how good a
driver he will turn out to be.
Saul Eslake: Most people who write things
have at least one opportunity to review what they’ve written before anyone else
reads it. And, you know, in that case, if there are egregious grammatical
errors or misuse of words, well, you know, that casts some real doubt on
whether – particularly if it’s a subject about which you don’t know very much,
and your presumption is that the person who’s writing your reading is meant to
know something about it, if it’s really badly written, I’m gonna have second
thoughts about that. It’s even more obvious when people are speaking, because
when you speak, you don’t have the opportunity to review what you have said
before someone hears it. And so if I have to listen to someone who can’t string
10 words together without four of them being ’like’, for example, I’m going to
switch off after about five minutes after that, after I’ve counted about 50
’likes’, you know, I’ve lost interest. And, you know, ditto if whoever I’m
listening to has various other vocal tics or fry that distract me from the
substance of what he or she is trying to say, you know, they’ve lost me. But
normally in writing, because you do have the opportunity to review yourself,
and you usually have the opportunity to show it to someone else before it goes
to its intended audiences, there’s less excuses for that sort of thing, I
think.
Communication is a leadership task
Obviously we count Saul Eslake as an enthusiast for clear
communication.
But does clear communication with the public matter in the
real world? Saul Eslake says he has seen its real-world value. We just heard
him recount how a powerful and clear report changed Victoria’s liquor laws. But
that’s not the only place he’s seen well-written work make a difference. I
asked Saul how he came to realise clear and lively writing mattered.
Saul Eslake: Partly by observing more senior
people when I was at Treasury, partly by seeing outside of the public service,
once I left, examples of it having been done very poorly, and what the
consequences of those were … People with a lot of their own intellectual effort
and time into writing something that disappeared without trace if people
couldn’t understand it. It could also disappear without trace, if it was
recommending something that very powerful vested interests were determined to
prevent happening. But I suppose you wouldn’t feel quite as aggrieved about
that, or you’d feel a bit aggrieved about it for a different set of reasons
than if it failed, because your own writing was the main reason for it.
Saul notes that the Australian government’s leading
economic institutions have traditionally done well at teaching people how to
write advice to leaders.
Saul Eslake: One of the reasons why I used to
recommend that young aspiring economists go and work for Treasury or the
Reserve Bank or some institution like that for a while was partly because of
the insights working there would give them into how economic policies made,
which is a very useful thing, if you want to do the kind of job I subsequently
did, but also because the Reserve Bank and Treasury are very good at teaching,
newly-minted economists how to write about economics for people who are not
economists, which, of course, includes treasurers, who are generally speaking,
not economists. And whether they do it deliberately or through osmosis, as was
the case during the Stone Age, I don’t know. But that’s a skill you don’t learn
at university. And you can learn it in the public service. I mean, you
certainly could during my day; whether you can as much now I don’t know. But
it’s a skill that a lot of people don’t have.
Communication can rescue an institution
Another voice for the real-world value of clear
communication is Gary Banks. For 15 years to 2012, Gary Banks ran Australia’s
Productivity Commission, which is an independent advisor to Australia’s federal
government on economic, social and environmental issues. Its primary instrument
of advice is reports. So over the years the Productivity Commission has worked
out a process for making sure those reports speak clearly to their audiences –
to policymakers, and to the broader public. Here’s Gary Banks, talking about
how clearer and more pointed language helped preserve the institution he ran:
Gary Banks: When I joined the Productivity
Commission, when I was appointed chairman, there was an election due … If
Labour had won that election, they were going to abolish the organisation. So I
was appointed in May, and the election was in November, and I could have been
out of a job by December. So I came into that role thinking, you know, this
organisation has to be seen to be helpful and influential. And one of the
things I first saw that was a bit problematic as some of the language we used.
And another was that, you know, some of the messages, the key messages coming
out of the studies, was a bit lost, you know. It wasn’t absent, because I think
the commission has always been quite good at that. But we worked harder on
that. And our earlier discussion about summaries and key points sort of
overlaps with that. So, you know, it really is important that you don’t spend
all your time doing a big huge body of work, and not enough time thinking about
what really matters in this body of work in terms of influence and execution of
policy. And again, as we said before, you cannot expect that, you know, the
ultimate decision maker about a policy or a strategy to be wading through
hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff. So you’ve got to break it down.
Banks makes an important point about people: it often
takes the involvement of experienced senior staff to liven up a report. Senior
staff are the people most likely to understand what the audience is going to
need to know in order for the report to succeed.
Gary Banks: In my experience at the Commission,
because the commissioners are much more attuned to the environment in which the
report will land, they are more conscious of making it appealing and compelling
if they can be. Whereas the people who are writing doing the first draft of the
chapter are more concerned about getting it right, getting the detail right,
making sure it conceptually stands up. And a lot of boring stuff can happen at
that level. But if it’s gone through a process of discussion, and the more
senior people involved in the project, have been able to exert an influence,
then hopefully, by the time it comes out, that’s been addressed.
Leadership of reports teams clearly matters here. Not
enough people who lead reports start off by saying this: we must speak clearly
and directly in this document. Nick Gruen points out that this leaves clarity
as a low priority in many reports – to the point where outsiders often can’t
really read and absorb what they say.
Nicholas Gruen: It means that I can’t read most
government reports, because I don’t know what they say. They’re so laden with
cliches and spin. So you will say the government improved or enhanced some
policy. Well, that’s for other people to decide. Tell us what you did with the
policy? Tell us, you know, did you fund it more? Did you fund it less? What if
you were seeking to enhance a particular thing – let’s say, its responsiveness
– then tell us something about the texture of those changes. And give us a
reason to believe that you’re not just saying that. Because unfortunately,
we’re just beset with this tendency of human beings. When they hear that
something’s been done, they sort of think it has been done. But if you give it
a texture, if you say how you did something, and ideally say a little bit more,
to sort of prove your point – like it was important in this phase of the
program for it to become more responsive, and customer satisfaction was taken from
35% to 60% during this period – it’s just a sort of a simple … it’s just a,
it’s a fact, it’s a thing which helps to create a picture, that that is
independent of your nice words.
Improve your ideas
So far in this podcast, we’ve heard our experts talk about
making reports and other written documents more interesting. But these experts
often say something else, too. By disciplining yourself to express ideas
clearly, you will not just be more interesting; your ideas will actually be
better too.
This idea is not new. In the past century, it has been
most famously associated with the author George Orwell. He wrote Animal Farm and 1984, but some writers remember him just as much for his classic essay Politics and the English Language. In that essay, he makes
the point that bad writing and bad thinking tend to go together: do one, and
you’ll be forced to do the other too. Here’s how Orwell puts it in Politics and the English Language, read here by Jonathan
Streeter:
… A man may take to drink because he feels himself to
be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is
rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes
ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of
our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that
the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full
of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is
willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can
think more clearly.
“If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more
clearly.” In the rest of this episode,
we will return often to this theme of Orwell’s: clear and lively writing pushes
you towards clear and lively thought.
Saul Eslake holds this view strongly. He has found muddled
thought is a major cause of muddled language. People put their thoughts down on
paper before they know what they think, and they fail to use the writing
process to figure out what their true thoughts are.
Saul Eslake: Yeah, I mean, I’ve often found –
and I think I was counselled by mentors of mine in the past, along these lines
– that actually trying to write out what you think is a useful discipline for
clarifying what you think, you know. And if you can’t do that, then there’s
probably a good chance that what do you think has got some flaw in it. And so
writing about something, or – not everyone does this, I suppose, but – if
you’re going to be speaking, rather than thinking, running through what you’re
going to say in your head before you say it, and asking yourself, ’does this
make sense to me?’ or if I was trying to have this conversation with someone
who might not be an expert in the field, but is nonetheless an intelligent
person, if I can’t explain it to this person, I’m probably not going to
convince the audience, either that I know what I’m talking about, or that if I
can at least get them to accept that I know what I’m talking about, that what
I’m saying might actually be of some relevance to them.
Nick Gruen holds a similar view to Saul Eslake on this: figure
out what you can say that will have some real value to the audience. That will
improve what you write. Better still, you’ll have better ideas that provide the
reader with more lasting value. And so you won’t produce a document that
everyone sees as a waste of their time. Gruen regrets that more and more
government documents are like this – and that might include one of his own.
Nicholas Gruen: I
mean, take this as an example. This is rather countercultural, but the only
regret I can think of – and maybe it’s not a regret, it’s just a sort of a, it
could have been different, I’m not sure it would have been better – but one
possible regret I have about the government 2.0 task force is that everybody
wanted to give it a propaganda name. And it ended up with a propaganda name,
which was Engage. And we were trying to say this is our one word for
government engaged. Now, I did want to say that and it's even possible that
I was the guy who came up with the propaganda name. But I actually think that
we’re so swamped in propaganda that there’s something that before the age of
propaganda, and … I can even, I can even detail it, where it happened in
Australian government at the top level was between 1990 and 1991. Because the
last economic statement that Bob Hawke made, it was a small economic stimulus
made in 1990, and it was called, it was an October 1990 statement, and I may
have the date wrong. But its name was Economic statement by the Prime
Minister, October 1990. And then when Paul Keating had put the sword through
him [Hawke], as he likes to put it colourful, and become the Prime Minister – I
was on staff at that point – and we all put together this slightly bigger
economic, economic stimulus, and it had a propaganda name and it was called
One Nation. Now, for Australians who are tuning into this bill, they'll find
that quite amusing. I used to wander around the corridors of Parliament House
calling it Ein Reich … Now everything is named. You know, we named the
invasion of Iraq and Kuwait, we generate these propaganda names for things
rather than just saying what’s happening and letting other people decide the
extent to which they’re good or they’re bad or what they represent and so on.
So anyway, I see that as just endlessly replicated through government reports –
this constant compulsion to say things are good, and that creates all sorts
problems when you want to say that certain things are bad, which also happens
in government reports, but everyone’s tiptoeing around.
David Walker: It’s actually quite a difficult
art to find things that are really going to move the dial in people’s thinking
about an issue.
Nicholas Gruen: What tends to happen is that
everyone amps up the rhetoric, and in the process ends up with less and less to
say. So one of the things that you’ll find – or I’ve found when dealing with
lots of groups, and particularly business groups – is that everyone says, as if
they’re delivering themselves of great wisdom, they say we need a vision.
Now, every vision of any magnitude for society always says three things, which
is we want a strong economy, a strong society and a strong environment. But
everybody says, oh, no, we need a new vision, and then we can all follow the
vision. And so and what those things that people love to talk about these
visions is, that’s the rhetoric, that’s all the things that make us feel good
about what we’ve said, that make us feel that we ’ve seen something important,
and we’re bringing it about when we’re actually not – we’re just engaging in,
in nice words. So I would argue that if you really want to cut through – and
… Most reports just don’t cut through because an awful lot of reports
commissioned by people who don’t know what to do, and will not have any strong
commitment to doing anything, if it’s difficult when they get the report back.
So that that’s that’s to be taken as background. But if you are clear – if you
are clear in your mind, and you’re clear in your writing – people will be
shocked by that. And they won’t even often know that they’re shocked. But
they’ll have a different kind of experience to the sort of experience they have
when they read government reports. And that gives you the best chance of impact
that I can think of in a massively overcrowded market.
And that brings us back to where we started: getting
people’s attention and having them remember what you’ve said – that may not
seem like a very high bar. And yet, in practice, most people find it
surprisingly hard. You need the writing in your report to be clear and lively.
And the best way to do that is to have an honest conversation with your readers
about the problem at hand.
That’s never easy, but it stands a chance of paying off.
View all episodes
By Shorewalker DMSFive experts on language and meaning talk about the ways in which how we write shapes our ideas and changes our reports.
TranscriptDavid Walker: This episode of Shorewalker On Reports takes a stab at answering an old
question: how do you write so that people will want to read what you have
written? This is, how do you write readably and memorably?
But first, let’s ask another, more specific question: for
reports, how much does memorable language matter?
And we can answer that second question right away: for
reports, clear and memorable language matters a lot. It matters not
just because it improves your communication, but also because it improves your
thinking. By aiming to write clearly and memorably, we can improve the entire
shape of reports. We can give reports more impact. In this episode, I aim to
show that’s true.
So in this episode we’ll hear from a world-famous academic
and writer, Deirdre McCloskey; from innovation expert Nicholas Gruen, from former
Productivity Commission chief Gary Banks, from journalist and editor Peter
Martin, and from well-known independent economist Saul Eslake.
All of them have the same message: if people are going to
take up your message, your first need to get their attention, and then to make
them remember some of what you’ve said.
Be lively
Now, getting people’s attention and having them remember
what you’ve said – that may not seem like a very high bar. And yet, in practice,
most people find it surprisingly hard. We mostly overestimate how much
attention people are paying to us, and we mostly overestimate how much they
remember of what we say to them.
Professor Deirdre McCloskey has been a professor of economics,
English, communication, philosophy, history and classics, at universities in
the United States and The Netherlands. And when I interviewed Deirdre McCloskey
recently, she reminded me of how hard it is to get people to remember what
you’re saying. In fact, when she writes for academic audiences, she tries first
just to keep readers awake.
Deirdre McCloskey: Just purely awake. I had a
wonderful colleague in the history department at the University of Iowa, Bill
Aydelotte. Like me he was a British economic, British historian. And Bill said:
The big thing in scholarship is to keep awake. He said: If you’re going to
be a scholar, you’re gonna have to read a lot of boring things. So you’ve gotta
learn how to stay awake. And so vice versa? You gotta – you can’t bore people.
You know, that seems an awfully harsh standard for some kid who doesn’t
know writing very well. But you got to keep them awake.
So try to write in the liveliest way you can find.
Be clear
Once you’re satisfied your audience won’t doze off, then
you need to try to say things in ways that they will understand.
Peter Martin is business and economics editor of the
online publication The Conversation, and a former
long-time ABC economics correspondent. Like Deirdre McCloskey, he is always
conscious of the need to make what he’s writing more interesting. But an even
more important task, Martin points out, is to help them to understand what’s
going on:
Peter Martin: Being boring isn’t the worst
crime. Actually, you could be boring because the material might be
intrinsically boring. And that’s fair enough. I think the crime is not making
it as clear as is possible. When I edit things for The
Conversation, I don’t change what people are saying, of course. But I
actually probably change every sentence – not even the words, in a sense, often
just the order the words are arranged in to sort of make a sentence sing. I was
doing something this morning, that referred to a decrease in interest rates, or
an increase in interest rates on the part of the Reserve Bank, and I changed it
to will cut interest rates or will increase them. It’s much more evocative,
and so on every in every occasion, you can not necessarily with changing the
content, you can make it clearer in the sense that it grabs people more. Anyone
who’s been to, you know, an English class or communication school knows that
active words – these are verbs – are much better than nouns. So you don’t say:
I have great affection for you. You say: I love you. So you should make
something as clear as you can. If it needs to include a lot of facts, well, it
just has to. People like me like reports that are boring; my job is translating
them into something that’s more interesting. But you often can improve the
words to make things clearer. And often, there’s a lot of stuff you can relegate
to footnotes or to links to something else.
To write like this requires not just a set of rules, but a
mindset. You need to start focusing, as often as you can, on how you can
simplify and clarify and make more vivid the things you want to say. Peter Martin
again:
Peter Martin: I’m an extremist on this. And I
realise not everyone is skilled in this area. It is a crime to communicate any
less clearly than is possible. When I was talking earlier about how you can
change sentences to make them clearer, for someone not to do that is really,
really bad. The year in a way that the most precious resource we’ve got is
time. Obviously, it takes time to do that. But I’m referring to the time of the
reader, I suppose you know, the other precious resources, you know, sort of
their mental load. So if you can ease their mental load, if you can make it
quicker and easier to absorb. You’re doing whatever it is you’re working for a
real service. My wife and I listen to the ABC News at night in bed at 10pm. We
both used to work for ABC News. And you should hear us. It’s hilarious. We’re
like, you know, those two pensioners in the balcony in the Muppets saying: Why
did they say it that way? They could have said it that way! It would have been
so much clearer! Who's working there these days? And why did they have that
story? And then that story, instead of that one, which could link to it? Can't
anyone do these things anymore? So I’m a bit of an extremist about this. But
you know, so long as you’ve got the time, there’s really no reason why you
can’t use it to make something clearer, because you’re doing the readers – even
if the readers are into the field – you’re doing them a service. And you might
get readers then who aren’t interested in the field. People who aren’t into astronomy
might then actually, who aren’t the intended audience, might then be able to
read it. And wouldn’t that be great? You might get a few more people interested
in the field!
Say what you mean
Economist and public policy expert Nicholas Gruen has a
slightly different obsession: saying what you mean to say. Nick has worked for
senior Australian federal government ministers under prime ministers Bob Hawke
and Paul Keating, as well as for the Productivity Commission and the Business
Council of Australia. He chaired the 2009 Web 2.0 Task Force and now runs an economics
consultancy, Lateral Economics. In all these roles and others, he has helped to
write quite a few reports.
David Walker: You’ve been very clear about
your guiding principles in writing reports. And perhaps most important of those
is to be clear, you quote Orwell – say things as simply as possible and strip
back the euphemism.
Nicholas Gruen:Yeah, yeah. Express yourself in the active tense. If
you say something is happening, if possible, say who’s making it happen. If
something is being done, be direct, and say who is doing it … This reads
better, it’s much easier to read, it goes into your brain much better. But
there’s another really big benefit – which is, as Orwell says, if you strip
your language, if you make your language direct and active, and you don’t allow
yourself to use cliches and euphemisms, you find that it’ s harder to talk
bullshit. And bullshit is a major problem. For reports everywhere, there is
bullshit, all over the place. And often we don’t know that we’re drifting into
it – when people say things like ’moving forward’ instead of ’in the future’.
There’s a very gentle slope into bullshit that begins with euphemisms and
phrases that people are starting to use right now for no apparent reason:
We’re going to sing from the same hymn sheet, all these kinds of things. They
don’t do any great harm, but they lull you into choosing words and ways of
putting things that are not your own. And that robs your thoughts of your own
agency in a very subtle way that’s quite hard to notice unless you make a point
of noticing.
Saul Eslake has worked as chief economist for companies
including National Mutual, the ANZ Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and
he now runs his own consultancy firm. Saul’s ability to speak clearly about
economics has made him a fixture in Australian media and the corporate world
for more than three decades. He believes very strongly that reports for public
consumption have to be able to be understood by a wide range of people. Here
Saul talks about the influence that good communicators can have – and gives his
take on where reports succeed in using clear and lively language.
Saul Eslake: Where they go well is where they
minimise the use of jargon. And complex unintelligible to ordinary folk, parrot
sentences and paragraphs that are hard not only for ordinary people to
understand, but hard for journalists to turn into language that ordinary people
can understand, which is, as I understand it, part of a journalist’s job –
maybe not the most important part of it, but part of what journalists do. And,
you know, while there will be instances where the use of, or reference to
complex work – you know, I think, for example, reports that the IPCC has
written about climate change issues, you know, are discussing very complex
matters, and to be credible with scientists, which is important, have to be
written in a way with all sorts of caveats and your standard deviations around
means and things like that, that can be very difficult for ordinary people to
understand – I think, in those circumstances where the use of complex technical
language and argument is unavoidable for reasons of credibility with other
experts, that that needs to be put in a separate volume or a separate part of
the report from those parts that are addressed to politicians, members of
parliament, journalists and the general public. And that isn’t always done. I
think reports that are written by judges usually manage to do that fairly well.
Reports that are written by lawyers who are not judges don’t always succeed in
doing that. And reports that are written by other experts who are not
necessarily accustomed to defending their opinions in the face of challenges
from others – which, you know, barristers do for a living – sometimes they
struggle with it, sometimes they don’t. I mean, one of the other really well-
written reports, incidentally, that I, I could have mentioned before is an
example of someone writing in the field that’s not their primary expertise was
the report that John Niewenhuysen wrote to the Cain government about liquor
law, deregulation, licensing deregulation. Now, this was about the law. And
Niewenhuysen was an economist. But that was, as I recollect a report that was
about law reform, not written by a lawyer, that was written incredibly
persuasively and ultimately did a great deal of good in terms of reform,
reforming Victoria’s extraordinarily arcane and complex liquor licensing rules
in the late 1980s. So it can be done. But I think it takes people with particular
talent and determination in order to do it.
Saul’s clearly right here: not every expert has the talent
and determination to make their writing clear and lively. And that matters even
to other experts. A shrewd economist called Ian MacFarlane ended up running
Australia’s central bank for a decade. Macfarlane once admitted to me that he
didn’t read the middle sections of most economic research, because he could no
longer follow the mathematics. At the time he told me that, he was research
manager of the Reserve Bank. It underlines the point that even people with
formal training and professional responsibilities don’t necessarily want to
struggle through unclear explanations.
Saul Eslake: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I really
struggle to read a lot of academic economic research in, say, the premier
journal of the Economic Society of Australia, the Economic Record. I mean, I
can’t understand more than half the articles. And that’s partly because I don’t
have the training in econometrics that enables me to understand a lot of what
passes for pathbreaking academic economic research these days. Quite often,
it’s on topics in which I have no interest as well. But a lot of it’s just
really poorly written from the point of view of reaching a wide audience. Now,
in many cases, of course, academic economists are not writing for a wide
audience. They’re writing for other academic economists, which is a very narrow
audience. And you know, I often when I was asked by people studying economics,
or having just graduated in economics, what they should do and could they come
and work for me when I was working brains, it also I would often say to them,
that during your university degree, you are taught how to write about economics
for academic economists, because they’re the people who mark your exams. But
unless you want to be an academic economist yourself, that’s a skill you will
never need again.
Saul Eslake has spent much of his life communicating with
the public almost daily. But he still values precision in writing, just as he clearly
values precision in speaking. He has quoted the Financial
Times’ Michael Skapinder writing that a communicator who does
not know where an apostrophe goes is like a racing driver who does not know
what a dipstick is. The racing driver can still do the job without that
knowledge. But it’s kind of embarrassing, and you start to wonder how good a
driver he will turn out to be.
Saul Eslake: Most people who write things
have at least one opportunity to review what they’ve written before anyone else
reads it. And, you know, in that case, if there are egregious grammatical
errors or misuse of words, well, you know, that casts some real doubt on
whether – particularly if it’s a subject about which you don’t know very much,
and your presumption is that the person who’s writing your reading is meant to
know something about it, if it’s really badly written, I’m gonna have second
thoughts about that. It’s even more obvious when people are speaking, because
when you speak, you don’t have the opportunity to review what you have said
before someone hears it. And so if I have to listen to someone who can’t string
10 words together without four of them being ’like’, for example, I’m going to
switch off after about five minutes after that, after I’ve counted about 50
’likes’, you know, I’ve lost interest. And, you know, ditto if whoever I’m
listening to has various other vocal tics or fry that distract me from the
substance of what he or she is trying to say, you know, they’ve lost me. But
normally in writing, because you do have the opportunity to review yourself,
and you usually have the opportunity to show it to someone else before it goes
to its intended audiences, there’s less excuses for that sort of thing, I
think.
Communication is a leadership task
Obviously we count Saul Eslake as an enthusiast for clear
communication.
But does clear communication with the public matter in the
real world? Saul Eslake says he has seen its real-world value. We just heard
him recount how a powerful and clear report changed Victoria’s liquor laws. But
that’s not the only place he’s seen well-written work make a difference. I
asked Saul how he came to realise clear and lively writing mattered.
Saul Eslake: Partly by observing more senior
people when I was at Treasury, partly by seeing outside of the public service,
once I left, examples of it having been done very poorly, and what the
consequences of those were … People with a lot of their own intellectual effort
and time into writing something that disappeared without trace if people
couldn’t understand it. It could also disappear without trace, if it was
recommending something that very powerful vested interests were determined to
prevent happening. But I suppose you wouldn’t feel quite as aggrieved about
that, or you’d feel a bit aggrieved about it for a different set of reasons
than if it failed, because your own writing was the main reason for it.
Saul notes that the Australian government’s leading
economic institutions have traditionally done well at teaching people how to
write advice to leaders.
Saul Eslake: One of the reasons why I used to
recommend that young aspiring economists go and work for Treasury or the
Reserve Bank or some institution like that for a while was partly because of
the insights working there would give them into how economic policies made,
which is a very useful thing, if you want to do the kind of job I subsequently
did, but also because the Reserve Bank and Treasury are very good at teaching,
newly-minted economists how to write about economics for people who are not
economists, which, of course, includes treasurers, who are generally speaking,
not economists. And whether they do it deliberately or through osmosis, as was
the case during the Stone Age, I don’t know. But that’s a skill you don’t learn
at university. And you can learn it in the public service. I mean, you
certainly could during my day; whether you can as much now I don’t know. But
it’s a skill that a lot of people don’t have.
Communication can rescue an institution
Another voice for the real-world value of clear
communication is Gary Banks. For 15 years to 2012, Gary Banks ran Australia’s
Productivity Commission, which is an independent advisor to Australia’s federal
government on economic, social and environmental issues. Its primary instrument
of advice is reports. So over the years the Productivity Commission has worked
out a process for making sure those reports speak clearly to their audiences –
to policymakers, and to the broader public. Here’s Gary Banks, talking about
how clearer and more pointed language helped preserve the institution he ran:
Gary Banks: When I joined the Productivity
Commission, when I was appointed chairman, there was an election due … If
Labour had won that election, they were going to abolish the organisation. So I
was appointed in May, and the election was in November, and I could have been
out of a job by December. So I came into that role thinking, you know, this
organisation has to be seen to be helpful and influential. And one of the
things I first saw that was a bit problematic as some of the language we used.
And another was that, you know, some of the messages, the key messages coming
out of the studies, was a bit lost, you know. It wasn’t absent, because I think
the commission has always been quite good at that. But we worked harder on
that. And our earlier discussion about summaries and key points sort of
overlaps with that. So, you know, it really is important that you don’t spend
all your time doing a big huge body of work, and not enough time thinking about
what really matters in this body of work in terms of influence and execution of
policy. And again, as we said before, you cannot expect that, you know, the
ultimate decision maker about a policy or a strategy to be wading through
hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff. So you’ve got to break it down.
Banks makes an important point about people: it often
takes the involvement of experienced senior staff to liven up a report. Senior
staff are the people most likely to understand what the audience is going to
need to know in order for the report to succeed.
Gary Banks: In my experience at the Commission,
because the commissioners are much more attuned to the environment in which the
report will land, they are more conscious of making it appealing and compelling
if they can be. Whereas the people who are writing doing the first draft of the
chapter are more concerned about getting it right, getting the detail right,
making sure it conceptually stands up. And a lot of boring stuff can happen at
that level. But if it’s gone through a process of discussion, and the more
senior people involved in the project, have been able to exert an influence,
then hopefully, by the time it comes out, that’s been addressed.
Leadership of reports teams clearly matters here. Not
enough people who lead reports start off by saying this: we must speak clearly
and directly in this document. Nick Gruen points out that this leaves clarity
as a low priority in many reports – to the point where outsiders often can’t
really read and absorb what they say.
Nicholas Gruen: It means that I can’t read most
government reports, because I don’t know what they say. They’re so laden with
cliches and spin. So you will say the government improved or enhanced some
policy. Well, that’s for other people to decide. Tell us what you did with the
policy? Tell us, you know, did you fund it more? Did you fund it less? What if
you were seeking to enhance a particular thing – let’s say, its responsiveness
– then tell us something about the texture of those changes. And give us a
reason to believe that you’re not just saying that. Because unfortunately,
we’re just beset with this tendency of human beings. When they hear that
something’s been done, they sort of think it has been done. But if you give it
a texture, if you say how you did something, and ideally say a little bit more,
to sort of prove your point – like it was important in this phase of the
program for it to become more responsive, and customer satisfaction was taken from
35% to 60% during this period – it’s just a sort of a simple … it’s just a,
it’s a fact, it’s a thing which helps to create a picture, that that is
independent of your nice words.
Improve your ideas
So far in this podcast, we’ve heard our experts talk about
making reports and other written documents more interesting. But these experts
often say something else, too. By disciplining yourself to express ideas
clearly, you will not just be more interesting; your ideas will actually be
better too.
This idea is not new. In the past century, it has been
most famously associated with the author George Orwell. He wrote Animal Farm and 1984, but some writers remember him just as much for his classic essay Politics and the English Language. In that essay, he makes
the point that bad writing and bad thinking tend to go together: do one, and
you’ll be forced to do the other too. Here’s how Orwell puts it in Politics and the English Language, read here by Jonathan
Streeter:
… A man may take to drink because he feels himself to
be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is
rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes
ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of
our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that
the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full
of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is
willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can
think more clearly.
“If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more
clearly.” In the rest of this episode,
we will return often to this theme of Orwell’s: clear and lively writing pushes
you towards clear and lively thought.
Saul Eslake holds this view strongly. He has found muddled
thought is a major cause of muddled language. People put their thoughts down on
paper before they know what they think, and they fail to use the writing
process to figure out what their true thoughts are.
Saul Eslake: Yeah, I mean, I’ve often found –
and I think I was counselled by mentors of mine in the past, along these lines
– that actually trying to write out what you think is a useful discipline for
clarifying what you think, you know. And if you can’t do that, then there’s
probably a good chance that what do you think has got some flaw in it. And so
writing about something, or – not everyone does this, I suppose, but – if
you’re going to be speaking, rather than thinking, running through what you’re
going to say in your head before you say it, and asking yourself, ’does this
make sense to me?’ or if I was trying to have this conversation with someone
who might not be an expert in the field, but is nonetheless an intelligent
person, if I can’t explain it to this person, I’m probably not going to
convince the audience, either that I know what I’m talking about, or that if I
can at least get them to accept that I know what I’m talking about, that what
I’m saying might actually be of some relevance to them.
Nick Gruen holds a similar view to Saul Eslake on this: figure
out what you can say that will have some real value to the audience. That will
improve what you write. Better still, you’ll have better ideas that provide the
reader with more lasting value. And so you won’t produce a document that
everyone sees as a waste of their time. Gruen regrets that more and more
government documents are like this – and that might include one of his own.
Nicholas Gruen: I
mean, take this as an example. This is rather countercultural, but the only
regret I can think of – and maybe it’s not a regret, it’s just a sort of a, it
could have been different, I’m not sure it would have been better – but one
possible regret I have about the government 2.0 task force is that everybody
wanted to give it a propaganda name. And it ended up with a propaganda name,
which was Engage. And we were trying to say this is our one word for
government engaged. Now, I did want to say that and it's even possible that
I was the guy who came up with the propaganda name. But I actually think that
we’re so swamped in propaganda that there’s something that before the age of
propaganda, and … I can even, I can even detail it, where it happened in
Australian government at the top level was between 1990 and 1991. Because the
last economic statement that Bob Hawke made, it was a small economic stimulus
made in 1990, and it was called, it was an October 1990 statement, and I may
have the date wrong. But its name was Economic statement by the Prime
Minister, October 1990. And then when Paul Keating had put the sword through
him [Hawke], as he likes to put it colourful, and become the Prime Minister – I
was on staff at that point – and we all put together this slightly bigger
economic, economic stimulus, and it had a propaganda name and it was called
One Nation. Now, for Australians who are tuning into this bill, they'll find
that quite amusing. I used to wander around the corridors of Parliament House
calling it Ein Reich … Now everything is named. You know, we named the
invasion of Iraq and Kuwait, we generate these propaganda names for things
rather than just saying what’s happening and letting other people decide the
extent to which they’re good or they’re bad or what they represent and so on.
So anyway, I see that as just endlessly replicated through government reports –
this constant compulsion to say things are good, and that creates all sorts
problems when you want to say that certain things are bad, which also happens
in government reports, but everyone’s tiptoeing around.
David Walker: It’s actually quite a difficult
art to find things that are really going to move the dial in people’s thinking
about an issue.
Nicholas Gruen: What tends to happen is that
everyone amps up the rhetoric, and in the process ends up with less and less to
say. So one of the things that you’ll find – or I’ve found when dealing with
lots of groups, and particularly business groups – is that everyone says, as if
they’re delivering themselves of great wisdom, they say we need a vision.
Now, every vision of any magnitude for society always says three things, which
is we want a strong economy, a strong society and a strong environment. But
everybody says, oh, no, we need a new vision, and then we can all follow the
vision. And so and what those things that people love to talk about these
visions is, that’s the rhetoric, that’s all the things that make us feel good
about what we’ve said, that make us feel that we ’ve seen something important,
and we’re bringing it about when we’re actually not – we’re just engaging in,
in nice words. So I would argue that if you really want to cut through – and
… Most reports just don’t cut through because an awful lot of reports
commissioned by people who don’t know what to do, and will not have any strong
commitment to doing anything, if it’s difficult when they get the report back.
So that that’s that’s to be taken as background. But if you are clear – if you
are clear in your mind, and you’re clear in your writing – people will be
shocked by that. And they won’t even often know that they’re shocked. But
they’ll have a different kind of experience to the sort of experience they have
when they read government reports. And that gives you the best chance of impact
that I can think of in a massively overcrowded market.
And that brings us back to where we started: getting
people’s attention and having them remember what you’ve said – that may not
seem like a very high bar. And yet, in practice, most people find it
surprisingly hard. You need the writing in your report to be clear and lively.
And the best way to do that is to have an honest conversation with your readers
about the problem at hand.
That’s never easy, but it stands a chance of paying off.