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When the famed poet Shelley
said, "Poets (read writers) are the unacknowledged legislators
of the world", he was paying a befitting tribute to the people who
transform the world through the word.
Jawaharlal
Nehru made a name for himself as a seasoned politician but it was
said of him that he would have made a bigger dent on the minds of
the people as a writer.
The power
of the printed word is a known and acknowledged phenomenon. "I read
it in a book", is often used as a clincher in an undecided argument.
Herbert Drucker has written a book "Communication is Power".
It indeed
is! But those aspiring to go up the slippery pole of success in
competitions of life, often blink away its importance. They either
are 'innocent' of its importance, or worse, think that it comes
naturally.
Get down
to the business of writing and see the improvement in your overall
personality.
The ability
to communicate clearly in writing is one of the "most important
skills you will ever master. It will help you to get your ideas
across effectively and to get the results you want in your business
and personal life. There is no mystery to good writing-it is a skill
you can learn.
There are
a few executives who have rare kind of secretary who can take care
of all sorts of correspondence with no more than a quick memorandum
to work from. But for most of us, if there is any writing to be
done, we have to do it ourselves.
We have to
write papers (book reports, term papers, college applications),
business papers (memos, reports, letters of inquiry, letters of
adjustment), home papers, invitations etc. We are constantly called
on to put words to paper. It would be difficult to count the number
of such words, messages, letters, and reports put into the mails
or delivered by hand, but the daily figure must be enormous.
Be brief
"THAT writer
does the most, who gives the reader the most information, and takes
from him the least time", wrote Charles C. Colton. This is an observation
which everyone who writes should commit to heart, an observation
to post above the desk of "every businessman who dictates a memo,
of every housewife who pens a letter, and of every student who writes
out a term-paper.
The purpose
of writing is to communicate:
A thought,
an idea, a sentiment, a fact. The more concrete and concise these
elements in a communication, the more precise, the more rewarding
they are to the reader. "Brevity is the soul of wit", said Shakespeare.
This maxim warrants remembering, along with Mr. Colton's admonition,
that we demand the least time from our readers.
Clear
and Complete
Othe other
hand, nothing can be more irritating and sometimes frustrating than
the omission of essential detail Suppose, for example, the shirts
you manufacture come in several styles, colors and sizes, but the
order you have received in the mail gives no specifications. Or
you are driving to visit a friend in the country and you come to
a fork in a country lane; you consult the map he has sent you and
he has omitted both the fork and the road you are to take.
Someone writes
down a telephone message from your out-of-town friends, telling
you they're going to be in the city and will drop in to see you;
but the message contains no date, no time and nothing to indicate
whether they are coming alone or with their children. And there
are the instructions for setting up your hi-fi tape recorder which
take for granted that you know what a "patch cord" is.
There is
virtue in brevity, but you must never assume that your reader is
as expert or as knowledgeable as you are about whatever it is you
are writing. Brevity is not an excuse for lack of clarity. And
clarity, above all, is essential to what you have to say on paper.
Certainly
you want to avoid stiffness and rigidity in your writing (even when
you send off an angry letter to the manager of your local cinema).
At the same time, you wouldn't write a report on the market conditions
in the "chummy" manner of a letter to a cousin or a college roommate
who has just become president of an organization.
Lively Language
There has
been more pretentious non sense written and spoken about style than
about any other literary subject. As a result, half the unpracticed
writers assume an unnatural pomposity when they settle down to composition,
three-eighths of them are intimidated, and only the one eighth left
over are independent enough to forget about style and write naturally
Just as you
have your own way of wearing your clothes or drinking soup, so you
have your own individual way of expressing yourself.
This does
not mean that your natural way cannot be improved. Just as it is
kind to tell a man who sucks up his soup noisily that his social
acceptability will be enhanced by applying the silencer, so it is
necessary for an inexperienced writer to be told what errors or
ill-manners in writing to avoid.
Any writing
interlarded plentifully with "goshes" and dashes and exclamation
marks, for example, grates on the reader, and is therefore bad manners.
Any writing
in which nouns are habitually qualified by two or more adjectives
is too wordy and unlikely to express any meaning with precision.
There are
certain basic rules of good writing which are almost universal in
their application, and within the framework of which it is possible
for writers of the most diverse gifts and styles to express themselves
with individuality.
The main
five rules are:
Prefer the
short word to the long; Prefer the concrete word to the abstract
word; Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance; Prefer the short sentence
to the long; Use no word which does not directly contribute towards
the sense you wish to convey.
Prefer
the short word to the long:
The short
word is generally better because it expresses your meaning more
quickly and certainly. A deliberate search for short words leads
to incisiveness in writing. How much better to say: "I couldn't
come because it was raining", than "My attendance was rendered impossible
by adverse meteorological conditions."
Prefer
the concrete word to the abstract word:
In most writing
it is possible to choose between concrete and abstract words. If
you are:' writing about ideas, which are abstractions, you naturally
have to use abstract words, but there is a deplorable tendency among
many people to use vague abstract words where short concrete words
would be better.
Prefer
the Saxon word to the Romance:
The Saxon
word is what is bred in the bone; it is racy, idiomatic and direct.
The Romance
word is the genteelism assumed by Frenchified Englishmen. But good
English writers still prefer, "wood" to "timber", "sail" to "navigate",
"walk" to "ambulate", "sickness" to "invalidity".
The English
language has been immensely enriched by words from other languages,
and it would be both impracticable and foolish to hamstring your
writing by turning a recommendation into a hard and fast rule. Use
your commonsense-but avoid pretensions.
Prefer
the short:
Sentence to the long: Here again
commonsense must be used. A succession of short sentences can be
choppy. A succession of long sentences sends your readers to sleep.
The best arrangement is a nice balance of short and long sentences,
with a general preference for the short.
Use no
word that does not directly contribute towards the sense:
It is astonishing
how many "passenger" words you will find in print. They contribute
heavily to dullness. A good writer is like a marksman: he fires
one shot from his rifle and hits the mark, or near it. The indifferent
writer blazes away both barrels of a shot-gun, hoping that the "spread"
will make up for his lack of accuracy.
In short,
know what you want to say, and say it in the fewest words than can
be used without baldness. The voluble are seldom really articulate.
Precision of meaning is lost in the verbiage.
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