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That Sure Sounded Important!
But I wonder what it meant.
I grew up during the rise of the evangelical community in America.
Raise that topic and you can start anything from a friendly conversation to a riot, but my interest here is for writers: evangelicals embraced plain language.
They drove the popularity of modern-language versions of the Bible, supplementing and even supplanting the King James with translations aimed at modern readers and focused on clarity of meaning. This swept away the unintended atmospherics that had become attached to the text by the aging of words, style, and construction. Same for prayer, especially in public, which ceased to be conducted with thee and thou and wouldst and started sounding more like half a conversation with the Lord Almighty if you were to run into Him in line at the grocery store.
Was all this good or bad for the soul? For religion? For the church on the corner? No idea. But as a writer, I observe a community of people who, first, felt strongly that certain ideas were important; second, wanted to better understand those ideas; and third, wished to share their ideas with others. The conclusion they drew was that Thou knowest all things, o most High is a pretty weak way convey the otherwise straightforward proposition that God is watching over everything. So they tossed the poetry and switched over to prose.
This is one of the most important lessons a writer must learn: avoid pretentious diction, which is how Orwell put it in his famous essay on politics and language. Bad writers, he wrote, imagine that certain less-common words are superior choices to the ones we keep handy. Orwell cited expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, and subaqueous, for instance, as unnecessary. He’s right. The only reason most of us deploy (Strike that. Let's go with "use.") these words is because we think it makes us sound smarter than we are.
Go back a couple sentences. See where I wrote about “superior” choices? You and I know the truly superior choice is the word, phrase, construction, or style that most precisely expresses a meaning or feeling; in other words, language that approximates what we're thinking. But we often choose instead what we think will make us sound smarter or more serious. Or we speak the way we think people expect us to speak instead of just saying what we have to say. In both cases we weaken what ought to be our pursuit, saying what we mean.
Thus the prayer before the high school football game sounds less like sincerity and more like the winning monologue from a Bad Shakespeare competition. The author of the college paper hides their findings deep inside the inscrutable goop of the academic treatise. The opinion-maker retreats to the vague, the overly broad, and the cherry picked, forsaking evidence for assertions supported by nothing but the breezes of what we already believe.
Avoid the inscrutable goop.
Imprecise writing is typically the product of insufficient effort; substituting fancy words for real knowledge is easier than hunting down words that reflect exactly what is bubbling in your brain. As for the queen of effective expression, critical thinking, she’s left standing at the airport arrival lane wondering why no one bothered to pick her up.
Say what you mean. Be precise. Be simple. Focus on clarity of content and style will take care of itself.
Mike's Calendar
| Topic |
Organization |
Date |
Location |
| Public Relations Writing |
A private corporation |
January |
Northern Virginia |
| Public Relations Writing |
A private corporation |
January |
Northern Virginia |
| "Sleep Here" |
A new short play |
February |
New York City |
| Speechwriting |
Georgetown University |
February 5-7 |
Washington, DC |
| Professional Writing |
A trade association |
March |
Washington, DC |
| Storytelling |
A trade association |
March |
Washington, DC |
| Speechwriting |
PSA |
March 19-20 |
Washington, DC |
| Speechwriting |
Georgetown University |
April 8-10 |
Washington, DC |
| Storytelling |
PSA Online Speechwriting School |
May 27 |
Chicago |
| PR Writing |
IABC World Conference |
June 14-17 |
Chicago |
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