This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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Let’s turn our attention to the words and sentences that we might use in a document, the things we write, the things we place on a page.
Impress people with your thinking, not your language
The first thing I want to say is how important I think it is to not try to impress people with the complexity of your language. If you feel you have a need to impress somebody, do it with the quality of your thinking.
Now, sometimes I read documents where it seems to me that the writer has used big words and long convoluted sentences in an attempt to impress on me how clever they are, and I guess by implication, how clever I am not. You’ve likely read that type of writing at some stage in your life. Let me say that style of writing just gets in the way of good communication. It does not impress people, it just confuses.
In fact, I think if we accept that style of writing in our organisations and the documents we produce, there’s a little bit of the Emperor’s New Clothes going on there. You’ll remember that fable by Hans Christian Andersen. Some tricksters come into town and they say they have this wonderfully fine fabric. In fact, they’ve got nothing at all. But they say they have this wonderfully fine fabric. And they say if you can’t see it, there is something wrong with you. You are less sophisticated, less worthy, less intelligent, something like that. They convince the king to get some new clothes made out of this non-existent fabric. The king prances down the street in his new clothes and nobody wants to say anything because nobody wants to be thought of as lesser until a small boy calls out the obvious and everyone has a laugh.
I think there’s a little bit of that going on when we pretend that that style of writing is good and proper and effective. It’s not. So I think we can just dispense with that. We’re not going to write in that way. We’ll recognise that it’s a pretence. It’s not going to be part of the way we write in our organisations.
When I make a comment like that I sometimes get a little bit of pushback. People say, I do need to make it a little bit hard for people so that they will respect what I’m saying, so that they will treat me seriously. Well, I don’t think that’s true. And I don’t think anybody has ever said, hey, this is too easy to understand. In fact, there’s some good research around that shows that people who can explain ideas in a clear and simple way are actually thought of as more intelligent than those who can’t.
Beware the curse of knowledge
The second cause of complex writing is a little harder to dismiss, and it’s been described as the curse of knowledge. I think this is a real problem. This happens when you know stuff so well, you find it hard to imagine other people not knowing it. So this could happen if you’ve been working in a particular area for some time and you’ve built up a body of knowledge. You will have heard people talk about this topic in a particular way. You will have read some stuff that’s been written about the topic using a particular language style, that you may have even used yourself when you write. You’re not trying to be difficult. You’re not trying to make it hard for people. But it does come across that way, not intentionally.
There was an experiment done some time ago with the experimenter divided people into two groups, tappers and listeners. He asked the tappers to just tap out the rhythm of a familiar tune on the desk. Just tap out something like happy birthday, and he asked the tappers how likely is it that your listeners will be able to guess the tune from your tapping. I think it was about 85% of them said yeah, sure they will. It’s a really obvious tune, we all know that one. The reality was about 25% of the listeners could guess that tune.
Now that’s just a really simple experiment that demonstrates how we have a tendency to overestimate what other people know based on what we know. If we’ve been working in a particular topic area for some time, our knowledge almost seems as though it’s become like common sense. Everybody knows it. But it’s not common. We can tend to forget the pain and the struggle we had in developing that knowledge.
Now my guess is if you’re doing this course, you do have a particular expertise in some area, and so this curse of knowledge may be at play all the time when you are writing. So the first thing, be aware of it as a possibility. Another thing you can do is to ask somebody who doesn’t have all your experiences to have a read of your work and to point out anything that’s a bit difficult.
I have a sign on the screen here. Just have a look at that and see if you can guess what type of organisation that is just by looking at the words on the screen. Well, it’s actually from a solicitor. And the thing that gives it away is the word ‘pursuant’. How many normal people use ‘pursuant’.
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