Writing Well, Part 2: Clear Thinking, Clear Writing
Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
–Strunk and White, Elements of Style
I’ve found Strunk and White’s quote above to be exactly right. When I sit down to write about an idea I have clear in my head, I often find that it was not so clear after all. The act of putting it into writing—making it tangible—often reveals facets of the idea I hadn’t thought about. Clear writing only comes when your thinking is clear, and the process of trying to write clearly can clear up your thinking. The process of writing sloppily leaves your thinking muddled.
George Orwell was concerned with the link between sloppy writing and sloppy thinking. In his time, he witnessed political decisions so bad that they could only be explained with vague, deceptive, muddled language. Unfortunately, this poor language fit right in with the sorry state of English in general. It’s remarkable how applicable Orwell’s frustrations are to our own time.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. 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, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
 |
| I have too much respect for Feynman to give him a jokey picture. |
The physicist Richard Feynman is one of my favorite thinkers, so it is no surprise that the quality of his writing is excellent. He was intellectually curious, a troublemaker, and acutely aware of the link between clear thinking and clear language. I’ll share with you a couple of his anecdotes from his time at Princeton when he visited the philosophy students and the biology students in an effort to see what the world looked like outside of the physics department.
Feynman sat in on a philosophy seminar where the graduate students were discussing a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They talked a great deal about the term “essential object” and Feynman took it as a technical term he didn’t know the definition of. Then the professor leading the seminar asked Feynman if he thought an electron is an essential object. Feynman admitted that he didn’t even read the book (he was just sitting in on this one seminar) but said he’d try to answer anyway if someone could answer for him whether a brick is an essential object.
Feynman’s plan was to then bring up the question of whether the inside of a brick is an essential object. We can’t actually see the inside of a brick; when we break a brick open we create new surfaces, but we believe the inside of the brick is still underneath those surfaces. His point was that an electron isn’t so much a concrete thing like a brick, but more of a concept like the “inside of a brick” that helps us understand the world.
 |
| Physicist Richard Feynman casts a powerful spell, giving all nearby creatures a -3 penalty. |
Feynman didn’t get to make his point. One student said, “A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead meant by an essential object.” Another man said, “No, it isn’t the individual brick that is an essential object; it’s the general character that all bricks have in common—their ‘brickness’—that is the essential object.” Yet another man said, “No, it’s not in the bricks themselves. ‘Essential object’ means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks.”
Feynman couldn’t believe that these philosophers had spent so much time talking about this subject without asking whether something as simple as a brick is an essential object, much less an electron. It’s a safe guess that any papers they would have written about this subject would turn out bloated, fluffy, and vague. You can only write vigorously and concisely if you know exactly what you’re talking about.
After the philosophy incident, Feynman took a biology class for the hell of it, promising he would do all the assignments like any other student, even though he was already a renowned professor of physics. The students laughed hysterically at one of his biology presentations when he talked about “blastospheres” instead of “blastomeres” or some other such thing.
His next presentation was about the nerve impulses in cats. The research paper he was reading often mentioned specific muscles and nerves in the cat, but Feynman had no idea where any of these things were located relative to each other. He then went to the biology library and asked for a map of the cat. “A map of the cat, sir?” the librarian asked, horrified. “You mean a zoological chart!”
 |
| A map of the cat. |
Feynman started his presentation to the graduate biology students by drawing an outline of the cat on the board and labeling various muscles. The students interrupted him saying, “We know all that!” Feynman replied, “Oh you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” He said they wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
While the philosophy students hadn’t defined their language well enough to have clear ideas, the biology students were so caught up in language and jargon that they had not spent enough time going beneath the surface. Language is a tool, but it is also a barrier between people and ideas. Using vague language is like trying to see those ideas through a dirty lens. But spending all your time polishing the lens (quibbling over jargon rather than the underlying concepts) is no good either. You have to actually look through the lens of language at the ideas underneath.
While we look down on muddy writers because they only convey muddy thoughts, there is another, greater enemy. The most dangerous type of writing comes from clear-thinkers who write vaguely to deliberately deceive you. (Note: only deliberately split an infinitive if you really mean it.)
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
–George Orwell
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
It’s ironic that Orwell uses the image of soft snow falling upon the facts to blur them when the name of the current US Press Secretary (as of this writing) is Tony Snow. His job is almost entirely based on deception. I hate to subject you to even a snippet of his language because reading it triggers the sensation of sinking into quicksand, but you’ll have to suffer through it anyway. This is a perfect example of inflated language that is intentionally vague and confusing, designed to anaesthetize a portion of your brain.
Question: Tony, a couple of minutes ago, you said one of the goals in Iraq is to prevent civil war. Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with? Because he continues to say it’s not at that state yet; lots of analysts do say it’s at that state. What’s the threshold that the administration is working with –
SNOW: I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within [the land].
[...]
SNOW: At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.
What you do have is a number of different groups – you know, they’ve been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.
 |
| I guess someone has to defend the atrocities of the Bush administration with deceptive language. Might as well be this guy. |
In case you fell asleep somewhere during that quote, make sure you got the part at the end about how rejectionists and terrorists “severally and together pose a threat to the government.” Tony Snow can’t really tell you the truth—that there is a civil war in Iraq—because that’s not politically good for him to say. He’s forced to play the exact kind of word games that Orwell was trying to unmask.
You can write plainly and clearly, if only you honestly try. Even Tony Snow could, if he had any incentive to. Clear writing is not a skill reserved for professional writers, but it is reserved for those who have their thoughts in order in the first place and for those who aren’t trying to hide the truth. As Strunk and White pointed out, if you don’t have your thoughts in order, attempting to write them down is a good way to help you straighten them out. But if your problem is that you need to hide the truth, then you’re certainly not coming to me for writing tips.
If you’d like a reading assignment, I recommend anything by Richard Feynman. As a physicist, he spent most of his time thinking about how the world works, and was always battling against layers of language. Sometimes it was jargon from other fields, sometimes it was trying to communicate with colleagues who spoke Japanese or Spanish, sometimes it was inflated political language trying to hide the truth. But Feynman was ever-vigilant, cutting through these language barriers so he could understand what the underlying idea really was. Once you truly understand something—and only then—you can explain it clearly to others, leaving out all unnecessary words.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
–Richard Feynman
--Sirlin
This is part two of a three-part series on writing:
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
September 17th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
You may as well just go suggest we get and read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman instead of copying every good point made in the book :P
(It’d take a while to do that, anyway.)
Also interesting is this quote from Greenspan, famous (and bizarrely respected–but that’s Washington for you) for being “cryptic”:
“I would engage in some form of syntax destruction which sounded as though I were answering the question, but in fact, had not,”
(Taken from an interview on NPR–google it!)
In fact, half of the political process these days seems to revolve around this sort of linguistic kung-fu, both in creating confusion and cutting through it. Writing what people like Snow (and especially his predecessor: Scotty “The Stoat” McClellan, Scotty “2 Hottie” McClellan, etc) say in clearer language is one of the great games of internet partisans.
For that matter, there are entire groups that are dedicated to this sort of thing. The Yes Men (google them, they’re incredible!) call this “identity correction”. Which is, itself, a nice little euphemism for “ripping the mask off the gibbering, four-tongued monstrosity whose gaze no mortal face can bear unscarred”…
I’m going to close with more advice from Feynman, primarily because i don’t listen to my own suggestions. I tried to track down the actual quote, but i couldn’t and so i gave up. But Feynman said (probably on a couple different occasions) that any sort of physics that can’t be reasonably explained to a half-bright physics Freshman isn’t something that’s truly understood. The reason, i suspect, is partly (or more than partly) because things that can’t be explained in a straightforward way (so that a Freshman can understand them) can only be explained through jargon and fuzzy arguments that SOUND right but whose principles can’t be separated and cleaned up. We lie to ourselves, using comfortable language, about things that we think we know but do not and then get all confused when we try to explain them to someone else who hasn’t already bought into the language.
(I could expand on that if someone wants, but right now i’m too busy to do so. I think i got the point across though…)
September 18th, 2007 at 12:13 am
I have long suspected that the Bush’s practice of grammar and pronunciation abuse is a deliberate and sophisticated obfuscation technique he uses so that the people who are listening have make an effort to decipher the language that occupies them and prevents them from thinking about the content of the message.
Winter, the Feynman quote is probably: “I firmly believe if you cannot explain a principle of physics in common language and terms, then you probably do not fully grasp the principle in the first place.” From THE THEORY OF ELEMENTARY WAVES - PART 1.
September 18th, 2007 at 1:18 am
I’m sorry, but if you can agree that “At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force.” then why would you say there is a civil war?
His language isn’t confusing. He just said that the conflict in Iraq isn’t a civil war, at least according to the common definition of civil war. War typically implies that all opposing forces are made up of nations or states. You might call civil war a special case since one of the opposing forces may not currently be a nation or state, but they at least need a leader that clearly defines goals and organizes the resistance. Tony Snow says they don’t have that, so I guess you could argue that he was a liar and deceptive in that sense, but unless you want to argue about the definition of civil war, I don’t see how he was confusing.
Hate the Bush administration or politics in general if you want(I sure do!), but there are better examples to use.
September 18th, 2007 at 2:06 am
Another excellent article.
September 18th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Well put. It really does hurt trying to listen to businessmen talk about their failures. And this article explains how spin doctors work.
September 18th, 2007 at 2:24 am
Brandon: It doesn’t matter whether you think there is a “civil war” in Iraq. The point is that reporters asked Tony Snow how he defined “civil war” so as to be able to deny that there is one in Iraq, and the deeper issue is whether a conflict by any other name would justify US intervention. Snow’s answer side-tracked you into a debate over semantics and the many different names you can give to Feynman’s bird, and got people arguing over one specific definition of a conflict instead of trying to understand what really matters. Intentionally unclear writing doesn’t just fail to answer a specific question. It succeeds in distracting you from asking other, more relevant questions.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:14 am
Linklater: Actually, the reporter asked Snow what definition of ‘civil war’, the president was using, and, more specifically what the threshold for civil war is. Snow’s response distilled is, basically that there can’t be a civil war unless there is a small number of factions, and that all of the factions have clearly identifiable leaders. (Until then, I suppose it’s just violent anarchy, since it’s apparently organized enough to qualify as a war.)
September 18th, 2007 at 7:38 am
NateTG: That’s why intentionally unclear writing is so dangerous. You’re still talking about the definition of civil war, even after I’ve told you the real question is why are we in Iraq.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:19 am
The reporter’s question was, “Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with?” And, while Snow’s answer doesn’t actually adress that issue directly, discussing the definition of ‘civil war’ is certainly apropos in a response to that question.
Since we’re discussing clear writing - the assertion that ‘why are we in Iraq’ is not the question that Snow was responding to. Boldly and repeatedly stating a falsehood is a common and effective specious argument.
Really, the cited passage is an example of what takes place *after* a successful snow job. The question the reporter is asking is playing a game of minutae. A more exacting reporter might have asked a better question, but Snow is relatively innocent in this one.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I’m not going to get into the argument with NateTG at this time, but i just want to point out:
It was the reporter’s confused and unclear language (and probably lack of clarity one what the reporter actually wanted) that allowed Tony Snow to jump in and answer the question he wanted to answer rather than the question that he saw coming. (”How can Bush say there’s no civil war in Iraq when there very clearly is?”)
The reporter clearly didn’t want to just ask how Bush can say there is no civil war, as that would get a pointless response. So instead the reporter wanted to ask how Bush can say there is no civil war when it meets the requirements–to hear an actual argument why, not just some bullshit Snow made up on the spot as to why. But he fumbled a bit and so Snow interrupted and answered the wrong question (unclearly) and then said “next”.
So forgetting Snow for a moment: you can also defeat yourself if you aren’t direct and clear with your language!
September 18th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Quick, what do you think would happen if I became a famous person in some field and failed and said “Sorry, everything went wrong” and took about 5 minutes to explain myself?
English as a language is crap. It has the advantage that its speakers can say EXACTLY what they want to, but this isn’t the Olympics. A 1% quality difference isn’t going to cause a good piece of writing to become a great piece of writing. The added precision comes with the price of an obnoxiously huge vocabulary. In Spanish (my favorite example of a language done ALMOST right), you have… pick a verb… hablar. Hablar is translated “speak” and speak is translated as “hablar”. Pretty simple, right? English has a huge number of verbs that mean almost the same thing and can’t be differentiated without actually hearing each one used. We have speak, talk, and orate, just to name a few. Orate usually means to give a public speech, so that’s pretty different from the other 2. Speak and talk are much closer. Speak is a tiny bit more formal, and you don’t “talk English”. But beyond that, it’s dang near impossible to give an actual list of rules for when to use each one. But most native English speakers will come to the same conclusion.
But, when faced with a difficult question, like Snow about Iraq being in a state of civil war, an English speaker will have to dig deep into their vocabulary to find words they do not use very often. Since the distinctions between these words aren’t often as simple as “speak” and “talk”, and since coming up with all the words for the necessary concept is difficult, the speaker’s success rate in finding just the right word is lower than in everyday speech. The result is like what we saw with Tony Snow.
English grammar is even worse, but that’s a topic for another time.
September 18th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Linklater:
Apparently I totally misread the reporter’s question. So I might have come off a bit in the wrong direction, but I still think how he replied was completely clear. It was a better response than I thought initially.
The reporter asked the definition of civil war Bush was working with, and Tony Snow basically answered his question through explanation instead of definition. I doubt he had a Bush dictionary under his podium.
Most politicians completely avoid tough questions when asked on the spot, but he even answers the question about the “threshold” the administration is working with. I will admit that he is not perfectly direct, but to act as if he did that intentionally is kind of silly. I don’t think he carefully planned his answer.
Also, is it really avoiding other, more relevant questions? I’m not sure what you want him to say. Do you think the reporter expected him to give some definition that someone could break down and use to analyze the conflict in Iraq? That’s not a rhetorical question, because I hadn’t considered the reporter’s motives. I don’t think it really matters, though.
September 18th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
If you guys are into this sort of analysis of the use of language in politics/media and how it affects thinking, you might like reading Noam Chomsky.
As for me, I think maybe I need to check out some Feynman!
September 19th, 2007 at 2:31 am
Haus:
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. We have more words, with more meanings, and it diminishes our language?
I think what you just described is English’s greatest strength. We have the ability to use a word like “orate” (def. to deliver a formal, public speech) rather than “speak” (def. to communicate vocally). Orate has a very specific and seperate meaning, and is used and such by anyone who has properly learned English. Your argument seems to be that ignorance of the language in some speakers necessarily equates to the language being at fault rather than the speaker.
I’ll also note, that most people speaking in other languages tend to have a need for the subtle distinctions that English can make with its rich vocabularly. Unfortunately, since they can’t use seperate words for distinct meanings, they tend to use various types of contextual information. Try taking any type of formal writing in another language and translate it word for word, vs. finding someone fluent in the language and having them translate it meaningfully. You’ll end up getting completely different translations, because the literal meaning isn’t enough in most languages. Again why I say that English’s greatest strength is the large vocabularly and distinct definitions of similar words, we can actually say what we mean.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:49 am
Depends on ho wyou look at the value of language. As a means of communicating efficiently and clearly, english is quite bloated and obfuscated. The upside is we get to use awesome words like obfuscated, but still, the language is overly complex with many meanless rules and circumstances that make it difficult to learn and can often make it difficult for even fluent English speakers to speak clear and effectively.
But yes, this brokenness also makes it very interesting. So to put this in a language we can all understand…
English is MvC2
I think that about sums it up.
September 19th, 2007 at 7:01 am
You make some very good points with this article Mr. Sirlin. The use of language as a deceptive tool to conceal the true meaning of what is actually being said is a notable one that almost every government uses, especially when the government is trying to conceal unethical or illegal actions it is taking. Calling captured enemy soldiers “enemy combatants” instead of soldiers is a verbose way to avoid having to follow conventions for the imprisonment of those soldiers.
I think another reason that people have trouble making their points concise is how grading works in the school and university system. You’re actually punished for being concise with your ideas in many cases, by being forced to think a lot harder about each point in order to reach arbitrary page requirements, such as a 5 page English paper. If you’ve finished making all your points and defending them fully by page 4, why would any reasonable person go through the effort of coming up with extra points or evidence when it’s much easier to add a page of useless adjectives, adverbs, and extra phrases that add nothing to the paper. After finishing school, most people have a learned tendency to write and speak with these cluttered phrases in order to use up more space. A 4 page paper tends to be viewed as more impressive than a 1 page paper, even if they both say the exact same thing. Eliminating page requirements for papers, or at least making them guidelines rather than strict requirements, might make students learn that it’s the CONTENT of their ideas that matters more than how much space they can make their ideas take up in a paper.
September 19th, 2007 at 7:55 am
I’m hearing this identical theme from a lot a people here regarding page length in school grading. Did any of you bother to ask your teachers for more details regarding their grading policies? I always made sure to get something clearer than page requirement on the depth they wanted (usually by asking outside of standard class times), and I think over 90% of my various middle/high/college teachers were happy to oblige. In most cases, just the fact that I asked meant they were often willing to let me throw the page requirements out completely as long as I wrote well enough to live up to their other standards. (Of course, even I ran into a few teachers that weren’t quite so friendly;;)
Page requirements is really a very poor excuse for bad writing. The page requirements usually seem to exist just to give something concrete to students that might not care enough to write well in the first place… and the fact that it’s being repeated so often perhaps goes to show that it really was necessary?
September 19th, 2007 at 8:09 am
You make some good points Claytus. However, most students don’t take that extra step to bother asking their teachers, at least from what I remember from school. Page requirements do not give an excuse for bad writing, but many students only view their paper as a “3 pages down, one to go” type of affair. Mentioning the flexibility of page requirements in assignments would go a long way toward making students focus on developing their main concepts rather than the length of their papers. However, giving them as guidelines is a valid tool for teachers to use to give a general description of the depth of discussion expected for an assignment.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Interesting… the essential premise that the idea drives the goal of writing well, and why we should write well, was… well written. And based on a good idea. :) But by this article’s reasoning, I could just as easily conclude that it uses lots of “unnecessary words” to say that you don’t like the Bush Administration basically (especially for reasons already cited such as a poor example with Tony Snow’s _spoken_ quote).
For more irony, the Sirlin Administration recently entertained the idea of removing Free Speech Zones entirely by shutting off comments. What would Professor Feynman say? Look at the two birds (administrations) and what the birds are doing; this particular behavior looks pretty similar.
Speaking of teachers of English, you can also question further assumptions made in the traditional curriculum, right from the start of English language education: Capital letters are usually taught first (even though lower case are tremendously more practical and useful), and there’s a big deal made about the alphabet song. The alphabet song is merely the _names_ of the letters (”names of birds” in Feynman’s terms); not the _sounds_ those letters make (”what the bird does”, or …”phonics”, only a very recent innovation in English language instruction, for some reason).
And for the record I stopped reading Strunk & White early on, at the apostrophes part you mentioned in the first/early chapter, because it was silly and probably contradicted by most writers of English. You really have to be careful with so many of these rules- for example here’s one that is also more bad than good: “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.” As Winston Churchill said, “That is precisely the sort of English up with which I will not put.”
September 19th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
To most of you: thanks.
And then we have some jackassy comments from Mr. Boudreau and people thinking Tony Snow’s answer was a-ok. Exactly the kind of things I expected, unfortunately. If I were to ever disable comments, I would not disable trackbacks, btw. So various trash-talkers would be able to get their fill on their own sites, linking here. And as for the ludicrous comment about me not supporting free speech, I’ll remind the audience I have never, ever, ever deleted a single comment or forum post for content, only for spam. This includes some incredibly insulting posts. Even if I deleted posts all day though, it would of course have nothing to do with actual free speech, but I’m sure I don’t have to explain that.
Strunk & White is still very good. Regarding ending sentences with a preposition, it’s the one grammar rule I break intentionally many times in my book. So no disagreement there.
Maybe I’m better off ignoring jackassy comments entirely and instead using that energy to write new content and balance Street Fighter, Kongregate’s card game, and my own card game.
Anyway, Kayin wins best fighting game joke and Linklater wins the thread.
–Sirlin
September 19th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Sirlin, most of us already know Boudreau is a jackass. I’m so used to ignoring him that I hadn’t noticed he posted until you pointed it out. Please don’t do that again.
September 20th, 2007 at 3:41 am
Deliberately vague language has a way of carefully changing the subject. It has a way of hiding the real issue. Vague language can take a small part of a big issue and isolate it, and get bogged down in semantic games. I think that’s the real point.
To return to the example, the words “civil war” would justify a serious change in strategy. Tony Snow manages to separate the question “what is civil war?” from “when could you imagine calling it civil war” and thus “when do we get out”. He mashes the term “civil war” up into a bunch of vague terms like “feuding sides” and “supremacy”. This allows him to dodge “civil war” and use terms like “sectarian violence”, “factional struggle”, and “violent disorder” — they are all wonderfully Orwellian euphemisms.
Hello, “Ministry of Truth”.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
When reading this, I’m reminded of how in advertising, the Gamecube and XBox were “game consoles” while the PlayStation2 was a “computer entertainment system.” And I’m also reminded of something I read in one of George Carlin’s books about how “shell-shocked” developed into “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
September 21st, 2007 at 8:22 am
Sirlin, I am a fan and you’ve undoubtedly seen my ramblings around your site (or you haven’t, hell if I know). But man, I want you to write about video games again…
September 23rd, 2007 at 7:09 am
I greatly respect you, but I find myself rather disappointed every time you try to drag your politics into a completely apolitical subject.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Matthew E. Ryan,
Sirlin did not drag his politics into this subject. Politics is unavoidably entangled with the subject in the first place. Indeed, politics is one of the reasons why we need people like Sirlin to remind us how to write clearly. To say that the subject of thinking and writing clearly is ‘completely apolitical’ is dead wrong.
September 25th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
This article reminds me of one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips:
Calvin (to Hobbes): I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?
Hobbes (reading from sheet): “The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psycic Transrelational Gender Modes.”
Calvin: Academia here I come!
September 27th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Ricefrog, I respect Noam Chomsky’s linguistic work greatly, but don’t forget that Mr. Chomsky is himself a master of using obfuscatory language… perhaps precisely because he understands it so well.
September 27th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
I fail to see how Tony Snow is obfuscating here. Lets break it down.
Question: Tony, a couple of minutes ago, you said one of the goals in Iraq is to prevent civil war.
<B>Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with? </B>
Because he [Bush] continues to say it’s not at that state [a civil war] yet; lots of analysts do say it’s at that state [a civil war]. What’s the threshold that the administration is working with – (rewritten: How does the Administration define civil war?)
If anything this questioner should get a gold star for unclear language. Do keep in mind though that this is off-the-cuff speech, whereas in writing you can go back and edit before you publish something. Speech is often a one-shot deal.
SNOW: I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within [the land].
(rewritten: Most people believe a Civil War is between organized competing groups with clearly stated goals and leaders fighting for national control.)
[…]
SNOW: At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.
(rewritten: Currently, there are many internal and external forces in Iraq pressuring or outright undermining the government, but none of them have a stated purpose or leader. [-the implication is therefore that no, Iraq is not a civil war according to the traditional definition.])
What you do have is a number of different groups – you know, they’ve been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.
(rewritten: These groups include anything from people who reject the new government to terrorist organizations. These groups do not naturally agree with each other’s goals, but each group individually and as a whole destablizes the government.)
It would have been more clear if Tony had the third paragraph before the second, but of course that’s a luxury limited to writing. You’d also eliminate the redundant references to the various factions.
The end product would be something like this:
Most people believe a Civil War is between competing organized groups with clearly stated goals and leaders fighting for national control.
Currently, there are many internal and external forces in Iraq pressuring or outright undermining the government, but none of them have a stated purpose or leader.
These forces include anything from people who reject the new government to terrorist organizations. These groups do not naturally agree with each other’s goals, but each group individually and as a whole destablizes the government.
That;’s all you can really gather from Snow. It would have been better if he summarized it with something like “So no, President Bush does not believe there is a civil war, but he does recognize that Saddam’s removal has created a power vacuum which many disorganized groups are trying to fill, unfortunately to the detriment of overall stability.”
But again, his communication mechanism was limited to speech. Writers can work things like this out, Tony deals with a blitzkreig of questions on various different topics, none of which he can give the kind of thought and conciseness that a writer generally enjoys.
In other words, I recommend if you’re trying to find a solid example of obfuscatory writing, take it from a source that is written, not spoken. A transcript of a press conference is not a good example of well-thought out, direct attempt to decieve someone.
The Communist Manifesto is a good place to start.
September 30th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
I agree with the premise on language, but not the premise on politics. Whenever I argue politics, I try to present my arguments in the most damning fashion to *myself*, not the nicest. Examples:
We should carpet bomb and slaughter the people of the middle east, killing even the innocent children, because they follow an ideology that, if allowed to flourish, would stop us from enjoying our materialistic greed.
Possession of, and desire for, child pornography shouldn’t be illegal or even immoral. Only its production should be. Even if a person wants to commit horrible, scarring rape against a child, they’re perfectly moral until they actually do it. No matter what the statistics say, no matter how many pedophiles actually commit rape, preventing those isn’t worth damaging free thought and speech.
(whenever possible, I try to point out the bad things for kids. People have a soft spot for kids. Me, I say kick em to the curb and let only the ones who survive back in)
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:46 am
I fail to see what any of this has to do with game design.
Tony Snow sucks. Bush sucks. And you’re stupid if you think John Kerry, Al Gore, Trent Lott, John McCain or Bill Clinton suck any less.
But does this matter? Hell no. It isn’t about Street Fighter or Guilty Gear. Which is, at the very least, what I came here to read about. I can already write pretty damn well, I think. And it’s a scarcity that anybody completely makes an ass of themself through text. Really, just by looking at the comments it’s apparent that everyone looking at this site is decent at writing.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:33 pm
If Tony Snow spoke non-English, we wouldn’t have this problem and we would only be frustrated by his crappy ideas rather than his lame attempts to make himself sound smart. By the way, for those of you who were here a while back, that’s the point of my personal vendetta against English. It’s one of the only languages where a native speaker might have to sit back and go “what the hell?” after hearing something grammatical and with a meaning to it. Most of us had to give Tony Snow’s speech a second pass even though it followed all the rules of the language and DID indeed say something.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:07 am
You guys are reading too much into it. Tony Snow, like every Press Secretary that ever worked for the White House, is trained in deceptive language and it is really good at using it. I don’t think anybody reasonable will contest that.
Silrin had to use some example. Maybe if he used Clinton’s Press Secretary republicans would now be clapping hands and Democrats would’ve been outraged. The end results would be the same though. Maybe this is not the best example, and surely it is not the most tactful one (extra point for coherence here), but its a valid and clear example that express the idea well enough.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
If only I could have included a youtube video of Jon Stewart ripping apart Tony Snow on this exact quote, you would all think it’s a pretty darn good example. I searched for hours and gave up. I couldn’t find any footage of this from The Daily Show, but it was a great segment.
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:27 am
I wanna know more about Puzzle Fighter :(
And SF2. I NEED TO GET GOOD AT SF2!!!!!!
November 3rd, 2007 at 9:37 pm
I have to complain about your comment on split infinitives. The idea that you shouldn’t split infinitives is, just like the idea that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, a flat-out made up rule some grammar-book writers thought they could impose on English because it was true in Latin. (For that matter, please don’t refer to the practice of not ending sentences with prepositions as a “grammar rule”. It’s not a rule of English; it’s arbitrary prescriptivist nonsense.) The fact is that the split infinitive is usually clearer than the alternative; people like to put “to” in front of the whole verb phrase, and often to put the adverb before the verb. Hence, “to boldy go”. “Boldy to go” sounds archaic, if not downright awkward. (In this case, “to go boldly” works just as well, but not in the general case.)
November 5th, 2007 at 4:08 am
I can’t believe I’m being lectured about split infinitives and “to boldly go,” of all things.
At MIT, a writing professor crossed out my split infinitives with red ink and added the note “never split infinitives.” The next day in class she asked if we had any questions about our papers. I said that she shouldn’t have crossed out my split infinitives. I wrote them very much on purpose, just the way I wanted. Sometimes it sounds better that way, but usually it’s for special emphasis. She said it’s considered bad form. I said no it isn’t, not anymore. The Wall Street Journal also splits infinities for emphasis or when it sounds better. (And yeah, you’re better off not splitting them for no reason at all. Do it if you mean it, as I said in this very article.)
Then for the sake of rhetoric, I pointed out the most famous split infinitive of all: Star Trek’s “to boldly go.” Even though she had a Ph.D in English, she was a native German speaker. She watched Star Trek in German, so it was actually news to her that in English, the phrase is “to boldly go.” She said ok, she’d look into this.
Three years later, I needed the head of MIT’s writing department to sign the papers saying I met the requirements for a “concentration” in writing (it’s like a minor). Guess who it was. I walked into her office and said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I need you to sign these papers….” She laughed and said of course she remembers me. I’m the one who told her about “to boldly go” and corrected her about split infinitives in front of the whole class. I said yeah, it was me.
She said that I was right, and these days it is acceptable. She said she didn’t mind being corrected like that, but she really wished I had chosen any other day to do it. On that particular day, the administration sent an observer to evaluate her teaching performance, and it was kind of embarrassing for her. I said, “oh, I had no idea,” and apologized. In a moment now frozen in time for me, she said calmly, “It’s ok. You’re very contrary. It’s how you make your way.” She signed the papers and handed them to me, smiling.
Thanks Professor Klingenstien.
–Sirlin
November 7th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Why is it that people get all pissy about split infinitives but not split verb tenses? As far as I know, we are the only language that can express every single verb tense by adding particles spaced away from the verb. For instance, using the “to boldly go” example, “will boldly go,” “did boldly go,” “do boldly go,” “used to boldly go,” and “has boldly gone” are probably really bad from the treating-verbs-like-they-should-be-treated perspective because they are all forms of the verb “to boldly go” rather than “to go.” Singling out the infinitive is staggeringly arbitrary and even though it’s not improper any more some teachers have resisted the change (or in your case been completely unaware of it).
November 13th, 2007 at 5:13 am
civil war in iraq. Now shut it.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
English isn’t a language with rules, but a language with guidelines. :p
OK, that’s a smartarse way of saying it, but there is a point in there. Since English is a language that is derived from not one, but several main sources - a real bastard language, so to speak - it has never been the most gramatically consistent language as such. Almost every rule has one or more exceptions to it, which is one of the reasons English is one of the hardest second languages to master to the fullest.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that because of this, anything goes. That just leads to a breakdown of communication. No, if you want to break the rules, you have to know the rules. Not just know, but understand them to the fullest. Much like how only a very good and talented and hard-working musician can make improvisations of any given tune on the spot, and still make it sound “right”. So, you’d better be ready to put in some effort.
And -then- you can start to boldly split where no infinity has been split before. :D
December 6th, 2007 at 2:46 am
I really, really hate split verb tenses when they are in the same sentence. When somebody writes “he thought this was a good idea and is~~~~~” I get tempted to imitate that generic forum avatar of a stick figure beating on his keyboard until his arms are gone, then headbutting his monitor until he decapitates himself. Hate that.
That’s right up there with using the same word in a sentence multiple times.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
<strong>Alice</strong>
I just wanted to say that the quality of your Free Mp3 Download is exceptional. On top of all that it really complements the content that is provided by your site.
July 30th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
[…] Welcome to strengths-theory; enjoy your stay Read Now, Discover Your Strengths. That book will give you a base understanding about strengths and talents, and give you a language you can use to describe them (i.e. the various "talent themes" mentioned in the book). As for discovering your talents… when I have a good resource I can highly recommend, I’ll start doing so. There’s nothing scary about not being able to change your talents; in fact, it’d probably be scarier if you could change your talents, since, well, read Now, Discover Your Strengths and that will become clear. Oh and the research shows that it’s around the age of 16 where your talents–the synaptic connections in your brain–stop changing significantly and start becoming less "malleable" (figuratively speaking). The book, The One Thing You Need to Know has a section on the biology of synapses and talent, but it doesn’t go into as much detail as I would have liked it to and still leaves some things unexplained. My advice to you is to throw away any vague definition you use for and start becoming very specific and clear. Most people throw around words like "talent" like candy, without having the slightest clue as to what it really means. A key technique I use to find people who are speaking, but not really speaking (which happens when you use words that you don’t really understand the meaning of) is to ask people to define a word they just used. E.g. If someone says, "That was a great presentation. You have great talent" I’d ask them to define "talent" to find out what they really mean, since "talent" (when most people use it) tells me nothing. It’s sort of a blank filler word that anesthetises your brain. You’d also do well to read the following article, since it teaches *great* lessons on thinking with clarity and actually being effective. It’s helped me become a much better writer and speaker. On the downside, virutally nobody else thinks clearly, so communicating with people who aren’t very specific and clear (even people you’d call "intelligent" don’t do it… and yep, if I were you, I’d be asking me to define "intelligent" ) becomes a bit of a chore since, in general, people use English to reflect their thinking (which is often very unclear and subjective, and more about emotion than words that accurately represent their emotion) instead of carefully choosing words that have definitions that match what they’re feeling and then using English as a language as it’s intended to be used (and yes, I butchered that explanation, but it’s a pretty hard concept to explain… very abstract; I need more practice). But yeah, the link: Sirlin.net ? Writing Well, Part 2: Clear Thinking, Clear Writing Another tip: if you think you understand something, try to write about it. To the degree that you can express it concisely and effectively is the degree you understand it. You may have an intuitive, subconscious grasp of something, but that won’t help when you’re communicating with people unless they have similar experience to you. Final tip: if you want to know more about talent and strengths, search for "talent" and "strengths" and "strength" using an advanced search using my name ("Bruce Achterberg"). You’ll further your education about strengths, since I’ve written a fair bit about them and linked to some nice sites. Boy, I just can’t stop giving tips: I’m going to be posting some links to various resources I find useful in my Twitter account (Twitter / bruceachterberg), so feel free to check that out. I’ll make a special effort to posts some links about talent, since virtually no one truly understands it (I’ve researched and studied it in both life and other sources… lots). __________________ - Bruce Achterberg Twitter.com/BruceAchterberg […]
August 13th, 2008 at 2:53 am
[…] Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too. ? Strunk and White, Elements of Style, Sirlin.net ? Your source of shocking insights on game design ? Blog Archive ? Writing Well, Part 2: Clear Thinking, Clear Writing Quote: […]