In any body of writing, there are words which contribute absolutely noth- ing at all to the significance of what is being said.
Take that last sentence. In any ‘body of ’ writing? What does ‘body of ’ con- tribute? How about ‘absolutely nothing at all’ (an example of pleonasm) and ‘to the significance of what is being said’. That sentence can come down to ‘All writing contains unnecessary words’ – less than a quarter of the original. Any writing [at all] can be cut. A fishmonger proudly hangs up a fresh- painted sign: Fresh Fish Sold Here Daily. A kibitzer (critical onlooker) com- plains at once ‘That’s ridiculous. You’ve used far too many words. Look at that Daily. If it’s fresh fish you have to sell it daily.’ The fishmonger is embarrassed and paints out the Daily. The sign now reads Fresh Fish Sold Here. The kibitzer is still not satisfied. ‘Far too many words again. Why say Here? Where else are you selling your fish, in Paris, France?’ The fishmon- ger is embarrassed and paints out the Here. The sign now reads Fresh Fish Sold. The kibitzer frowns. ‘Fresh Fish Sold? Do people think you give fish away?’ The fishmonger is embarrassed and paints out the Sold. The sign now reads Fresh Fish. ‘Well, really,’ says the kibitzer. ‘Do you want them to think you might sell stale fish? Of course your fish are fresh.’ The fishmon- ger is embarrassed and paints out the Fresh. The sign now reads Fish. The kibitzer glares. ‘Forget the sign, Benny. Anyone can smell your fish a mile away.’
The kibitzer’s strategy could make you a very popular speaker. But be ruth- less selectively. Keep the essential words of your speech – the Fish. Talking your speech through and applying the ‘conversation test’ (see Chapter 5) will give you some help in cutting out unnecessary words but it is not an infallible method. In conversation, we all regularly use unneces- sary words (like ‘absolutely nothing at all’) and we do not automatically edit them into the most direct way of expressing our meaning. When you are looking for dead words, it is worth keeping a special eye out for the fol- lowing:
1. The passive: the passive mood of a verb (the mat was sat on by the cat)
mat). Watch out for the double passive (statistics were ordered to be prepared on the number of cats observed on mats).
2. Pointless clauses beginning with ‘it’: especially followed by a passive, such
as ‘it should be remembered that’. If you write and speak well enough, whatever it is will be remembered.
3. Pleonasms: ‘in this day and age’ (today); ‘at this moment in time’ (now);
‘in the final analysis’ (ultimately); ‘the position in regard to cats’ (cats).
4. Circumlocution: especially when achieved by piling up abstract nouns
(consideration of accessibility issues in relation to transport modes is of paramount importance, in other words, we must think about trans- port).
5. Pointless modifiers: such as quite important, relatively insignificant. When
you use an adjective do not hold back. Another one that comes up quite often, no, often, is the redundant reinforcer, trying to add something to a word which is already at maximum strength. Spot the deliberate exam- ple in the first paragraph of this chapter.1
6. Entire sentences which repeat something already said: these can slip through
sometimes when there is nothing wrong with them as sentences. ‘The report could not attempt to be comprehensive. It deals with some issues more thoroughly than others.’ One of those sentences can go.
Grammar
Although you can break some rules of written prose in a speech, you should not break rules of English gram- mar. Some people think it gives them the common touch to say something like ‘me and my friends got on the bus’: wrong, it makes them sound ignorant. Every audience contains pedants and there is no reason to annoy them or distract them from your mes- sage by bad grammar, and with those pedants in mind
you are better off splitting the atom than splitting an infinitive. It is easy to avoid grammatical errors and split infinitives, and even the crew of the
1 It is ‘thoroughly’ after ‘routed’. To ‘rout’ someone already means to do it thoroughly.
Every audience contains pedants and there is no reason to annoy them or distract them from your message by bad grammar.
Starship Enterprise should have managed to go boldly rather than to boldly
go, which confusingly sounds like a new verb, to boldligo. Pedants also go mad if you make ‘media’ or ‘data’ singular: they are plural.
It is not pedantic to be annoyed when a speaker suddenly shifts tenses between past and present or uses a tense confusingly : ‘by the year 2000 output is up 20 per cent’. The year 2000 is now history. Change it to ‘by the year 2000 output had risen by 20 per cent’ or ‘in the year 2000 output was 20 per cent higher than . . .’ and remember to say higher than what. Com-
parisons always need comparators.
You should spell words properly when you write your speech, even though people will not hear you misspell them. After all, your speech will probably appear in print somewhere, some time. Of course you must not misspell any word in a visual aid.
Clichés
‘We must avoid clichés like the plague’ was quite a good joke once, and all clichés were once fresh and new. Since you and I never use clichés, the best way to keep alert for them is to listen to other people, especially on the news. Mentally record the phrases that make you cringe because they are so stale and drab – perhaps a politician talking about ‘a whole raft of meas- ures’, an industrialist talking about ‘a strong platform for expansion’, anyone at all talking about a ‘quantum leap’ or ‘thinking the unthinkable’? Listen for them in case they infect your own writing.
There is a paradox about clichés: the nearer it is to death, the harder it is to spot a cliché. For example, ‘leaving no stone unturned’ still has a little colour and stands out as a cliché but its companion ‘exploring every avenue’ has almost no life left and is more likely to survive the editor’s pencil. When a cliché is clinically dead, that is when it has lost any link with the concept which first made it fresh and exciting, it may be reborn as a standard term. The expression ‘tongue in cheek’ has had such a rebirth. It has become a convenient way to describe something said which is provocative but not to be taken seriously.
The nearer it is to death, the harder it is to spot a cliché.
To help your cliché-hunting, here are a few which I cannot stand:
● . . . needs no introduction from me
● right across the board
● There are no easy answers
● . . . play a [vital] part/have a [vital] part to play
● cold or hard (or both), in relation to facts
● long and hard, in relation to looks
● exploring every option
● pictures or overviews or scenarios of growth and other abstract phe- nomena
● . . . and their ilk (ilk actually means ‘the same’, and is not a term of abuse)
● acid or litmus test
● frameworks of any kind except real ones
● better or other half, meaning a partner or spouse
● state of the art
● cutting edge
● step change
● hit the ground running
● almost any sporting allusion outside sport
● all-singing, all-dancing. Once fresh when it described movie musicals, now used regularly in silly contexts (‘it will not be an all-singing, all- dancing public inquiry’)
● challenges, particularly major challenges, which are not really challeng- ing, as in ‘Car parking is a major challenge for the airport’.
Jargon
It is sometimes right to use jargon. Every occupation, every branch of human life, has its special vocabulary which may be the only correct or instant way to convey a particular idea. If a lawyer uses the word ‘consider- ation’ instead of ‘price’, if a doctor says ‘haematoma’ instead of ‘bruise’, if
a bridge player says ‘ruff ’, if a cricketer talks about an ‘outswinger’ and a baseball player about a ‘curve ball’ these people all have a good reason. People who really need correct and instant communication use jargon all the time – listen to any aircraft pilot.
Bain McKay, a practitioner of the new science of Knowledge Management, has defended specialists’ jargon in these stirring terms:
“
Jargon is a key cornerstone of Knowledge Management. More impor- tantly, it’s a key underpinning to learning and leveraging knowledge. Interestingly enough, a taxonomy is a jargon vocabulary of shortcuts that experts use to iconify conceptually classified meaningful pat- terns, so they can cover ground very quickly – that is, more produc- tively. It’s part of the abstraction process we all go through as we learn a discipline and abstract it into anchors and hooks to tie asso- ciated concepts together into internally visualized patterns of 7+/–2 scoped hierarchies.”
By all means use jargon when there is no other way to explain what you mean. But be certain that your audience can understand it. Take special care with jargon words which have an everyday meaning. If you are a computer specialist, you know that a ‘field’ is an area in a fixed or known location in a unit of data such as a record, message header or computer instruction, which has a purpose and usually a fixed size but your audience may think first of an area with cows. Take even greater care with acronyms, which can have dozens of different meanings. Unless your audience consists entirely of pilots, do not use GP for ‘glide path’ – say the words in full and no one will think ‘general practitioner’ in Britain or ‘general purpose’ in the United States. Acronyms are especially hard work for foreign audiences unless they have been internationally agreed.
However, you must be ruthless with unnecessary jargon, particularly the buzz words which have evolved to give trivial thoughts the air of science. The following words or phrases are known to have inspired loathing and mass hysteria:
It is sometimes right to use jargon.
● architecture (in politics, economics, management science)
● B2B, B2C (business-to-business, business-to-consumer)
● benchmark
● best practice, best value
● core competences, missions or tasks
● deliver for anything other than groceries, packages and speeches, and even worse, deliverables
● drivers not in vehicles as in ‘technology is a key driver of economic growth’ and all adjectives formed with -driven (customer-driven)
● empowerment and enablement
● fast-track
● first-mover
● focus and all adjectives formed with -focused (mission-focused)
● -grounded (as in theory-grounded)
● input, especially as verb
● -ize (new verbs formed with -ize, especially optimize, maximize, incen- tivize, utilize, prioritize, diarize, diurnalize: try not to use any verb in -ize which is less than 50 years old)
● key (when used as adjective in isolation to mean ‘crucial’, as in ‘deriva- tives are key to the group’s success’)
● knowledge-based
● leading edge
● leverage, as verb
● next-generation
● -oriented or worse, -orientated (as in team-oriented)
● out of the loop or outside the box or envelope
● ownership, not in precise everyday sense but as piece of psycho-socio babble meaning ‘has some sense of involvement in’. Recently I heard a police officer say ‘The community has now taken ownership of the murder.’
● paradigm, especially a new one or a paradigm shift. However, it is per- missible to sing this word, in the modern classic ‘Buddy, can you para- digm?’
● pilot as verb not attached to aircraft, as in ‘We have been chosen to pilot the Best Value initiative.’ However, if the initiative is -grounded in any way (see above) it may never take off.
● proactive
● seamless
● segue
● stakeholder – actually quite a useful shorthand for people who have some interest in some phenomenon, but unbearably smug and smarmy. Whenever I hear the word ‘stakeholder’ I reach for my revolver.
● synergy
● 24/7/365
● win-win
Have you noticed how much jargon overlaps with cliché?