Clear and lively language

Five experts on language and meaning talk about the ways in which how we write shapes our ideas and changes our reports.

Presenter: David Walker

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David Walker: This episode of Shorewalker On Reports takes a stab at answering an old question: how do you write so that people will want to read what you have written? This is, how do you write readably and memorably?

But first, let’s ask another, more specific question: for reports, how much does memorable language matter?

And we can answer that second question right away: for reports, clear and memorable language matters a lot. It matters not just because it improves your communication, but also because it improves your thinking. By aiming to write clearly and memorably, we can improve the entire shape of reports. We can give reports more impact. In this episode, I aim to show that’s true.

So in this episode we’ll hear from a world-famous academic and writer, Deirdre McCloskey; from innovation expert Nicholas Gruen, from former Productivity Commission chief Gary Banks, from journalist and editor Peter Martin, and from well-known independent economist Saul Eslake.

All of them have the same message: if people are going to take up your message, your first need to get their attention, and then to make them remember some of what you’ve said.

Be lively

Now, getting people’s attention and having them remember what you’ve said – that may not seem like a very high bar. And yet, in practice, most people find it surprisingly hard. We mostly overestimate how much attention people are paying to us, and we mostly overestimate how much they remember of what we say to them.

Professor Deirdre McCloskey has been a professor of economics, English, communication, philosophy, history and classics, at universities in the United States and The Netherlands. And when I interviewed Deirdre McCloskey recently, she reminded me of how hard it is to get people to remember what you’re saying. In fact, when she writes for academic audiences, she tries first just to keep readers awake.

Deirdre McCloskey: Just purely awake. I had a wonderful colleague in the history department at the University of Iowa, Bill Aydelotte. Like me he was a British economic, British historian. And Bill said: The big thing in scholarship is to keep awake. He said: If you’re going to be a scholar, you’re gonna have to read a lot of boring things. So you’ve gotta learn how to stay awake. And so vice versa? You gotta – you can’t bore people. You know, that seems an awfully harsh standard for some kid who doesn’t know writing very well. But you got to keep them awake.

So try to write in the liveliest way you can find.

Be clear

Once you’re satisfied your audience won’t doze off, then you need to try to say things in ways that they will understand.

Peter Martin is business and economics editor of the online publication The Conversation, and a former long-time ABC economics correspondent. Like Deirdre McCloskey, he is always conscious of the need to make what he’s writing more interesting. But an even more important task, Martin points out, is to help them to understand what’s going on:

Peter Martin: Being boring isn’t the worst crime. Actually, you could be boring because the material might be intrinsically boring. And that’s fair enough. I think the crime is not making it as clear as is possible. When I edit things for The Conversation, I don’t change what people are saying, of course. But I actually probably change every sentence – not even the words, in a sense, often just the order the words are arranged in to sort of make a sentence sing. I was doing something this morning, that referred to a decrease in interest rates, or an increase in interest rates on the part of the Reserve Bank, and I changed it to will cut interest rates or will increase them. It’s much more evocative, and so on every in every occasion, you can not necessarily with changing the content, you can make it clearer in the sense that it grabs people more. Anyone who’s been to, you know, an English class or communication school knows that active words – these are verbs – are much better than nouns. So you don’t say: I have great affection for you. You say: I love you. So you should make something as clear as you can. If it needs to include a lot of facts, well, it just has to. People like me like reports that are boring; my job is translating them into something that’s more interesting. But you often can improve the words to make things clearer. And often, there’s a lot of stuff you can relegate to footnotes or to links to something else.

To write like this requires not just a set of rules, but a mindset. You need to start focusing, as often as you can, on how you can simplify and clarify and make more vivid the things you want to say. Peter Martin again:

Peter Martin: I’m an extremist on this. And I realise not everyone is skilled in this area. It is a crime to communicate any less clearly than is possible. When I was talking earlier about how you can change sentences to make them clearer, for someone not to do that is really, really bad. The year in a way that the most precious resource we’ve got is time. Obviously, it takes time to do that. But I’m referring to the time of the reader, I suppose you know, the other precious resources, you know, sort of their mental load. So if you can ease their mental load, if you can make it quicker and easier to absorb. You’re doing whatever it is you’re working for a real service. My wife and I listen to the ABC News at night in bed at 10pm. We both used to work for ABC News. And you should hear us. It’s hilarious. We’re like, you know, those two pensioners in the balcony in the Muppets saying: Why did they say it that way? They could have said it that way! It would have been so much clearer! Who's working there these days? And why did they have that story? And then that story, instead of that one, which could link to it? Can't anyone do these things anymore? So I’m a bit of an extremist about this. But you know, so long as you’ve got the time, there’s really no reason why you can’t use it to make something clearer, because you’re doing the readers – even if the readers are into the field – you’re doing them a service. And you might get readers then who aren’t interested in the field. People who aren’t into astronomy might then actually, who aren’t the intended audience, might then be able to read it. And wouldn’t that be great? You might get a few more people interested in the field!

Say what you mean

Economist and public policy expert Nicholas Gruen has a slightly different obsession: saying what you mean to say. Nick has worked for senior Australian federal government ministers under prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, as well as for the Productivity Commission and the Business Council of Australia. He chaired the 2009 Web 2.0 Task Force and now runs an economics consultancy, Lateral Economics. In all these roles and others, he has helped to write quite a few reports.

David Walker: You’ve been very clear about your guiding principles in writing reports. And perhaps most important of those is to be clear, you quote Orwell – say things as simply as possible and strip back the euphemism.

Nicholas Gruen:Yeah, yeah. Express yourself in the active tense. If you say something is happening, if possible, say who’s making it happen. If something is being done, be direct, and say who is doing it … This reads better, it’s much easier to read, it goes into your brain much better. But there’s another really big benefit – which is, as Orwell says, if you strip your language, if you make your language direct and active, and you don’t allow yourself to use cliches and euphemisms, you find that it’ s harder to talk bullshit. And bullshit is a major problem. For reports everywhere, there is bullshit, all over the place. And often we don’t know that we’re drifting into it – when people say things like ’moving forward’ instead of ’in the future’. There’s a very gentle slope into bullshit that begins with euphemisms and phrases that people are starting to use right now for no apparent reason: We’re going to sing from the same hymn sheet, all these kinds of things. They don’t do any great harm, but they lull you into choosing words and ways of putting things that are not your own. And that robs your thoughts of your own agency in a very subtle way that’s quite hard to notice unless you make a point of noticing.

Saul Eslake has worked as chief economist for companies including National Mutual, the ANZ Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and he now runs his own consultancy firm. Saul’s ability to speak clearly about economics has made him a fixture in Australian media and the corporate world for more than three decades. He believes very strongly that reports for public consumption have to be able to be understood by a wide range of people. Here Saul talks about the influence that good communicators can have – and gives his take on where reports succeed in using clear and lively language.

Saul Eslake: Where they go well is where they minimise the use of jargon. And complex unintelligible to ordinary folk, parrot sentences and paragraphs that are hard not only for ordinary people to understand, but hard for journalists to turn into language that ordinary people can understand, which is, as I understand it, part of a journalist’s job – maybe not the most important part of it, but part of what journalists do. And, you know, while there will be instances where the use of, or reference to complex work – you know, I think, for example, reports that the IPCC has written about climate change issues, you know, are discussing very complex matters, and to be credible with scientists, which is important, have to be written in a way with all sorts of caveats and your standard deviations around means and things like that, that can be very difficult for ordinary people to understand – I think, in those circumstances where the use of complex technical language and argument is unavoidable for reasons of credibility with other experts, that that needs to be put in a separate volume or a separate part of the report from those parts that are addressed to politicians, members of parliament, journalists and the general public. And that isn’t always done. I think reports that are written by judges usually manage to do that fairly well. Reports that are written by lawyers who are not judges don’t always succeed in doing that. And reports that are written by other experts who are not necessarily accustomed to defending their opinions in the face of challenges from others – which, you know, barristers do for a living – sometimes they struggle with it, sometimes they don’t. I mean, one of the other really well- written reports, incidentally, that I, I could have mentioned before is an example of someone writing in the field that’s not their primary expertise was the report that John Niewenhuysen wrote to the Cain government about liquor law, deregulation, licensing deregulation. Now, this was about the law. And Niewenhuysen was an economist. But that was, as I recollect a report that was about law reform, not written by a lawyer, that was written incredibly persuasively and ultimately did a great deal of good in terms of reform, reforming Victoria’s extraordinarily arcane and complex liquor licensing rules in the late 1980s. So it can be done. But I think it takes people with particular talent and determination in order to do it.

Saul’s clearly right here: not every expert has the talent and determination to make their writing clear and lively. And that matters even to other experts. A shrewd economist called Ian MacFarlane ended up running Australia’s central bank for a decade. Macfarlane once admitted to me that he didn’t read the middle sections of most economic research, because he could no longer follow the mathematics. At the time he told me that, he was research manager of the Reserve Bank. It underlines the point that even people with formal training and professional responsibilities don’t necessarily want to struggle through unclear explanations.

Saul Eslake: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I really struggle to read a lot of academic economic research in, say, the premier journal of the Economic Society of Australia, the Economic Record. I mean, I can’t understand more than half the articles. And that’s partly because I don’t have the training in econometrics that enables me to understand a lot of what passes for pathbreaking academic economic research these days. Quite often, it’s on topics in which I have no interest as well. But a lot of it’s just really poorly written from the point of view of reaching a wide audience. Now, in many cases, of course, academic economists are not writing for a wide audience. They’re writing for other academic economists, which is a very narrow audience. And you know, I often when I was asked by people studying economics, or having just graduated in economics, what they should do and could they come and work for me when I was working brains, it also I would often say to them, that during your university degree, you are taught how to write about economics for academic economists, because they’re the people who mark your exams. But unless you want to be an academic economist yourself, that’s a skill you will never need again.

Saul Eslake has spent much of his life communicating with the public almost daily. But he still values precision in writing, just as he clearly values precision in speaking. He has quoted the Financial Times’ Michael Skapinder writing that a communicator who does not know where an apostrophe goes is like a racing driver who does not know what a dipstick is. The racing driver can still do the job without that knowledge. But it’s kind of embarrassing, and you start to wonder how good a driver he will turn out to be.

Saul Eslake: Most people who write things have at least one opportunity to review what they’ve written before anyone else reads it. And, you know, in that case, if there are egregious grammatical errors or misuse of words, well, you know, that casts some real doubt on whether – particularly if it’s a subject about which you don’t know very much, and your presumption is that the person who’s writing your reading is meant to know something about it, if it’s really badly written, I’m gonna have second thoughts about that. It’s even more obvious when people are speaking, because when you speak, you don’t have the opportunity to review what you have said before someone hears it. And so if I have to listen to someone who can’t string 10 words together without four of them being ’like’, for example, I’m going to switch off after about five minutes after that, after I’ve counted about 50 ’likes’, you know, I’ve lost interest. And, you know, ditto if whoever I’m listening to has various other vocal tics or fry that distract me from the substance of what he or she is trying to say, you know, they’ve lost me. But normally in writing, because you do have the opportunity to review yourself, and you usually have the opportunity to show it to someone else before it goes to its intended audiences, there’s less excuses for that sort of thing, I think.

Communication is a leadership task

Obviously we count Saul Eslake as an enthusiast for clear communication.

But does clear communication with the public matter in the real world? Saul Eslake says he has seen its real-world value. We just heard him recount how a powerful and clear report changed Victoria’s liquor laws. But that’s not the only place he’s seen well-written work make a difference. I asked Saul how he came to realise clear and lively writing mattered.

Saul Eslake: Partly by observing more senior people when I was at Treasury, partly by seeing outside of the public service, once I left, examples of it having been done very poorly, and what the consequences of those were … People with a lot of their own intellectual effort and time into writing something that disappeared without trace if people couldn’t understand it. It could also disappear without trace, if it was recommending something that very powerful vested interests were determined to prevent happening. But I suppose you wouldn’t feel quite as aggrieved about that, or you’d feel a bit aggrieved about it for a different set of reasons than if it failed, because your own writing was the main reason for it.

Saul notes that the Australian government’s leading economic institutions have traditionally done well at teaching people how to write advice to leaders.

Saul Eslake: One of the reasons why I used to recommend that young aspiring economists go and work for Treasury or the Reserve Bank or some institution like that for a while was partly because of the insights working there would give them into how economic policies made, which is a very useful thing, if you want to do the kind of job I subsequently did, but also because the Reserve Bank and Treasury are very good at teaching, newly-minted economists how to write about economics for people who are not economists, which, of course, includes treasurers, who are generally speaking, not economists. And whether they do it deliberately or through osmosis, as was the case during the Stone Age, I don’t know. But that’s a skill you don’t learn at university. And you can learn it in the public service. I mean, you certainly could during my day; whether you can as much now I don’t know. But it’s a skill that a lot of people don’t have.

Communication can rescue an institution

Another voice for the real-world value of clear communication is Gary Banks. For 15 years to 2012, Gary Banks ran Australia’s Productivity Commission, which is an independent advisor to Australia’s federal government on economic, social and environmental issues. Its primary instrument of advice is reports. So over the years the Productivity Commission has worked out a process for making sure those reports speak clearly to their audiences – to policymakers, and to the broader public. Here’s Gary Banks, talking about how clearer and more pointed language helped preserve the institution he ran:

Gary Banks: When I joined the Productivity Commission, when I was appointed chairman, there was an election due … If Labour had won that election, they were going to abolish the organisation. So I was appointed in May, and the election was in November, and I could have been out of a job by December. So I came into that role thinking, you know, this organisation has to be seen to be helpful and influential. And one of the things I first saw that was a bit problematic as some of the language we used. And another was that, you know, some of the messages, the key messages coming out of the studies, was a bit lost, you know. It wasn’t absent, because I think the commission has always been quite good at that. But we worked harder on that. And our earlier discussion about summaries and key points sort of overlaps with that. So, you know, it really is important that you don’t spend all your time doing a big huge body of work, and not enough time thinking about what really matters in this body of work in terms of influence and execution of policy. And again, as we said before, you cannot expect that, you know, the ultimate decision maker about a policy or a strategy to be wading through hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff. So you’ve got to break it down.

Banks makes an important point about people: it often takes the involvement of experienced senior staff to liven up a report. Senior staff are the people most likely to understand what the audience is going to need to know in order for the report to succeed.

Gary Banks: In my experience at the Commission, because the commissioners are much more attuned to the environment in which the report will land, they are more conscious of making it appealing and compelling if they can be. Whereas the people who are writing doing the first draft of the chapter are more concerned about getting it right, getting the detail right, making sure it conceptually stands up. And a lot of boring stuff can happen at that level. But if it’s gone through a process of discussion, and the more senior people involved in the project, have been able to exert an influence, then hopefully, by the time it comes out, that’s been addressed.

Leadership of reports teams clearly matters here. Not enough people who lead reports start off by saying this: we must speak clearly and directly in this document. Nick Gruen points out that this leaves clarity as a low priority in many reports – to the point where outsiders often can’t really read and absorb what they say.

Nicholas Gruen: It means that I can’t read most government reports, because I don’t know what they say. They’re so laden with cliches and spin. So you will say the government improved or enhanced some policy. Well, that’s for other people to decide. Tell us what you did with the policy? Tell us, you know, did you fund it more? Did you fund it less? What if you were seeking to enhance a particular thing – let’s say, its responsiveness – then tell us something about the texture of those changes. And give us a reason to believe that you’re not just saying that. Because unfortunately, we’re just beset with this tendency of human beings. When they hear that something’s been done, they sort of think it has been done. But if you give it a texture, if you say how you did something, and ideally say a little bit more, to sort of prove your point – like it was important in this phase of the program for it to become more responsive, and customer satisfaction was taken from 35% to 60% during this period – it’s just a sort of a simple … it’s just a, it’s a fact, it’s a thing which helps to create a picture, that that is independent of your nice words.

Improve your ideas

So far in this podcast, we’ve heard our experts talk about making reports and other written documents more interesting. But these experts often say something else, too. By disciplining yourself to express ideas clearly, you will not just be more interesting; your ideas will actually be better too.

This idea is not new. In the past century, it has been most famously associated with the author George Orwell. He wrote Animal Farm and 1984, but some writers remember him just as much for his classic essay Politics and the English Language. In that essay, he makes the point that bad writing and bad thinking tend to go together: do one, and you’ll be forced to do the other too. Here’s how Orwell puts it in Politics and the English Language, read here by Jonathan Streeter:

… 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.

“If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly.” In the rest of this episode, we will return often to this theme of Orwell’s: clear and lively writing pushes you towards clear and lively thought.

Saul Eslake holds this view strongly. He has found muddled thought is a major cause of muddled language. People put their thoughts down on paper before they know what they think, and they fail to use the writing process to figure out what their true thoughts are.

Saul Eslake: Yeah, I mean, I’ve often found – and I think I was counselled by mentors of mine in the past, along these lines – that actually trying to write out what you think is a useful discipline for clarifying what you think, you know. And if you can’t do that, then there’s probably a good chance that what do you think has got some flaw in it. And so writing about something, or – not everyone does this, I suppose, but – if you’re going to be speaking, rather than thinking, running through what you’re going to say in your head before you say it, and asking yourself, ’does this make sense to me?’ or if I was trying to have this conversation with someone who might not be an expert in the field, but is nonetheless an intelligent person, if I can’t explain it to this person, I’m probably not going to convince the audience, either that I know what I’m talking about, or that if I can at least get them to accept that I know what I’m talking about, that what I’m saying might actually be of some relevance to them.

Nick Gruen holds a similar view to Saul Eslake on this: figure out what you can say that will have some real value to the audience. That will improve what you write. Better still, you’ll have better ideas that provide the reader with more lasting value. And so you won’t produce a document that everyone sees as a waste of their time. Gruen regrets that more and more government documents are like this – and that might include one of his own.

Nicholas Gruen: I mean, take this as an example. This is rather countercultural, but the only regret I can think of – and maybe it’s not a regret, it’s just a sort of a, it could have been different, I’m not sure it would have been better – but one possible regret I have about the government 2.0 task force is that everybody wanted to give it a propaganda name. And it ended up with a propaganda name, which was Engage. And we were trying to say this is our one word for government engaged. Now, I did want to say that and it's even possible that I was the guy who came up with the propaganda name. But I actually think that we’re so swamped in propaganda that there’s something that before the age of propaganda, and … I can even, I can even detail it, where it happened in Australian government at the top level was between 1990 and 1991. Because the last economic statement that Bob Hawke made, it was a small economic stimulus made in 1990, and it was called, it was an October 1990 statement, and I may have the date wrong. But its name was Economic statement by the Prime Minister, October 1990. And then when Paul Keating had put the sword through him [Hawke], as he likes to put it colourful, and become the Prime Minister – I was on staff at that point – and we all put together this slightly bigger economic, economic stimulus, and it had a propaganda name and it was called One Nation. Now, for Australians who are tuning into this bill, they'll find that quite amusing. I used to wander around the corridors of Parliament House calling it Ein Reich … Now everything is named. You know, we named the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait, we generate these propaganda names for things rather than just saying what’s happening and letting other people decide the extent to which they’re good or they’re bad or what they represent and so on. So anyway, I see that as just endlessly replicated through government reports – this constant compulsion to say things are good, and that creates all sorts problems when you want to say that certain things are bad, which also happens in government reports, but everyone’s tiptoeing around.

David Walker: It’s actually quite a difficult art to find things that are really going to move the dial in people’s thinking about an issue.

Nicholas Gruen: What tends to happen is that everyone amps up the rhetoric, and in the process ends up with less and less to say. So one of the things that you’ll find – or I’ve found when dealing with lots of groups, and particularly business groups – is that everyone says, as if they’re delivering themselves of great wisdom, they say we need a vision. Now, every vision of any magnitude for society always says three things, which is we want a strong economy, a strong society and a strong environment. But everybody says, oh, no, we need a new vision, and then we can all follow the vision. And so and what those things that people love to talk about these visions is, that’s the rhetoric, that’s all the things that make us feel good about what we’ve said, that make us feel that we ’ve seen something important, and we’re bringing it about when we’re actually not – we’re just engaging in, in nice words. So I would argue that if you really want to cut through – and … Most reports just don’t cut through because an awful lot of reports commissioned by people who don’t know what to do, and will not have any strong commitment to doing anything, if it’s difficult when they get the report back. So that that’s that’s to be taken as background. But if you are clear – if you are clear in your mind, and you’re clear in your writing – people will be shocked by that. And they won’t even often know that they’re shocked. But they’ll have a different kind of experience to the sort of experience they have when they read government reports. And that gives you the best chance of impact that I can think of in a massively overcrowded market.

And that brings us back to where we started: getting people’s attention and having them remember what you’ve said – that may not seem like a very high bar. And yet, in practice, most people find it surprisingly hard. You need the writing in your report to be clear and lively. And the best way to do that is to have an honest conversation with your readers about the problem at hand.

That’s never easy, but it stands a chance of paying off.

Show notes

Guests

Deirdre McCloskey, distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago
(Photo: Wikimedia/Gage Skidmore)

Saul Eslake, independent economist and company director

Gary Banks, former head of Australia's federal Productivity Commission

Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics

Peter Martin, The Conversation business and economics editor