KiwiStreet. Greater clarity. More style.

When I first started writing for a living, one of the senior sub-editors took me to one side and gave me his ‘new boy chat’.

‘Most people’s writing is heavily influenced by their reading,’ he said.  ‘So read widely, but read wisely.  Learn from the best and ignore the rest.’  Among the best, he counted Winston Churchill, Graham Greene, and Anthony Burgess.

One of my tasks this week was to tidy up a veritable bucket of gobbledygook.  The author was a man of science and a rising star in his organisation.

If his writing is influenced by his reading, I would guess that he has read a lot of rather opaque scientific papers.  He also seems to have absorbed more than his share of online ‘clickbait news’.  ‘Mineral supplements potentially as damaging as smoking a new study to be published in a prestigious journal later this week will suggest’ seems to be his idea of literature.

I sent him the edited prose and waited for his comments.

‘Spot on,’ he said.  ‘That was exactly what I was trying to say.  It’s just that your version is easier to read.  I wish that I could write like that.’

‘You can.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Just stop reading writing that isn’t easy to read.  Seek out writing that is clear and concise.  Seek out stories that say something to you.  And if you find yourself confronted with umpteen pages of opaque mumble, politely ask the author if you can have a brief summary in plain English.’

‘Thanks.  I’ll give it a go,’ he said.

An old friend died recently.  His death wasn’t unexpected; he was nudging 90 and he had been unwell for almost two years.

As a young man he had survived The Great Depression and The Second World War, and, despite coming from a relatively poor family, he had managed to acquire a good education.

By the time I got to know him, his general knowledge was truly impressive, and he had an enviable facility with numbers.  But what used to delight me most was his prose style.  It was spare, but not too spare.  And even when he engaged in fierce pen-and-paper combat, there was always an underlying tone of good humour.

Helping his daughter to tidy up his ‘stuff’, I came across a draft of a letter to his bank manager.  It was a masterpiece of grace and grumpiness.  The bank manager would have been in no doubt as to where his bank had gone wrong and what it needed to do to put matters right.  But I’m also sure that, on reading my friend’s letter, the bank manager would have smiled.

Another friend of mine, a man who spent most of his working life teaching English to high school students, once suggested that you can’t teach kids to write well.  Each good writer learns for themselves.  All of the exercises and tutorials are just opportunities to ‘develop the writing muscles that the natural writers have been given’.

Back in the early-to-mid-1980s, when PCs first started appearing on people’s desks, many arrived with bits of ‘boilerplate’, chunks of prose that could be inserted into documents of one sort or another in order to make life easier for the writers of letters and reports.  Unfortunately, the people who composed the boilerplate sections often knew what to say, but they seldom knew how to say it.  As a result, clunk reigned.  Unfortunately, there is still a good deal of this clunk about today.

Throughout many organisations, there is a tacit belief that everyone can write.  ‘Hey, if our people weren’t literate, we wouldn’t have hired them.’  But this is patently not true.  Some people can write clearly, concisely, and with graceful style.  Others can do little more than arrange words in some sort of order that, on a good day, hints at an attempt to communicate.

Just as every organisation needs a strategy expert and a finance expert and an IT expert, every organisation also needs a prose expert, someone who can help your organisation to communicate with your customers, your suppliers, and everyone else that you need to get onside.  Find that person in your organisation.  And, if you don’t have one, recruit one.  And then make them the Minister of Words.  You won’t regret it.

My first grown up writing job was with an advertising and communications consultancy.  My boss was a former accountant with a degree in economics.  But his real passion was for words.

‘Tell a story,’ he used to say.  ‘And tell it in the plainest language that you can.  Make it interesting, but be direct, be concise, and keep it simple.

‘And don’t let anyone tell you that simple means childish.  Child-like, perhaps – but child-like has much to commend it.  When did you last hear a seven-year-old use words that you didn’t understand?’

Not everyone subscribed to Don’s philosophy.  One of the old hands used to grumble that he hadn’t spent 30 years hunched over a typewriter in order to write ‘for morons with a reading age of seven’.  And, to prove it, he often peppered his prose with words like grandiloquent.  But David, the former sub-editor turned copy supervisor, was on to him.  Grandiloquent rarely – if ever – made it into print.

Don’s other advice was to steer clear of anything abstract.  ‘Leave abstraction to the painters,’ he used to say.  ‘Jackson Pollock can do abstract.  You stick to concrete.’

I thought of Don recently while I was listening to ‘an expert’ explaining how to solve a social problem has, thus far, proved resistant to all of the usual approaches.

‘We should treat the whole minefield as a new landscape,’ he said.  ‘We need to interrogate the intention.  We also need to interrogate the data in order to glean the learnings.  And of course we need to build new pathways.  But most importantly, we need to kick-start the national conversation.’

Yeah right.

Is it any wonder that nobody seems to know what to do next?

I love radio.  I grew up listening to light static interspersed with music, comedy, news, and drama.

Is there a radio gene?  I suspect that there might be.  My father was a big fan of radio (‘wireless’, as he called it).  And my only other sibling spent most of her working life presenting, producing, and directing radio in four different countries.

Among my earliest memories are programmes like Take It From Here, The Navy Lark, Brothers In Law, Hancock’s Half Hour, and, of course, The Goon Show.

But I also enjoyed American shows like Nightbeat.  ‘Hi there.  This is Randy Stone.  I cover the night beat for the daily.  Stories start in many different ways ….’

And I was an enormous fan of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America.  I loved the way in which his ‘letters’ took you on a journey and then, perhaps when you least expected it, they returned you to the point from which you had set out.

Quiet early in my writing career I heard radio described as ‘theatre for the mind’.  And that seemed about right to me.  That’s what it is.  You hear sounds; and your mind ‘sees’ pictures.

After I had been writing for radio for a year or five, I attended a workshop led by a couple of radio ‘gurus’.  Over the course of the day, they stressed three things.

Tell a story.  Whether you are reporting news, presenting drama, or pitching a commercial message, what people are listening for is a story.  They are listening for something that tells them something.  They are listening for something that ‘makes sense’.  If there is no story, they will probably tune out.

Use language that people can easily understand.  If the listener has to stop and mentally – or literally – look up a word or phrase, they will miss part of your message.  And maybe they will abandon it altogether.  Use plain language.  Wherever possible, eschew jargon and other esoteric language.

Don’t over-write.  Let your listeners use their imagination and ‘fill in the gaps’ in their own way.  Leave space for them to think, to digest, to ‘file’ what you have told them.

Over the past few years, most of us have learned to deal with potential information overload.  We have learned to pick a path, however imperfect, through the multiple messages we are presented with each day, each hour, each minute, even each nanosecond.  And yet the old radio ‘rules’ still have a lot to recommend them.  Just a thought.