As you know by now, I’m a humor snob. So I’m gutted to discover, after taking the New Yorker‘s test for advanced readers, that I only scored three out of five. Being a Yoga snob as well, the last one threw me off. But even with that allowance, I’d only be four out of five. And so my Friday morning begins with a crisis.
Good things happen whenever I clean out my old emails. Here is one from our editor at The Economist, John Micklethwait, regarding the use and misuse of quotations in writing:
At our meeting on Friday I read out part of a letter … by Alan Parker, who used to work for us in the 1970s, and its main point was to explain – in a touchingly matter-of-fact way – that he had just discovered that he was about to die (which he did indeed do two weeks after he sent the letter). … I still think one part of it is worth passing on:
“I shall continue to read The Econ for the rest of my life, as my sub will outlast me. I shall enjoy it of course, but I should enjoy it even more if my death-wish could be granted: viz, that the editor decrees that henceforth all meaningless and trivial quotes should be excised before the copy gets anywhere near him. I cannot abide the constant oscillation between (a) serious reporting, and (b) meaningless quotes by non-entities. All I want is the story, clear and concise and preferably with a bit of style. As soon as I get to “Joe Bloggs, an accountant, says ‘these are big numbers'”, I turn over the page….”
I think he had a point. One of our hallmarks has always been avoiding the gratuitous quotes that slow down our rivals. Obviously, we should quote people when they are saying something new and refreshing – just as we should credit other news organisations. And I also accept that good sources occasionally need some form of payback; but, if you want to bring them into the story, make sure they are saying something that is original, which does not slow down the piece.
In general, our rule with quotes should be that either the singer or the song should be interesting. Thus “America is in trouble in Iraq” is worth using only if, say, the speaker is George Bush. But I would add three particular bugbears of mine. The first is beginning a paragraph with a general quote from an uninteresting source (“America is in trouble in Iraq” says Dwight Smith of the Foreign Policy Institute), when we are really just introducing a new part of our argument – and very little of what follows could be seen as Mr Smith’s unique insight. Quote Mr Smith later by all means if he has uncovered a new fact about National Guard numbers, or use him as an example of one side of a debate; but don’t hand over the paragraph to him – unless he deserves it. Second, where we do quote, we should whenever possible simplify intrusively long titles (so “Professor Dr John Smith, head of special research projects at the Joe. A. Doe Global New Media Centre at Massachessetts Institute of Technology” becomes John Smith of MIT). And, lastly, one word is often preferable to a full quote: “This research strikes me, on the basis of available evidence, as dubious,” said Professor John Smith etc can happily become, “The research is “dubious”, reckons John Smith of MIT”.
The alternative is more people turning over the page.
I still remember my high-school English teacher telling me that good writers minimize the use of the, of, a and so forth. Those are fill words–in effect, noise. Turn nouns into verbs and get rid of them, so that the signal-to-noise ratio of your writing goes up. Don’t say: “A restructuring of our financial system and a recapitalization of our banks is an imperative for the avoidance of a depression.” Say: “We have to change our financial system and put capital into our banks to avoid a depression.”
I’ve also warned in a previous post about the treacherous first-person voice, which writers overuse, in my opinion, especially in America.
James Pennebaker
Well, James Pennebaker is now forcing me to think much more deeply about all this. He’s a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and he counts words. All sorts of words, especially the fill words that I thought existed only to be eliminated, and all those Is, mines and mes.
Why? Because how people use words, even and especially the ones we think don’t matter, says so much about them.
For instance, in analyzing the difference between Obama and McCain, Professor Pennebaker has this to say in on his blog:
Categorical versus fluid thinking. Some people naturally approach problems by assigning them to categories. Categorical thinking involves the use of articles (a, an, the) and concrete nouns. Men, for example, use articles at much higher rates than women. Fluid thinking involves describing actions and changes, often in more abstract ways. A crude measure of fluid thinking is the use of verbs. Women use verbs more than men.
McCain and Obama could not be more different in their use of articles and verbs. McCain uses verbs at an extremely low rate and articles at a fairly high rate. Obama, on the other hand, is remarkably high in his use of verbs and low in his use of articles. These patterns suggest that McCain’s natural way of understanding the world is to first label the problem and find a way to put it into a pre-existing category. Obama is more likely to define the world as ongoing actions or processes.
In this post, Pennebaker actually counts how often the candidates use various categories of words.
It’s all about probabilities, of course. But I love how Pennebaker reminds me–not that I’m somebody who was likely to forget it–just how much words matter!
Well, after exhausting all of you with my recent trilogy on metaphor-mixing, I thought I was done. But I also felt guilty that I didn’t quite live up to my promise of juicy and sufficiently current examples from The Economist. Let me atone herewith.
It must be this financial “meltdown”. It’s impoverishing all of us, and to add insult to injury (is that a metaphor?) it is making metaphor mixers out of hitherto presentable magazines. I will venture a theory about this below, but let’s have fun with–oh, let’s pick a random piece from our Finance section–the first two paragraphs, including title, rubric and chart caption, of this article: (As always, different metaphors in different colors)
Domino or dynamo?
Oct 9th 2008 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print editionChina is pretty well placed to cushion a global downturn
CHINA has become the main engine of the world economy, accounting for one-third of global GDP growth in the first half of this year. Will it keep humming? Compared with many other emerging economies, notably Brazil and Russia, which have recently suffered big capital outflows, China has so far largely shrugged off the global credit crunch. But there are signs that China’s economy is sputtering. Export volumes have slowed markedly; the growth of industrial production dropped to a six-year low in the 12 months to August; car sales fell by 6% in the same period; and China’s property boom seems to be turning to bust.
Some of the recent slowdown reflects the temporary closure of factories around Beijing during the Olympic games, which cleared the air but made China’s statistics even hazier than usual. …
Now, you notice that I couldn’t color the caption of the chart, but “Sweet and sour” is another metaphor.
So we have: Dominos, dynamos, cushions, a lot of engine stuff (with humming and sputtering, which is fine because it belongs to the same metaphor), as well as some shrugging and crunching and flowing and the obligatory dropping, falling, sliding and so forth.
I haven’t taken the time to test this hypothesis, but I will venture to guess that newspapers were mixing fewer metaphors after 9/11. After all planes flying into skyscrapers setting off blazing infernos over the skyline, human beings jumping off of buildings and avalanches of dust shrouding an entire city don’t need metaphors. Such images are what metaphors are made of. They are not abstract but primal.
This financial crisis is the opposite. Who has seen the enemy? What does a credit-default swap look, smell, sound, taste and feel like? Has anybody ever kicked a money-market fund in the shin? Have you ever seen a mortgage-backed security go up in flames? Have “toxic” assets ever actually made you puke?
No, no, and no. This stuff is so hard to write about because it’s so abstract. I once taught a class in which I started by asking “What is money?” One or two people tried the usual “I don’t care as long as I have enough of it”. But, as in the 1930s, people are discovering that money, banknotes and coins aside, is not actually there. That’s in the Gertrude Stein sense of “There’s no there there.” Go into a bank and ask politely to see and touch your money. That’s what I mean.
Ergo: We are in huge trouble, but we can barely even describe why and how. So we stretch for metaphors from primal experience. And we overdo it.
That doesn’t mean I condone it. For good writers, the advice stands: Just say No.
“What is truer than truth?”, asks writer Isabel Allende at the very beginning of her TED talk, below. “Answer: The story.”
How similar to Amy Tan (still from the same interview that I quoted from in my last two posts):
I think that’s why I’m a storyteller. I take all these disparate events and I have to connect them. I have to make them seem inevitable and yet surprising and plausible. That’s what I think life is like, too. I have the luxury to do exactly what it is we all need time to do, and that is just think about the mystery of life.
And how similar to a less poetic author, Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern who has
a life-story theory of identity, which argues that modern adults provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose by constructing and refining self-defining life stories or “personal myths.”
It’s all about the story, in other words. Human beings remember and understand things only insofar as they learn them in a story.
The absence of such a story is what, in my opinion, limits so many non-fiction books. They have an idea or a thesis, but don’t wrap it into a story. So people read until they get the basic idea, then drop the book at page 50. After all, once you “got it”, why waste your time?
In my book, I’m trying to do the opposite. It is non-fiction, but true stories can be more suspenseful and surprising than fiction. And there is an idea, but it comes out through the story.
This is also my main rebuttal to my mom so far, who worries incessantly that I am giving away too much of my secret sauce in this blog, for some anonymous villain to steal it all. What, I keep thinking, would he (or she) steal? The idea without the story? Good luck. As Allende said, you need the story to get the truth. So, mom, for now I’ll keep blogging. Let me know what I’ve overlooked.
And from that same issue of The New Yorker, this piece, which might well have telepathically come out of my mind.
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I feel rather strongly about words and language–in more than one language, as it happens. So when a political movement arises with the apparent mission to abase and disdain language itself, you might be able to guess where my sympathies lie…
And just to follow up with the final post in this trilogy on mixed metaphors (after this and this), here is the exegesis of what goes on when you commit this crime.
From the writer’s point of view, the reason for mixing metaphors is usually fear and laziness, a toxic cocktail.
The fear is that whatever he is writing is not interesting enough in and of itself. It is not a murder mystery, but a friggin’ merger of two banks, for instance. Or a wobble in the stockmarket. Or something else that Truman Capote never chose to write about. So, out of insecurity, he and his editor dramatize. They do that by aggrandizing the thing in question with words from more primal situations. Mergers become either “takeover battles” or “marriages.” Divestitures become “divorces”. Usually, war, love, sex, floods, fires, mountains and geology (“erosion,” “tectonic shifts,” “rifts”) find their way into the passage. And so on.
The laziness consists of not even noticing. They stuff these templates of primal experience into their paragraphs and don’t bother to think about what the words actually mean.
When the reader sees the outcome, he has one of two reactions. If sophisticated, he will notice the mixed metaphors and lose respect for the writer, usually in excess of what is justified, and probably stop reading the article, or at least taking it seriously.
If less sophisticated or hurried, he may not notice the mixed metaphor per se. But something more insidious now occurs. The different metaphors (floods, fires, quakes, wars) will cancel one another out in his mind. Instead of evoking strong and specific images, which is what metaphors are supposed to do, they produce a verbal goo. Its effect is tedium. The text loses energy and the reader gets tired and bored. The subject that the writer feared was not sufficiently interesting is now even less interesting. It’s excruciating.
In 99% of all cases, the solution is for the writer to address first the laziness (because that’s easier) and then the fear. To stop being lazy, just get in the habit of loving words and seeing their original meanings. To stop being afraid, get in the habit of forgetting about your audience entirely. You must find your subject interesting (otherwise, why not choose something else to write about?), and so it simply is interesting.
At this point, you’re ready to take all metaphors out of your text and see what’s left. Usually, it will be much better. The big secret about metaphors is that you don’t usually need them at all! Other details, from direct observation, take over.
Then, if you really feel something is missing, choose something evocative–but just one single image for the entire article–and stick with that. It doesn’t need to be “literary”. I heard a Congressman complain about the “bailout” package last week by saying that it was “a giant cow patty with a little marshmellow in the middle of it”. He didn’t even need to spell out that he was not going to swallow the marshmellow (by voting Yes), given what it was served in. Now that’s an effective metaphor, don’t you think?
I promised in the discussion underneath my declaration of war on the pox of wordsmithery–this pox being the mixed metaphor–to follow up with examples from…. The Economist, lest I sound smug.
Now, now. That was a joke. I was just seeing whether you were paying attention. War, pox and wordsmithery do not belong together, because that would be … mixing metaphors!
In any case, those mixed metaphors are everywhere. Well-known writers such Thomas Friedman practically bathe in them. (Does he not have editors?) So it was good to see that the New York Times Book Review finally took him to task for it today, choosing this example from his new book:
“The demise of the Soviet Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical and political roadblock on the global economic playing field.”
Oh, right, I was going to make us at The Economist look bad. Sorry.
Alright, here is a story that pains me to this day. It was supposed to be my first act of heroism for The Economist. It happened almost ten years ago, on a Thursday morning (London time). Thursday mornings are when we “close” the issue of the week. We sit in a room in a building we call the “tower” in St James’s Street (London’s drag of private clubs for toffs) and proof-read. No big changes are supposed to be made, because the pages are about to be sent off to the printing presses. Only if huge news happens, do we “open” up the book again and quickly insert something new.
I was still relatively new at The Economist and was not, on that morning, planning to call attention to my existence. But then a news item crossed the wires. A large Dutch insurance company had just announced that it would buy Transamerica, the large American finance firm that gave its name to San Francisco’s landmark skyscraper. As it happened, I had just met and interviewed the boss of that Dutch firm, and had really fun, colorful details about him in my notebook. I thought I might be able to hack out a piece quickly and … bask in glory.
I mentioned it to two editors, and they said ‘alright, write something really fast, and we’ll see if we can keep the paper open to use it.’ My adrenaline spiked, and I set to it. To my relief, the words came out in a torrent. And it was good. And the editor said it was good. And they took the piece into the still-open book.
There were only minutes or seconds to spare now. Two editors had to sit in front of the screen to give the piece a quick edit (because that’s what editors do). I stood behind them, watching the clock tick and biting my nails. They loved it and I was proud. And then…..
To my horror, he (who shall remain unnamed) fiddled here and there, and suddenly the last sentence–the very last and thus most prominent sentence!–read:
Surely Mr Storm hasn’t been seduced by the greatest merger wave in history?
Say what? Seduced? By a wave? You mean, not swept up by it, or deluged by it? I was horrified. But I was new and they were senior and this was my big moment and there were seconds left and I was not about to make this my final stand. I said nothing. They pushed ‘send’, and it went to the presses. I was that week’s hero.
But I walked through the streets of London in a state of shame comprehensible only to the loony fringe among pedants. Everyone–no, really, every Briton in this city, everyone in the Tube, and certainly my landlord–would within hours receive a copy of The Economist, and they would all turn straight away to the most important article, which was mine, and they would immediately spot this atrocity of a sentence! I was ruined!
And in truth, I have never gotten over it.
For those of you who want to read the silly thing in question, which is a decent sample of my style as of a decade ago, here it is.
In my previous post, I promised to follow up with the second secret to good writing. Here goes.
The first secret, to recapitulate, is not “worrying about what readers might want,” as my old boss and colleague, Clive Crook, put it in that piece I linked to. Thither lies authenticity.
But I ended by saying that every lesson needs a counter-lesson, just as yin and yang need each other, or as it takes two blades to make scissors. If you only say “to hell with the audience” and hold forth, you risk making a fool out of yourself. Thither lies pompous, self-important–and often incomprehensible–blather.
So what is that second blade? In a word, it is: empathy.
Empathy, properly used, means the ability to imagine what somebody else is feeling or thinking. The word comes from the Greek em (in) and pathos (feeling), so the direct English would be in-feeling. German actually has that direct translation, in the word Einfühlung.
I say that because some people confuse empathy with sympathy and compassion, which are very different things. Sympathy is with-feeling in Greek, and compassion with-suffering in Latin. The first is taking somebody’s side. The second is feeling pity. Both can be good, but this is not what we are talking about.
A good writer needs empathy because he (or she) needs to imagine, beginning with the first word and ending in the last, how a reader might understand those same words. Jacques Derrida tried to pretend that words cannot communicate their intended meaning to readers because they have a life of their own and each reader will understand them differently. This is 1% insight and 99% nonsense.
The trick is to be so precise about choosing words, sentences, paragraphs–and through them details, scenes, characters, plots, sequences, and theses–that readers are able to follow along the thoughts inside the writer’s mind. For that the writer has to empathize with other minds. Those minds are probably anonymous and absent, perhaps of a different gender, age, nationality, and so forth. So this can be difficult. Hence: empathy.
In my writer’s brain, what goes on is a permanent interrogation: If I want to say this, what would somebody need to know first in order to understand it? Can I introduce this without first introducing that? On the other hand, I don’t want to “bury my lede”, so can I find a way of changing the order, so that something else entirely–something more interesting–comes first, grabs the reader, and then introduces the other thing. And so forth.
For instance, when I introduce Hannibal in my book, and assuming that the reader does not already know about him, which detail should come first? The objective is to create not only a picture but the right picture of him, which is that picture which leads naturally to the aspect of him that I want to bring out. Which precise moment in his life should I choose as the first? The time when he was nine years old and swore an oath to his father? The time he stood on the Alpine pass and saw Italy? The moment just after the battle of Cannae? (In which case, why not the moment during the battle of Trasimene?) The time he was planting olive trees? The moment when he committed suicide? Should I start with the eye he lost? Or with a memory of him that somebody else later had, which might put his life into perspective?
Whatever you start with determines what comes next and next and next. If you take a reader off in the wrong direction, even just be one degree, you can’t bring him back later.
Some might say that empathy is itself audience-specific. Take Sarah Palin and Joe Biden last night. She was empathetic (“Can I call you Joe?”, “doggone”, “soccer moms”) in thinking herself into the minds of a certain kind of person–one who likes folksiness and hates “elitism”. She didn’t give a hoot about the minds of another demographic, who saw a shrewd and manipulative, but inexpert and ignorant, mind on display. In her case, that was fine, because she had to survive politically, and for that she only needed one audience (the other being lost to her anyway).
The story-teller also needs to be prepared to let certain audiences go. That was the point of the first secret. But he needs to have a way of letting all of them come back, and then follow along.
So, yes, don’t worry about what readers might want, but do worry about what readers might need.
Clive Crook
I’m just cleaning out some of my old stuff and came across this, which is now two-and-a-half years old but worth re-reading for a moment. In it the author, Clive Crook, writes about why, in his opinion, The Economist is such “a splendid, and partly inadvertent, success,” as he puts it. He gives a few reasons, but one is, I believe, relevant to all writers–of books, articles, blog posts–and even to all story-tellers, whether in video, audio or text.
First, though, the obvious disclaimers: I write for The Economist, and it was Clive who “discovered” and hired me, way back when. Clive was The Economist‘s deputy editor for many years, until he left to join the National Journal/Atlantic family. (He also blogs for the FT now.) At the time of the article from which I am about to quote, The Economist was looking for a new editor, and Clive threw his hat into the ring. (John Micklethwait became editor instead.) But that is neither here nor there.
Instead, here is the crux, buried in his last two paragraphs (my italics). Isn’t it odd, he says, that we are getting so many readers, when
… it is not as though the paper’s writers and editors ever really sought those readers out. In my experience, the editorial side of the enterprise spends little time worrying about what readers might want. In this insecure age, the larger part of the media industry thinks about little else but what readers, viewers, and advertisers might want—the better to serve them, or condescend to them, or pander. The Economist has always been much more interested in the world, and in what it thinks about the world, than in the tastes of its readers or anybody else.
… I suspect that if The Economist ever starts to worry very much about the new readers it would like to reach, in print and on the Internet, and to think about how it should tailor its content more deliberately with them in mind, then that will be the moment when its business starts to conform to industry averages.
The lesson: don’t second-guess what others want, for that is the way to inauthenticity. Say what you want to say, and to hell with “the market”.
Now, every lesson, needs a counter-lesson, just as yin and yang need each other. Otherwise you make a fool out of yourself. I’ll give you the counter-lesson in the next post.
Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history 