Use Anglo-Saxon

I have come to understand that the first step in revision is to make writing as concise as possible. Once the writing is concise, it becomes a lot easier for writers to see other problems, beginning with content, connections and logic, organization, clarity, and even correctness. 

Most writing could stand to be made more concise. Certainly concise writing is more economical, both monetarily and in efficiency. The problem, as I’ve stated before, is that most of us have been trained to make our writing as long as we can, to sound more educated, to meet page limits, to satisfy requirements that should never have been imposed in the first place. So where do we begin?

(Warning: a lot of what follows is over-simplified. If you want the whole story, look it up.)

I’ve found six ways to make writing more concise. The first is to use Anglo-Saxon instead of Norman French.

You probably know that English is a language derived from a number of root languages. English is notorious for stealing (or inventing) words and grammar from other languages when people cannot find a way to say what they want. 

To clarify, a little history is in order. Two of the root languages of English are Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. About a thousand years ago, William of Normandy decided he wanted to become king of England, so he invaded and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king Harald II at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. From that time, Norman French began to influence the English language in ways we still see today, usually in legal phrasings. The phrase “last will and testament” combines both Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and Norman French. “Will” is the Anglo-Saxon; “testament” is the Norman French.

So how does this affect writing? Most Norman French words tend to be multi-syllabic. If you remember the Fog Index, the formula calls any word three syllables or more a hard word. So using words with a Norman French derivation means using more hard words.

At this point, everyone is yawning and saying ok, so what?

Try this: Fornicate is the Norman French. What’s the Anglo-Saxon? I’ll give you a hint. It is four letters long and begins with an F.

Defecate is the Norman French. What’s the Anglo-Saxon? It’s another four letter word and begins with an S.

Urinate is the Norman French. I’ll leave you to figure out the Anglo-Saxon.

This often leaves my foreign students bewildered. So it’s all right to use swear words in writing? No, it is not all right. The point is that Anglo-Saxon packs a punch that Norman French does not. Anglo-Saxon also tends to be shorter. Four letters as opposed to three syllables? Take the short word.

Let’s look at some other examples:

Utilize—try use instead.

Accomplish—do.

Facilitate—ease.

Application—use (the noun in this case, not the verb).

Represent—is.

Demonstrate—show.

Modification—change.

Construct—make.

Conjecture—guess.

Assistance—help.

Am I saying you can never use long words? No, emphatically not. In many cases, those long words have a shade of meaning the shorter ones do not have. But when your writing requires that you use vocabulary from your own field (aka jargon, and jargon is usually hard words), why make the reader work to understand words that don’t have to be hard? Basically, if you have a choice between a long word and a short one, go for the short one.

If you want to keep your writing short and make it emphatic, go for Anglo-Saxon.

Fog Index

Fog: a cloudlike mass or layer of minute water droplets or ice crystals near the surface of the earth, appreciably reducing visibility; something that obscures and confuses a situation or someone's thought processes.

The second part of that definition certainly applies to writing. No one likes to read prose so difficult that they end up in a fog, with the subject so obscure that they don’t know what to think. From this came the concept of the Fog Index. And this entry is for the mathematicians.

The Fog Index was created as a way of calculating just how difficult a piece of writing is to read. It has serious limitations, but looking at the formula is certainly illuminating, even for non-mathematicians (like me—show me numbers, and I run the other direction).

The formula follows:

                0.4 [(words/sentences) + 100(complex words/words)]

Or as I prefer it:

         Fog Index = 0.4(Average Sentence Length + %Hard Words)

Hard words are words three syllables long or more, not counting proper names. What you get is a number that corresponds to the number of years of school required to understand a piece of writing. So a Fog Index of 12 means someone with a high school degree should be able to understand it easily.

Most word processors will calculate a reading scale of some sort, but I prefer the Fog Index because of what you can see in the formula. What makes the Fog Index go higher? Longer sentences and hard words. I am editing a paper right now with a high Fog Index. It sits right at 26. That’s not just high school, but college, both master’s and PhD, and a post doc.

As a general indication of readability, the Fog Index works pretty well. Short sentences and short words (along with short paragraphs) are easier to read than long sentences and long words (and long paragraphs).

This formula does have drawbacks. First of all, not all long words are hard words. And not all readers find the same words hard. Moreover, not all long sentences are difficult to read; that depends entirely on the writer. The Fog Index doesn’t solve all the problems of writing that is too obscure to read, but it certainly provides a little insight.

I thought about providing examples. Instead, I provide a website:

http://gunning-fog-index.com/

Have fun!

Bad Habits

One thing I have learned after years of writing, learning and reading about writing, and teaching writing: the rules aren’t the rules. Often the rules we have learned make our writing difficult to read. They create a set of bad writing habits. 

Before I start on guidelines to good writing, we have to understand the rules that create bad habits. Most of these rules are those we absorbed in years of reading bad writing, in school, and from people who don’t know what they are doing telling us that what we are doing is incorrect. These habits are hard to break.

First, most of us learn to write by copying what we read. If we don't read at all, if what we read is bad writing, then we tend to write badly. Think about some of what you have read in your own field. How much of it do you have to read more than once just to understand it—and many times, even several readings leave you confused? My students often complained that their textbooks, books that should teach them the basics in their fields, left them confused instead of instructed. 

This goes back to efficiency in writing. If the goal is to communicate an idea from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader, then many writers fail at what they do.

Worse, how many readers think that the fault lies with them? I’m sure most of us have blamed ourselves for not understanding a textbook, what an outstanding researcher has published, even simple instructions. 

I tried to put a television stand together not too long ago. As an exercise in futility, I first read the instructions. They were clear enough, although the pictures were more instructive, but they left out several steps and did not point out certain restrictions or cautions necessary for putting that stand together. I had to take the thing apart three times and redo it before I finally got it right. That was a waste of time. Something that should have taken at most an hour took up an entire afternoon and caused my blood pressure to soar.

Fortunately, I felt no need to blame myself. Those instructions were badly written. If the reader doesn’t understand, the fault is the writer’s. Let me repeat that: the writer is responsible for helping the reader understand. Taking the time to consider the reader is a necessary part of writing. And any time you hear a writer blame a reader for not getting it, you know the writer has no clue how to write.

So if you read a lot of bad prose, you are likely to emulate that bad prose in your own writing. The antidote is good writing. If we learn by imitation, we should choose a good writer to imitate. Identify someone whose articles you actually enjoy reading, the ones you understand the first time through; read that writer’s work, even if the articles aren’t directly related to your field. You should also read something besides professional articles. Pick up some decent fiction and read that. Many biographers and historians are also excellent writers. The book doesn’t have to be a classic. It just has to be something you enjoy reading.

School is no place to learn good writing habits either. I have great respect for English teachers in public schools, but most of them have too many students to do a good job of teaching writing. (Don’t get me started on class size and teacher compensation. You get what you pay for.) Unfortunately, I also know a great many teachers who don’t have a clue how to teach good writing because they don’t even know what good writing is. (I still recall the temptation to edit the notes I got from my children’s teachers. Can you imagine their reaction if I had edited the notes and sent them back?)

No doubt you remember writing assignments from high school and from college. Were you given a set number of pages to write? Teachers often assign a report that is five pages long. What happens if you have said everything you have to say in four? You get points taken off. What happens if you use simple words and short sentences? You are told that such writing doesn’t sound educated. So what did you do? You piffled for an extra page, stretching the sentences out, repeating yourself, searching the thesaurus for long words to substitute for short ones. And yet what you turned in was not necessarily good writing. It was just longer writing.

Then you get your paper back redecorated in red ink. You would see comments like: You cannot begin a sentence with because; Don’t use first person—don’t use I and you; Don’t start a sentence with and or but; Don’t use the verb to be (am, is, are, was, were); Don’t split infinitives; Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. How many paragraphs are in an essay? Five: one introduction, three body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. 

No doubt you can add to the list yourself. These rules, and I’m stretching a point to even call them rules, don’t make you a good writer. If anything, they make you worse.

Are there rules? Yes. We have grammar rules and spelling rules, but even those can be bent. A preoccupation with rules can end up making your writing dull, long, claustrophobic, unfriendly, and uncommunicative.