When you write, are you improving the life of your reader – or at least, improving the reader’s understanding? The people who think that writing is easy have deluded themselves that it’s just a question of bunging some words down on the screen.
Writing is not dedicated to the proposition, “All right, let’s get this over with.” But we are all being bombarded with examples of that perfunctory style of writing.
It’s unfair to pick on politicians… but I’m gonna! Their self-serving attempts to avoid communication are usually laughably easy to spot… because they leave out the bit where they listen. Communicating requires speaking and listening. Most politicians are deliberately bad at the first and rarely even make a pretence of trying to do the latter.
I often remember an example from 1940 that comments on the misuse of language, in Agatha Christie’s short story “The Augean Stables” from the collection The Labours of Hercules.
[Hercule Poirot] felt, at the same time, a sympathy for [Home Secretary] Sir George Conway. The man obviously wanted to tell him something – and, as obviously, had lost the simple art of narration. Words had become to him a means of obscuring facts – not of revealing them.
Politicians are only the most obvious and omnipresent users of language to avoid being sincere. With job applications, with actor’s auditions, in any scenario when one person is being selected among many, those making the selection also select transparently insincere words.
I once applied for a technical writer position at noon on a Thursday. On Saturday (!!!) at 2:30 PM, I received this:
Our team has reviewed your experience for the [specific job title omitted] role and we were impressed with your skills and accomplishments. It was a difficult decision to make; however, at this time we have decided to pursue other candidates…
This company is not the only one that has chosen to use so-called AI to review a résumé. (Which is kind of like saying that Alabama is not the only state to implement restrictive voting regulations.) But this company very clearly chose to use a large language model to draft their form rejection emails. Because they have no desire to communicate.
They were impressed? Really? Then why did no one actually review my application and résumé? Or, if they have developed “AI” that is capable of being impressed, why are they keeping that to themselves?
Amusingly, the worst communication I ever experienced in response to a job application came from a Texan firm with “Communications” in their corporate name. Yes, it was worse than the paragraph cited above.
So here’s your action item, fellow technical writers: keep in mind the focus question sometimes used in advertising: “What’s in it for me?” Pretend that you’re the reader, and ask yourself that question. Ask it before you begin writing, or while you are writing, or once you have finished your first draft, or while you are re-writing.
But do not fail to ask it, or your writing will be as bad as that produced by a large language model. Or as self-serving as the language of a politician.