Proof That The Internet Did Not Destroy The Ability To Write

What is the secret to good writing?

I recently had the good fortune to hear Ian McEwan (author of the wonderful Atonement, among other books) and Steven Pinker (a name I’d never heard before — yet more proof of my vast ignorance) discuss what makes good writing. McEwan is of course a gifted novelist; Pinker is a cognitive scientist who thinks about (among other things) how children acquire language skills. This made for an interesting discussion.

Both authors had recently published new books. If you don’t want to spring for the price of Pinker’s book, you can read the nutshell version of his thesis in his recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

I stole the title of this column from Pinker’s talk. Pinker says that many people blame the internet for the younger generation’s inability to write clearly. But if Twitter’s the culprit — “the kids these days can write only 140-character sentence fragments” — then the world should have been awash in pristine prose in the days before Twitter.

We were not, of course. Most writing sucked in the ’90s, too. And in the ’80s. And the ’70s. And, according to Pinker, people have been complaining about bad writing in literally every generation since the invention of the printing press.

So it would be nice — but wrong — to blame today’s bad writing on modern technology.

If technology isn’t the culprit, then what is? Pinker’s thesis is one that I suspect all good legal writers have known subconsciously all along. But it’s worth speaking the words out loud and thinking about how to use this concept to improve both your writing and the writing of those you edit. . . .

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Pinker says that good writing requires “an act of pretense”: You know something. You must convey that information in writing to someone else. To accomplish this, you must forget the thing that you know and put yourself back into an imaginary state of ignorance. Only then will you be able to select words that convey to an ignorant reader the idea that you’re trying to communicate.

Most writers don’t do this. Most writers start from a state of knowledge and then scrawl words that are incomprehensible to any reader who didn’t know in advance what the writer was trying to say. (This is why it kills me when I tell someone, “I don’t understand this paragraph,” and the author says, “But I understand it.” Of course you understand it! You wrote the damned thing! You understood it before you put pen to paper! That’s not the test. The test is whether a reader can understand what you’ve written, and I’m telling you that you’ve failed that test.)

Think about this.

Within just the last hour, I’ve received two emails from folks in our Compliance Department. One told me: “In the Section 166 report, the FCA imposed an RMP . . . .” The other said that, “The NEDs are discussing the MI they receive . . . .”

In a pig’s eye.

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I don’t care that I’m a specialist in the field who’s supposed to understand our secret code. Use words. Words that people can understand. That’s the best way to convey information, and the only way to make the reader’s life bearable.

(Yeah, yeah: The FCA is the Financial Conduct Authority, a regulator in the United Kingdom. And it issues reports under a certain statutory section — section 166 — that can require companies to complete “Risk Management Programmes.” And the “non-executive directors” were thinking about the “management information” — data about how the business is performing — that they receive. See? Words! They’re great! Use ’em!)

We of course see the same thing from folks in finance, who tell me that I should look at the plug loaded into budget code 13030 on the attached spreadsheet and let them know if I agree. Agree? I don’t even know what they’re asking. And the folks in human resources (who use a certain computer system every day) telling managers to go into TRS on PeopleSoft and complete the nine-square using the ALM. And guys in the business, sharing their content agendas to incentivize ACIM to do God-knows-what. And the folks in IT, who suffer from this malady so completely that it’s not worth trying to parody.

I see this failure on the litigation front, too. I see it in the reports coming up through the ranks about, for example, on-going trials or arbitrations. The note to the general counsel or a senior executive cannot say: “Smith asked . . . . Anderson answered . . . . ”

You’re attending the arbitration, so you know who these people are. Your reader hasn’t thought about this case in a month and doesn’t have a clue what the last names of the witnesses or arbitrators are. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes.

I see this in draft briefs. A writer assumes, for example, that the mediator will remember the case from an earlier mediation session held nine months ago. The mediator will not.

Or that the judge remembers your case from some earlier motion practice. She does not.

Put yourself in the reader’s state of ignorance, and write for that audience.

Think, too, about just how vast a reader’s ignorance might be. A couple of decades ago, a legal secretary came up to me at work: “Mark, I heard a story on the radio when I was driving in today, and it left me confused. The story said that an investor wanted to buy a company’s debt. Why would anyone possibly want to buy debt? Heck, you can have my debt for free.”

That was an entirely legitimate question. The person who wrote the piece on the radio should have thought about a listener’s possible state of ignorance.

Or, more recently, I heard a guy give a talk about federal preemption of product liability claims against manufacturers of certain medical devices. The speaker explained that preemption is an important doctrine, because “preemption means that federal law displaces all state law claims.”

The person sitting next to me whispered: “Hey, Mark. Why don’t the plaintiffs just sue under federal law?”

Right! That’s a legitimate question. The speaker should have said that there isn’t any federal law allowing recovery, so if there’s no state law claim, the plaintiffs go home empty-handed.

Before you put fingers to keyboard, put your mind back into a state of ignorance. Only then can you hope to convey a thought.

Thank you, Steven Pinker, for verbalizing a previously subconscious thought.

(Ed. note: The links to books mentioned in this post are affiliate links.)


Mark Herrmann is the Chief Counsel – Litigation and Global Chief Compliance Officer at Aon, the world’s leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital and management consulting. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.