Why Most Academics Write So Badly

I had wanted to say something positive about the beauty of the English language. Instead, I found myself having to wade through the inpenetrable prose of academics who seem to have the greatest difficulty in expressing themselves – the worst examples being -

Language and Power, Norman Fairclough (2019) being far too theoretical
Naming and Framing – the power of words across, disciplines, domains and modalities 

Viktor Smith (2021) far too academic and features too many bibliographical references
The Politics of Language David Beaver and Jason Stanley (2023) too long-winded 

– at 500 pp
Public policy writing that matters David Christinger (2017) as too simplistic
Beyond Public Policy – a public action language approach  Peter Spink (2019) is the only 

text containing more acceptable language

The saving grace is a German trying to make sense of the language of the Nazi regime viz The Language of the Third Reich Victor Klemperer (1946)

I was reminded of Steven Pinker’s book - The Sense of Style – the thinking person’s guide to good writing (2014) which asks -

Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?

The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. But the bamboozlement theory makes it too easy to demonize other people while letting ourselves off the hook. In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it. I once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on technology, entertainment and design. The lecture was also being filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely surprised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about. 

The “curse of knowledge” is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know what she knows—that they haven't mastered the argot of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail……. 

This is good stuff and what follows echoes exactly what my own draft said all these years ago -

How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice—always remember the reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. None of us has the power to see everyone else's private thoughts, so just trying harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't make you much more accurate in figuring out what that person knows. But it's a start. So for what it's worth: Hey, I'm talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don't, you are guaranteed to confuse them. A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience and find out whether they can follow it. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what's obvious to us isn't obvious to them. 

The other way to escape the curse of knowledge is to show a draft to yourself, 

ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. 

If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, "What did I mean by that?" or 

"How does this follow?" or, all too often, "Who wrote this crap?" The form in 

which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they 

can be absorbed by a reader. Advice on writing is not so much advice on how to 

write as on how to revise.

Steven Pinker is an eminent psychologist and has a good interview on the book in the current Slate Magazine. My only quibble is with his title – there are a lot of style books out there but I don’t think that’s what he’s actually talking about. He seems rather to be addressing the more crucial issue of how we structure our thinking and present it so clearly that the reader or listener understands and is actually motivated to do something with the insights…..

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking. One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”  Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work – bit it did not amount to a coherent statement about power.

My own Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power looks at more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform which have this effect and offers some definitions which at least will get us thinking more critically about our vocabulary – if not actually taking political actions.

And the Plain English website is the other source I would recommend. It contains their short but very useful manual; a list of alternative words; and lists of all the organisations which have received their awards. Academics do need to have a read of Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly – how to succeed in the social sciences (2013) or have a look at On Writing Well W Zinsser (1976)

Other Relevant Posts

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/03/does-being-outsider-improve-quality-of.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-to-write-well.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/10/writing-as-power.html

MORE READING ON THE SUBJECT

Another four books this time – starting with some classics 

from the 1980s The Forward March of Labour Halted? ed M Jaques 

and Ed Mulhern (1981)

perhaps the most important contribution of the 1980sPolitics for a Rational Left – political writing 1977-1988 Eric 

Hobsbawm (1989)
The grand old man of historical writing reproduces some of 
his most important thoughts from the period
The Left in History – revolution and reform in 20th century politics 

Willie Thompson (1997)

The confident optimism of the early century was perhaps no longer present (in the era of Mutual Assured Destruction how could it be?) but the vista of indefinite technological and material progress was well reinstated. Cultural pessimists continuing to lament the good old days still existed but were on the defensive. A very popular and renowned text published in 1962 (and still in print), entitled What is History? by the historian of Soviet Russia and maverick pillar of the English academic establishment, E. H. Carr, eloquently conveyed the prevailing sense of advance. The theme of this short book is historiography, but Carr takes space to mock intellectuals who bemoan the alleged deterioration in civilised standards during the twentieth century, remarking that these gripes have more to do with the difficulties Oxbridge academics have in hiring servants than with the actual experiences of ordinary people. In addition he commits himself unreservedly to the idea of progress and longterm historical improvement. In this he reflected the elite and popular perception that the outcome and lessons of the Second World War had definitively overcome the causes of economic and political collapse that racked the world during the internar decades.

Leaving aside the question of the Soviet bloc, the era of the late 1950s, though presided over, paradoxically, by formally right-wing governments in all the major states, may certainly be viewed historically as the hour of the left. Carr, the more so because he was not identified with any specific political party or grouping, can be seen as representative of a general left-wing ethos. His text emphasises the left’s status as a historical current closely associated with modernity, and which would indeed be meaningless in any other circumstances. The left’s distinctive feature in the landscape of modernity however is its identification, rhetorically at least, with social improvement and regulation of economic structures in the interests of the masses.

If the values of the left implicitly dominated the language of politics in the 1950s, the language of the left came to dominate the discourse of politics and culture in the succeeding decade. The 1960s are traditionally regarded as the high tide of left-wing ascendancy in the public domain - era of hope or devil’s decade depending on your point of view. Alongside the established traditions of the left, which continued to flourish and spread up dll that point, emerged also a proliferation of new ones, influencing social levels hitherto scarcely touched by its outlook.

The subsequent collapse was by any historical standard astonishingly rapid. In just a little over two decades an entire modem culture appeared to wither and perish. Mighty institutions fell apart and expired almost without a struggle. Systems of belief were abandoned by millions practically overnight, even where, in governments or parties, institutional continuity and outward symbols were preserved. It is difficult to suggest any parallel in history: the only analogy which comes to mind is the uprooting of European paganism by Christianity - and that was a much more prolonged process, as well as the conquest of the old by the new rather than vice-versa. Barely two hundred years after the term first appeared in political usage it has begun to look as though ‘the left’, both culturally and institutionally, might well prove a transitory historical episode or even, in a breathtakingly ambitious formulation, that its catastrophe has marked ‘the end of history’.

This Is Only The Beginning – the making of a new left from 

anti-austerity to the fall of Corbyn Michael Chessum (2022). 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this text is the reading list at the end!

Below are a limited set of recommendations on further reading, split up thematically and chronologically.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to give a full list of classic theoretical texts relating to the themes covered in the book, so I will focus instead on highlighting books which are more or less contemporary and designed for the general, as opposed to the academic, reader. So, from a theoretical perspective, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (Zero, 2009) is short in length but essential reading. Keir Milburn’s Generation Left (Polity, 2019) is a concise and excellent summary of the radicalization of millennials. Hilary Wainwright’s A New Politics from the Left (Polity, 2018) is another concise bringing together of many years of thinking about a new left. Meanwhile, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (Verso, 2022), Jeremy Gilbert’s latest book (written alongside co-author Alex Williams), develops the theme of the ‘long 1990s’ touched on in our interview. Similarly, those interested in exploring debates around technology and the future of capitalism touched on in interviews should read Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (Penguin, 2015) and Clear Bright Future (Allen Lane, 2019); Aaron Bastani also released a book on the subject, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019). In and Against the State is not a contemporary text, but the new edition (Pluto, 2021) contains insightful and timely reflections from John McDonnell and the book’s editor Seth Wheeler.

There remains relatively little general literature on the student movement of 2010. Matt Myers’s oral history Student Revolt: Voices of the Austerity Generation (Pluto, 2017) remains the only authoritative account. Fightback: A Reader on the Winter of Protest (Open Democracy, 2011, edited by Dan Hancox) contains a diverse range of articles and essays from participants in the movement. For anyone interested in primary sources on the movement in a more global perspective, Springtime: The New Student Rebellions (Verso, 2011, edited by Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri) is also worth a look. Those interested in the higher education policy landscape at the time would do well to read The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education (Pluto, 2013) by Andrew McGettigan and The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance (Pluto, 2011 – edited by Michael Bailey and Des Freeman).

For wider texts on the global revolts of 2011, there is much more available. In terms of the events themselves, the classic text is Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012). The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013) is David Graeber’s first-hand account of the start of the Occupy movement. The specific history of the UK anti-austerity movement is a much less covered area, however. By and large the sources that go into any kind of detail, or engage with the movement on its own terms, are to be found in academic journal articles, blogs and position statements from the time – though accounts of it can be found in passing in mainstream print (for instance, in Owen Jones’s This Land: The Story of a Movement, Allen Lane 2020; and Andrew Murray’s The Fall and Rise of the British Left, Verso, 2019). One of the reasons why Chapter 3 is the longest chapter of this book is an attempt to fill some of these holes in the literature – though much of that work remains undone.

There are no shortage of accounts of the rise of the new Labour left and the Corbyn Project, though the vast majority of these are focussed on the high politics of the moment rather than the broader picture behind it. Two accounts of the Labour left’s rise, by Owen Jones and Andrew Murray, are already listed above. Alex Nunn’s The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power (OR Books, 2018) remains a good inside story of the campaign. For a less involved journalistic take, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (Vintage, 2020) gives a detailed and entertaining court history. David Kogan’s Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party (Bloomsbury, 2019) also provides an outsider’s perspective, including a great deal of detail and historical background.

There are a wealth of texts on the general history of the Labour Party and the Labour left, but two recent titles in particular are worth mentioning. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys’s Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn (Verso, 2020) is an unmissable account. So too is Simon Hannah’s A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left (Pluto, 2018), which covers a longer chronology and is written from a more critical and politically engaged perspective.

Finally, there are a number of forthcoming books which should be mentioned because they relate to key themes that this book contains and are written by people who feature as protagonists in this book. These include Ash Sarkar’s debut book and take on the culture war, Minority Rule, published by Bloomsbury; Owen Jones’s The Alternative and How We Built It, published by Penguin, which may cover some of the same ground as this book; James Schneider’s Our Bloc: How We Win, a strategic manifesto for the British left published by Verso; and James Meadway’s Pandemic Capitalism, also with Verso.

More Reading about Socialism

Four more to whet your appetite - 

Towards Socialism ed Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (NLR 1965)

An amazing collection of essays from some of the original thinkers of the 1960s – including Anderson, Balogh, Blackburn, Coates, Crossman, Gorz, Nairn, Titmus, Westergaard and Williams

Arguments for Socialism Cockshott and Zackariah (2012)
a series of fairly hard-left essays. Not recommended 

Leftism Reinvented – western parties from socialism to neoliberalism Stephanie

Mudge (2018) – from the Intro

Insofar as left parties are checks on plutocracy, they are also lynchpins of democracy writ large. Without left parties, in other words, democracy is in trouble. Indeed, standard theories in historical political economy—in particular, those of Karl Polanyi—are quite clear on what we should expect of a world in which there is no longer any democratically imposed limit on the expansion of market society: the rise of an unpredictable populist and extremist politics marked by protection-seeking rebellions against the march toward homo economicus, grounded in a volatile mix of class politics, ethno-racial and nationalist resentments, and basic human responses to disruption, risk, uncertainty, anxiety, and boundless competition. Around the turn of the twentieth century the French sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to refer to this state of affairs; by the time of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), the fate of the whole Western political order hung in the balance.

There is now good reason to see the 1990s as the eve of a new Polanyian moment that is very much with us still. To my mind, if we are to grasp these troubling times, the story of the third ways requires a careful, analytical, historical retelling. This retelling needs to be clear-eyed about the self-justifications of third way spokespersons, but, at the same time, it should avoid the “logic of the trial”—in the phrasing of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—in which the more or less explicit question is where, or with whom, blame lies.7 Third wayers need to be situated and historicized, not frozen in time or rendered one-dimensional. If the aim is to shore up left representation not for parties’ sake but for democracy’s sake, then we need to grasp the forces that shape how left parties “see,” informing political debates rather than feeding the divorce of politics and reason.

To this end I adopt a historical, cross-national, and biographical approach focused on parties and their spokespeople. Essential here is the juxtaposition of third way leftism, and the people who gave it form and substance, with the leftisms (and spokespersons) who came before it. Starting from this premise, my analysis centers on left parties’ cultural infrastructure—that is, the organizations, social relations, persons, and devices through which parties organize how people see and understand the world. Instead of asking whether party change is “top-down” or “bottom-up,” I ask how left parties have shaped the very meaning of what it is to be an American “liberal,” or to be “Labour” in Britain, or to be a “social democrat” in Sweden or Germany. I also ask why a strikingly uniform cross-national identifier—“progressive”—has now supplanted all of these terms. To ask these

questions is to acknowledge that, like the umbrella terms “left” and “right,” monikers like “liberal” or “social democratic” do not have the same meaning, or describe the same kinds of people, across times and places. There is also variation in such terms’ territorial reach, and indeed whether they travel across national boundaries at all.

And so, to understand Western leftism’s reinventions, I focus on four parties: the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. I punctuate a long historical view, ranging from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, with emphases on three moments: the 1920s–1930s, the 1950s–1960s, and the 1980s-1990s.

Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist transformation ed M Brie 

and C Thomasberger (2018)

The last two decades have been marked by a renewed interest in the work of Karl Polanyi. Spreading resistance to the neoliberal agenda and the deepening crises of the last 25 years, which culminated in the global financial and economic crisis of 2008, are viewed as a strong support for the main theses of Polanyi’s 1944 masterpiece The Great Transformation. Karl Polanyi was quoted by leading intellectuals and in the editorials of the main newspapers around the world as one of the most influential thinkers in the time of crises. But reception of his work remains largely restricted to the so-called “double movement” of commodification vs. social regulation. Polanyi is typically regarded as a social reformer supporting an increased social state, welfare intervention, and a broader national and international regulation of the financial markets. Or he is depicted as a theorist who gives legitimacy to various social associations and organizations which develop in the niches of current society. Both interpretations fail to address the depth of Karl Polanyi’s analysis and alternatives which are linked to his understanding of socialism as a new and different type of civilization.

The socialist intention behind The Great Transformation, and indeed of the totality of his work, is not widely understood. The first reason is that a large part of his oeuvre concerning his understanding of socialism has, until now, not been published in english. Some important texts noted down in the 1920s and 1930s as well as some of his Hungarian writings have been published only recently (Polanyi 2014, 2016b, 2016c, 2017, forthcoming). To bring his unpublished writings to a wider public, we include in this book first-time translations of some of Polanyi’s most significant papers from the 1920s. A second reason is the depth and complexity of Polanyi’s analysis. The Great Transformation strives neither for a sociological theory of social development nor for a blueprint of a new great transformation. It aims primarily at an explanation of the disasters which, starting with the great war, caused the european civilization of the 19th century to collapse. It lays bare the roots of this historic cataclysm. In “The Great Transformation” Polanyi makes the attempt to reveal the meaning of this unique and singular event. He searches for a true understanding of the reasons which caused the horrors of two world wars, the great Depression, the rise of fascism and Auschwitz so as to prevent the repetition of disasters which threatened to extinguish the legacy of the west.

More Leftist Tracts

I seem to be unable to stop posting about the books attempting to understand where the left has gone wrong. For the moment let me mention three which caught my attention – with the first (and shorter) being my favourite

20th Century Socialism David Bowie (2022)

Appealed by virtue of it being short (88 Pages) and a brief summary of 47 key 

texts of the 20th century and 2 of the 21st. These range from Ramsay MacDonald 

and Philip Snowden in the early 1900s through Tawney, Cripps, Strachey and 

Jay in the 1930s; Durbin and Laski in the 1940s; Perry Anderson in the 60s; 

Stuart Holland and Tony Benn in the 1970s to Hirst and Wainwright in the 1990s

It’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism Bernie Sanders (2023)

A little too US focused for me

The Age of Social Democracy – Norway and Sweden in the 20th Century Francis 

Sejersted (2011)
 

Sheri Berman has made a comparative analysis of the Social Democratic

movements in five European countries (Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and

Sweden) up to World War II. According to her, “social democracy emerged

out of a revision of orthodox Marxism.” The fact that this is the case in

these five countries is one of her reasons for choosing them. Among these

countries Sweden is the exception, as it was only in Sweden that Socialists

“were able to outmaneuver the radical right and cement a stable majority

coalition, escaping the collapse of the left and democracy that occurred

elsewhere in Europe.” Berman continues, “The key to understanding the

Swedish SAP’s [the Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party’s] remarkable

success in the interwar years lies in the triumph of democratic revisionism

several decades earlier.”

Berman identifies Sweden with Scandinavia. If she had considered Norway, she would have had to modify her conclusions, as we shall see. Norwegian Social Democrats clung to their Marxism for a long time but were nevertheless almost as successful as the Swedes.

Berman is certainly right in maintaining that Sweden became a model for

Western Europe after World War II, as the Western European countries were

developing the democratic mixed-economy welfare state as we know it.

Criticizing the common view that the mixed economies that emerged after

World War II were a modified version of liberalism, Berman writes that

“what spread like wildfire after the war was really something quite different: social democracy.”9 She argues convincingly that Social Democracy must be regarded as a separate order in its own right. But whether this view applies to all of Western Europe is another question. Tony Judt has a different take: the post–World War II history of Europe includes more than one “thematic shape,” and it was not until “the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community” that we can discern something like a “European model”—a model born “of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation.”

The chapters are thus -

Introduction

The Many Faces of Modernization

The Scandinavian Solution

Three Phases

PART I 1905–1940: Growth and Social Integration

1 Dreaming the Land of the Future

Norsk Hydro

Science and Modernization

Industrialization, a Natural Process for Sweden

Norway Follows Hesitantly

Emigration and Industrialization

War and Structural Problems

2 National Integration and Democracy

The Question of Political Democracy in the Period around 1905

Mobilizing the Public

Training for Democracy

Toward an Integrated School System in Norway

Contrasting the Two Countries

Currents of Antiparliamentarianism

Farmers on the Offensive: Norway and Sweden

Women and Civil and Political Rights

3 Assistance for Self-Help

Health Insurance

National Pension Plans

Unemployment Insurance

Population Crisis?

The Politics of Sterilization

4 Revolution or Reform

Marxist Rhetoric and Reformist Practice

The Labor Movement and the Land Question

The Big Strike of 1909

The Level of Conflict Escalates

The Solidarity Game Is Established

Revolution or Reform

5 Distance and Proximity

World War I

An Expanded Home Market?

A Nordic Defense Alliance?

Part II 1940–1970: The Golden Age of Social Democracy

6 Cooperation in a Menacing World

The Cold War—Still Not the Same War?

A New Drive for a Nordic Customs Union

SAS: A Success Story

Cooperation in a Menacing World

7 “The Most Dynamic Force for Social Development”

Class Society in Transformation

The Vision of the Atomic Age

The Wallenberg System

Swedish and Norwegian Labor Market Policy

8 The Crowning Glory

Technocracy and the Welfare State

The Radicalism of the Myrdals

The Struggle over the Compulsory General Supplementary Pension (ATP)

Swedish Health Policy

Good Family Housing

9 What Kind of People Do We Need?

A Break with the Past?

What Kind of Equality?

Swedish and Norwegian University Reform

Church and Morals

10 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

The Struggle over the Planned Economy in the 2 countries

Corporatism and Economic Democracy

How Democratic?

Taxation Socialism

PART III 1970–2000: A Richer Reality

11 A Difficult Modernity

A Decade of Conflict

The Nordic Energy Market

Norway Becomes an Oil Nation

Sweden Loses Its Leading Position

12 What Happened to Economic Democracy?

Corporatism under Pressure

Self-determination

Wage Earner Funds—a Radical Move

State Ownership

13 From Equality to Freedom

The Welfare State under Pressure

From an Emigration Society to an Immigration Society

Toward the Two-Income Family

Gender Equality Lite

Toward the Dissolution of the Comprehensive School

14 The Return of Politics

A Weakened Party System

New Forms of Participation

The Media-Biased Society

The Decay of the General Public?

15 The Last “Soviet States”?

The Volvo Agreement: Another Unsuccessful Campaign

Toward a Nordic Economic Region?

Europe

Why Did Sweden Reverse Its Policy on Europe?

AFTER SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: Toward New Social Structures?

A Success—but Not Exclusively So

Social Democracy’s Liberal Inheritance

The Institutional Structures under Pressure

The Freedom and Rights Revolution

What Kind of Freedom?

Another Post on..Style

Following on from an earlier post about STYLE, I realised I had omitted an important book Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters Harold Evans (2017). Evans was the editor of the London "Times" before moving to the States and his book offers a useful guide, with the Intro opening by referencing Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language

Words have consequences. The bursting of the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession revealed that millions had signed agreements they hadn’t understood or had given up reading for fear of being impaled on a lien.

But as the book and movie The Big Short make clear, the malefactors of the Great Recession hadn’t understood what they were doing either. This book on clear writing is as concerned with how words confuse and mislead, with or without malice aforethought, as it is with literary expression: in misunderstood mortgages; in the serpentine language of Social Security; in commands too vague for life-and-death military actions; in insurance policies that don’t cover what the buyers believe they cover; in instructions that don’t instruct; in warranties that prove worthless; in political campaigns erected on a tower of untruths.

with the following chapters 

I. Tools of the Trade

1. A Noble Thing

2. Use and Abuse of Writing Formulas

3. The Sentence Clinic

4. Ten Shortcuts to Making Yourself Clear

5. Please Don’t Feed the Zombies, Flesh-Eaters, and

Pleonasms

II. Finishing the Job

6. Every Word Counts

7. Care for Meanings

8. Storytelling: The Long and Short of It

III. Consequences

9. Steps Were Taken: Explaining the Underwear Bomber

10. Money and Words

11. Buried Treasure: It’s Yours, but Words Get in the Way

12. Home Runs for Writers

Posts often echo in my mind after they’re written and suggest an updating – 

hence this post.

And I would also recommend The Tyranny of Words Stuart Chase (1938) 

Is it possible to explain words with words?

Can some of the reasons why it is so difficult for us to communicate with

one another by means of language be set forth in that same faulty medium?

It is for the reader to judge.

I have read a few books which have broadened my understanding of the

world in which I live. These contributions I here attempt to pass on. To

them I have added much illustrative material and a few conclusions of my

own. The subject dealt with—human communication—has worried me for

many years. I believe it worries every person who thinks about language at

all. Does B know what A is talking about? Does A himself know clearly

what he is talking about? How often do minds meet; how often do they

completely miss each other? How many of the world’s misfortunes are due

to such misses?

As a result of this uneasiness I long ago formulated a few rules which I

tried to follow in my writing and talking. They were on the edge of the

subject which concerns us in this book. In due time I found certain men

who had penetrated boldly into the heart of the subject, equipped with tools

of analysis more sharp than any I had used. I follow behind them here. I do

not tell all that they tell, because I do not understand all that they tell. So

this is not a full and careful account of the findings of other explorers into

the jungle of words, but only an account of what I found personally

illuminating and helpful.