When the famed poet Shelley said, “Poets (read writers) are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, he was paying a befitting tribute to the people who transform the world through the word.
Jawaharlal Nehru made a name for himself as a seasoned politician but it was said of him that he would have made a bigger dent on the minds of the people as a writer.
The power of the printed word is a known and acknowledged phenomenon. “I read it in a book”, is often used as a clincher in an undecided argument. Herbert Drucker has written a book Communication is Power.
It indeed is! But those aspiring to go up the slippery pole of success in competitions of life, often blink away its importance. They either are ‘innocent’ of its importance, or worse, think that it comes naturally.
Get down to the business of writing and see the improvement in your overall personality.
The ability to communicate clearly in writing is one of the most important skills you will ever master. It will help you to get your ideas across effectively and to get the results you want in your business and personal life. There is no mystery to good writing—it is a skill you can learn.
There are a few executives who have rare kind of secretary who can take care of all sorts of correspondence with no more than a quick memorandum to work from. But for most of us, if there is any writing to be done, we have to do it ourselves.
We have to write papers (book reports, term papers, college notes), business papers (memos, reports, letters of inquiry, letters of adjustment), home papers, invitations etc. We are constantly called on to put words to paper. It would be difficult to count the number of such words, messages, letters, and reports put into the mails or delivered by hand, but the daily figure must be enormous.
Be brief
“That writer does the most, who gives the reader the most information, and takes from him the least time,” wrote Charles C. Colton. This is an observation which everyone who writes should commit to heart, an observation to post above the desk of every businessman who dictates a memo, of every housewife who pens a letter, and of every student who writes out a term-paper.
The purpose of writing is to communicate
A thought, an idea, a sentiment, a fact—the more concrete and concise these elements in a communication, the more precise, the more rewarding they are to the reader. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” said Shakespeare.
Clear and Complete
On the other hand, nothing can be more irritating and sometimes frustrating than the omission of essential detail Suppose, for example, the shirts you manufacture come in several styles, colours and sizes, but the order you have received in the mail gives no specifications. Or you are driving to visit a friend in the rural area and you come to a fork in a remote lane; you consult the map he has sent you and he has omitted both the fork and the road you are to take.
Someone writes down a SMS from your out-of-town friends, telling you they’re going to be in the city and will drop in to see you; but the message contains no date, no time and nothing to indicate whether they are coming alone or with their children. And there are the instructions for setting up your hi-fi DVD player which take for granted that you know what a ‘patch cord’ is.
There is virtue in brevity, but you must never assume that your reader is as expert or as knowledgeable as you are about whatever it is you are writing. Brevity is not an excuse for lack of clarity. And clarity, above all, is essential to what you have to say on paper.
Certainly you want to avoid stiffness and rigidity in your writing (even when you send off an angry letter). At the same time, you wouldn’t write a report on the market conditions in the ‘chummy’ manner of a letter to a cousin or a friend who has just become an office bearer of an organization.
Lively Language
There has been more pretentious nonsense written and spoken about style than about any other literary subject. As a result, half the unpracticed writers assume an unnatural pomposity when they settle down to composition, three-eighths of them are intimidated, and only the one-eighth left over are independent enough to forget about style and write naturally.
Just as you have your own way of wearing your clothes or drinking soup, so you have your own individual way of expressing yourself.
This does not mean that your natural way cannot be improved. Just as it is kind to tell a man who sucks up his soup noisily that his social acceptability will be enhanced by applying the silencer, so it is necessary for an inexperienced writer to be told what errors or ill-manners in writing to avoid.
Any writing in which nouns are habitually qualified by two or more adjectives is too wordy and unlikely to express any meaning with precision.
There are certain basic rules of good writing which are almost universal in their application, and within the framework of which it is possible for writers of the most diverse gifts and styles to express themselves with individuality.
The main rules are:
Prefer the short word to the long: Prefer the short word to the long; Prefer the concrete word to the abstract word;; Prefer the short sentence to the long; Use no word which does not directly contribute towards the sense you wish to convey.
The short word is generally better because it expresses your meaning more quickly and certainly. A deliberate search for short words leads to incisiveness in writing. How much better to say: “I couldn’t come because it was raining”, than “My attendance was rendered impossible by adverse meteorological conditions.”
Prefer the concrete word to the abstract word: In most writing it is possible to choose between concrete and abstract words. If you are: writing about ideas, which are abstractions, you naturally have to use abstract words, but there is a deplorable tendency among many people to use vague abstract words where short concrete words would be better.
Avoid Pretensions: The English language has been immensely enriched by words from other languages, and it would be both impracticable and foolish to hamstring your writing by turning a recommendation into a hard and fast rule. Use your commonsense, but avoid pretensions.
Use no word that does not directly contribute towards the sense
It is astonishing how many ‘passenger’ words you will find in print. They contribute heavily to dullness. A good writer is like a marksman: he fires one shot from his rifle and hits the mark, or near it. The indifferent writer blazes away both barrels of a shot-gun, hoping that the ‘spread’ will make up for his lack of accuracy.
In short, know what you want to say, and say it in the fewest words than can be used without baldness. The voluble are seldom really articulate. Precision of meaning is lost in the verbiage.
