Detained indefinitely at home, most people are looking for things to do. I’m going to suggest learning to write.

Yes, everyone learns to write — more or less. But most people don’t do it well. No fault on their part. They’ve been badly taught or over-complicate their writing for invalid reasons.

To my knowledge, no written advice, no book, no YouTube tutorial covers how to write like an old-time reporter. We were taught well.  And the crux of what we learned can be reduced to a few simple edicts. Write short sentences. Use short and familiar words. Omit needless words, a famous expression. (Many of you will know why.) Think as you write. (Thinking before might be prejudicial. Thinking after can be too late if you’re careless about revising.)

I’ve drafted a summary of a book on how to write simply and succinctly. It contains two or three complete chapters. From today, I’ll put bits of it online. They’ll be in the right order and flagged. You’ll know that they come from my book. By the way, it’s called Saving Ink & Paper for reasons that are explained.

 

Saving Ink & Paper

Prologue

I HAD PROBABLY just finished editing a rambling newsletter. Or perhaps I’d read a newspaper article and—in my mind—had got out my red pen and slashed into its mangled syntax, its rampant use of ‘multiple’ instead of ‘many’.

That people were unable to communicate in short, clear sentences had dispirited me for a long time. My mind’s eye had always ‘edited’ media reports online and in print. But the blight of ‘in order to’, ‘the fact that’, and especially ‘impact’ used as a verb—‘impacted’ and ‘impacting’ instead of ‘affected’ and ‘affecting’—had got me down.

Some horrifying news made me even crabbier about the state of Aussie English. Our children’s writing was deteriorating. Preliminary results of the 2018 national assessment of literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) had revealed a statistically-significant decline. While in year five almost nine out of 10 children reached or exceeded a minimum standard, by year nine fewer than eight in 10 wrote acceptably or better. The year-nine result was especially disheartening. It revealed a drop in quality in a year of more than 21 per cent.

Australians appeared to be losing their ability to write clear, brief English. And at an early age. They no longer wrote letters, the old-fashioned way of practising penmanship.

I wondered why. Was it laziness? Not enough writing? Not enough reading? The digital age? Smartphones? After all, it wasn’t hard to write clearly and simply. You followed some simple rules and learned a few tricks.

Then I had a eureka moment. I had been taught to write well at The Age. Within months of joining straight from university I’d adopted several clever ways of wielding words. I’d learned how to pare down prose. I’d learned how to delete unnecessary words. I’d learned that short sentences made reading quicker and easier. I’d learned to keep in mind first, last and always those who might read me. The result was clear, simple and concise sentences.

Could others learn the same skills? Businessmen and women? Bureaucrats? Speechmakers? Politicians and their staffs? Young people, especially in secondary schools? Small and medium-sized businesses might benefit enormously, I thought. They have to communicate, yet many of them do it poorly. Millions of dollars—possibly tens of millions—were probably squandered each year because of windy, hazy writing, I reckoned.

But perhaps I was optimistic. Bureaucracies, education departments, politicians and their off-siders and professionals would probably show zero interest in writing better. They thrived on poor expression. Wordy reports, memos and emails kept armies of pen-pushers employed. Kept people in jobs. Camouflaged the truth. And jargon ensured that no one outside learned pursuits such as law and medicine and accountancy, for instance, could sneak in.

Despite that particular area of probable disinterest, I had enough of an idea to write about it. A few days later I sent about 1000 words to The Age. Within a week, the Fairfax behemoth had published it online and in print. Here is how it began.

When I started in journalism, sub-editors counted the letters in headings to fit the spaces they had for them. News came out in ink on paper, and those who owned the presses were keen to use a minimum of the makings. Ink and paper cost money.

For most letters you counted 1.0, the letters “l” and “t” 0.75. Lower-case “m” counted 1.5, if I remember rightly, and “M” was 2.0. (Most capital letters were 1.5, and spaces were 1.0. This was before computers, of course, which these days fit headings automatically for sub-editors.)

Reporters, too, had to keep paper-and-ink costs in mind and write as concisely as possible. Short sentences. One thought, one sentence. Fewer than 30 words in the first sentence of a news story. Remember George Orwell’s advice, and instead of “in order to” write just “to”.

But the world has changed and the cost of newsprint and ink is no longer a concern. Wordiness seems to be a virtue, not a waste of time and energy and money.

Let’s count some expressions and words that have recently usurped more concise and simple ones. “A number of” is rampant. It means “several”, and its count is somewhere between 11 and 12. “Several” has a count of 6.75.

You will often read and hear “on a daily basis”, which has a count of 15 to 16. It means “every day”, which has a count of 9. The expression “change up” means “change”, and we waste three counts every time we write it.

Over months and years, savings in printing costs were enormous, of course, and the golden rivers of classified ads were not the only source of newspaper-owners’ wealth.

We could waste time trying to determine how poor expression has weaselled its way into our lives. Instead, let’s consider what might be done to improve writing.

My article suggested that perhaps there was room in Australian businesses and classrooms for a kind of simple style guide. It would join the slim volumes that used to be thrust into the hands of cadet journalists as soon as they stepped onto an editorial floor. It would trail Aussie kids like a lost pup. With luck, throughout their education.

Its aim would be to get those who read it to enjoy writing. They would learn how to pen simple, clear and succinct sentences, which is a joy to do. My piece pointed out that most journalists love writing. I added, ‘When you know the rules, it’s a pleasure and a breeze to write briefly and precisely’. It was fun. I said that it would be hard to find a suited executive with the same enthusiasm for putting down words. (Indeed, they put them down all the time.)

The book would remind people that we write to be read. That the reader is paramount, that she deserves respect. We should lighten her load. Out of the billions of new combinations of English words that appear each day, she’s chosen ours to read. We should be flattered. She deserves our courtesy.

In the following week, letters to the editor cascaded in. Nothing I had ever written in a long career had drawn as big a reaction. Nothing.

In the four days after The Age published my piece, the paper selected the supportive views of 16 of its readers to applaud my story. One wrote that I had completely echoed his thoughts. A woman said I deserved three cheers. (I blushed.) A director of an educational institution said that concise writing needed to be taught—teachers failed to be trained to write succinctly. In fact, she went on, they taught children to write complex sentences ‘rich in descriptive words’. A correspondent said that my article had reminded her that ‘words matter’. I was enormously flattered.

And because it was my idea, I thought, why not try to write the book?

You hold the result, a slim publication that is intended to be wholly practical. No one who uses it is likely to write great novels and poetry by following its advice. Literature requires prose of loftier scope altogether. But I hope that its readers will gain respect for the exquisite beauty of English, the infinite potential of the written word. I hope that they will come to enjoy the immense pleasure that laying word-pavers—the right ones in the right order—provides. I hope that they will also realise that it’s an honour to be read. Understanding that, I hope that they will show their readers greater courtesy.

My book’s purpose is to teach communication. My hope is that it helps its readers to write simple, shorter, clearer sentences. That those who read it will convey what they want to tell someone quicker and better.

Many of my examples of poor writing come from present-day print and online media, from advertising copy and magazines. You might argue that the journalists and copywriters who have penned these weak efforts advocate poorly for fine writing. We don’t want to write as these people do. And I’d have to agree. But as media bosses strangled their babies, diverting money from journalists, the gatekeepers of quality were collateral damage, as the saying goes. They got murdered too.

When I joined The Age, ‘readers’ were employed to find faults in writing and printing. They had a big room to themselves. I looked in only once or twice. Reporters didn’t enter. I’m not sure if we were officially banned, but we knew that the independence of the ‘readers’ was prized. It was a holy place, a temple to quality. Hushed. ‘Readers’—unsmiling—sat on high chairs at high desks, the latest page proofs in front of them. Their falcon eyes dived on errors, and thick-nibbed pens circled and underlined.

Long before ‘readers’ had reviewed the pages, sub-editors had gone over reporters’ work, correcting syntax and spelling and asking difficult questions … How can this town in WA be 500 kilometres west of Perth?

These days, ‘readers’ are no more. It seems, too, that sub-editors have followed them out the door. Instead, media bosses scrabble to hire the world’s cheapest editing ‘services’. (Now there’s an overused word.) Often they’re somewhere distant—in another country, as Christopher Marlowe wrote. And the ‘wench’—newspapers—is dead. The result is often appalling journalism.

No reporter these days seems to get the training I got. Precision and respect for readers seem to be redundant.

Finally, what used to be called ‘journalese’—writing like journalists—is sneered at. Journalists can’t write, giggle academics, teachers, politicians and bureaucrats. I believe that they’re wrong. The opposite is true. And even if this book helps you to produce the plainest of sentences I’d be happy. So long as what you write conveys meaning better than today’s reams and terabytes of lazy, wordy, windy reports, speeches, official papers, newsletters and business correspondence I’d be delighted. They are bombastic ballast—wet sand instead of communications cargo.