Dewdney Media Inc.

Reg Gothard - "Yonder Pedant"

Brevity, Clarity, Civility

Although the title of today’s piece sounds like a parody of the French national motto, it’s actually about balance; balance between being brief (concise), being clear, and being civil or polite.

It’s reasonably well known that emails and texts can be misinterpreted. It’s also reasonably well known that a good deal of the underlying problem is that the words alone are only a relatively small part of a message. Hearing the communicator speak increases the effectiveness of the communication somewhat, and conversing face-to-face gets us to 100% (assuming communicator not speak with forked tongue).

Ideally, therefore, we should always communicate face-to-face if we wish the full context and impact of our message to be understood. However, today’s fully scheduled, overcommitted, technology-enabled (or -impeded) lifestyles frequently make it too difficult to communicate face-to-face and too easy to communicate using the written/typed word.

Today’s technologies provide many ways to communicate, all of which have been adopted enthusiastically by hundreds of millions of people around the world. This is how, for example, my wife can discover that a “friend” (the quotes are there to show that the person is a Facebook friend) seven thousand kilometres away has just said goodnight to her grandson whose gastro-intestinal equipment is currently overstimulated.

These technologies have made it so easy to communicate that we do; but we don’t consider if it’s necessary, appropriate, or even wanted. But that’s fodder for a rant another time.

No matter what medium we use for communication, we always have to strike a balance between brevity, clarity, civility and (just for good measure) comprehensiveness.
Let’s look at each in turn.

Brevity

I admit it. I write horrendously long emails. The pieces that I write for my websites are all longer than I‘d like them to be. So I’m probably not qualified to write about brevity. But I’ll do it anyway.

Generally, if you want your message’s recipients to read your communication (or to maintain concentration while they see and/or hear it), you should minimize extraneous information. I’ve already resisted the urge to insert interesting, but only indirectly related information into this article three of four times, yet I’ve already written well over three hundred words. I know of no single guideline for an effective email length, but it strikes me that if the reader is required to scroll down on a computer, then it’s too long. Since many people read their emails on a mobile device these days, the writer should consider an even lower word count than he would have in the days before smartphones.

Text messages, Twitter and Facebook impose limits, so at least technology encourages brevity. It also spawns (at times obfuscating) abbreviation.

Completely random thought – I wonder how much shorter War and Peace would be if it was translated into text messages using common abbreviations? Anyone out there care to take that one on?

The problem with brevity is that it might detract from the civility, clarity or comprehensiveness of the message. Sentence fragments, misconstrued abbreviations and punctuation omission are just some of the hazards in the brevity minefield. Here’s an example.

20151110FarmerShovelUnderwearThe article was actually about a French man who used a shovel to attack protesters on his land. He was wearing just a tee shirt and underwear. It’s possible that the headline/tagline was written ambiguously deliberately, in order to increase clicks. If it was, it certainly worked – it was top of the “Most Viewed” articles that day.

Franklin D. Roosevelt advocated brevity. His advice on speeches: “be sincere; be brief; be seated.” At the other end of the brevity spectrum, Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante described the long-time Cuban president’s speaking style as “Castroentiritis”. (Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, p289) One hopes that Fidel’s speeches were at least comprehensive!

Clarity

Communications need to be clear in order to be of any real use. (The exceptions are political and diplomatic statements, which are largely, to my cynical mind at least, deliberately obtuse.)

Clarity can be marred by an illogical sequence of thoughts, incorrect or irrelevant data, thoughtless use of homonyms, or by the author trying to come up with a fourth example. How many people do you know who tell stories with side excursions into related but irrelevant details? Listeners have to be alert to the resumption of the main story or the communication will lose its purpose.

Clarity and brevity can be achieved together by the use of a wider vocabulary, but only if the recipients’ vocabulary is wide enough to comprehend the message. It takes considerable thought and/or skill to achieve both with the vocabulary of everyday speech.  (By the way, 16 of the 42 words in that last sentence are not among the top 1000 words from the internet, according to this website.)

Some people are masters of brevity and clarity. Assuming the attribution to be accurate, a story goes as follows. A lady of a certain age said to Calvin Coolidge (who had a reputation of being economical with words), I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” His reply? “You lose.” Whether or not the lady thought his answer civil is not recorded.

Civility

Brevity can mar civility unless care is taken. Think for a moment about how people speak to each other when they are in disagreement and being “more than assertive” about it. Sentences – even words – come out as short staccato bursts. If your communication is brief, it runs the risk of being interpreted as being curt. Careful word choice, with perhaps an attention to the rhythm of the sentences could mitigate this effect, but let’s be honest – how many people stop to consider the meter of their texts, tweets or emails? How many of us have the time, skill and inclination to do so?

Most people are aware of the brevity/civility dilemma, and several devices and conventions have evolved to help maintain balance.

ALL CAPS INDICATE THAT WE ARE YELLING.

Placing words and phrases in quotation marks is a way to show “irony” or some other “clever” literary device.

Emoticons and the more recently-created emoji provide ways to convey the tone of a message or portion thereof. But peppering your subordinate’s performance reviews with these images will send a different message from the one you intended.

Civility is rarely an issue with mundane, everyday communication. It’s when disharmony, dispute or dissatisfaction are latent in the correspondents’ relationship and one party is trying hard not to initiate or escalate a problem that the result is frequently a “walking on eggshells” writing style – perhaps using phrases such as, “although this may sound provocative…” or “I’m trying not to turn this into a major issue…”. Such phrases not only draw attention to potential contentiousness, but may actually amplify it. So you can’t win!

Besides, almost all attempts to go out of your way to appear civil result in a higher word count; and there goes brevity.

Comprehensiveness

When I first conceived this article, I envisaged it as a discussion of a brevity/clarity continuum, but even before I started writing it, I realized that civility was part of the equation. Then I considered some of the more major faults of my own writing, and noted that frequently I fail in the brevity stakes because I try to cover all aspects of a subject.

And so, in the full knowledge of the irony of my inclusion of this section of the article, I turn to address comprehensiveness.

Comprehensiveness is the enemy of brevity. While researching for this article, I spent a couple of hours looking for information about what percentages of comprehension of a message are conveyed by the words, the tone and tempo in which it’s delivered, and the body language of the messenger. In doing so, I learned several things on the topic, and was tempted to include them. But to do so would have required two or three hundred words (possibly more), so I resisted the urge, tough though it was to make that decision.

The upside was that I had an instant example of how comprehensiveness can defeat brevity. Would the more detailed information have added clarity to this article? Possibly; but not in proportion to the increase in length of the article.

The Long and Short

When writing to someone, consider the communication medium, the audience, your relationship with that audience (both generally and in the context of the message), the subject matter of the message, and your own ability to craft an appropriately worded message. If you don’t then one or more of the following may occur.

  • Your message will not be read (too wordy; too comprehensive)
  • Your message will be misunderstood (too brief; poorly sequenced; ambiguous text and/or abbreviations)
  • Your message will offend (brief and curt).
  • Your message will undermine your position (too jocular; poorly composed)

If you don’t think you’re up to the task of writing the message appropriately, then pick up that phone or go pay a visit.

Woodrow Wilson is quoted as having said, “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I’m ready now.”

I wonder how long he would have taken to compose a text message?

Please Help Improve Yonder Pedant’s Ramblings

  • Did I miss a typo? (I’ll feel bad when you tell me, but I’d rather you did tell me!)
  • Did I write something that makes you want to turn green and burst out of your shirt?
  • Do you have any better examples that you would share and allow me to use?

If so, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Dewdney Media Inc. © 2015 Frontier Theme