A colleague recently sent me an article – a manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists. On a quick skim, several things leaped out, and I thought it would make an excellent focus for discussion with my PhD students over how many of the “rules” from journalism applied to the range of academic writing students complete (thesis, conference/journal papers, public dissemination work).
Some of the rules leapt out as being uncontroversial, including:
1. When you sit down to write, there is only one important person in your life. This is someone you will never meet, called a reader.
4. Journalism is important. It must never, however, be full of its own self-importance. Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. Therefore simple words, clear ideas and short sentences are vital in all storytelling. So is a sense of irreverence.
15. Words have meanings. Respect those meanings. Get radical and look them up in the dictionary, find out where they have been. Then use them properly. Don’t flaunt authority by flouting your ignorance. Don’t whatever you do go down a hard road to hoe, without asking yourself how you would hoe a road. Or for that matter, a roe.
However there were others where there was a long running discussion. Two of the rules led to a similar discussion. Those rules were:
16. Clichés are, in the newspaper classic instruction, to be avoided like the plague. Except when they are the right cliché. You’d be surprised how useful a cliché can be, used judiciously. This is because the thing about journalism is that you don’t have to be ever so clever but you do have to be ever so quick.
20. English is better than Latin. You don’t exterminate, you kill. You don’t salivate, you drool. You don’t conflagrate, you burn…
We had a discussion around how clichés become clichés because they provide a convenient shorthand for something – and as an author I’m as guilt of this as anything. Similarly, the formality of language can sometimes be challenging. However, the students discussants who have English as a second language noted that this doesn’t work for them. Clichés are culturally grounded, and therefore by using them, you are instantly disenfranchising a large proportion of your potential audience, given the international nature of research. Interestingly, these students also highlighted that salivate, incinerate and exterminate have roots in their native languages – Greek, Portuguese, French and Italian – and therefore are easier to interpret than the alternatives.
The other rule that led to the longest discussion was:
9. So if an issue is tangled like a plate of spaghetti, then regard your story as just one strand of spaghetti, carefully drawn from the whole. Ideally with the oil, garlic and tomato sauce adhering to it. The reader will be grateful for being given the simple part, not the complicated whole. That is because (a) the reader knows life is complicated, but is grateful to have at least one strand explained clearly, and (b) because nobody ever reads stories that say “What follows is inexplicably complicated …”
Our discussion highlighted that this could be interpreted in at least four different ways – a) considering scope and ensuring your research has a suitable focus; b) thinking about statistical generalisability from your study population; c) the red thread, ensuring you have a complete narrative than runs throughout the thesis; d) ensure that you writing makes complex things simple. All four of these interpretations have value in writing, but also suggests that rule 9 doesn’t follow it’s own argument regarding keeping the narrative clear.
We also concluded that much of the discussion of the rules actually related back to the 5th rule:
5. Here is a thing to carve in pokerwork and hang over your typewriter. “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.”
Which we paraphrased as the KISS principle – “keep it simple, stupid”. Writing is a developed skill that takes time to learn; and no set of rules can capture the complexities. Everyone develops their own style, and some authors break many of the “rules” of writing, but can do so because their style is compelling enough, or clear enough, to take the reader with them. In my view, the most important piece of advice appears nowhere in the manifesto – always be writing.