"Get out of the way of the information."
This was the most helpful career advice I ever received, generously given by a colleague (one David Bricker) at Indiana University Media Relations. Later, an editor (who also happens to be my out-of-stepmother, Ann Taylor) told me, "Be straightforward and meaty and avoid abstractions." I try, in everything I write, to follow these precepts.
Such is my fixation on clarity that I become a bit unhinged when someone throws a giant word at me. Today an interviewee used the term "verisimilitudinous" to mean, as I understand it, lifelike, and I can't decide whether to use the quote or not. It's a delicious word, I admit, but doesn't it seem inherently snotty? If I use it, I fear I risk either alienating the reader or appearing to mock the source -- possibly both.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a dance professor at Stanford. Naturally, jargon was slung throughout every department at the school, but never in my four years was I so confused as when I attempted to converse with Robert Moses.
"Your dancing is very articulate," he told me. "I want you to emphasize that."
Let me note before I go on that rarely did I or anyone else at the university ever admit to not understanding what someone was saying. But I was so lost -- and, let's be honest, such a terrible dancer -- that it seemed worth asking what in God's name he was on about.
"What do you mean, it's articulate?"
"What do you mean, what do I mean? Am I being too ambiguous or too amorphous?"
I gave up. I also dropped my dance minor.
When I do marketing and PR work, I tend to expend a fair amount of energy trying to convince smart people that they don't need to use big words to sound smart. Communications are about just that -- communicating, getting a message across. I suppose great writers manage to have some kind of recognizable flair, but my goals are not so lofty. If I do my job well, I'm not sure anyone sees me at all. Hopefully all they see is the information.
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