March 1954 — Vol. 35, No. 3 —
On Saying What You
Mean
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Any person can, at any time in
his life, increase his skill in saying what he means.
This is an age which seems to revolve around the communication
of ideas, a time in which one of the greatest assets in business,
politics and social life is the ability to express ideas clearly
and concisely.
When we think of it, can we conjure up any prospect more
appealing to common sense, to social sense, to moral sense,
than this: that we should be engaged in forming exact ideas
and in expressing them clearly in language.
It is not an ability easily come by. It requires attention
and thought, but it is richly rewarding.
There are four questions which will help to make clear the
general problem of communication of ideas. If we apply them
to specific cases in everyday life we shall find that we can
make our thoughts known clearly so as to persuade people to
see events and ideas from our point of view.
What is it we wish to communicate? (We must have it clear
in our own minds)
To whom? (It is childish to try to score a bull's—eye
by aiming in the general direction of the target.)
What is the best medium of communication? (Writing, word
of mouth, photographs, movies, or what?)
What sort of words will best carry our message to this audience
through this medium?
Because of the breadth of the subject, this Monthly Letter
must limit itself to the communication of ideas by means of
words. What is to be said here holds good for both spoken
and written language, although writing will be more often
mentioned.
Art in Words
An artist in words seeks lucidity and melody. If what he
says is not clearly understood as he means it, then it were
better he had not spoken. If he uses cloudy language and harsh
construction he loses not only the aesthetic enjoyment he
might have had in writing but he repels his audience.
If any one doubts the difficulty in communication of ideas
by words, let him attempt to teach, without active demonstration,
his son how to knot his tie.
His perplexity is not caused by rules of grammar or syntax.
Many who write well would be hard—pressed to justify
by a rule their use of this or that expression or of this
or that sentence construction. Clearness of thinking, the
skill that may be gained in analysing the thought that is
to be conveyed, the ability to choose the right words: these
lie at the base of communication of ideas.
They are qualities needed no matter what language is used.
Men of all tongues take joy in speaking and in hearing perfect
speech. The same principles of thinking apply whether we use
perfect French or perfect English.
Thinking itself needs words. Only by throwing our nebulous
notions into some sort of understandable language within our
minds can we avoid sloppy thinking. Words are the only currency
in which we can exchange thoughts even with ourselves.
The beginning, then, of communication of ideas is words.
Our thoughts provide us with the words in which to express
them, but words also affect our thoughts and help to create
and condition our bias in whatever we are thinking of communicating.
Words are not things in themselves, but merely the names
we give things and actions. Our ability to express ideas depends
greatly upon the stock of words we have built up through exercise
of our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. If
we have kept these alive, registering impressions and facts
gained through personal experience, then we have contributed
to our ability to do a good job of conveying our messages
to other people. Only when we use words as symbols of things
known to us and to them can we say effectively and significantly
what we ache to say. The theme of a poem or of a business
letter, of a speech before an august audience or of an anecdote
at the bridge table, may well have arisen from a single experience,
but the images which provide the words in which we tell it
will usually be drawn from a much wider field, perhaps the
total life experience of the writer or speaker.
Have a Purpose
It is, of course, wiser to have something worth saying than
to talk or write "off the top" for the mere sake of making
conversation. So much has been advertised about the value
of public speaking as a way of developing personality, building
confidence, and all the rest, that the pertinent fact relevant
to speaking is sometimes lost sight of: has the speaker something
to say? has the writer something to write about?
Without a purpose, our words are empty sound. Insincerity
cuts the heart out of writing and speaking. We may marshal
our arguments and concoct our pretty devices of words, but
if we do not believe in what we say and in the need for saying
it, we are only play—actors.
We frequently comment about some statement that it is an
"inspired saying" - like Churchill's wartime speeches, or
the Psalms of David, or Dr. W. E. McNeill's lecture on The
King's English when he was Chancellor of Queen's University.
We call them "inspired" because they sound like it. These
people, like the Greeks, detested exaggeration and had no
taste for embroidery. They were in earnest. They knew what
they wanted to say, and they took pains to say it sincerely,
accurately and vividly, in such a way as to appeal to the
persons they desired to reach.
Eloquence in speaking or writing consists in this: the author
of it makes an attempt to adapt his argument to the receptive
system of his audience. By his clear thinking and his good
choice of words, he helps his audience to avoid confusion.
By the structure of his composition he guards his audience
against mistaking the incidental for the fundamental. He fits
his language to his audience, restraining his natural bent
at times so as not to be too flowery, and at other times garnishing
the wonted plainness of his diction to suit an occasion.
Gracefulness is needed as well as logic. We must please
before we can instruct. The speaker or writer has to overcome
the friction of pre—occupation, disinterest and lack
of knowledge.
If what we have written fails to transmit our ideas accurately
- nay, even if the reader merely pauses in his reading to
decide what interpretation he shall give a phrase of ours
D we have failed in the operation of communicating.
One reason for failure of letters to convey to the reader
what is in the writer's mind is that we do not take the trouble
to imagine the reader sitting across the desk while we are
dictating or writing. If he were there - or if we imagined
him there - we would write what we have to say straightforwardly,
easily, and without effort or affectation. "Being ourselves"
is much more important than erudition in the communication
of ideas.
Putting Pictures into Words
Churchill's comment in his latest book Triumph and Tragedy
is wise: "It is a mistake to try to write out on little
pieces of paper what the vast emotions of an outraged and
quivering world will be either immediately after the struggle
is over or when the inevitable cold fit follows the hot."
But it would be spineless indeed if we were to refrain from
all expression of thought because we could not make it complete,
final, and perfect.
By using with wisdom the knowledge we have, and being watchful
to choose the right words, we can proceed a long way upon
the road of recording experiences, telling our judgments about
them, and forecasting what our intelligence leads us to believe
will grow out of them.
Every word was at first a stroke of genius. It was a sound
by which one man conveyed to another an idea of something
not present to sight. By—and—by words achieved new
distinction, because they became adapted to the picturing
not only of absent things but of the circumstances, physical
and social and sentimental and psychological, surrounding
them. Still later, words were thrown into forms which had
beauty as well as utility.
Only part of our enjoyment of a verse of poetry or a passage
of prose arises from the knowledge it gives of a situation.
Much comes from the beauty of the words as a pattern of sound
and rhythm. Herein lies one of the secrets of successful communication
of ideas: beauty in a communication made to us inclines us
emotionally to receive it kindly. Not all the rhetoricians
of twenty centuries have improved the terseness and soundness
of Paul's advice to the Colossians, referred to admiringly
by Dr. McNeill: "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned
with salt."
Any truth, a business truth or a scientific truth or a philosophical
truth, may be nakedly expressed so as to vex us by its difficulty,
its obscurity or its harshness. Any truth may, without destroying
its accuracy and clearness, be made to appeal to our sensitivity
by expressing it in words of harmony and liveliness.
Writers seeking the best are careful to have their words
get close to their thoughts. Their words, as Dr. Trench says
in his treatise On the Study of Words, "will not be
too big here, hanging like a giant s robe on the limbs of
a dwarf; nor too small there, as a boy's garments into which
the man has painfully and ridiculously thrust himself."
Poetry in Prose
Prose is one of the high achievements of civilization, and
the most lofty sort of prose would deal with the greatest
things quietly and justly. It has no language that is distinctive
from that of poetry, but the user of prose (even in the common
affairs of everyday life) has much to learn from poetry.
Poetry can convey the same facts as prose, plus feelings.
It breaks up the genteel patterns of life, and finds words
and phrases that make things written about come to life in
the minds of readers.
Prose can embody all the necessary qualities of poetry.
Some writers, notably John Ruskin, have been masters of a
medium between prose and poetry. Churchill's prose, spoken
or written, has harmony and rhythm. These men arranged their
well—chosen words to flow in agreeable succession.
To write that sort of prose, attractive and powerful, is
a priceless advantage in business, politics, philosophy, science,
and every other realm wherein me work and thought of human
beings demand the exchange of ideas.
Words are not things in themselves, immutable and invariable
in their properties like the chemical elements. They are changeable
and lively, deriving force from very trifling changes of position,
and taking colour, chameleon—like, from the words which
precede and succeed them, and being heightened or lowered
in their significance by the powers of melody and inflection.
Coleridge, who defined poetry as "the best words in the
best order", went on to say that in first—rate writing
there is a reason not only for every word but for the position
of every word. In reading a well—ordered sentence the
reader will receive no jolt or check. He will, in today's
language, take off, find the target, complete the flight,
and land.
The writer is the person in the control tower, who has the
whole situation visualized before him. If he can look upon
what he is writing as if he were to be the person receiving
it, he should discover what is fitting to be said, find the
words in which best to say it, and discover any unseemliness
of either matter or form.
Urbanity of style does not necessarily, grow out of verbal
agility. To write well, even to write clearly; to use words
so true and simple that they oppose no obstacle to the flow
of thought and feeling from mind to mind; these are virtues
rooted in something deeper than word acrobatics. Once the
reader recognizes a piece of writing as an ingenuity, the
author's purpose suffers defeat or at least meets a formidable
obstacle. An obvious striving after "style" is ridiculous.
Once again - as in so many other activities of life - we
invoke the law of the Golden Mean. Between the muddy flow
of the verbose person who is too lazy to endure the fatigue
of thoughtful writing, and the perpetrator of "fine" writing
that is full of ornament and daintiness, there is a way of
writing which fulfils writing's purpose: to convey to us things
useful to be known.
Simplicity is a good guide on the middle road. Almost any
business executive can go through the carbon copies of the
past month's letters from his office and the offices of his
subordinates and find many that rival this news report which
was scathingly commented on in an issue of Scientific Monthly.
Instead of saying that an injured man had two black eyes,
it said: "He had bilateral perobital hematoma and left subjunctival
hemorrhage." How often is a simple, clear statement like "haste
makes waste" turned by some letter writer into what he believes
to be more in keeping with the prestige of his position: "precipitation
entails negation of economy."
Simplicity can be lost through making explanations more
technical and more detailed than necessary. The Scottish saying
is to the point: "Why build the bridge much wider than the
road?" Every word that can be spared from a piece of writing
is hurtful if it remains, but this does not mean that we advocate
telegraph form writing. An apparent superfluity may be part
of the necessary graciousness, or of the needed attractiveness,
of the piece of composition. Then the word is not expendable.
Concrete and Precise
Despite the resources of our language for clarity, beauty,
distinctive expression and minute differentiation of meanings,
there are people who write their letters and reports in an
abstruse, involved, pompous and thoroughly tiresome manner.
Simple things are made complex, and complex things are made
well—nigh incomprehensible.
Careful writers avoid portmanteau words, loaded with a whole
suitcase of meanings. The use of general words instead of
particular, or of abstract instead of concrete, may be a saver
of the writer's thought processes. We are not here concerned
with avoiding the travail in thought of the writer, but with
the communication of ideas, and that is hindered if the reader
has to deduce the meaning of a communication by a careful
sorting and analysis of it.
Says Sir Arthur Quiller—Couch in his book On the
Art of Writing: "So long as you prefer, abstract words,
which express other men's summarized concepts of things, to
concrete ones which lie as near as can be reached to things
themselves and are the first—hand material for your thoughts,
you will remain, at the best, writers at second—hand."
Being concrete means that a writer may give an air of informality
to matters basically formal, thereby contributing to their
understandability. The poet Horace, classic poet of the countryside,
had this manner of writing. He did not speak of love, but
of a particular girl; not of poverty, but of a row—boat;
not of the austere life of old Italy, but of sons carrying
firewood; not of tranquillity, but of sheep at a river bank
without a breath of wind.
The power of rightly chosen words is very great, but we
do not wish to get ourselves enmeshed in the study of words
to the point where we quibble and quarrel with our friends
about the technicalities of language. This sort of literary
affliction is most wearisome to those who are concerned with
thoughts and the communication of thoughts.
It is quite another thing to be particular within ourselves,
to define our terms so that we know of what we are thinking
and what our thoughts about it are. That is the way for a
man sincerely seeking to improve his communication of ideas
to sharpen up blunted words and restore their cutting edges,
or to decide to discard them and get new ones.
When the shoe is on the other foot - when one receives obscure
writing - the most effective rebuke is not a tirade upon the
writer's faults, but a simple statement: "I do not understand;
what do you mean?" That should effectually awaken the offender
from his intellectual twilight sleep, and at the same time
achieve the reader's purpose, which is understanding.
A paragraph which illustrates the need for precision and
concreteness is to be found in Kenneth S. Keyes' useful book
How to Develop Your Thinking Ability. He points out
that the word dog may appear a simple word to most people,
but animals labelled with the group word "dog" will range
from "sassy little handfuls of caninity like the Mexican Chihuahua
to massive great Danes. Dogs will range from sweet—tempered
and patient animals...to pugnacious mutts that probably dream
of such delicious adventures as severing human jugular veins."
It is amusing — and not without profit - to make a
game with some word used carelessly in a letter one receives.
Take the word "dog" for example: whose dog? what sort of dog?
is the correspondent writing about that dog today or that
dog as it was yesterday or last year? what does he say the
dog did? from my experience of the writer, of dogs generally,
of dogs of this sort, and of this particular dog, do I believe
what the writer asserts?
Now, substitute "contract" or "order" or "machine" for the
word "dog" and the practical purpose in the game appears.
Much obscurity would be cleared away by such a practice, and
we should perhaps learn through it not to be afraid of being
simple and demanding simplicity. We should, in our own writing,
cease to follow the logic of Sancho Panza in The History
of Don Quixote de la Manchu: "If you do not understand
me, no wonder if my sentences be thought nonsense."
Economy of Words
There is no greater aid to clarity than a discreet economy
of words, providing, of course, that the right words are used.
Roundabout phrases should not be used where single words would
serve, and we should not clutter up necessary phrases with
useless words. Aristotle remarked in his great treatise The
Poetics that anything whose presence or absence makes no discernible
difference is no essential part of the whole. Art in writing,
as in sculpture, often consists in the removal of surplusage.
If we say what we have to say, what we have a will to say,
in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible
to us, with no excess words and no foggy construction to obscure
the picture, then we are well ion the way toward becoming
proficient in the communication of ideas.
The selection of words should be primarily for clarity of
expression: do they say unmistakably what we have in our minds
to say? Words, we should remind ourselves often, are labels.
It doesn't make much difference how long the yard is, or how
heavy a pound is, or what quantity of liquid makes up a gallon.
What really is important is that we all mean the same thing
when we talk or write about a yard, a pound, and a gallon,
or that we make allowance for the difference in meaning. An
illustration of the confusion caused by the fact that sometimes
two things may be labelled alike and yet have different qualities
is afforded by the word "gallon". In Canada the gallon contains
160 fluid ounces whereas in the United States it has only
128. On the other hand, things may have different labels and
be the same: like "gasoline" in Canada and "petrol" in Britain.
Add to these difficulties the fact that words pick up subsidiary
meanings and personal significances in everyday use, and it
begins to appear why great care is needed by the man who is
ambitious to communicate ideas successfully.
Whatever aesthetic virtue there is in literature and language,
the first concern of language study in schools and universities
must be to prepare students to have and to communicate ideas,
to seek the best way of expressing an idea in order to share
it with others or to accomplish a desired end. But language
study does not end with schooldays. A man should revise his
language habits from time to time in order to keep pace with
life and custom and, indeed, necessity.
In language, as in all else, material change is the order
of the day. The reality of life is a process, implying continuous
change, and this necessitates change language, adapting it
to new conditions.
Two Key Questions
Meaningful language, says Dr. Wendell Johnson in People
in Quandaries, a book dealing with the semantics of personal
adjustment, is clear and it is designed to be accurate or
valid. "'It is continually directed by two great questions:
'What do you mean?' and 'How do you know?'"
When we use language we should be concerned with the prime
purpose of language: to put together and to convey ideas.
Some persons, perhaps readers of this Monthly Letter, will
write essays which, because of the ideas they convey, will
be read a hundred years hence; others will write business
letters which, because of their thoughtful handling of facts
and their clear presentation of plans, will affect the commercial
life of this country.
The only way to reach that stage of perfection is by the
practice of writing, but we need not set unrealistically high
standards. The urge to be "tops", to break records, to do
something bigger and better - like writing the great Canadian
novel - these are part and parcel of our age. Reaching for
the moon represents a characteristic of our society. The wise
person will be content if his everyday writing is recognized
as appropriate, accurate, persuasive, and clear.
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