ESCAPE FROM THE KINGDOM OF FOG: BEING PRECISE

Imprecise language leaves your reader in the fog.

Here, once again, in a return engagement, are my Five Rules of Good Writing:

1. Be specific.

2. Be concrete.

3. Be precise.

4. When you can, use action verbs in the active voice.

5. Rely on hard facts.

I’ve written in depth about the first two rules on this blog before (see posts of January 17 and 18, 2011). Now I’ll tackle rule number 3: 

Be precise. 

I didn’t mention this before, but, as you may have noticed, Rule Number One, “Be specific,” applies primarily to nouns: “poodle” is more specific than “dog”; “cell phone” is more specific than “electronic device”; “tennis” is more specific than “sport.” These are all nouns. To use a mathematics term, a more specific word encompasses a smaller "set" of things than a more general word. “Things” in English are nouns.

“Be precise” is a lot like “be specific,” but it applies to words that are not nouns—especially verbs and adjectives. Consider this paragraph:

“My English teacher is incredible. She communicates through fantastic methods that all her students can relate to. She has a special way of getting us to interact with each other on a regular basis so that our educational literary and communicative goals are achieved. She has one awesome teaching technique that involves redesignating us so as to bring about a truly weird configuration in the classroom, leading to unique interpersonal growth.”

      Of course, nobody really writes this badly. Well, actually, they do.

      The problem is pretty obvious: Not only does the writer have no specifics or concretes in the paragraph, but he also relies on words that mean either nothing at all or something different from what he’s trying to say. “Incredible,” for example, has a precise meaning: “not believable.” If his English teacher is “incredible,” does that mean I shouldn’t believe anything she says? Or maybe I shouldn’t believe she even exists! “Fantastic” and “awesome” likewise have precise meanings that the writer chooses to ignore or warp. “Incredible,” “fantastic,” and “awesome” are simply this unfocused writer’s way of saying “I like my teacher’s method of teaching” or “she teaches effectively.”

Other adjectives are equally abused here. “Weird” conveys no information at all—it’s a popular catchword that, used imprecisely, means “I’m not willing to try to describe what I’m talking about.” “Unique” literally means “one of a kind,” but most careless writers, like this one, twist it to mean “special” or “unusual” or just “different.” “Interpersonal growth” could mean almost anything at all: a growing list of twitter followers? The shared organ of conjoined twins? And what does “on a regular basis” mean? Daily? Once a week? Every 15 minutes?

I "relate to" both Pluto and Angelina Jolie.

The paragraph also uses imprecise verbs. What does “communicates” mean here, for example? Does it mean “lectures,” “runs class discussion,” “texts,” “telephones,” “writes on the blackboard”? The problem is, “communicates” is so imprecise that it could mean any of those things. “Relate to” is likewise imprecise. In fact, I “relate to” everything in the universe in some way—I even create a small gravitational pull on Pluto and feel a distinct gravitational pull toward Angelina Jolie. There are innumerable ways to “relate” to people. “Interact” is just as imprecise. If I “interact” with you, that could mean I send you a message on Facebook, or it could mean I give you a big French kiss. By “redesignating,” the writer could mean “has us sit in different seats,” or he could mean “calls us different names.” When the range of possible meanings is that wide, you know you’re in the foggy kingdom of the imprecise.

That’s enough. You can no doubt point to the other examples of imprecise language here.

The sample paragraph above sounds as if it had been written by a teenager. Young writers often resort to imprecise language, not because they lack a more precise vocabulary, but because they’re in a hurry or they’re lazy or they just don’t care enough about what they’re writing to spend the time to search out more meaningful words. Any teenager could just as easily say his teacher’s methods are “effective”—a word that he almost surely knows and that is far more precise than “fantastic” or “incredible.” (Even better: “Miss Platocrates teaches well. We learn from her without being bored. She has us change seats once a week and chat one-on-one with each other about the book we’re reading.”)

Would you want to be graded by a teacher who walks like this?

In fact, however, it is not just immature writers who use words imprecisely. People with vast vocabularies and graduate degrees by the fistful are often the most imprecise of writers. In my next post I’ll give you examples of befuddlingly imprecise writing by supereducated writers—writing that uses fancy language to convey almost no meaning.

Precision, after all, is about meaningfulness. To repeat: More precise verbs and adjectives, like more specific nouns, contain more information.

Consider this sentence:

The thin teacher walked into the room.

Now think of all the alternatives you can for the verb “walked.” [Note to teachers: This is a useful and enjoyable exercise to do in the classroom. Have your students call out all the synonyms they can think of, as fast as they can, while someone writes them on the board. Even poor students can do it. I once got 25 synonyms from an 8^th grade class in less than 5 minutes.]

Here’s a beginning list of more precise alternatives to “walk.” Some are synonyms, some simply other ways to describe the teacher’s entrance:

ambled

strolled

marched

staggered

sauntered

waltzed

tip-toed

creeped

slid

stumbled

strode

lumbered

waddled

Note that although most of these are officially “synonyms” for “walk,” they each mean something different. I often ask students which teacher they would rather be graded by—the one who “marched” into the room or the one who “ambled” into the room. You can predict their answer. That’s when I point out two things:

1) The more precise word, like the more specific word, contains more information. In this case, “marched” and “ambled” tell me not just how the person walked, but what kind of person it is!

2) The verb is the engine of the sentence. Change it, and you change everything else in the sentence. Here, going from “marched” to “ambled” changes the very personality of the subject. (More on verbs in the future.)

You can do the same exercise with the adjective “thin.” Think of all the possible synonyms (svelte, slender, skinny, anorexic, scrawny, lean, emaciated, and so on). Each suggests something different. That’s because words, of course, come clothed in their connotations. Good writers are aware of every connotation, every nuance of meaning in a word. Note how “The thin teacher waddled into the room” doesn’t seem right somehow, because “thin” and “waddle” seem contradictory. There was, however, one famous little thin comic actor who did waddle. I’ll bet you can name him. He was funny precisely because "thin" and "waddle" don't normally go together.

A word of warning: If you’re a teacher, be sure to tell your students that always combing the thesaurus for “special” precise words can lead to overwriting. “The engine stormed into the station vomiting clouds of smoke and bellowing its arrival as Patty perambulated on the platform ” is an example of overwriting. If you don’t want to draw attention to how the teacher came into the room, just use the more neutral word “walked.” Some good students will, at first, tend to overwrite when they learn the power of precise verbs. Not a problem: They can always be reined in later. In any case, I'd rather see them overwrite for a while than vomit clouds of imprecision.