This book seems to have had a digital release in September, but isn’t coming out in physical form in the UK until 2024. It’s therefore the first book I’ve read in ages which I’ve read purely digitally. I bought it after the book was referenced in this Johnson column in The Economist.
It’s a short book largely based on behavioural science about how to write clearly and concisely. At work, one of my pet peeves is poorly written corporate communications. I get quite riled when people send mass emails which I can’t understand, frequently with calls to action that are bafflingly unclear. You wouldn’t know it from my rambling on here, but in professional life, I spend a lot of time refining things I write to make them as precise, concise and clear as possible.
As a result, I spent most of this book nodding along. I don’t think I picked up anything new from it, but I appreciated how to authors compiled sage advice into this short, actionable format. It should be required reading for anyone drafting any sort of corporate communication… and many of the principles are applicable in personal life as well.
Sycamore Gap also features on endless bits of North East merchandise: often the option left over once the Tyne Bridge, Millennium Bridge and Angel of the North tat has been sold. It always felt like the North East’s symbol for the North East, not necessarily known or appreciated to the same degree by outsiders.
To prove the point, here are six examples I’ve recently seen while wandering the city.
The Economist had a lovely obituary. I particularly liked their line about the tree ‘bearing a pastoral load’, which feels like a neat way of communicating a feeling which is quite difficult to put into words.
I know nothing about sport, but even I’m aware that England faces Spain in the World Cup Final this morning.
I enjoyed reading the Economist’s Simply Science newsletter on the subject, written by Abby Bertics. I had no idea, for example, that “women still overwhelmingly wear football boots designed for small men, not women.”
But the most interesting part of the article concerned some research by Arve Vorland Pedersen, who proposed several modifications to the game to scale it to the physiological attributes of women, rather than those of men. Women are shorter, for example, so the pitch and goals ought to be smaller. Women should not have to live in a world designed for men.
And yet the kicker, so to speak, came at the end. The average physiological attributes of men at the time the sport’s rules were codified have more in common with the average physiological attributes of today’s women than today’s men. So really, the challenge ought not to be to scale things down for women, but up for men.
It is delicious to know that one reviewer called John Keats’s poetry “drivelling idiocy”. It is more pleasing yet that Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce’s writing to be “tosh”. And surely no one can be uncheered to hear that when the critic Dorothy Parker read “Winnie the Pooh” she found it so full of innocent, childish whimsy that she—in her own moment of whimsical spelling—“fwowed up”.
And:
In the Victorian era, “reviews were seen as a kind of cultural hygiene, so there were high standards,” says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English at Oxford University. Reviewers were not merely taking a swipe at an enemy but cleansing the sacred halls of literature. Not that this stopped them from mild grubbiness themselves. For example, one reviewer called a fellow writer’s work “feculent garbage”; the reliably robust Alfred Tennyson called yet another “a louse upon the locks of literature”; while John Milton (apparently having momentarily lost paradise again) described another as an “unswill’d hogshead”.
And:
One of the most famous poems of the Roman writer Catullus is a riposte to critics who accused him of being effeminate. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” he wrote, which means (broadly speaking): “I will sodomise and face-fuck you.” Not the sort of thing you see in the Times Literary Supplement these days.
But the comments later in the article about the effect of the internet on book reviews came to linger longer in my mind. The article argues that the risk of a social media pile-on has led to fewer scathing reviews.
I then came to read an article by Megan Nolan in the New Stateman and one by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, both criticising the negativity of the online book-themed social media site Goodreads. They both cite the same examples in some cases, and make the point that many people on the site review books even without reading them.
At first, I was slightly taken aback at how this implies people use Goodreads: I mostly use it to see what people I know in real life thought of books, not to look at the aggregate scores and (seemingly aggressive) reviews of random strangers. I’m not certain why people would attach much weight to this.
And secondly, I thought about how this is a good example of the complexity of the influence of the internet on systems. According to these three articles taken together, the internet has vastly decreased the likelihood of a book being panned by a critic, making professional reviews less valuable as a result of them essentially becoming less discriminating. At the same time, it has drastically increased the likelihood of an amateur reviewer having a disproportionate effect through sharing opinions uninformed by the most basic facts.
It feels like that that might read across to other areas of life, too.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
Firstly, though, I need to address an error in the column:
Doctors have a private vocabulary for patients when they are out of earshot. “Status dramaticus” is how some medics diagnose people who have not much wrong with them but behave as though death is nigh; “ash cash” is the fee that British doctors pocket for signing cremation forms.
The idea that this sort of unsympathetic, uncaring use of language is ‘the norm’ in my profession is a myth. It’s the sort of language that routinely gets called out, and which gives people an unsavoury reputation.
Regardless, the column cites two main benefits of jargon.
The first is ‘creating a sense of tribe and of belonging’. This may be true, but I do not see this as a virtue. This is essentially suggesting that an exclusive culture is preferable to an inclusive one. The column suggests that knowledge of the language confers ‘membership’, which might be fine in social groups, but is really quite abhorrent in the workplace. People ought to be included by dint of their employment in the organisation, and it is up to the organisation to welcome new recruits; they ought not to be excluded until they acquire ‘membership’ of the cult.
The second is ‘practical reasons’ such as ‘increasing efficiency’. It’s hard to understand how jargon increases efficiency if it excludes some staff members and—as the article cites elsewhere—frequently leads to errors and misunderstandings.
One of the organisations I currently work for is in the process of rolling out a programme to improve wellbeing, morale and a sense of inclusion in the organisation. Let’s imagine that they called it ‘Inclusion for Excellence’, which is not a million miles away from reality. I’m now deluged with corporate communications for the ‘I4E programme’ and seemingly no-one recognises the irony.
The most dangerous jargon of all is the language we don’t even recognise to be jargon. Some years ago, I led the response to an outbreak in a prison. The health services, me included, talked about ’vulnerable prisoners’, meaning those at higher risk of serious illness if they contracted the infection. The prison services heard us talking about ‘vulnerable prisoners’ and thought we meant those in special protection due to the risk of attack from other prisoners. We used identical shorthand for different groups of people.
I concede that I’m not totally opposed to jargon: it can indeed be a useful shorthand in situations where one can be certain that everyone understands what is meant. Everyone uses it, to some degree, every day.
But it is my fervent and unshakeable view that jargon is, for the most part, best avoided. Where unclear language is used and not understood (or misunderstood) it is a failure of the speaker.
And your chosen deity help you if you ever send me an email saying, without further explanation, that you’d like my input into
an innovative outsourced supply chain solution that will drive strategic alignment as we recalibrate towards business as usual
You’re unlikely to receive the reply you’d hoped for.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
The recipe for saving the NHS requires radicalism, but of a simpler sort: turning the NHS from what it has become—a sickness service—into what its name promises—a health service. That will mean spending more money. But to spend it productively requires a shift in focus: away from hospitals to the community, from treatment to prevention, from incentivising inputs to encouraging better outcomes.
A system focused on hospitals is one designed to treat people only after they have become really sick. That is the equivalent of buying more fire extinguishers while dismantling the smoke alarms.
The whole thing is well worth five minutes of your time.
There is certainly a trend within my employing organisation in recent times for holding impractically large meetings via Microsoft Teams. These often seem to a mechanism for effectively broadcasting information which would be better communicated asynchronously, preferably in writing. In my personal notes, I’ve somewhat petulantly developed a habit of recording the number of participants in a meeting along with its length. None of these meetings would have been held pre-pandemic, when we were reliant on audio-only teleconferencing. In these cases, it seems to me that the technology is being used because it is there, not because there is a strong underlying need for it.
There was a notable occasion recently when I sat in a meeting where twenty participants spent half an hour ‘discussing’ whether some minor changes should be made to a document, or whether this was a poor use of time. This was ten person-hours spent discussing whether a task that would take roughly two person-hours was worthwhile. The irony struck no-one.
The close of the Economist article:
The right way for companies to respond is to make meetings shorter and more relevant. Whether you are on camera or in the room, it is always easier to listen when there is something worth hearing.
Well, quite.
The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.
5: Over the last month, I’ve received 3,100 work emails.
6: I heard on the radio this morning that Romans painted eyes on their ships because they believe the gods would protect ships with eyes on them. And it made me think: was this the real reason? Will people in two millennia look back at our time and say that we printed crossed-fingers on all lottery tickets because we believed it brought luck (as opposed to it just being a brand)? There are so many things in life which start as superstition but become traditions which are completely divorced from the original beliefs.
7: The Normal People TV series was better than the book. I know people say you can’t compare the two, but I’m doing it anyway.
8: A loose lock meant that I got to peek through a crack in the door into the southwest tower of the Tyne Bridge:
9: Balancing rocks really seems to have become a trend these days. I know this makes me sound grumpy, but I’m not really a fan: there’s something that feels entitled about taking a shared area of natural landscape and putting a personal ‘project’ on it rather than leaving it how it was found.
12: When I’m asked to give talks about antimicrobial resistance, I sometimes mention the issue of incorporating antibiotics into ships’ paint to prevent the formation of a biofilm on the hull which allows barnacles to attach. This initially seems like a ridiculous use of a precious resource, but the issue is actually a bit more subtle than it first appears: barnacles create surprisingly high levels of drag, increasing fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions from the ship far more than you might first imagine. I was therefore delighted to learn of the invention of HullSkater, which is basically Roomba for ship hulls.
17: Solar panels in space generate more energy than those on Earth because our atmosphere reflects or absorbs over half of the solar energy reaching the planet. This topic popped into my head for no clear reason this morning, and the magic of the internet meant that clarification was only a click away. What a time we live in.
19: The OED defines “suspend” as “to debar temporarily from participation in something.” Today, I’ve seen the BBC using the construction “permanently suspended” for the first time, which seems like a significant moment of change in the use of that word.
20: Food is all about salt, fat, acid, heat… and Samin Nosrat, who is impossibly endearing.
30: Fukushima serves as a reminder of the long-term consequences of major incidents on mental health. I worry that the response to covid-19 in the UK suggests we haven’t learned that lesson.
4: Paul Collier’s critique in The TLS of the UK Government response to covid-19 is the best I’ve read to date (though admittedly I’m trying to avoid reading too much on covid-19 outside of work). I don’t agree with the detail of all of his conclusions, but I think he brings important issues to the surface.
5: “There are many modern thinkers who emphasise the individual’s dependency upon society. It is, on the contrary, only the cultivation of interior solitude, among crowded lives, that makes society endurable.” So said John Cowper Powys, apparently. I tend to agree.
8: Moving a Bank Holiday to a Friday makes it more difficult to know what day it is. Lockdown and the consequent intense but irregular working pattern already made it hard enough for me.
20: Cereal taught me the Korean idiom “when tigers used to smoke,” meaning a very long time ago. And also the lovely saying “deep sincerity can make grass grow on stone.”
22: “A local leader characterises PHE’s response to the crisis as ‘carry on covid.'” It seems that even The Economist has now concluded that Public Health England is “unlikely to survive the crisis.”
23: This video introduced me to several new terms unique to the world of antiquarian book repair (though Slightly Foxed taught me the meaning of ‘slightly foxed’ some years ago!)
24: Itsu’s katsu rice noodles are lovely, even if they are basically a posh pot noodle.
28: A month ago, I don’t think I could have confidently defined ‘pangram’. Now, I’m coming across them everywhere: there’s been a running feature in The Times diary column, they feature in Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan which I’m currently reading, and The Browser recently recommended an article about them. My current favourite is ‘amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes’.
29: The Twentieth Century Society made me aware that tax incentives promote new construction over refurbishment, which is part of the reason why perfectly sound buildings are often demolished rather than repurposed.
30: It’s been lovely to have a day off and go for a walk with Wendy. COVID-19 work has run us both ragged recently. I’ve also had my first takeaway coffee in several months.
31: According to anonymous sources talking to The Sunday Times, “Boris has always been clear that he doesn’t ever say sorry,” “these stories about Boris being fed up with the job are all true” and “the chances of Boris leading us into the next election have fallen massively.”
2: Contrary to everything I thought I knew about myself, it turns out that I am the kind of person who stands in a queue outside Asda. Covid-19 has done strange things to us all.
3: Doctors often spend a lot of time moaning about the involvement of politicians in political decisions about healthcare. I appreciated this article from Political Violence at a Glance for giving a brief but thoughtful answer to the question: “In pandemics, should the experts or the politicians be in charge?”
7: There’s a great article in the April/May 2020 edition of Courier—not online as far as I can tell—about what a company learned from deciding to pay all their staff the same salary. It didn’t work out for them. Courier does these articles on failed business experiments really well: it’s great to see failure embraced and learning shared rather than just pretending everything works all the time.
9: According to a lecture by Dr Mary Rogers who manages the Abbott Global Viral Surveillance Programme, from all the SARS-CoV-2 viruses genetically sequenced to date from over twenty countries, there is only variation in 149 positions in a 29,000nt virus (i.e. very little mutation and variation).
12: Stoking anger and resentment in difficult times still sadly brings gainful employment for some, according to Andrew Tuck: “At the park there’s a man lurking by the bushes. He’s got a camera with a telephoto lens as long as his arm. He’s here not to spot a rare bird in the trees but to try to catch out people sunbathing, sitting on a bench, talking to someone who does not live in their household (I know this because a few hours later I check the tabloid sites to confirm my suspicions and there are his pictures). He’s also got a series of people allegedly cycling too close to one another. But they are not what they seem to be. He’s simply used the lens to make it look like people are super close by shortening the field of vision. With a country on edge, it’s incredible why anyone would try to sow unease.”
15: I read a lot of library books and have never really worried about catching infections from them. But Gill Partington seems to think I should worry (and according to this article, Public Health England has guidance on cleaning library books, which was also news to me).
16: It’s easy to forget the unprecedented pace of social change over the last hundred years, which means it’s easy for a news report from a century ago to knock my socks off with its attitude to gender politics.
17: The Government’s latest covid-19 graphic feels strangely reminiscent of certain 1990s weekend shopping trips.
21: By dint of being in the second half of the decade, I don’t think I can describe myself as being in my “early thirties” anymore. In Misbehaving, Richard Thaler suggested that people can no longer be considered “promising” once they turn forty. To wit: I’m now a “promising thirty-something.”
22: According to this headline, the ideal moment to invite more people to attend NHS services is the moment of greatest pressure on those services.
27: In The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker argues that “style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily.” Events over the last few days have made me think a lot about how consistent and accurate advice is crucial for outbreak control, but I had been thinking in terms of ethics and efficacy. Trust is, of course, especially important too: people don’t follow advice they don’t trust. It’s normally the sort of thing I bang on about a lot, so it’s interesting to reflect on why it was so far from my mind this weekend.
30: I didn’t realise I was tired tonight until I woke up having falling asleep while reading in an armchair. I’m not sure this is correct behaviour for a promising thirty-something.
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