Communication is hard. It must be, because we’re so bad at it. Many of us, anyway. Sometimes. Often. Not that we tend to be aware of it. We thunder away online, oblivious, pouring forth an endless stream of tweets and texts, manifestos and slideshow presentations that border on criminal dullness and inaccuracy.
To reach an audience consistently, delivering an intended message, you need to work at it, constantly. I’ve been writing a newspaper column since I was 15, and though I’ve managed to achieve a certain facility, the process still requires concentration and effort. I still manage to fail spectacularly now and then, if I’m not careful and sometimes even when I am. It’s hard to develop an edge and easy to lose one. Frequent sharpening is required to avoid dullness.
To this end, a welcome whetstone for communicators is being published this Tuesday: “Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Concise Writing” (Simon Element $24.99) written by a pair of Chicago communications professionals, Melissa Harris and Jenn Bane, and edited by former Sun-Times colleague Mark Jacob. It’s a boon for those who don’t have a clutch of eagle-eyed newspaper editors picking over their prose.
For those weaned on Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” reading “Everybody Needs an Editor” will be an eye-opener (I almost called it “ENAE,” but took to heart the advice on page 144: “Don’t overuse acronyms”). It outlines how to write email subject lines and speeches, how to fire someone and how to resign. Filled with useful tips, both specific and general, the book warns against overuse of quotation marks, of shouting via ALL CAPS (they do have a habit, either good or bad I can’t decide, of illustrating what not to do by doing it), and encourage vividness. I was surprised to see several tricks I thought were genius divinations of my own — such as to use photo captions to tuck in additional information you couldn’t fit into the body of your story.
“Everybody Needs an Editor” also offers a primer on the role of artificial intelligence.
“AI can improve your writing,” they write (at least I assume they wrote it, as opposed to merely prompting a machine to do it, then buffing the result). “Think of it as a tool, like spell-check: It should be used in conjunction with human judgment and expertise.”
Soon writers will polish AI-generated copy more than they compose original work.
“Increasingly, writers will not be putting the first draft down; 100% of their writing experience will largely be editing,” said Harris in a Zoom interview. “We truly believe that editing [AI] … making it better, is going to be the future.”
I’m not the book’s target audience. It is intended for “young professionals entering the workforce; people who think or have been told their writing needs work.”
Ideally, you shouldn’t need to be told; you should tell yourself, continually. I believe a bad writer is someone who thinks their writing is good, and glibly flings at the shrugging public. While a good writer fears their writing is bad, and strives to improve it.
This book can help. One recurrent theme is encouraging brevity — don’t write a long paragraph when you could write a short paragraph, don’t write a short paragraph when you can use a sentence, don’t write a sentence when you fire off a bullet point. “Every time you slice a long sentence, you’re doing your readers a favor.” It took me decades to figure that out.
Understand the book isn’t going to help you write poetry. It’s geared toward business, though the techniques offered serve any kind of writing. “Make every word count” is good advice whether you are penning an annual report or a villanelle.
As a long-form kind of guy, parts broke my heart. At one point, they encourage a larger font — say 14 point — because “your intended audience could be reading their phone while walking, jogging, or doing jumping jacks.” In the world they are addressing, a 750-word column is as ponderous as “Vanity Fair” and as little read. I wish I could declare them wrong. I can’t.
Communicators need to continually ask themselves: “How is this going over?” Reading “Everybody Needs an Editor” and talking with its authors helped me, I hope, be less out of the swim, navigating myself more directly into the times I’m trying to live in. To write something that makes someone do something — cry, think, write a check, RSVP to a party, hire you, renew their subscription to the Chicago Sun-Times — is a magic trick, turning black marks into fluttering thoughts, real emotions and actions. “Everybody Needs an Editor” can help you do that.