Nib of the Week

Okay, you’ve targeted your audience, mapped out an outline, vomited up a terrible first draft, and now you’ve edited and revised it once. Now what? The first answer is, “Edit and revise it again, at least once more.” (Writers should not voluntarily hand in anything rougher than a third draft — see Nib #86 .) On the other hand hand, you can’t rewrite forever. At some point, writing projects have to be put to bed. So the question remains: in the absence of a pressing deadline, how can writers know when they reach that point? How do you know you’re done done? The best answer is, when you feel yourself nitpicking . The first round of edits is for out-and-out mistakes. The second is for big refinements — breaking up long sentences, streamlining repetitive points, deleting digressions. After draft three, your edits will get more granular: eliminating unnecessary words, condensing overlong clauses and phrases, correcting personal tics, and tightening up word choices. Somewhere after draft four, your edits will become less obvious and less clarifying. Some of them will help with flow or tone. You may even stumble onto a gem of a new thought. But at a certain point, the changes will start to feel almost arbitrary — whether to put a subordinate clause before or after the independent clause, whether to turn a certain comma into an em dash, whether to change a “President Trump” into “Trump” or “the Administration.” When changes to the text stop clarifying its meaning, you’re no longer editing. You’re nitpicking. And when you feel yourself nitpicking, it’s time to stop. It may come on your fifth draft. It may come on your 20th. It’s not about the number. It’s about the feel. It’s about the moment when you’re reading your work and you can’t really tell the difference between this draft and the last one — when tweaks start to feel like they are coming from you rather than from the text itself. When you can’t tell if your changes are making the writing better or worse: that’s when you know you’re done. Until next week… keep writing!

“Show, don’t tell” may be the #1 piece advice in creative writing. It urges authors and poets and even journalists to put their readers in a scene, in a moment, in an image, rather than simply describing it. It’s good advice — and just as applicable to persuasive writing. Consider the following telling sentences, of the sort written every day in Washington op-eds, speeches, constituent letters, etc. Immigration is a crucial issue to America. These budget cuts will hurt the most vulnerable. The economy needs pro-growth tax cuts. The problem with these telling sentences is that they assert conclusions instead of presenting evidence. They raise questions rather than answer them. Why is immigration crucial? How will the budget cuts hurt people? What will pro-growth policies do for the economy? If we rework those sentences to focus on evidence instead of unearned conclusions, they become more interesting, vivid, and persuasive: Joe Biden’s open borders policy reduced blue collar wages by 4%, added $61 billion to the budget deficit, and enabled drug cartels to smuggle enough fentanyl into the country to kill every American citizen. Under these budget cuts, a single Ohio mom with three kids would lose her health insurance, child care, and her second job. If we lower income and capital gains tax rates today, Colorado alone will see 3,200 new business startups and 20,000 new jobs in the next 12 months. Persuasion is not about telling people how they should think about an issue. It’s about showing them the issue — the problems, proposals, and tradeoffs — in such a way that they reach the conclusion you want them to reach. Whatever your evidence — statistics, stories, analogies, images — don’t describe them. Don’t explain how people should feel about the evidence. Instead, present the evidence, as clearly and concretely as possible. Do that, and the persuasion will take care of itself. Until next week… keep writing!

This week, a little trick for all the speechwriters out there working with dense, wonky policy minutiae (and bosses who love it). Turning complex ideas and obscure data into compelling stories and arguments is very often what speechwriting is . That’s why even the most abstruse technocratic debates, when introduced to a general audience, can quickly devolve into blistering morality plays. Sometimes, though, certain details are too essential to an argument to be dumbed down or moralized. They must be presented in all their dry, impenetrable specificity. The problem here is not just that obscure facts can be boring, but that using them risks alienating one’s audience — making the speaker seem pretentious, talking down to the less informed. One way speechwriters skin this cat is with the phrase, “As you know…”, like this: “As you may know, violent crime in the county fell by 22 percent over the last six months.” Or: “As many of you know firsthand, Ireland is America’s top pharmaceuticals trading partner.” Prefacing information that the audience probably doesn’t know with the suggestion that they might can soften its reception. It invites the audience into the argument, making inclusive points that might otherwise be alienating. Ronald Reagan used it: "And as you may know, I approved raising the ceiling so they can buy an additional 10 million metric tons in the next year.” So did John F. Kennedy : "As you may know, there is currently a dispute over whether the Administration should spend the additional defense funds voted by the last Congress.” And Franklin Roosevelt : “[A]s you know, we have put 300,000 young men into practical and useful work in our forests and to prevent flood and soil erosion.” Of course, “As you know” does not give a speechwriter license to lard up rhetoric with unnecessary wonkery. It’s just a little sugar you can sprinkle on necessary details every once in a while to help them go down easier. Until next week… keep writing!

Jargon gets a bad wrap. To listen to most writing advice these days, you’d think that specialized, technical language is inherently wrong and should never be used. But that’s silly. Jargon helps people communicate — that’s why we create it. Every group with specialized knowledge has its own vocabulary: chemists, stock brokers, Dungeons and Dragons nerds, sports gamblers, etc. Used properly, jargon saves time, money, and lives. Think of doctors in an emergency room — “Give one of epi I-V push, stat!” — or soldiers on a battlefield — “Contact front, request immediate suppression, danger close!” The only admonition against jargon is that it oughtn’t be used to communicate with people who don’t understand it. It comes across as cliquish and snotty, like you’re lording your in-group membership over uninitiated outsiders. Misusing jargon in this way is an especially toxic problem in Washington because unlike in other industries, here the insiders work for the outsiders. The solution is for D.C. people to always remember to write like it. It’s perfectly fine for emails between congressional staffers to be full of Hill jargon because it saves time and energy. A congresswoman’s speech to a local Chamber of Commerce should probably avoid Hill jargon, but could employ some business jargon — “ROI,” “pass-throughs," “depreciation.” A Senator’s opening remarks at a town hall meeting, on the other hand, should probably drop jargon altogether. Just focus on communicating clearly with each particular audience you're writing to, and the jargon will take care of itself. Until next week… keep writing!

In honor of Stephen King’s 78th birthday Sunday, this week’s Nib offers a partial — but unequivocal! — recommendation from among King’s 50+ best-sellers. It’s the middle section of his 2000 memoir, On Writing — the section also called “On Writing.” It’s about 90 pages of excellent advice to improve one’s writing. Much of it mirrors Strunk & White — as most good writing advice tends to do. The difference is the generosity with which King explains the rules and principles he writes by. What The Elements of Style might cover in a sentence or two, King guides readers through for a paragraph or even a page, with examples, alternatives, and the cheerful enthusiasm of the natural teacher. “On Writing” takes up everything from dialogue attribution (no adverbs!) to distraction elimination to literary devices to editing. Whatever you think of King’s fiction — or, these days, his politics — his writing about writing is worth every writer’s time. Until next week… keep writing!