Charles Wheelan - Write for Your Life: A Guide to Clear and Purposeful Writing (and Presentations)

WRITE
FOR YOUR
LIFE

CHARLES WHEELAN

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

ALSO BY CHARLES WHEELAN

We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year

The Rationing: A Novel

Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System

The Centrist Manifesto

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

10 Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science

WRITE
FOR YOUR
LIFE

For my teachers

A bout a decade ago, I went skiing in Colorado with my family. I was entrusted for the day with my nephew, Nate, who was eight years old at the time. After lunch, Nate asked if he could ski on his own, which seemed like a reasonable request. I pointed to a pine tree near one of the chairlifts. Meet me under that tree at four oclock, I instructed. Nate skied off to the lift line.

At four oclock, I returned to our designated rendezvous point. Nate was not waiting by the pine tree. Fifteen minutes later, he still had not returned. I was mildly concerned: had I lost someone elses child? More minutes went by, and Nate still had not turned up. Now I was worried enough that I decided to report Nate missing to the Ski Patrol. If something terrible had happenedif Nate had broken his leg and been airlifted to a Denver hospitalthe Ski Patrol would know.

I found the Ski Patrol office, where a man behind a desk appeared to be wrapping up work for the day. How can I help you? he asked.

Ive lost a child, I said.

The man sized me up for a moment and then asked, How lost is he?

Technically, that phrase is ungrammatical. Lost is a binary condition; something is either lost or not lost. Nothing can be more lost or less lost. Either I knew where Nate was, or I did not.

In this moment, as I stood plaintively in front of the Ski Patrol officer, I did not know where Nate was. Yet the Ski Patrolmans questionHow lost is he?was a brilliant use of language. With just four words, this gentleman told me a number of things. First, he signaled that Nate was not seriously hurt. If there were an injured child lying on a cot in the Ski Patrol center, the Ski Patrolman would have asked me, Whats his name?

Or, if Nate were so seriously hurt that he was unconscious as they airlifted him to Denver, the Ski Patrolman might have asked, Is he a boy with dark hair and a blue coat who looks to be about eight years old?

This gentleman did not ask any of those things. Instead, his questionjust four wordssuggested something more reassuring: young people get lost every day at a ski resort and they get lost in different kinds of ways. There is lost when two men jump out of a white van, nab a child, and race away, tires screeching. That kind of incident is rare, bordering on nonexistent. And there is lost when a young, semiresponsible boy who might be tempted to take an extra run does not show up at the appointed time. As I reflected on the question, I knew Nate was the second kind of lost. I was not processing these thoughts consciously; rather, they were racing through my mind subconsciously, which was the genius of the question: How lost is he?

I answered, Not very lost.

The Ski Patrolman nodded in a friendly, unconcerned way. Why dont you go back to where you said youd meet him and see if hes there, he advised.

I walked back to the pine tree, where Nate was waiting patiently for me.

L anguage is how we interact with other humans. Words matter. Politicians use language to sell their ideas and capabilities. Hope and Change. With just three words, Barack Obama embodied the promise of his presidency. Make America Great Again did the same thing for Donald Trump. Thats four words, and I suspect you responded to them with strong emotion.

Journalists write to inform us as succinctly and accurately as possible. Columnists write to persuade us, or to inspire us to think in new ways. Comedians spend months or years crafting a joke. One misplaced word and the joke falls flat. Entrepreneurs write business plans to attract investors. Dave Girouard, former president of Google Apps and the founder and CEO of Upstart, feels so strongly about the importance of

Judges use language to render decisions. There is a winner and a loser in every case, but those verdicts also provide guidance for other courts. When the Supreme Court renders a decision, such as a verdict on the role of affirmative action in college admissions, the language in the majority opinion is an instruction manual for the lower courts. The clearer the language, the less confusion there will be around that legal issue in future decades.

Sloppy writing sows confusion. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution reads: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. I have great admiration for the Constitution, but that sentence was not the framers best work. What exactly does that cumbersome, passive sentence tell us about whether Washington, D.C., can ban handguns? Legal scholars and policymakers have been arguing about the meaning of the Second Amendment for as long as I have been alive.

When President George W. Bush nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers to serve on the Supreme Court in 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a scathing

It is hard to finish those sentences without skimming; Ive read them repeatedly and I still have no idea what they mean. Brooks, a wonderful columnist, wrote, Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Mierss columns provide no evidence of that. President George W. Bush ultimately withdrew the Miers nomination. There were a lot of reasons for that, but the trail of opaque legal writing did not help.

What does great legal writing look like? Elena Kagan is the best writer on the current Supreme Court, says Jennifer Sargent, a colleague of mine at Dartmouth College who teaches legal writing. Kagan is the most persuasive writer, and thats the job of a jurist, Sargent explains. Justice Kagan has an aptitude for writing majority opinions, which require language that can hold a coalition of justices together, like a diplomat finding common ground and avoiding points of disagreement.

Elena Kagans writing is not brilliant because she uses fancy words and makes esoteric historical references. Rather, she uses the tools that will be described in this book: clear, straightforward language; a coherent narrative structure; rigorous editing; and even humor if it serves to make a point. Justice Kagan cited Dr. Seuss (One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish) in a 2015 case involving illegal fishing.

Ironically, great writing can be deliberately opaque. Former US senator George Mitchell played a crucial role in negotiating the agreement that ended the violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement. Mitchell wrote in his memoir that vague language was essential to getting the final agreement approved. The parties had been at war for so long, and the various constituencies had developed such hardened positions, that no agreement was possible unless the language was sufficiently elastic to allow it to be read differently by opposing sides. known as constructive ambiguity. The prose was so convoluted in places that it spawned a joke: What do you get if you cross the Northern Ireland peace process with the mafia? Answer: An offer you cant refuse and cant understand.