When I was a junior at UT-Austin, I wrote a paper about World War I poetry in which I argued Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves “sought to evoke the monumentality of combat.” My professor told me Churchill probably would have shot me for writing that phrase. Lincoln, he insisted, certainly would have. He assigned me George Orwell’s “Politics and The English Language” and allowed me to rewrite the paper until I produced a draft both he and I were satisfied with.
I thought of that experience as I read Erin Mundahl’s lamentation about the staleness of Business English. Mundahl, an editorial assistant at the Weekly Standard and a Robert Novak journalism fellow, parodies better than I ever could the newspeak that characterizes the contemporary corporate argot. Adjectives like “dynamic,” verbs like “empower,” and phrases like “touch base” do not convey ideas, Mundahl writes. Rather, they conceal the fact that, for the most part, very little needs to be said in a work environment.
Another seminar I took as an upper-classman dealt with social entrepreneurship. The professor, whose achievements in the business world I don’t mean to denigrate, kept using the word “disruptive” to describe the positive aspects of emerging companies. I got a general sense of what he was trying to say. Some businesses thrive on developing more efficient ways of producing goods and providing services (see: ride-sharing). We subsume the ways in which they do this under the category “disruption.” In some cases, however, I felt as if the vocabulary this professor used did not clarify what the businesses we studied had achieved. They had simply “disrupted.”
This spring I interviewed at a Texas company that manufactures lab equipment to specifications. One of the first things the boss said when he saw I had a liberal arts background was that he was sick and tired of proof-reading his employees’ emails. One of my mentors–an engineer who built a wildly successful technology company and retired at an early age–reminds me that in the 70s IBM loved to hire liberal artists. The fanatic concentration on STEM amuses him.
Not only do the people just entering the workforce write poorly. The people above them write without intention. It’s important to address the criticism that complaining about this problem is petty and elitist. Placing a premium on eloquence privileges people like me whose gifts are almost exclusively literary. My circumstances were such that I didn’t need to study Engineering or Business in college to achieve or maintain a middle-class lifestyle.
Writing poorly, however, has political consequences. This is what concerns Mundahl and Orwell. Politicians thrive on the ambiguity of language and shy away from precision. You don’t have to ask what “Make America Great Again” means, I told a friend yesterday. It’ll mean whatever people want it to mean. How to deal with our debt, as Donald Trump recently proved, demands knowledge of economic principles and the ability to convey that knowledge succinctly and persuasively.
From my perspective, writing well–by which I mean writing in a way that conveys your thoughts concisely, precisely, and empathetically–has ramifications far beyond politics and professional success. As David Walker Howe observed in his book about the American Whig Party, there’s an intimate connection between what we think, how we write, and what we do. “Watch your thoughts,” Meryl Streep says in the Iron Lady, “for they become your words. Watch your words for they become your actions. Watch your actions for they become your habits. Watch your habits for they become your character, and watch your character for it becomes your destiny.” This piece of wisdom originated with Aristotle.
To quote from Cory Morrow, “I’m too young to have a point of view.” But my impression in life so far is that if you can match some technical knowledge with a moral compass, social skills, and the ability to think clearly and write well, you’ll be in relatively good shape. And it’s going to be fun to watch.
The Southern Unionist 