Category Archives: Writing

A good analogy does not just invoke some chance resemblance between the thing being explained and the thing introduced to explain it. It capitalizes on a deep similarity between the principles that govern the two things…A good analogy helps you think: the more you ponder it, the better you understand the phenomenon. But all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon.

This is Steven Pinker, reviewing a book on scientific illiteracy.

The most impressive thinkers I know are quick on their feet with analogies. Good use of analogies doesn’t just represent a communication skill. It’s a thinking skill. It’s making sense of a thing based on its relationship to other things. It’s viewing an idea in context and explaining it to others as such.

Anyone have tips for how we can improve on this thinking skill, besides being self-aware of its importance?

I’m always on the lookout for well-put phrases. I am now starting to read things twice — once for meaning, twice for good writing.

In this week’s New Yorker I spotted this gem of a sentence describing Segolene Royal after her defeat in the French elections:

Suddenly, amid the hubbub, an ivory blur: the leader in the flesh, her smile intact, sailing through the flashbulbs with that faint uplift of the head with which the nobly defeated used to mount the tumbrel.

Elsewhere in the New Yorker, Louis Menand opens his brief essay on college with a fantastic mini-example. Besides the vivid (and utterly true) story, it’s also a highly original way to start a discussion of a topic (college and college admissions) which the mainstream media by now treats so dully.

On your first sleepover, your best friend’s mother asks you if you would like a tuna-fish-salad sandwich. Your own mother gives you tuna-fish-salad sandwiches all the time, so you say, "Sure." When you bite into the sandwich, though, you realize, too late, that your best friend’s mother’s tuna-fish-salad tastes nothing like the tuna-fish salad your mother makes. You never dreamed that it was possible for there to be more than one way to prepare tuna-fish salad. And what’s with the bread? It’s brown, and appears to have tiny seeds in it. What is more unnerving is the fact that your best friend obviously considers his mother’s tuna-fish salad to be perfectly normal and has been eating it with enjoyment all his life. Later on, you discover that the pillows in your best  friend’s house are filled with some kind of foam-rubber stuff instead of feathers. What kind of human beings are these? At two o’clock in the morning, you throw up, and your mother comes and takes you home.

College, from which some 1.5 million people will graduate this year, is, basically, a sleepover with grades.

In Harper’s May issue Yohannes Edemariam reports on the slums of Addis Ababa, Ethopia. It’s not pretty. I always admire journalists who try impossible feats like describing the poverty in Ethopia to a western reading audience. In her article the sentence below popped out. Awesome writing. Three "by the time" clauses followed by semicolons, then a "by that time" clause, and then a perfect use of the normally-banal adjective "nice". Whether it’s run-on sentences or the use of overused words, the very best writing seems to always break the "rules" of grammar and good writing. It’s kind of like the billionaires-wearing-jeans idea: at the top you don’t conform.

By the time Messeret had told me, in speech interrupted by witch-like cackles, that she gets up late every day, eats, chews khat, then dresses for work at the Venus Nightclub, whose owner gives her birr 20 to flirt with his customers, encourage them to stay and buy drinks, which "put them in the mood" to sleep with Messeret, in one of the bar’s back rooms, for a price of 150 (birr 100 being the lowest agreeable price) or to pay birr 50 for "a short"; by the time she had said there was no way I could imagine (and there wasn’t) the "sniff" (she said the word in English) of the mouths and feet of the men she lies with, and had told me that "nobody ever fucks me without draping on two condoms," and that after her customer leaves, "I sleep, and this is what life is, disgusting"; by the time the girls had asked me to circulate their photos on Toronto’s streets to potential husbands, and the smoke from six seemingly eternal cigarettes and the smell of roasting coffee mixed with body odor was beginning to make me feel ill; by that time, I very much wanted to leave, and so Binyam and I did, and I went to my grandmother’s to lie in bed and stare at her nice white ceiling.

Also, since I’m playing wannabe Francine Prose, I wanted to point out another sentence in Edemariam’s article.

"The thing I’m most afraid of is" — she smiled, with her lips and with her watery eyes, which look perpetually stung, as if life were one long slap in the face — "that I might die," she said.

Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like David Foster Wallace’s line:

"A slim calm kindly lady of maybe 45 who wears dark tights, pointy boots, a black sweater that looks home-crocheted and a perpetual look of concerned puzzlement, as if life were one long request for clarification."

I’m not yelling the P word, but if the "he carries the perpetual look of X, as if life were one long Y" formula is indeed in the public domain, then I want to use it!

Here’s an NYT piece on Catherine Orenstein’s "how to write an op/ed" class. Nut graf:

During the seminar Ms. Orenstein laid out a basic formula for writing a 750-word op-ed piece (with the caution that “common sense trumps everything I say”): a lead connected to a news hook, a thesis, three points of evidence, conclusion. And don’t forget the “to be sure” paragraph in order to pre-empt your opponents’ comeback, she instructed. (emphasis mine)

Solid advice for any persuasive-writers-to-be. For in-person interactions, however, argumentative strategies must change slightly. For example, at the conclusion of an argument you win, always give your opponent an "out" by offering something you both can agree on. After a bitter back and forth on whether capital punishment is an effective deterrent against crime, you might conclude, "Well, at least we agree that crime is a reality of big-city living and we should do whatever we can to curb it."

There’s a related technique salespeople learn quickly on the job which is not to make the prospect feel wrong (or worse, stupid). Perhaps the prospect blurts out a simply wrong observation about your product. Instead of saying, "No, not at all" the better response is, "That’s the right direction, but we really need to be precise: ….". Correct their error or mis-assumption by turning it into an insight. Make your champion look good in front of her staff.

So say recruiters in the Wall Street Journal’s career site:

"It is staggering the frequency of typos, grammatical errors and poorly constructed thoughts we see in emails that serve as letters of introduction," says Mr. Aisenbrey. "We still see a tremendous amount of email from students who are writing to the recruiter like they are sending a message to a friend asking what they are doing that evening."

It’s a balancing act: while you want to maintain some level of professionalism in communications, you also don’t want to bounce to the other extreme which is MBA jargon-speak.

If I think of the evolution of my own writing style, it started with casual, IM kind of talk (not good), then when I started my business I bounced to the lawyerly / ultra professional tone (also not good), and now I strive for somewhere in the middle: casually authoritative.

I write as if I’m wearing jeans and a collared shirt, not a ripped t-shirt and shorts, or tuxedo and bow tie.