First Draft #3 - October 5th 2020
Welcome to the third edition of our newsletter, First Draft. This month we’re looking at presidential debates, the language of illness, robots and more. Sign up here to receive our newsletter direct to your inbox a week before we post it here.
THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE
There is no politician in the world today with a more fully-formed rhetorical character than President Donald Trump. Watching him is an occasionally egregious encounter but he is always recognizably himself. He is, to use a corporate buzzword which isn’t always the compliment it seems, authentic. He was, sadly, himself throughout the first of three Presidential debates which took place late on Monday night in Cleveland, Ohio.
Trump talked over his Democrat challenger Joe Biden. He threw out insults to imaginary enemies. He accused everyone of bad faith. Biden is lying, the Democrats are crooks, the news is fake, the election process is corrupt. The world is comprised of false rhetoric. He even accused the moderator Chris Wallace of favouring the other side. At his lowest, Trump even started insulting Biden’s son.
All this was very much in character. Maybe Trump cannot contain himself. Perhaps he has the quality of a very shop-soiled Coriolanus in that he cannot help but blurt out what is on his mind, no matter how impolitic. But surely this authentic display of character was an error. Trump had two themes on which he was quite persuasive which were law and order and the economy. These were the topics, and this is not a coincidence, on which he was most rational and ordered. And they were topics which might conceivably move some voters.
Trump’s character is well defined. We know he can conjure emotions, most of them unpleasant. His best moments, though, were his rare excursions into rational thought and it is salutary, for those of us hoping he loses, that they were so fleeting. (PC)
IN PRAISE OF SIMPLE LANGUAGE
Two of George Orwell’s six rules of writing (in Politics and the English Language) are about keeping things simple. “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” is rule two, and “if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out,” is rule three. Strunk and White were more concise in their seminal Elements of Style: “Omit needless words.”
In a similar vein, my favourite academic paper title appeared, as it periodically does, on my Twitter feed yesterday: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly”. Simple writing, quite simply, works better. Even the most jargon-laden professions are better when rid of the stuff. In 2010, a US attorney presented 800 judges with one argument in legalese and another in plain English. The judges overwhelmingly preferred the plain English version, finding it more persuasive and concluding that the author was better educated and worked for a more prestigious firm.
When we teach writing at The Draft, simplicity is our golden rule. Defining simplicity is a bit like Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography. "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description... But I know it when I see it.”
There are some useful tricks of the trade, however, and there is one we particularly like. The HemingwayApp does a decent job of spotting unclear writing. In general the lower you can get the reading age that it assigns to your writing (it uses the “Automated Readability Index” to do so), the clearer it will be. Hemingway himself apparently wrote at grade five level, which means a ten-year old should be able to read it. This document is a grade eight, so please do forward to anyone over the age of thirteen. Corporate and public sector language are rarely so readable. The Brexit Withdrawal Agreement of October 2019 was graded “post-graduate”, which might explain why our Prime Minister has had such a tough time remembering what it said. (JW)
JARGON BUSTERS: UTILISE
“Utilise” is criminal. It’s stolen the identity of “use”, donned a shiny suit, clamped a blue-tooth headset to its ear. It’s swaggering down the street, trying to convince everyone it's the real deal. It’s not. Google suggests there are subtle differences between “utilise” and “use”. But Google all day long. It’s no use. “Utilise” is simply appalling, and there’s no context, no dictionary technicality, that can save anyone from sounding ridiculous when they utilise it. Use “use”. (AD)
GRAHAM V GORE
The folks at the Lincoln Project have been swotting up on their neuroscience. The ex-Republican-run PAC, which has vowed to defeat not just Trump but Trumpism, recently lobbed a brutal ad at one of the president’s most effective defenders, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Decaying foxes, mutant bugs, and creepy crawlies flash up as a voiceover compares Graham to a parasite that will do anything to appease its host. A gruesome watch. Too gruesome, surely, to persuade voters?
Not according to research. In the mid-2000s, a political consultant commissioned neuroscientist Read Montague to study links between political ideology and physiological reactivity to threats. Montague’s experiment scanned brains of randomly selected Americans while exposing them to an array of neutral and emotionally evocative stimuli. Initially sceptical, he said his “jaw dropped” when he saw the results. He found he could predict with 95% accuracy political persuasion just by looking at a subject’s scan. And while conservatives reacted more strongly to violence and threat, it was repulsive images, things like dirty toilets and open wounds, that were most predictive.
Meta-studies have since confirmed the connection between disgust and ideology. It has even spawned its own field of research, irreverently named “disgustology”. Academics are yet to explain the phenomenon. Some think it could be to do with our “behavioural immune system”, which identifies threats from pathogens in our surroundings. Either way, if you’re trying to cut through to Republicans, a little gore can’t hurt. (AD)
PATIENTS AND UNDERSTANDING
The early weeks of the pandemic were marked by debates about how to communicate. How to avoid spreading misinformation? How to talk about those fighting the disease? Is “fighting” even an appropriate word? One reason we get into difficulty, writes the University of Cork’s Professor Fergus Shanahan in a new book, The Language of Illness, is that medical professionals and patients speak different languages. Doctors use “disease words” while patients speak “illness language”. The latter reflects the story of having lived with a disease, words like grief, despair, fear and denial. Disease words, on the other hand, are impersonal, clinical and shorn of the feelings which, for many patients, are more vivid and overwhelming than the disease itself. In the gap between these two languages, misunderstanding, trauma and substandard care can lurk.
Shanahan, an eminent gastroenterologist, also notes medicine’s curious addiction to jargon. At medical school, he writes, “students are taught to replace the familiar with the unfamiliar.” Why say “pruritus” when you could say “itch”? Surely “runny nose” is more useful than “rhinorrhoea”? Is “haemorrhage” any improvement on “bleeding”? Needlessly complicated medical language exacerbates the asymmetry of doctor-patient relations. It creates distance at the very moment closeness is required. (AD)
THE ROBOTS AREN’T COMING
Is it all over for those of us who write for a living? On September 3rd, GPT-3, an artificial intelligence programme, wrote an article that was published in the Guardian. The robots come in peace, it had been programmed to argue. After an inauspicious start (“my brain is boiling with ideas!” it told us, apparently to put us at ease), something like an argument emerged. It was far from perfect, but if this is AI today god knows what comes tomorrow.
Or so we were led to believe. The article ended with a lengthy footnote from the Guardian’s editors that was telling. The introduction had been written by a human. The machine had then produced eight different essays. The Guardian’s editors had drawn the best parts of each to form one. Lines and paragraphs had been cut and reorganised.
Our desire to believe that the robots are coming is timeless. In the 1770s, a chess-playing robot called the Mechanical Turk toured the world. It beat Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The latter tried, predictably though unsuccessfully, to cheat. The robot’s secret? There was a human hidden inside the contraption, working the arms. It would take two hundred more years before IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.
So fellow writers, fear not. GPT-3 is the Mechanical Turk, not Deep Blue. The article you read was more human than robot. The typo in the second paragraph was a dozy sub-editor not a malfunctioning bot. Spit out enough words and a human can reorganise them into just about anything. Robots for now are of the Morecambe and Wise school: all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order. (JW)
LANGUAGE AND BEYOND
Reply All, Gimlet Media’s podcast on internet weirdness, is consistently good, but this episode, on the origins of the bizarre and scarily widespread QAnon conspiracy, is brilliant.
Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, Dems, libs, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber on the language of Fox.
Oratorical brilliance is no guarantee of debating prowess but Obama had both. This compilation of the great man’s best zingers is a great way to spend 8 minutes.
Ever marvelled at the unexpected literary brilliance of a Hollywood blockbuster? A new biography lifts the lid on playwright Tom Stoppard’s secret side-hustle as a writer on big movies. Credits include The Bourne Ultimatum and 102 Dalmatians. Glenn Close’s line, “You may have won the battle but I’m about to win the wardrobe” is, on reflection, vintage Stoppard.
Jonathan Nunn, the food critics’ fiercest critic, has changed the game in British food journalism. Already an internet hero for his exhaustive lists of the best out-the-way restaurants, his newsletter, Vittles, has influenced editors to look past the latest PR-represented openings in central London (e.g. this review of a Nigerian restaurant in Peckham in, of all places, the Mail on Sunday, which gives Vittles a shout out).
An excellent article by Joshua Yaffa asks if the perception of Russian disinformation is more damaging than the disinformation itself.
Harper’s magazine printed an extract from the latest Don DeLillo novel, which unexpectedly weighs into the debate on the pronunciation of “scone”.
A lovely poem by little known American poet Robert Francis appeared on Twitter. A student and friend of Robert Frost, he has much in common with his mentor, though never reached his heights.
NEW FROM US
Neither plugged into the government nor the mains, Phil has a new home at the New Statesman, with his most recent column on Boris’s Autumn of Discontent.
Fifty years after Milton Friedman’s seminal essay, “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, Josh rides unfashionably to his defence.
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