Early in my career, I took a class on written communication. I don’t remember most of it, but one moment is seared in my memory. The instructor told us to write for a sixth grade reading level. This seemed like nonsense to me, especially at an aerospace company. “But what if the perfect word just happens to be more advanced?” Too bad, he said. Find a different way to say it.
That just didn’t sit right. I kept arguing. He finally said, “If you really want to use those obscure words, save them for your poetry!” Ouch. In retrospect, he probably didn’t say it that harshly - but that’s how I heard it. I was proud of my vocabulary. I didn’t see why I should limit myself to the words that other people knew.
While I was fixated on word choice, it was only a small part of his overall message. His point was this: Whether you’re speaking or writing, it’s your job to make yourself understood. If my audience doesn’t understand me, it’s my fault - not theirs. And no matter how smart they are - no matter how well they speak the language - it will always be easier to read simple sentences and familiar words.*
To be successful, I need to keep my audience in mind. At my first job, all of my co-workers grew up speaking American English. That certainly made it easier to communicate. These days, English may be my co-workers’ second (or third) language, or they may have grown up with a form of English that sounds a bit different than my own. I love to play with language - but if the joke doesn’t land, it only wastes time and adds confusion.
When I’m communicating with people above me in the org chart, I have an additional reason to keep it simple. They’re not just busy - they’re generalists. They don’t have time to dive deep; they rely on me to distill topics down to the critical takeaways. If I waste their time, I might not get another chance to talk to them. So I spend hours transforming a rambling first draft into a few key points. I ruthlessly delete and compress. I think about the right format for the topic - bullet points, tables, maybe a chart. It’s not enough to put the information on paper. It needs to get into their brains, as well.
I have to admit … these days, I’m a bit of a generalist. It’s hard to find the time to read through a long document filled with unnecessary jargon. And I really appreciate it when people know how to keep it simple.
* This seems similar to what Brian Kernighan wrote in The Elements of Programming Style: “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”
Originally posted on Substack