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I’m assuming that “no one will want to read what I’m writing” (Gettysburg Approach to Writing and Speaking like a Professional, principle #1). So how can I hook your interest in this review? As I just learned: 1) Give you, the reader, what YOU want to know not what I want you to know. 2) Make this review as long as necessary and short as possible. And 3) offer information, that is precise, specific, detailed or, in the author’s words, logically dense. So here goes: Are you passionate to pep up your expository writing? How can you rouse that recalcitrant segment of students who regularly dose off as each semester proceeds? For answers, consider reading Philip Yaffe’s informative guide to speaking and writing well. Yaffe — a self confessed, “poor writer”, who went on to become, a journalism professor, Wall Street Journal correspondent, and the director of a marketing communication company in Belgium — has distilled 30+ years of business writing and speaking seminar insights in this three part book named for the Gettysburg Address, that model of world-class oration and compelling prose. (This sentence, by the way, was logically dense, or filled with precise information.) The first part of the book tackles the art of writing world-class expository prose — any type of material from textbooks to technical reports. Here you’ll get standard suggestions. Be concise. Stick to the topic. Include everything the reader needs to know. Cut what is irrelevant to the argument out. Make your subject compelling to your audience not to you (see above). Write so that your ideas flow logically and you cannot possibly be misunderstood. Yaffe illustrates these principles via catchy formulas such as Co=LS (concise= long as necessary and short as possible). Far more informative, he provides numerous examples showing why sentences and paragraphs are poorly written and how they can be improved. I enjoyed the fact that Yaffe targets newspapers as the model for superb expository writing. Journalists must hook the reader immediately and jam their paragraphs with concise, dense, relevant facts. Their strategy — which you should adopt — is the inverted pyramid; put the most important information first, then turn to secondary or less vital material, so what is written towards the end of the article can easily be cut or left unread. (Notice, anyone whose attention already wandered could get my basic message by only reading paragraphs one and two of this review.) I was particularly captivated by his counterintuitive writing tips. Here’s a sampler: Write the executive summary before you compose the body of a report. It alerts you to what you should emphasize as you go along. Contrary to what we are often taught, sometimes a logically constructed longer sentence is easier to understand than several shorter ones. It’s perfectly acceptable to write paragraphs that are very short when you want to highlight or set them off (see below). Actually, my favorite section of the book — because of its wealth of simple, counterintuitive insights — is part 11: How to lecture well. Lecturing well, Yaffe points out, means adopting the identical framework: “No one will be interested in listening to what I say” (a no brainer revelation for us academics) and giving your audience what they want to know. Pepping up sleep deprived undergraduates, you’ll be happy to learn, doesn’t require being a gifted orator. You simply have to be enthusiastic about your topic and follow some easy tips. One key to engaging an audience, for instance, is to regularly look at least one person directly in the eye as you talk. The reason is that people automatically get more alert when they feel you are addressing them as individuals not an amorphous group. When addressing any group — colleagues as well as students — never just lecture, but interject some questions as you go along. Here’s one principle that seems obvious in retrospect, but that we tend to often overlook. Don’t make your Powerpoints “dense”(filled with a lot of writing). Abbreviate bulleted information, and put only a few points on each slide. Fancy technologies, such as dancing bears, that seem so dazzling, are apt to backfire and take away from a presentation. After all, the purpose is not to have people focus on the slides, but listen to you. Here’s another suggestion that can go against the grain: Keep summing up and summing up and then summing up again. You will think you are being excessively repetitive. Because words evaporate into thin air, your audience — even when they are fellow academics — will conclude, “this presentation is really clear”. Ok, I have a problem with the structure of this book. The third segment, labeled “Appendix”, comprises almost two thirds of the manuscript (roughly 140 pages of a 250 page book!). The varying appendices — from A to M no less — are disjointed. Appendix A tells you how Yaffe helped turn around a corporate brochure and medical conference video advertisement display. Others (B –G) elaborate on the first part of the book by providing hands exercises to train you in writing well. Appendix J offers a great line-by-line analysis of the Gettyburg address and Shakespeare’s famous Mark Anthony speech (what I think should have been the book’s climax) followed by essays on random topics such as “how to get the most from your word processer “ and, worse yet, a reprint of an earlier article the author wrote. Don’t get me wrong much of this material is interesting. I especially liked the sections giving readers the kind of hands on training they would get if they actually took Yaffe’s weeks-long seminar. It’s just that it violates the conciseness principle, spelled out above, and compromises this author’s authority, to insert material that seems randomly cobbled together with few logical links. My advice: Rename the appendix something else; cut what isn’t needed; perhaps integrate the truly relevant information into the rest of the book. Still, I highly recommend the Gettysburg Approach to Writing and Speaking Like a Professional. It’s as long as necessary, although not as short as possible. It’s dense, or full of precise, relevant insights. And who in our organization wouldn’t be hungry for information about writing and teaching well? ----------------------------
Dr. Janet Belsky is a University of Chicago Ph.D. and professor in the Psychology Department at Middle Tennessee State University. She has been writing college textbooks in human development and teaching undergraduates for the past 30 years — by now about half of her life. During her 30s and 40s, she focused on adulthood and aging, first writing The Psychology of Aging, and The Adult Experience (was Wadsworth, now Cengage), then Here Tomorrow (John’s Hopkins University Press), a trade book explaining the behavioral science research on aging for older adults. Dr. Belsky’s capstone text, covering all of development, is Experiencing the Lifespan (Worth Publishers, 2006, 2010). A 2008 Texty Winner, the second edition of Experiencing the Lifespan just came out this past October. Dr. Belsky wants to thank TAA for this incredible honor and for allowing her to find her intellectual home!
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Reviewed by Dr. Janet Belsky
