This week: Speak your reader's language

According to a story I once heard, when the United States and the USSR were planning their first joint space mession, planners thought hard about how the language barrier would be crossed, especially in the perilous situations that could occur in space flight. Naturally, the American astronauts were taught Russian, and the Soviet cosmonauts were taught English. But which language should be used when, and by whom?

The answer may surprise you. After extensive study, NASA announced that the U.S. crew would always speak Russian, and the Soviet crew would always speak English. Why? Because the speaker, who knew what he wanted to say, could more easily do the work of mental translation. With lives at stake, the listener should not have to both mentally translate and absorb new information.

This principle applies to everything we write, even to speakers of our own language. We know what we want to say, so we bear the burden of making our message as easy as possible for our reader to understand.

This week, as you revise, pretend that your reader speaks a langauge different from yours.  Write as clearly as you can, so your reader cannot misunderstand.

Comments

[--Deb]

Just ... love. The rationale is perfect and it's a fantastic anecdote.

[Dwayne Phillips]

I have long used the phrase "the burden of proof" when describing the writer. As a writer, I have to go farther than I think is needed. If the reader understands something other than what I intended, I have to rewrite. It is easy to tell myself that the reader misunderstood because he is stupid, but that doesn't do any good.

Hence, I show my writing to a reader and ask things like, "What did you read? What was the point you read? What did you get?"

I listen to the answers.

[Patricia]

Great post, Kenneth, when writing in and translating into English, I couldn't agree with you more.

As an intercultural specialist, I'd qualify the explicit-implicit tango when striving to persuade a foreign audience.

Writers from high context cultures (such as France)need to be especially vigilant when writing for audiences from low context cultures (such as the US) - and vice versa.

In English, the meaning of the message is in the words; the writer must be explicit as he/she is expected to do do most of the work. In French, the context carries the meaning, writing is implicit and the burden of comprehension is largely on the audience.

Hitting the right balance between clarity and creating an ambiance is a challenge when targeting cultures different from our own. I blog about such topics off an on, as for example here: http://tinyurl.com/ykqq2dk