Role playing

The phrase play a role is trite and uninformative. Trying to salvage it by modifying role with such words as significant or active does nothing to improve it. What is called for instead is a precise, active verb. I offer the following alternatives.

Find the right verb
Before: Whether the project played a significant role in these changes is unclear.
After: Whether the project influenced these changes is unclear.

Before: Financial incentives are beginning to play an important role in behavior of commercially oriented enterprises, even when they are government owned.
After: Financial incentives are beginning to affect the behavior of commercially oriented enterprises, even when they are government owned.

Many other verbs suggest modest or indefinite action, among them: participate, share (in), engage (in), help, aid, assist, cooperate, support, influence.

Or cut it
Before: The government policy of requiring a fixed reduction in coal ash content is, in our view, a misguided attempt to set rules by administrative fiat, rather than allowing the market to play an active role in determining the appropriate technological choices.
After: The government policy of requiring a fixed reduction in coal ash content is, in our view, a misguided attempt to set rules by administrative fiat, rather than allowing the market to determine the appropriate technological choices.

Before: The program plays a catalytic role of helping poor, less-creditworthy municipalities to develop, grow, and eventually "graduate."
After: The program helps poor, less-creditworthy municipalities to develop, grow, and eventually "graduate."

Writing secrets of the pros

Follow these rules and I promise you will get results!

1. Start with the end in mind.
Do not wait until all the results are in to craft your conclusions. Write them first, that way you can make sure the research comes out right.

2. Manage expectations.
Devote several pages to the lack of data, uncooperativeness of interviewees, and indifference of managers that kept you from learning anything very useful.

3. Build suspense.
Why tell readers right away what they want to know? Drop it casually at the end of several pages of background. Better yet, bury it in the middle of the report. Readers love a good treasure hunt.

4. Showcase your skills.
Why let readers sail along on short sentences in plain English? Use your vast command of languages (don’t limit yourself to English) to dazzle them with unfamiliar vocabulary, impenetrable jargon, and elaborate sentence structures.

5. Match the writing to the ideas.
Complex ideas demand complex writing. If it takes you days or weeks to figure out what is going on in your organization, it should take your readers at least that long to figure out what you have to say about it.

6. Rules were made to be broken.
Only truly gifted or engagingly eccentric writers can break the rules of grammar with abandon. Show them how gifted or eccentric you are: toss out the rules you don’t like, experiment with alternative spelling, explore the limits of sentence length. Remember the immortal words of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

7. Leave interpretation to the pros.
Do not waste time clearly labeling your charts and explaining what they show, let the readers interpret them their own way—they’re going to do it anyway.

8. Neatness counts.
Bullets look like mouse droppings and headings interrupt the flow of ideas from page to brain. Blocks of text unhindered by such nuisance devices not only look better but also offer readers a more stimulating mental workout.

9. Make readers feel useful.
Do not edit the report yourself; everyone else is dying to do it for you. They enjoy finding all of your bizarre or amusing errors—not only does it make them look bright, it keeps them from looking too closely at the substance.

10. Leave them hungry for more.
Everybody loves a mystery. Sprinkle your report with red herrings, dead ends, and superfluous detail. Never be positive when you can be negative; never concrete when you can be vague; never clear when you can be misleading. Above all, follow the dictum “half an idea is better than none.”

Nine maxims of human discourse

Although originally used to characterize human conversation, these maxims apply equally to written communication. I keep them posted where all can see them.

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
3. Be relevant.
4. Make your contribution as informative as required.
5. Do not make you contribution more informative than is required.
6. Avoid obscurity of expression.
7. Avoid ambiguity.
8. Be brief.
9. Be orderly.

From H.P. Grice, Language Files (Department of Linguistics, Ohio State, 1994)

Write to communicate

One principle I have tried to instill in report writers "always think of the reader first". Much bureaucratic and academic writing tends to be author-centric. That is, it makes few concessions to readers and shows little concern for communicating to other human beings. The table below summarizes the differences between writing that is reader-centric and writing that is author-centric.

Reader-centric	Writer-centric
Satisfies the reader	Indulges the writer
Assumes specific use(s)	Assumes generic use (or no use)
Based on known audience needs	Based on writer's idea of audience needs (hunch)
Emphasizes form	Emphasizes content
Summarizes research findings	Records/reports research process
Takes responsibility for what it says	Avoids responsibility or assigns it elsewhere
Plans to communicate (invites engagement)	Presents information (avoids engagement)
Acknowledges the views of reviewers but maintains tight perspective	Tries to accommodate all views, loses focus
Assumes specific use(s)	Assumes generic use (or no use)

Another door to my office

When I came to the World Bank in 1998 I was asked not just to improve the quality of the reports being prepared by the evaluation department but to transfer my skills to others. But I was given several handicaps. First, I inherited the job from another editor who had left a legacy of distrust for editors and editorial process. Second, I was working with people from all over the world and, though most had been educated in English, they came from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and disciplines that had shaped their writing. Most had developed habits common to bureaucratic or academic writing - elaborate and tortuous argument, jargon-laden phraseology, plodding exactitude - all of which was counterproductive to effective communication. Third, the reports produced by these writers had to speak truth to power and get results. This is not your typical editorial assignment.

In the years since then I have developed habits of work that have created trust in the editorial process, given me room to establish standards of writing acceptable to my clients and their readers, and I am proud to say, have contributed to postive developments in the way the World Bank does its work. I have changed the way the evaluation department staff approach the writing task, advanced their use of technology to allow the creation of better-looking, "smarter" documents, and helped create a shared sense of duty to be clear, concise, and straightforward in presenting study results.

My most fundamental editorial principle is nothing to do with writing, it is to be of service. Hence, my door is always open. I am available to answer any question any time. When I have the time, I write down my advice and make it publicly available. While this has been useful, I see the creation of this blog as another door to my office. I will record here what I have to share about writing, grammar, quirks of the English language, the use of Microsoft Word to prepare complex reports, and whatever else may seem appropriate for this forum. I will answer questions. Some of what you find here may be familiar, some commonsense, but I hope above all that what you find here is helpful.