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A friend of mine who worked in a hospice once told me about an elderly woman who was completely silent after she became a resident, just lay still in bed, usually with her eyes shut, though she gave hints of life when friends came to see her. And a steady stream of visitors to her room offered their one-way conversations. They would talk about the family, what they had done since their last visit, the things that interested them. And she would say nothing.
One day a particularly chatty man rambled aimlessly on in a variety of directions, never coming to rest in any of them, moving effortlessly and aimlessly from one topic to another. The woman lying in bed tolerated his visit for a time, but she finally opened her eyes wide, probably for the first time in weeks, and snapped at him: “Do you know why I’m here? Get to the point already!”
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In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin explained why he had always tried to avoid writing documents for review by a public body:
When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome sign-board, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words: John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money, with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word hatter tautologous, because followed by the words makes hats, which show he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word makes might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words for ready money were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, John Thompson sells hats. ‘Sells hats?’ says his next friend; 'why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?' It was stricken out, and hats followed it, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So the inscription was reduced ultimately to John Thompson, with the figure of a hat subjoined.”
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As a writer in government, I was sometimes encouraged to obfuscate as much as possible, to use words to impress rather than to communicate. I turned down some assignments because the client was more interested in filling pages than in conveying any information. And I sweated some others because I was told to add words to the mix, even though there was no more to be said.
Some of the most successful government writers I have known were able to make a career out of piling words on top of each other without advancing a single idea. They were continually able to satisfy bureaucratic demands, such as I once heard from a deputy minister who took me to task for a draft text I had submitted. “Don’t say that,” she warned me. “If we publish that, people will think we’re actually saying something, and we can’t have that.”
Such candor is rare in government; it exposes the reason why so many government documents are more like soporifics than stimulants.
But this is not a new phenomenon. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have described a colleague as being able to “compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” I have tried to find out who he was talking about, and under what circumstances, but I have been unable to locate a context for the quotation, so I think this is just a story told to illustrate how Lincoln felt about words.
It's an approach worth paying attention to.
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