In his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” the political journalist George Orwell drew a connection between cloudy writing and cloudy content.
The basic idea was: if you don’t know what you’re saying, or if you’re trying to say something you don’t really want to say, then one strategy is to write unclearly. Conversely, consistently cloudy writing can be an indication that the writer ultimately doesn’t want to be understood.
In Orwell’s words:
[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
He continues:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
A few years ago I posted on this topic, drawing an analogy to cloudy writing in science. To be sure, much of the bad writing in science comes from researchers who have never learned to write clearly. Writing is hard!
But it’s not just that. A key problem with a lot of the bad science that we see featured in PNAS, Ted, NPR, Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc., is that the authors are trying to use statistical analysis and storytelling to do something they can’t do with their science, which is to draw near-certain conclusions from noisy data that can’t support strong conclusions. This leads to tortured constructions such as this from a medical journal:
The pair‐wise results (using paired‐samples t‐test as well as in the mixed model regression adjusted for age, gender and baseline BMI‐SDS) showed significant decrease in BMI‐SDS in the parents–child group both after 3 and 24 months, which indicate that this group of children improved their BMI status (were less overweight/obese) and that this intervention was indeed effective.
However, as we wrote in the results and the discussion, the between group differences in the change in BMI‐SDS were not significant, indicating that there was no difference in change in our outcome in either of the interventions. We discussed, in length, the lack of between‐group difference in the discussion section. We assume that the main reason for the non‐significant difference in the change in BMI‐SDS between the intervention groups (parents–child and parents only) as compared to the control group can be explained by the fact that the control group had also a marginal positive effect on BMI‐SDS . . .
Obv not as bad as political journalists in the 1930s defending Stalin’s purges or whatever; the point is that the author is in the awkward position of trying to use the ambiguities of language to say something while not quite saying it. Which leads to unclear and barely readable writing, not just by accident.
The writing and the statistics have to be cloudy, because if they were clear, the emptiness of the conclusions would be apparent.
The problem
Orwell’s statement, when transposed to writing a technical paper, is that if you attempt to cover the gaps in your reasoning with words, this will typically yield bad writing. Indeed, if you’re covering the gaps in your reasoning with words, you’ll either have bad writing or dishonest writing, or both. In some important way, it’s a good thing that this sort of writing is so hard to follow; otherwise it could be really misleading.
Now let’s flip it around.
Often you will find yourself trying to write an article, and it will be very difficult to write it clearly. You’ll go around and around, and whatever you, your written output will feel like the worst of both worlds: a jargon-filled mess, while at the same time being sloppy and imprecise. Try to make it more readable and it becomes even sloppier and harder to follow at a technical level; try to make it accurate and precise, and it reads like a complicated, uninterpretable set of directions.
You’re stuck. You’re in a bad place. And any direction you take makes the writing worse in some important way.
What’s going on?
It could be this: You’re trying to write something you don’t fully understand, you’re trying to bridge a gap between what you want to say and what is actually justified by your data and analysis . . . and the result is “Orwellian,” in the sense that you’re desperately using words to try to paper over this yawning chasm in your reasoning.
The solution
One way out of this trap is to follow what we could call Orwell’s Contrapositive.
It goes like this: Step back. Pause in whatever writing you’re doing. Pull out a new sheet of paper (or an empty document on the computer) and write, as directly as you can, in two columns. Column 1 is what you want to be able to say (the method is effective, the treatment saves lives, whatever); Column 2 is what is supported by your evidence (the method works better than a particular alternative in a particular setting, fewer people died in the treatment than the control group after adjusting this and that, whatever).
At that point, do the work to pull Column 2 to Column 1, or make concessions to reality to shift Column 1 toward Column 2. Do what it takes to get them to line up.
At this point, you’ve left the bad zone in which you’re trying to say more than you can honestly say. And the writing should then go much smoother.
That’s the contrapositive: if bad writing is a sign of someone trying to say the indefensible, then you can make your writing better by not trying to say the defensible, either by expanding what is legitimately defensible or restricting what you’re trying to say.
Remember the folk theorem of statistical computing: When you have computational problems, often there’s a problem with your model. Orwell’s Contrapositive is a sort of literary analogy to that.
One reason writing is hard
To put it another way: One reason writing is hard is that we use writing to cover the gaps in our reasoning. This is not always a bad thing! On the way to the destination of covering these gaps is the important step of revealing these gaps. We write to understand. Writing has an internal logic that can protect us from (some) errors and gaps—if we let it, by reacting to the warning sign that the writing is unclear.
I am going to go on a little tangent here and propose that unclarity of language is not a particularly big political problem at the moment, particularly on the right. I am hearing a lot of very clear statements about vermin and bloodbaths.
In that respect it is a huge problem at places like the New York Times that are still using euphemisms Iike “caustic” and “racially charged” rather than describing such utterances as what they are.
That’s pretty funny – before I went to Twitter and found the link to this article, I was at the NYT. Today’s NYT has an article (from The Athletic) entitled “USMNT 2, Mexico 0: Tyler Adams, Gio Reyna score in Nations League final halted by homophobic chant.” The article doesn’t say what the chant was or who was making it – it seems to be written from the perspective that the reader knows all about the chant (and its history) already.
They do give you a few clues, but I had to google and find first a current Sporting News article and then a ten year old Slate article to find out for sure who was doing the chant and what the chant was and so on.
https://theathletic.com/5365962/2024/03/24/usmnt-mexico-nations-league-reyna-adams/
It is surprisingly hard to find a source that will just tell you what the chant actually is… namely “puto” meaning “gay prostitute”
Do you think it’s important the the particularly slur is identified? If so, what significance do you attach to that (and the lack of it being specifically identified)?
Joshua:
I think it is important. By merely describing it as homophobic, the writer is forcing their interpretation on you and preventing you from forming your own opinion. Without knowing what was actually said, how can you know if you agree with the characterisation? What is a slur to some people, is not to others. And sometimes there can confusion when going between cultures and languages, e.g. the supposed slur from Bongi Mbonambi during the Rugby World cup.
The same term can also be used to cover very different positions. Someone could be described as homophobic because they claim that “gay marriage should not be allowed because marriage is a church institution but civil unions are fine as they are secular” but that is very different from someone who is described as homophobic because he says “gay people should be stoned to death.”
Joshua.
I think it’s important because if you’re watching the game and you hear it or lip read it you then know who it is that’s saying the thing and what the thing means. Also, if you’re not a native speaker of Spanish you might not realize it’s a homophobic slur and maybe think it’s ok to participate. Maybe you think it means “trip and fall” or “you’re an idiot” or whatever and you chant the thing with the other people around you watching the mexican team play, or whatever. Knowledge is power, censoring knowledge of what’s going on just leads to confusion.
Dmitri:
This was an issue when Orwell was writing too! Fascists and communists in Europe were using bloody take-no-prisoners-style language, and their apologists in England were using euphemistic language to express support for these movements while avoiding the ugly details.
Dmitri: it’s terrible the way Trump references violence! But please understand, like many Americans he was subjected for years to images of the wanton violence of a a ruthless space creature trying to destroy all the inhabitants of earth; a bird in an endless quest to murder an adult superior bird; a terrible WASP trying to kill a defenseless bunny for sport with a gun and myriad other portrayals of senseless violence. No doubt, he’s deeply scared by violence and can’t help himeself. We need to have understanding.
This resonates with writing mathematics. Your intuition tells you something is true. You convince yourself with a few examples and a handwaving argument.For the paper you need an actual proof. When you try to write that down you find the gaps in your reasoning. Then you either fill them or weaken the theorem to one you can prove.
The two columns remind me of the old fashioned (statement-reason) proof format I learned in high school.
I suspect that the difference between mathematics and social science is that you can’t publish handwaving mathematics. No proof, no paper.
Brings to mind a couple of Tufte gems:
“Slippery language, stupendous conclusions. This syndrome of overreaching is economically described by a new word: economisting, with accents on con and mist: economisting…1. The act or process of converting limited evidence into gran claims by means of punninig, multiplicity of meaning, and overreaching. 2. The belief or practice that empirical evidence can only confirm and never disconfirm a favored theory. 3. Conclusions that are theory-driven, not evidenced-based.” (Beautiful Evidence)
and
“Data graphics are paragraphs about data and should be treated as such.” (Visual Display of Quantitative Information)
I was looking for a third quote – something that cemented in my mind the parallel between clear thinking, clear writing, and clear data graphics, but I couldn’t find it.
It brought to mind some Tufte gems for me, too. These may be close to what you were looking for:
“…lack of visual clarity in arranging evidence is a sign of a lack of intellectual clarity in reasoning about evidence.” (Visual Explanations,1997)
“Good design is clear thinking made visible.” (source not immediately to hand)
“Chartjunk indicates statistical stupidity, just as weak writing often reflects weak thought.” (VisualDdisplay of Quantiative Information, 2001, I think)
“Good design is clear thinking made visible; it is clear teaching in action.” (Spoken during his 1-day course, 28.ix.2001)
And, for good measure, Tufte quoting Ben Jonson:
“Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre, nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous. …Negligent speech doth not only discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgment; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter, and substance.”
Both the Times and Guardian ran stories today about the completion of La Sagrada Familia In Barcelona, and both featured Orwell’s comment that it was “one of the most hideous buildings in the world” only the Guardian had the temerity to add his further comment that the anarchists who set fire to the crypt in 1936 and destroyed Gaudi’s workshop showed a lack of taste for failing to blow it up when they had the chance. Clear, but not nice.
And when vagueness is the norm, people are afraid to say what they mean because it doesn’t sound like real science. I once had a listener try to lodge a formal protest against my presentation because he understood it. Clarity in that venue was so rare that he had assumed it was forbidden.
I have to say, “And any direction you take makes the writing worse in some important way.” seems less straight-forward to me then, “And any direction you take makes the writing worse.”
Not that the above is a good example of what you were discussing, which I agree with. My point is that we all need to re-read what we have written with a critical eye for improvements–especially when it is a research paper.
Agreed!
Andrew: is the problem that “writing is hard” or is it that many humans either flat out liars or, well, just not so bright? The example you provide on BMI is interesting because the writer clearly recognizes there is a problem and is papering over it. This is the “liar”. But some writers / scienitists don’t even get there is a problem so they don’t bother to explain away conclusions that appear irrational to others. And – surprising not surprising – there are plenty of readers of the scientific literature (not scienitsts, of course!) who won’t recognize that there is a problem, so ignoring the problem altogether can work great. Can you say “power pose”?
I love Orwell’s toungue in cheek, blaming the English language for the lying, rather than the liars themselves. He’s being sensitive to people’s feelings. He didn’t want to be called “stasi” before the stasi even existed.
Chipmunk:
Sure, lots of people are liars, and lots of other people are acting as politicians when they write, shading things so that the bad things don’t sound so bad. Also I think writing is hard, and I think many people get into the habit of writing and thinking sloppily without realizing that they do it.
Andrew:
In one sence I agree writing is hard. But not because *writing* is hard. What’s hard is pleasing everyone that has differing opinions – e.g. your point that scientists are “acting as politicians” when they write. But contrary to Orwell, I say the flexibility of language is a beautiful thing, not evil. People can be good or evil or somewhere in between. But surely the language just reflects what people need to do with it. That flexibility can allow evil to be portrayed as good, but it can also allow people to work around contentious issues and make progress.
But having writen all that, suddenly I realize that the “tortured construction” in your block quote may not be the idea or belief of any human – but rather the language that was required to please all the gate keepers so ink could go on paper.
Hard cognitive tasks are particularly hard for people who aren’t so bright. I think most teachers know that students who do badly on tests also don’t tend to turn in very good writing assignments, and if asked to speak on the subject won’t communicate very well either.
I really want to write to you more in this Andrew, hopefully soon plus a couple other (hopefully) interesting tidbits. But, without further elaboration, as a graduate student in economics, I was told many times that I shouldn’t focus on the downsides of my research and instead to highlight the positives. I was never told to obfuscate, indeed, most professors professed clarity of writing rather strongly (pun intended), but there was a certain incentive to do so, if it meant abiding by the above!
To be fair to them, econ, especially some areas like my own macro, is rather brutal when it comes to criticisms and people are readily on the lookout to tear down things they don’t like, so “defensive” writing is understandable, if not excusable. And translating certain models into reality is tricky. And and I do think it’s gotten a bit better.
But still. This sort of defensiveness always seemed misplaced to me and I do think it had a negative effect on econ writing.
Lest we forget, writing is not the only endeavor which is hard:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/style/astrology-exam.html
“Though technically open book, the ISAR CAP has a reputation for being one of the most grueling exams in the astrological field.
Yes. In 2018 there are multiple rigorous exams that assess one’s ability to read the stars.”
And,
“Interpretation is one of many skills that the ISAR CAP tests. It includes an essay portion and about 600 multiple-choice, true-false and short-answer questions, which cover chart calculations, the history of astrology, basic astronomy as applied to astrology and forecasting skills. Sample questions include: What is the Sun’s greatest distance from the celestial equator? What is the harmonic of a quintile aspect, and how many degrees is it? And how often are Mercury and Venus trine? (Trick question! A trine is a 120-degree angle between two planets, which never occurs between Mercury and Venus!)”
Compared to the above, iambic pentameter is a breeze.