Clarity, Brevity & Politics

July 2007

The late computer scientist Edsgar Dykstra reputedly had this to say about programming:

Every line of code is not an asset.
Every line of code is a liability.

Dysktra's message is sweeping and poignant. The less things there are, the less can go wrong. This axiom seems to hold true elsewhere in life. It is unlikely that your home will catch fire, but the chances are much higher that just one of your houses may burn down if you own a hundred different weekend getaways. It's not cynicism, it's just math. Having more means having more problems.

Elegance and Language

All across the world of the science and engineering, successfully reigning in unnecessary excesses in design is called elegance. If you have two parts, try to make them into one. If something is rarely used, attempt to remove it. As Einstein puts it, "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler." Following these astute observations can transform creative efforts from mere adequacy into greatness.

Clarity in communication also emerges out of elegance. Let's consider a bit of legal jargon (inelegant by definition) from a joint Citibank/American Airlines promotion for a credit card that earns airline miles:

The maximum number of AAdvantage® miles you can earn from purchases using the Citi® Platinum Select® / AAdvantage® World MasterCard® and the Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express® is 100,000 AAdvantage® miles per calendar year and 150,000 AAdvantage® miles per calendar year with the CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® MasterCard® (purchases recorded on your Jan.-Dec. billing statements). AAdvantage Executive Platinum® members, AAdvantage Platinum® members and AAdvantage Gold members are excluded from these limits. AAdvantage® miles are earned on all purchases except returned goods and services, cash advances, convenience checks, transferred balances, credits, fees and finance charges.

Admittedly, lawyer-speak in small print sounds like an easy target. However, this is the part of the content which has all of the critical details consumers need to make a decision and the seller must have to protect themselves from unsound litigation. The text may make these two things technically possible, but it's a complete wreck. How many times did you have to read it to understand what's going on?

Clarity: The Big Idea

Clarity in language starts with an accurate summary. What's the purpose of this clause? After multiple re-readings, I think what the authors are trying to say is that there are limitations on the miles you earn. The rules depend on which type of credit card you have, your class of membership in the frequent flyer program, and the type of purchase made. Or, more simply, it's not a free lunch. Look what happens if we change the paragraph slightly to reflect this discovery:

There are some limitations on earning miles with this credit card. The maximum number of AAdvantage® miles you can earn from purchases using the Citi® Platinum Select ® / AAdvantage® World MasterCard® and the Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express® is 100,000 ...

Just adding this to the beginning of the provides you with a moment to gather your strength before diving into the details, like a stretching your limbs and cracking your knuckles before attacking a big project. It's easy to understand the central concept of "some limitations" and to recognize the moving parts involved—using the card and earning the miles. While the lead may give the reader pause that this whole clause could be a serious downside, it does provide some foreshadowing of what is to come. Letting people know in general what you're about to cover in detail is a great way to inject clarity into the written or spoken world.

Clarity: The Little Ideas

All though the rest of the paragraph is more palatable with a summary at the top, the individual requirements are still hard to follow. For a large part, this is because the distances between causal elements is absolutely huge. Look again at just the first part of the first sentence:

The maximum number of AAdvantage® miles you can earn from purchases using the Citi® Platinum Select® / AAdvantage® World MasterCard® and the Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express® is 100,000 AAdvantage® miles per calendar year...

Starting at the end of the subject ("The maximum number of AAdvantage® miles") and the actual, well, maximum number, there are twenty one words. That's gigantic, especially considering most of those words are registered trademarks and specialized jargon. This makes this sentence hard to understand at the first pass.

What happens if we try to bring subject and object closer together and drop unnecessary legalese? We get a statement like "The maximum number of miles you can earn is 100,000 per year". That's indisputably clear, but not entirely accurate. We need a qualifier that this only applies when using certain cards. The original version has this extra limitation crammed in between the critical subject "The maximum number of miles" and the object "100,000 per year". Placing it before or after makes this much easier to digest:

With either the Citi® Platinum Select® / AAdvantage® World MasterCard® or the Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express, the maximum number of miles you can earn is 100,000 per calendar year.

-or-

The maximum number of miles you can earn is 100,000 per calendar year, if using either the Citi® Platinum Select® / AAdvantage® World MasterCard® or the Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express.

Saying Just As Much With Less

Although "silence is the most commanding expression", brevity is not about clamming up nor offering pithy comments that inspire the imagination. Brevity is just word economy; or, saying everything you want to say, but with fewer words.

This sounds a little bit like a diversion into computer science and data compression techniques. But relax, there are no inverse discrete cosine transforms ahead, just simple substitution. This approach involves reassigning commonly used terms or concepts with a shorter nickname. In the ongoing example, we accomplished this with a couple of separate clauses:

The term "miles" is used exclusively to mean "AAdvantage® miles" in reference to an active membership in the American Airlines® frequent flyer program.

The term "Citi / AA MasterCard" means the "Citi® Platinum Select®/AAdvantage® World MasterCard® credit card". The term "Citi / AA Amex" means the "Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express® card", and the term "CitiBusiness / AA MasterCard" means the "CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® MasterCard®".

The term "Executive Platinum members" means "AAdvantage Executive Platinum® members", the term "Platinum Members" means "AAdvantage Platinum® members", and the term "Gold Members" means "AAdvantage Gold® members."

While these new sentences would benefit from additional review themselves, they do allow for the original paragraph we have been tackling to be greatly reduced:

There are some limitations on earning miles with this credit card. The maximum number of miles you can earn is 100,000 per calendar year, if using either the Citi / AA MasterCard or the Citi / AA Amex. For the CitiBusiness / AA MasterCard, the maximum is 150,000/year. Executive Platinum, Platinum and Gold members have no such limits. Miles are earned on all purchases except returned goods and services, cash advances, convenience checks, transferred balances, credits, fees and finance charges.

Brevity: Change your Structure

A compressed computer file often looks like a random pile of junk until it's unpacked and prepared for use. The lesson here is that a more succinct version does not necessarily need to be formatted in a miniaturized version of the original layout. Maybe the structure needs to be changed just as much as the content.

In the ongoing saga of the legalese from the joint-venture, credit card-frequent flier advertisement, the existing structure is just regular sentences in paragraphs. Switching this over to a different schema can reduce the number of words without changing the content.

Definitions:

miles

Point-to-point airmiles earned by the cardholder/active AAdvantage® member

Citi/AA MasterCard

Citi® Platinum Select®/AAdvantage® World MasterCard®

Citi/AA Amex

Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express®

CitiBusiness/AA MasterCard

CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® MasterCard®

Terms and Conditions:

Maximum number of miles you can earn by card:

Citi / AA MasterCard or the Citi / AA Amex: 100,000/year

CitiBusiness / AA MasterCard: 150,000/year

Special exceptions for AAdvantage Members®

Executive Platinum, Platinum and Gold members: No maximum on miles per year.

Other Restrictions:

Miles are earned on all purchases except returned goods and services, cash advances, convenience checks, transferred balances, credits, fees and finance charges.

Now that we've dumped the paragraph form, you can actually start to use this part of the text as a sort of lookup table. The reader can literally trace their finger down the page after deciding what type of card they want to see the corresponding benefits and limitations. This is tons faster than reading and parsing the original ugly block of text. The model could also be extended to other potential clauses that are different between each card, making the compression even more effective.

This exercise in brevity earned us a bonus improvement. Originally, all the shorthand terms were defined together at the top of the section. However, since the types of AAdvantage® membership all appear together and need to be set up by the subsection header, it's easier just to move them all closer together. We get even more readability for free.

Perception and Reality

We started this little journey with that Dysktra quote about assets and liabilities. Every word we speak or write is not a positive element, but another precarious structural member and a contribution to the overall risk of abject failure. Making unclear language clearer helps reduce the chances things will go wrong. Asserting some brevity by twisting and slashing and compressing away unnecessary elements without sacrificing content reduces the number of things that could go wrong. But there's another problem in human communication approaching, which just doesn't apply to machines, scientific inquiry, or computer science. We have to deal with the way people feel.

Politics is probably the most challenging aspect of effective communication. It is the study of the difference between perception and reality, the distinction between what people think is happening and what is actually happening. An honest and successful message closes the gap by trying to direct perception toward reality. A dishonest or ineffective snippet of language ensures that what people believe is far away from the truth.

Let's Talk About You

We will continue to pick on the running example some more with the first few words of the original paragraph:

"The maximum number of AAdvantage® miles you can earn ... is 100,000"

The tone of this leading sentence is restrictive and demoralizing. It starts out with a a limit, a maximum. It's hard not to feel immediately depressed and dejected, like you've spotted the "catch" in this otherwise sweet deal. It's tough to even motivate yourself to keep reading. The final number sounds kind of large, but you already know it's a maximum and can never be crossed. A simple tweak of language, however, can make this seem like a feature, not a limitation:

"You can earn as many as 100,000 AAdvantage miles..."

Now, the subject of the sentence is you, the reader, not the maximum number of miles. Isn't it nice to be thought of? The sentence is all about the person receiving this great offer, and any details about the offer itself are secondary. It doesn't even sound like a limit, but an opportunity. Look how many miles you can earn when you spend, spend, spend!

Changing the subject of the conversation away from the topic and toward the people affected by the topic is classic politics. This is why candidates for public office answer just about any question with "Thank you for asking that question, Fred, and thanks to all the hardworking people of this country who struggle with this issue every day." Of course it doesn't tell you much, but it makes you feel good about the start of the conversation, a feeling which help keep your attitude positive throughout the end of the experience.

Politics: Best Foot Forward

Curiously, the original paragraph way at the top of this essay was not all chains and horrible oppression. In fact, if you're one of the top three categories of AAdvantage Members®, you can earn an unlimited number of miles. This is a great deal buried in the bottom half of an otherwise gloomy footnote. Why not put it at the top?

Executive Platinum, Platinum and Gold AAdvantage Members® can earn unlimited miles from card purchases.

Otherwise, the maximum number of AAdvantage® miles you can earn from purchases is ...

And if that's not enough, you can even but the good parts of each of the individual sentences at the front, with a little bit of glamorized context to explain the numbers:

You can earn unlimited miles if you are already an Executive Platinum, Platinum or Gold AAdvantage® Member®!

You can earn as many as 150,000 miles annually with the CitiBusiness / AA MasterCard with any other AAdvantage® membership. That's like flying from LA to NYC thirty times a year.

You can earn as many as 100,000 miles annually with any of the other cards as an AAdvantage® member, which is enough to circle the globe four times!

Politics: You've Got a Friend

Politicians also shake hands with everyone and will kiss babies at any hour of the day. Communicating with an affable tone and using the language of camaraderie will help the reader (or listener) feel more comfortable and more confident in the validity of what you are saying. For example, the final bit of text from the clipping reads:

Miles are earned on all purchases except returned goods and services, cash advances, convenience checks, transferred balances, credits, fees and finance charges.

Although these words lead with the positive, they accentuate the negative. Why not make the good news even brighter and the bad news more reasonable?

Miles are automatically earned whenever you purchase any goods or services using your card. There will be no change to your miles balance in the event of returns, cash advances, convenience checks, transferred balances, credits, fees and finance charges.

The above two sentences are full of frothy reassurances, like the kind friends give each other for moral support. Don't worry about keeping track of your miles for each purchase—they will be handled automatically! Don't worry about unexpected changes to your balance. Finally, there's list of unlikely but unsettling events that won't affect your miles at all. This paragraph now sounds uplifting and comforting, as if written by someone out to help you, not profit from you.

Politics: Use your Powers Only for Good

It's difficult to be shady when focusing on clarity and brevity, but adjusting language for political reasons makes it easy to deceive. You may feel that the changes already made are a little bit slimy. They certainly lack the gangly feel of the original legalese, which at least has the advantage that it sounds like it might be less biased. Always compare, beginning and end, both by yourself and with a neutral third party. If anyone thinks the line has been crossed, you are ordered to feel guilt and delete the misleading version. Your conscience will thank you.

The Final Comparison

Here are the two versions side-by-side for your consumption.

The maximum number of AAdvantage® miles you can earn from purchases using the Citi® Platinum Select® / AAdvantage® World MasterCard® and the Citi Select® / AAdvantage® American Express® is 100,000 AAdvantage® miles per calendar year and 150,000 AAdvantage® miles per calendar year with the CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® MasterCard® (purchases recorded on your Jan.-Dec. billing statements). AAdvantage Executive Platinum® members, AAdvantage Platinum® members and AAdvantage Gold members are excluded from these limits. AAdvantage® miles are earned on all purchases except returned goods and services, cash advances, convenience checks, transferred balances, credits, fees and finance charges.

- You can earn unlimited miles if you are already an Executive Platinum, Platinum or Gold AAdvantage® Member®!

- You can earn as many as 150,000 miles annually with the CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® MasterCard® any other AAdvantage® membership.

- You can earn as many as 100,000 miles annually with any of the other cards as an AAdvantage® member.

Miles are automatically earned whenever you purchase any goods or services using your card, anywhere on your Jan-Dec billing statements. There will be no change to your miles balance in the event of returns, cash advances, convenience checks, transferred balances, credits, fees and finance charges.

That's a significant transformation. The text is certainly clearer and easier to consume overall, and although it's still about a hundred words, the change in structure creates a sense of brevity. This is a lightweight collection of three quick bullets and a short follow-up paragraph. Finally, it's authored in friendly language, but does not conceal the truth. The end result feels more like a shopping list and a warm handshake than an exclusionary legal clause enumerating maximum allowable execution of proposed contracted terms.

All is well that Ends

We've improved communication through an emphasis on elegance. The final result glimmers with clarity, brevity, and the honest application of politics. Although changes of this scale are not always possible (on penalty of death by lawyer, for example), thinking about what we say or write with these tools will always be wise. This life is short on people understanding one another. Anything we can do to help will be appreciated.

###

Clarity, Brevity & Politics July 2007