It also confirms what I have eventually discovered on my own throughout my working life, though I cast it on slightly different terms.
The subtitle of the book succinctly summarises the main point of the book:
It's not what you say, it's what people hear.My own version of a similar lesson is that one needs to speak things using the context and framework of whoever is listening to get the point across. So when speaking with a business development manager, technical merit means nothing compared to how it affects costs and revenue; similarly when talking to the more academic types, it is less about whether something is practical now, but whether something has eventual practicality, with novelty being the key focus in the short term.
It's one of the things that I taught my intern back in the day as well, using a more extreme example: just because someone doesn't speak the same language as you doesn't mean that the person is a dummy, conversely if one's mastery of the language being used in communication isn't fluent enough, people will assume that one is a dummy and have nothing useful to say.
Language is needed only because we need to share our ideas with other people. Well, not just language really; language alone allows transmission of information, but it still requires an agreed upon logic system in order to convince someone else of the information that is being transmitted.
Words That Work focuses more on how certain choices of words can make/break one's intent, with examples largely drawn from the corporate and political fields where the author is active in. We can call it spin, euphemism, obfuscation, or even manipulation, but those are largely projections of our own morals upon what is essentially about effective information transmittal.
In many ways, a successful communication of a piece of information can be argued to as something that may change a person's mind on something, since it can be positively seen as a means of updating the inner set of facts/evidence to correct any existing opinion that was less well-informed. As sleazy as some of the most effective users may be, I cannot deny that the principles thus outlined within Words That Work are sound.
At some fundamental level, as long as one isn't outright telling an untruth, any other form of expressing a particular attribute/situation with words necessarily chooses a certain context/framework to project it in. Some contexts are more positive in nature, while others are more negative, and it really behooves the person doing the communication to choose the one that best encompasses what he/she wants the outcome to be.
On the receiving end of it all though, knowing that anyone who seeks to communicate often has reasons to want to communicate, and knowing how they might choose certain words can provide one with more insight to the true intent and to determine if it is truly an attempt to inform using a context that is best suited for comprehension, or if it is an attempt to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Personally, I don't really like to have all my writing to be of the form that reeks of spin---much of the world is complex, and trying to simplify them just to get the right sound bite might be too much to ask for. There are some forms of writing that ought to be at that level of simplicity, the so-called ``high-level concept to obtain buy-in'' type of writing. But beyond that, specific procedural details do matter, and need to be articulated as such. In literary writing too, brevity might convey the action better, but not all literary writing is about the action alone---sometimes it is about the nuances and subtlety of the inner state.
In short, there's a place for each type of register of writing, and it is important for us to learn them all, including knowing when to apply which.
That's about it for now. Till the next update then.
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