VISUAL COMMUNICATION

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Building a good style takes energy and effort, but it’s well worth the work. Good style can make every document more effective; good style can help make you the good writer so valuable to every organization.

As You Choose Words The best word depends on context: the situation, your purposes, your audience, the words you have already used.

1. Use words that are accurate, appropriate, and familiar. Accurate words mean what you want to say. Appropriate words convey the attitudes you want and fit well with the other words in your document. Familiar words are easy to read and understand.

Sometimes choosing the accurate word is hard. Most of us have word pairs that confuse us. Grammarian Richard Lederer tells Toastmasters that these 10 pairs are the ones you are most likely to see or hear confused.17

Affect/Effect Disinterested/Uninterested

Among/Between Farther/Further

Amount/Number Fewer/Less

Compose/Comprise Imply/Infer

Different from/Different than Lay/Lie

For help using the pairs correctly, see Appendix B.

Can We Predict Earthquakes?

Seismologists define an earthquake prediction as a statement specifying exactly when and where an earthquake will occur: an earthquake will hit San Francisco July 30.

They define a forecast as a probability statement, usually over a lengthy time period: over the next 30 years, the probability of a major earthquake in the San Francisco area is 67%.

The U.S. Geological Survey states on its website that no scientist has ever predicted a major earthquake, nor does the Survey expect that fact to change in the foreseeable future. However, scientists can forecast earthquakes.

Adapted from Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (New York: Penguin, 2012), 148–49.

Some meanings are negotiated as we interact with another person, attempting to communicate. Individuals are likely to have different ideas about value-laden words such as fair or rich.

Some word choices have profound implications.

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officials and residents did not take it seriously enough, leading to damaging inaction. But once it hit, officials such as New Jersey’s governor hastened to keep it labeled as a post-tropical depression so their residents could get more insurance money (many insurance policies limit hurricane payments).18

Many hospitals are labeled as charities, a status that enables them to avoid millions of dollars in taxes. A survey of charity hospitals in one state found that in one-third of them less than 1% of expenditures went to charity care.19

In 2012, the American Psychiatric Association approved the fifth edition of its diagnostic manual for mental disorders, dropping and adding some categories, changes that will impact the billions of dollars spent on mental health insurance payments and subsidized treatments.20

Bribery Is Hard to Define

When companies conduct international commerce, the difference between bribery and routine business sometimes has been hard to define. U.S. officials have collected billions of dollars in fines that attest to that difficulty.

Now U.S. officials have provided a 130-page document giving specific advice for companies, particularly for gifts, travel, and entertainment. Small gifts or promotional items, taxi fare, and cups of coffee are fine. On the other hand, a $12,000 birthday trip, a $10,000 entertainment tab all for one official, and a sightseeing trip to another country are all bribery.

Adapted from Joe Palazzolo and Christopher M. Matthews, “Bribery Laws Dos and Don’ts,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2012, B1.

As the last example indicates, some word choices have major health repercussions. Smokers have sued tobacco companies for duping them into believing that “light” cigarettes were less harmful. Recall, when used in warnings about defective pacemakers and defibrillators, causes patients to ask for replacements, even though the replacement surgery is riskier than the defective device. For this reason, some physician groups prefer safety advisory or safety alert.

Accurate Denotations To be accurate, a word’s denotation must match the meaning the writer wishes to convey. Denotation is a word’s literal or dictionary meaning. Most common words in English have more than one denotation. The word pound, for example, means, or denotes, a unit of weight, a place where stray animals are kept, a unit of money in the British system, and the verb to hit. Coca-Cola spends millions each year to protect its brand names so that Coke will denote only that brand and not just any cola drink.

When two people use the same word or phrase to mean, or denote, different things, bypassing occurs. For example, a large mail-order drug company notifies clients by e-mail when their prescription renewals get stopped because the doctor has not verified the prescription. Patients are advised to call their doctors and remind them to verify. However, the company’s website posts a sentence telling clients that the prescription is being processed. The drug company means

the company’s customer service number, delayed prescriptions, and general customer dissatisfaction.

Problems also arise when writers misuse words.

Three major divisions of Stiners Corporation are poised to strike out in opposite directions.

(Three different directions can’t be opposite each other.)

Stiners has grown dramatically over the past five years, largely by purchasing many smaller, desperate companies.

This latter statement probably did not intend to be so frank. More likely, the writer relied on a computer’s spell checker, which accepted desperate for disparate, meaning “fundamentally different from one another.”

Appropriate Connotations Words are appropriate when their connotations, that is, their emotional associations or colorings, convey the attitude you want. A great many words carry connotations of approval or disapproval, disgust or delight. Consider firm or obstinate, flexible wishy-washy. Some businesses offer a cash discount; you rarely hear of a credit surcharge. Some companies offer an insurance discount if their employees follow specified good-health practices; the employees who do not follow those practices are paying a penalty, although it is not publicized that way.

A supervisor can “tell the truth” about a subordinate’s performance and yet write either a positive or a negative performance appraisal, based on the connotations of the words in the appraisal. Consider an employee who pays close attention to details. A positive appraisal might read, “Terry is a meticulous team member who takes care of details that others sometimes ignore.” But the same behavior might be described negatively: “Terry is hung up on trivial details.”