In the early eighteenth century, an Italian composer named Pietro Locatelli wrote a violin concerto called “The Labyrinth” that took a breathtaking amount of skill to perform. In one segment of the song, the violinist has to execute a variety of advanced techniques at an incredible pace, sawing at the violin like a raving lumberjack. One blogger from violinist.com called “Labyrinth” “three minutes of pure, uninterrupted violinist hell.” Another writer called it the most difficult passage of the Baroque era.
This was Locatelli’s style. A contemporary of Bach, the Lombard composer was known to write pieces almost solely for the purpose of showing off. Many of his works, which pushed the limits of human dexterity, seemed to have that “bet you can’t do this” quality to them. In fact, Locatelli inscribed a phrase underneath the title of “The Labyrinth” almost to taunt those who try to play it: “Easy to enter, difficult to escape.”
But, for all of the extraordinary technique it requires to pull off “The Labyrinth,” there’s something very interesting about the song: It’s awful. It’s the same sound you’d hear if you stepped on a cat’s tail for three minutes straight. (Don’t take my word for it. Go to 1:20 on this clip.)
Perhaps even more intriguing is that the composer who wrote this grueling concerto was terribly insecure. “He is so afraid of people learning from him,” wrote one Englishman who once heard Locatelli, “that he won’t admit a professed musician into his concert.” When you think about it, that’s pretty strange. It would be like Sinatra not wanting Dean Martin to hear him sing for fear of losing his edge.
In other words, Pietro Locatelli was creative and brilliant and technically gifted, but he lacked confidence. When he tried to make up for that insecurity by showing off how gifted he was, in some cases, the result was just bad music.
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In an earlier column, I posed that poor business writing is not so much a matter of flawed technique as a symptom of a deeper issue. And perhaps chief among the root causes of bad writing, I think, is something that plagues us today just as much as it did Locetelli three centuries ago: insecurity—an excessive desire to appear smart and a fear of looking stupid.
We all want to be thought well of in our careers, whether we are a boss in front of our team or a new hire looking to prove ourselves. This is perfectly natural. But something strange happens when our desire to appear sophisticated or savvy starts to take priority over communicating clearly: We stop communicating clearly. In our emails or letters, we begin sounding vague, abstract, or robotic. We posture. Our language becomes lifeless.
I recently saw this sentence in a life insurance policy: “A financed purchase occurs when the purchase of a new life insurance policy or an annuity contract involves the use of funds obtained by the withdrawal or surrender of or by borrowing some or all of the policy values, including accumulated dividends, of an existing policy to pay all or part of any premium or payment due on the new policy.”
When I read that passage, I have to ask whether the person who wrote it was more concerned about conveying an idea clearly…or making the company sound impressive. That’s what insecurity looks like. And often it produces lousy writing.
We’re all guilty of it. In an effort to make myself appear smarter, I’ve written about “semantic platform technology” without the foggiest idea of what it really is. In meetings, I’ve tried to sound more sophisticated by saying things like “deploy capital” when I could’ve communicated the same point by saying “spend money.” I’ll frequently write or say things and afterwards think, “Man, stop trying so hard.”
Read a management consultant’s PowerPoint presentation, a bank’s description of what it does, or an academic white paper and you’ll often come across the same problem: the writer is trying so hard to convince us how smart she is that we can’t figure out what she’s saying. (As in this paper: “…electronic commerce solutions were adopted by many companies due to a growing need for more efficient inter-company information exchange and communication coordination.”)
When we’re insecure, we make a more concerted attempt to make a good impression on others, but it comes at a cost. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes how tasks that require serious effort (such as trying to impress) often cause us to perform poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making. That’s because when most of our energies are poured into impressing others through our writing, we have little stamina left to actually think and write well.
C.S. Lewis once said, “You get second things only by putting first things first.” In other words, the way to become a world-famous composer (a “second thing”) is not by trying to becoming famous, but by trying first to write a beautiful piece of music (a “first thing”). The fame comes as a byproduct. A similar principle might apply to business writing: Don’t focus on sounding intelligent; just try to say something clearly and you’ll likely sound insightful in the process.
The point is not that there’s never a place for four-syllable words or technical language; it’s that, if you use such words, they should always point to something greater than themselves. You shouldn’t use “expeditiously” if “efficiently” can convey the same point. And you shouldn’t write “eleemosynary” if the real reason for using it—and you have to be honest with yourself here—is to broadcast that you know what it means. Johannes S. Bach knew many of the same techniques that Locatelli employed. The difference was, Bach seemed to start with a different question. It wasn’t “How do I show people how talented I am?” but “How do I best tell a story through this song?”
If insecurity is the cause of bad business writing, what’s the antidote?
The first step is to realize that our instincts are sometimes wrong. There’s often a disconnect between what we think makes us look dumb and what others actually think.
In one recent study, researchers looked at a group of participants who had just finished a brain teaser. Sometimes, the participants were asked by another person for advice on how to do the task, while other times, they were simply congratulated on finishing it. The study found that participants considered those who asked for advice to be more competent and smarter. So, if you’re about to write an email to a client you’d like to impress, take the risk of writing as clearly as you can. If you think it doesn’t sound sophisticated enough, that means it’s probably just right. Odds are he or she will find you more competent or interesting than if you’d written corporate-speak. There’s nothing unsophisticated about simplicity.
The second antidote is for those in positions of power to actively encourage clear language, examples, and helpful metaphors over jargon. If you’re one of these people, you have the benefit of not needing to posture in front of a team. If you sense people are trying to impress you with their words, ask for plain English. One of my favorite parts of interning for a lawyer one summer was going to court and listening to judges. The attorneys would drone on and on, and I wouldn’t understand any of it. Then the judge would cut them off: “Get to the point, counselor. Are you trying to say the defendant stole your client’s idea?” Judges can do that, because they’ve been around the block. They don’t feel as much of a need to prove themselves. Executives might do well to act with the same confidence.
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Why is business writing so bad? It’s bad because, like Locatelli, sometimes we try so hard to sound ingenious that we miss the whole point. After all, when it comes to writing and speaking, sometimes the most courageous and intelligent thing to do is not trying to look courageous and intelligent at all.
Ricky McRoskey 
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