Delphic Maxim 70: Speak plainly
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
70. Speak plainly
Today’s maxim is coming to you a day late because today I am holding a Writer’s Festival in my lounge room, and that requires a lot more preparation that you would think. It’s not just the setup itself that requires planning, but it’s also my talk for the festival: building slides, setting out a narrative, and speaking plainly requires quite a bit of work.
I’ll get to the more conventional understanding of ‘speak plainly’ in a moment, but I wanted to touch on one particular example that I am familiar with. I work in universities, and that’s a sector notorious for a lack of ‘plain speaking’. Academic writing is filled with jargon, and the convention is frequently to use long, obscure, archaic words where shorter ones will do. Sentences become long and laborious to read. Writers cloud out the clarity of their argument by layering in complexity — and justify it by saying they are dealing with complex ideas. This may be the case, but I don’t accept that complex ideas can only be expressed in complex language.
There are certain words — metalanguage, we call it — that can’t be avoided in particular disciplines (in teaching they would be pedagogy, curriculum, and on). There are also words that serve as shortcuts within certain theoretical traditions. For example, ‘practice’ has acquired a whole set of associations that make it useful to describe what people do, and a concept like ‘governmentality’, which describes the way people’s practices are regulated (governed), has come out of Foucault’s work and is easier to use than a sentence or two describing the concept all the time.
But on the whole, per the argument of Steven Pinker, good writing, classic writing, has a sense of style. It aims to be easy to understand, which in turn helps us to understand complex ideas.
Maybe that kind of brings me to the other way of thinking about speaking plainly: as a kind of truth-telling or honesty. When we ask someone to ‘speak plainly’, we’re not just asking them to avoid fuzzy language, we’re basically telling them to cut to the chase: tell me what you really mean! Business speak is notorious for clouding up clear communication with bullshit jargon, and weirdly there seems to be a trend to fluffing around our language in every day life — maybe an attempt to keep lost manners intact?
In Australian politics, a set of people gravitate towards candidates who speak plainly. Those are the ones who are able to communicate complex policy ideas in clear and plain language. It’s a real gift, a gift of rhetoric, and one to be admired…if they are giving ideas their due complexity.
Speaking plainly is fairly easy if you’ve got stupid ideas to throw around. It comes naturally to hard-right conspiracy theorists (people like Trump in America, or Pauline Hanson in Australia). This is the danger of a figure like that in a world of bullshit: their bullshit is easier for people to understand, it sells a simple message, even if that message is deeply wrong. Whenever someone of a more progressive bent with a positive message refutes these people with complicated language and jargon, it’s not the best way to cut through. It’s a shame, but that’s the truth: making complex ideas simple is hard work. Making simple — and wrong — ideas simple is piss easy.
This is known, funnily enough, as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. The energy required to refute bullshit is far greater than the energy required to produce it. To refute it convincingly is even harder, because simplifying complex ideas, making them easy to understand, is hard work.
So plain speaking is good, but it requires effort to be meaningful. Don’t bullshit, speak both your mind, but also make sure your mind is speaking from an informed position. That’s why this maxim isn’t just an easy call to be rude, it requires conscious effort. You have to work at speaking plainly, believe it or not it’s something deliberate.
The payoff is huge: you’re a better communicator, and your ideas are clearer. Just make sure they’re ideas worth sharing.
