May I speak plainly?
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about talking and writing, two things I do every day both for work and for pleasure. As I sat down to watch two very different, equally thought-provoking speeches – Tim Minchin’s speech to the students at the University of Western Australia, and Emma Watson’s address to the UN on the “He for She” campaign (for about the fifteenth time, because it’s so excellent) – I found myself listening hard not just to what these people were saying, but how they were saying it. What, exactly, the art of persuasive communication consisted of in each case. And I was struck by similar thoughts as I sat down to remind myself of the writings of three rather different commentators on nineteenth-century cultural history: Richard Taruskin, Tim Blanning, and Carl Dahlhaus. How we say the things we say matters.
The principles of clear communication are relatively simple, if you think about it. You need to convince your audience that you are confident and believe in what you are saying; and you need to make your points in terms that can be understood by everyone in the room. There are additional tools that you can employ, of course – throwing in the odd joke, perhaps; your ability to deliver your speech without notes or prompts; your use of certain tried-and-tested rhetorical devices, like making lists of three. (See what I did there? Some of these tricks work in writing, too.) If we cast the idea you wish to convey as Michelangelo’s untouched block of marble, you have to find a way to show your listeners or readers the finished, fluid lines of the statue within it.
But in certain circumstances, I wonder if we’ve gone a little far down this path. Don’t get me wrong: I am someone who has been banging the drum for clear, articulate, engaging communication in print and in person for as long as I can remember. Why would you deliberately present something in an over-complex, obfuscatory way when you can say the same thing in half the number of words and be understood? As Nietzsche put it, ‘those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity.’
Still, in academia, and in education – in all walks of life, in fact – we need to remember that the process of getting to a clearly-articulated thought is just as important as the eloquent, beautifully-phrased final product. As a teacher, I expect my students to have to untangle, out loud and on the page, the thoughts they are having as they encounter new ideas, events, individuals and creations. As a researcher, I am certainly guilty of wittering on endlessly, to myself and anyone who will listen, about my latest work and how I’m currently trying to organise my findings. As a human being, I rely on my friends (and my journal) to bear the burden of my verbalising the ongoing magical mystery tour that is day-to-day living, and the questions it raises. In exchange, I listen to them. That is the art of conversation, after all.
If we accept the necessity of such verbal unravelings in principle, perhaps we need to be a little kinder to each other in practice. At almost every academic conference that I have attended, I have been privy to (and yes, sometimes taken part in) moaning about the communication abilities of certain presenters. Their sentences are too long; their language is too esoteric; their awareness of their audience’s level of knowledge is abysmal; they mutter or drone or have some kind of irritating tick that draws attention away from their speech. And I don’t deny that I’ve been truly astonished by how… there’s no other word for it… boring some presenters can be, when discussing the thing that is supposed to be the centre of their professional universe – their own research area. Sometimes their writing can be just as turgid and indigestible.
How can we do something about this? At a time when academic researchers are expected, nay, obliged, to make their findings as broadly available as possible, to as wide an audience as they can, how do we help them to be engaging? What is the secret?
The most basic answer to this question is: talk to them about it. This may seem like stating the bleedin’ obvious, but earlier this year, on asking a doctoral student what his imagined reader looked like (their level of knowledge, their interest in the subject), he was quiet, thoughtful, and then said, ‘Do you know, I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.’ And all at once, the demon exorcised, we could discuss it, and talk about modes of writing and appropriate vocabulary. I’ve had similar conversations with performance students, too, in helping them address that most terrifying of all concert happenings, the bit where they have to introduce themselves and their repertoire to their audience. I love conversations like these, because I love making people think, at the most basic level, about the wonders of communicating with others and how we can do it most effectively. And there is nothing like talking (or writing) about something you love, after all.
But I do also want to sound a note of caution. There are many people who are excellent scholars, but never learned these skills. Some of them are painfully, heart-wrenchingly shy, and the idea of standing up and presenting their findings at academic conferences remains terrifying, even when they have developed major reputations in their field. So if you find yourself in a room listening to one of these people, remember that you are there to hear what they have to say as much as how they have to say it. If it’s hard listening, hang on as best you can. Sometimes, however carefully you try to make an idea transparent, it’s just a difficult, complicated idea, and there’s nothing that can fix that except time and thoughtfulness on the part of the listener or reader. And sometimes, you might be lucky enough to be bearing witness to the refinement of an amazing concept… that just isn’t quite fully formed quite yet. In all of these scenarios, be kind. Be patient. Even if the marble is still a little rough around the edges, remember that the sculpture is in there somewhere.
