Getting it write

by Eva Kaluzynska. This article first appeared in number 18 of Capital & Class

We want socialist ideas to become part of the common sense of our age, says the Socialist Society. Yet they are so often expressed in an elaborate code that restricts access to them, a 'leftwrite' which the newcomer cannot decipher.

How often have you felt or heard others say they feel excluded, bored, put down or upstaged in situations that are intended to nurture or develop socialist ideas and activity' Apparently even the cognoscenti find much socialist writing difficult and off-putting, though there is evidence that there comes a point, as with cigarettes, when the experience stops being revolting. Readers of this journal may have ceased to notice unnecessary political jargon, flights of academic obscurantism and lazy drafting. Worse, they may have been responsible for such things themselves, here or elsewhere.

'For socialist ideas, and a socialist alternative, to gain wider credibility and commitment we must seek a systematic public voice in the media of communication and education' Socialist Society.

Well, yes, but as long as that 'voice' has things like this to say, it will go on talking to itself:

'The major task now confronting us is to rejuvenate and enthuse the spirit of socialist theory and practice in a challenge to the exploitative structure and oppressive ideologies of contemporary British capitalism itself'. Socialist Society again.

Serious and important ideas too often come looking about as tempting a read as an out-of-date telephone directory. It seems expected that we should have to work punishingly hard to grasp them, though I have seldom felt ennobled by what 1 shall try and show is superfluous labour.

Few of us think critically enough about the form of what we read and what we write. We think of content as political. We must recognise that form too is political.

Ignore this and our ideas will continue to look old-fashioned or too 'academic' especially to younger readers for whom '68 is a meaningless cypher. We must write with more imagination, more care, more respect for the reader if we are to bring to that perennial 'major task now confronting its' anything other than more stale formulas.

Many texts could be improved by correcting simple errors of English grammar. But my main criticism is not of socialists' 'bad English'. In fact, a style that slavishly observes all the rules can sound dull and old-fashioned. More important is simplicity of structure and vocabulary.

In pulling to pieces the examples that follow, I have used relatively few grammatical terms, as I didn't feel labels would be that helpful, and I would have had to have looked them up myself anyway. Instead, I have relied on a feel for sense.

Neither of the types of division of labour that Marx describes as operating within commodity production - the a priori division of labour between workers employed by an individual capital through the organising control and authority of the capitalist, and the a posteriori social division of labour between workers employed by different capitals, which, though the market, operates via the coercive force of competition - neither of these divisions of labour touches domestic labour.

A long convoluted sentence often reveals a convoluted train of thought. There are no frank grammatical errors in this sentence. All the individual words are apt and make perfectly good sense. But it is a cumbersome compilation of statement and background, using 72 words.

Look at it closely and you'll see it's a sandwich. It has a huge parenthesis as the filling in a sliver of statement that has been split to accommodate it. Even the authors doubted its readability. Because the sentence is split, and because of the distance between the two ends of the statement, they have felt it necessary to repeat themselves.

'Neither of the types of labour ... neither of these divisions of labour. . .'

There are several alternative ways of reorganising the material to make it read more clearly. One, the most obvious, would be to start with the statement 'Neither of Marx's two types of division of labour touches domestic labour'. This could be followed with an explanation as to what each of the two divisions involves. Another structure might involve laying the groundwork for the statement before making it. I think this the better type of solution here. The statement could come as a punchline in a scheme something like this:

Marx described two types of division of labour as operating within commodity production. One is that which the organising control and authority of an individual capitalist exerts in dividing labour among workers employed by that capital. The other is the social division of labour between workers employed by different capitals, which, through the market, operates via the coercive force of competition. Neither of these divisions of labour touches domestic labour.

The sentence is now split in four. The material is organised into a series of steps rather than a loop.

I have omitted the distinction emphasised in Latin. Many readers who are perfectly capable of following the argument could well be put off by the sight of these italicised signals in an international language of the learned while they having trouble with 'difficult' English.

Unrelieved slabs of small, grey type across a wide measure can look very daunting, which is why I tried dividing the material into shorter paragraphs.

There is no single best way to rearrange or write such things. My example is intended merely to illustrate possible ways of doing so, and leading a willing reader to the point.

That example is from an academic journal with which readers of this one may well be familiar. The following is from a textbook that says it is 'mainly written for students who come to economics in the expectation of gaining an understanding of how economic society functions and who have become disillusioned with the subject'.

If they get as far as page 152, their quest for an alternative will lead them to this extract from a paragraph of some 200 words, 3in long and 4 in wide.

Because he must believe in a natural equilibrium for capitalist society, he cannot reconcile himself to the notion that there may not be an 'equilibrium real wage', that the workers may not be prepared to accept a wage convenient to capital while the objective situation gives them sufficient strength to fight, that they demand wage increases which are 'excessive' not from the point of view of their needs, but rather the need of the capitalists' system for sufficient profits.

'He' refers to Milton Friedman. Anyone familiar with the argument and sympathetic to it may be carried through the confusion by force of sheer goodwill. But the chances of persuading wavering readers to read from beginning to end, let alone agree, are severely reduced by the effort required to understand how the elements of the sentence are supposed to connect.

We need a strong contrast between the alleged needs and interests of the capitalist and those of the worker to bring the opposition between them clearly to view. Without that, the author's opposition to Friedman remains comprehensible to most readers only on an emotional level.

A more carefully assembled structure could achieve that opposition. Try stripping and reassembling the sentence now.

The habits that produce such muddled, if wellintentioned offerings mean that writers lack the flexibility to vary the mood of a text, for example, by using humour. Take the following clumsy example:

Prices increased by 2.4 per cent. The Government made much of the fact that the bulk of the latter rise was accounted for by increases in the prices of 'seasonal foodstuffs'. This information was as comforting to workers as would be the disclosure to those unemployed during the winter months of the fact that viewed in 'seasonally-adjusted terms', they were in work.

Here is a possible tightened rendering:

The government made much of price rises being due largely to seasonal foodstuffs costing more. It might as well have told workers unemployed during the winter that, viewed in 'seasonally- adjusted' terms, they were not on the dole.

There are 63 words in the first version, 38 in the second. The original has been pared down to a sharp point. Only superfluities are lost.

Conscious application of such staple editing techniques can ease, encourage, cajole the reader through an argument. It is the responsibility of the writer to use them when drafting. It is unreasonable to expect an editor to compensate for inattention and laziness. The writer that relies on someone else to that extent may later find cause to complain that the original intention was damaged in the laundry.

I cannot hope to do more here than sketch ways of encouraging clearer, more accessible expression. Below are some of the less desirable mannerisms I have noticed recurring in this journal and in other writings its readers will be familiar with. I hope this checklist will help Capital & Class writers and readers to see themselves as others see them and encourage clearer ways of writing.

Active forms of the verb are almost always better and livelier than passive ones. 'The dog bit the lecturer', not 'the lecturer was bitten by the dog'.

Use verbs rather than nouns to get ideas across. As the active bit of language, they're rather good at it. 'The dog bit the lecturer, who had to go to hospital', not 'There was an urgent necessity for the hospitalisation of a lecturer who sustained a canine dentally inflicted injury from a pet poodle'.

Acronyms are out unless instantly recognisable. TUC and UK are OK, PZPR (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) and P17SN (planning for social need) are not. AES, CSE? Try 'the strategy', 'the conference'. There are almost always ways of avoiding the difficulty and readers will feel articles just aren't for them if unfamiliar cyphers pepper the page.

Fashionable jargon changes with the seasons, but usually manages to sound coy, mannered, and then after a point, dowdy. 'Critiquing' appears to be passe now, but there's a lot of 'prioritising' around.

Short, simple words get less tired of being read than long ones and throw into relief the pieces where a long word or a technical term really is necessary. In spite of the fact that = although; approximately = about; accordingly = so; absence of = no; proceed = go; requiring additional physical and mental concentration in order to achieve satisfactory comprehension = harder to read.

Short sentences and paragraphs do a similar job. Unrelieved acres of grey type look very unappealing. Samizdat writers have the excuse of a paper shortage for omitting paragraph spacing. We waste paper that isn't read for want of white relief in the dense argument.

Start your sentence with an element comprehensible in itself. When you begin with 'That the . . . ', for instance, the verb usually drops at the end. This means you have to file a whole gobbet of wisdom before you know what to do with it. Similar bad starts in this category: 'The question of (an urgent improvement in). . . .'; 'The implication of the view that. . .'

Also avoid 'Said to. . .'; 'Having seen . . .', as starts of this type mean you don't find out whodunnit till later. Some readers just can't stand the suspense, so they don't read the sentence. Reverse is, putting the subject first, or at least early: 'The Tories, said to have . . .'

Check for strings of things tacked together with prepositions: 'The notification OF the list OF names BY the council TO the committee AT the meeting IN Birmingham ON Sunday was UNDER consideration BY...' Break it up. Try using some verbs instead.

In lists of items or ideas, decide what the priorities are and rank them. Serve them up bit by bit, sentence by sentence if necessary.

Parentheses, in this context usually lengthy explanations within a sentence (ie, as here, an explanation without which the author considers it impossible to proceed), usually mean you need two or more sentences to do the job.

Modify a point without losing sight of what it was. Avoid trying to pack all nuances in the same sentence ... ,even though' 'and similar proposals such as' 'unless'. . . could all deserve their own slot. That selection of illustrations all came from a genuine offender.

Puns when clever, can be funny. But beware semiconscious punning that is mere sleight of hand. 'The production of human beings is a distinct labour process'. Puns on reproduction have snarled up marxist and feminist theory.

Curb cliches and rhetoric. 'My point is basically that they have very little impact at all,' said the dreary speaker who wondered why no-one seemed to be listening.

Make sure the bits of your sentence connect up properly. 'Lecturers must take a discerning . position on marxist theory. Swallowed whole, students tend to rebel.' Jonah and the whale?

Mixed metaphors, and even consistent ones, need watching. Use sparingly. Concrete investigations?

Compound noun situations make difficult notions more difficult to digest by compacting them into dense units. 'The rapidly-accelerating deindustrialisation crisis situation' will have most readers indifferent to its outcome.

For me, the most striking feature of the kind of socialist writing to which I object is the extent to which people tend to get evacuated from the story, from the very activities with which they hope to change society. 'Movements' are supposed to involve people doing things, yet the protagonists in these texts are concepts, ideas, actions, merely impaled on labels for contemplation.

This sometimes goes a stage further, in such a way that the activities and phenomena themselves take on human attributes. People no longer appear to retain responsibility for actions and results. Some examples:

The necessity for a broadening of the mobilisation against the effects of this legislation is apparent.

A turn to building the party among industrial workers is, however, not nearly sufficient on its own.

The struggle to turn the AES around so that it faces not the higher echelons of the civil service, the trade union movement and the city - but rank and file workers, young people and women at home, has already begun.

Such habits start, I daresay, in school, where those responsible for 'the sodium having been added to water producing ignition and an explosion' manage to escape from the sentence by pleading scientific objectivity. We must try and avoid these formulae that distance both reader and writer from matters in which we explicitly take sides. We say we want people to join in, but thoughtlessly use a distancing technique that deepens the split between intellectual and activist, thinking and doing.

It's difficult to judge one's own writing, and it would be surprising to me if you hadn't thought of improvements you could make to this article by now. I find that the best test of a piece of writing for clarity is to read it aloud. If you can, without stumbling and referring back, and it makes sense to you, then there's a good chance that it will to someone else too.

Try it with this plea from the July CSE conference papers, then test yourself by attempting a rethink.

A vital concern for this conference as 157 for other socialist discussions now, as socialist principles and ideas seem to be further from popular acceptance than ever, must be first to make a real commitment to the idea of broadbased involvement instead of merely paying lip-service to it; second looking to the implications of this for the forms and practices we use - including the CSE conference itself and third seeking to discuss and develop ideas and action to enable a truly popular politics.

How to organise notes and references

Readers and writers of Capital and Class may have noticed that there has been no consistent system of dealing with 'footnotes' and 'bibliography' - some authors have used one style, some another. It will not be possible overnight to bring about uniformity, but we want to try to move in that direction.

Below we outline the system we would prefer. Would authors of future article please use it when typing their manuscripts?

May we also remind you, as editors, of the following points. Clean typing, double spacing and wide margins are essential. We need five copies of any manuscript submitted. The first paragraph should summarise the argument of the article and explain to the reader why it is worth reading - especially its political and strategic significance for socialists. Use only title; main headings; and sub-headings - no sub-sub-heads. Label them A, B and C heads. Please also attach a 40-60 word summary to go on the Contents Page.

Notes

First, there are no 'footnotes' as such in C&C. That is to say, there are no small-type notes at the bottom of the text page. Instead, 'footnotes' are cued by number and collected together at the end of the text, under the heading NOTES Notes should be used to expand points, not to give sources of information. That is dealt with under a separate section called REFERENCES (see below). Occasionally, of course, a 'note' will include reference to another book or article. This should be dealt with exactly

References

We plan to use a modified version the Harvard system. It is based on the principle that you minimise the amount of page-turning necessary, by including the name of the author in the text.

In the text will appear the following kind of cue:

Hartmann (1979) has argued that...

or:

A recent feminist critique (Hartmann,1979) has made the point...

If you are quoting from another work, again give the reference , including the page number, in the text, thus:

'like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism ... we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce' (Hartmann, 1979:1)

If you refer to a number of authors:

... as has been argued by several people (e.g. Baran, 1957; Frank, 1969; Amin, 1975)

If an author has more than one publication in a year, use small letters to distinguish them:

... as argued in Frank (1969a)...

In the References, as they are collected at the end of the article, the works should be listed in alphabetical order of author's surname. Begin with the author, followed by the date in brackets. Titles of articles and chapters of books will have only the first letter capitalised, whereas in the titles of books and journals the first letter of each major word should be capitalised. Underline the title of books, and the title of journals and periodicals, so that these will be italicised in the printed volume. Place the publisher's name in brackets. Use as little punctuation as reasonable.

Examples:

Coyle, A. (1982) Sex and skill in the organisation of the clothing industry, in J. West (ed) Work, Women and the Labour Market (Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Frank, A.G. (1969a) Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (Monthly Review Press).

Hartmann, H. (1979) The unhappy marriage of marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union Capital and Class 8