I was thinking about this yesterday as I took a long drive to someone’s house while listening to Randy Newman’s “Rednecks” album. I thought to myself what perfectly evocative, persuasive use of language. “More liberals should listen to this,” I said.
Because one of the things that drives me insane about progressive strategists is how poorly they use language. Man, do these people love to take a perfectly clear sentence and neuter the shit out of it! Perfectly nice people, but some of them have been educated into irrelevance – because real life is not a graduate seminar. So I hope this book is very, very popular and that they all read it:
I don’t normally do this. But right now, I am going to come out and gushingly endorse a book: Climate blogger Joe Romm’s Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.
Everybody who cares about why science doesn’t get through to the public should read it.
Basically, it is a powerful treatise on the neglected art of rhetoric, the technique mastered by Shakespeare, Lincoln, and the writers of the King James Bible. As an English major, I particularly delighted in Romm’s discussion of figures of speech and how they make orators persuasive by allowing them to activate people’s emotions. Indeed, as Romm writes, modern neuroscience now confirms what the poets always knew about getting to people’s heads through their hearts (that’s a metaphor, by the way–one of the chief techniques that Romm discusses).
If you ever want to understand why scientists fare so poorly getting their message across–and why liberals lose policy debates and, often, presidential campaigns–this is also the book for you. In essence: too much higher education, too much wonk sophistication, destroys the common language simplicity of good rhetoric and makes you less persuasive.
It’s what you don’t know that can ‘kill’ you. For example, Syria. The responsibility for the mess in Syria rests in large part with Hillary Clinton. Once Hillary decided that Suzanne Nossel’s (now the head of Amnesty International) theory of “Smart Power” was going to be the preeminent policy of the State Department the debacle in Syria became inevitable. But which sophisticated and highly educated liberal ever even talks about that? How words are used is important to be sure. But even more important is which words or explanations are not used.
I call bullshit. The language of science as practiced in labs and presentations must necessarily be as complex as the subject requires and comprehensible to the audience. A good scientific presentation *should* provoke questions, some of them very critical. But these questions require an understanding of the subject matter and that subject matter must necessarily be reflected in the precise use of language that describes procedures, hypotheses, references to other work, data collected and conclusions. It is a partilicularly technical kind of presentation and it can’t be simplified for the layman.
On the other hand, journalists who have been tasked to translate findings for the general audience tend to play up the more fantastic claims. Statistics are frequently used to exaggerate possible threats but they’re presented without context. For example, if a drug increases the possibliity of stroke by 300%, that is very alarming. But when the number of strokes in the control group is .001%, it’s incorrect to say that the treatment is putting the vast majority of users at risk.
The biggest problem with understanding science is that laymen are incredibly poorly educated. I mean, amazingly, horrifically, stupendously awful at understanding even the rudimentary concepts of science. I’m constantly surprised at the number of people who can’t identify the components of an atom, can’t distinguish between an atom and a molecule and couldn’t explain natural selection if their life depended on it. That’s just inexcusable. I blame it on poorly trained teachers. But come on, people, there are a ton of internet resources out there. Learn to use them. My international colleagues were always mocking how incredibly stupid average Americans were in math and science and they have a point. Scientists can simplify their explanations for the general public but the public has to do its part and actually take the time to understand basic science.
There’s a limit to how much we can dumb down.