Week 13: Writing To Reach You
Week 13: Writing To Reach You
An inspiring session discussing writing and language-use with Southeast Asian master's students
This week I gave a presentation on writing for the public to the ASEAN Scholarship Leaders Program. Given the efforts Australia is making to engage with Southeast Asia there are multiple leadership programmes of varying types. This one is a collection of masters students – in a variety of disciplines – who are on Australian government funded scholarships in Australia from ASEAN countries, plus Timor-Leste (who are approved for ASEAN membership, but have yet to ascend to it).
Over the past few years I’ve been honing a presentation about how to approach writing for the public. In particular how to write the 800 word piece – which is a standard for opinion writing or blog posts (although the New York Times has started giving people a little more space). This is obviously a different style of writing to academic work or report writing, so there’s a few tips and tricks to do it well.
I’ve been writing for The Diplomat for eight years now, and in April I will write my 400th piece for the site. This is a nice little achievement, but it comes with the problem of often being on autopilot when constructing a piece. Repetition builds proficiency, but can often prevent us from thinking about how we do something. So doing presentations like this forces me to think about how I actually go about this kind of work, and how to explain my approach.
This is a fairly boring thing to write about here, so I won’t. However, included in my presentation was a section on how to think about language use. Which is far more interesting, and something that excites me a great deal. Those who have followed me for a while will be aware this may even be a preoccupation of mine – having written about whataboutery, the linguistic virus of “so-called”, America’s ridiculous use of the word “liberal” and my disdain for the left-right spectrum. Watching language is my favourite thing.
In our current age of insecurity I think our reliance on commonly used terms and phrases without interrogating their implications has become worse. In general, we are seeking safety when we write, not assessing whether ideas have merit. So our writing has become little more than a series of in-group signals. Labels and slogans designed to demonstrate what team we are on.
As our media ecosystem has become more siloed – as a sign of insecurity – team-based writing has come to dominate. In the process we’re losing the idea of writing for persuasion. This becomes more difficult as editors are looking for content to placate the feelings of their audiences, but the objective should always be to write for those who don’t agree with you. This doesn’t mean diminishing your argument, it is about writing with good faith towards the broader public, and understanding how to use language to entice, rather than repel, the most people possible.
However, rather than me just ranting this perspective at this group of students I opened up the session to discussion. And this was the best part! Many of them already had strong ideas about what makes writing compelling, how to think about ideas and form arguments. With a keen understanding of the publications that are and aren’t engaging in the art of persuasion. As a group of students who were mostly working in their second or third language (English), they had an strong knowledge of the English-language terrain, but also ideas about how to approach writing in their mother tongues. It was inspiring stuff!
This Week’s Reading
When It Comes to Politics, Are Any of Us Really Thinking for Ourselves?
Neil Gross – New York Times
“On most political matters, however, it is an abdication of personal responsibility to allow our opinions to be unreflectively determined by our social position. It may be inevitable that our group identities, interests and experiences shape our political inclinations. But it’s up to each of us to scrutinise the beliefs we’ve absorbed from our social milieu to ensure that our values and political commitments are what we truly think they should be — that our beliefs are based on sound reasons rather than brute social forces.
Regrettably, a hyperpartisan society does little to reward such independence of thought, even as both progressives and conservatives claim its mantle.
If nothing else, reflecting on the social roots of your political opinions and behaviour should prompt some humility. Even if you hold the “correct” political beliefs, you may not deserve to congratulate yourself for them; your moral righteousness could be an accident of birth or a product of good social fortune.”
Klaus Neumann – Inside Story
“The subtitle of Stonebridge’s biography promises lessons. Arendt may have much to teach us: about indifference, about plurality and about racism, to name but three of the topics she wrote about. Stonebridge avoids turning Arendt into a Vordenker, somebody who does the thinking on others’ behalf. Arendt did not see herself in such a role either. She was principally interested in Nach-denken, in the exercise of chasing and thinking through issues that she found difficult. Such Nach-denken required close attention, patience, imagination and the willingness to leave well-trodden paths.
Without compromising her intellectual independence, Arendt relied on at least one Vordenker herself. Immanuel Kant taught her that our ability to think makes freedom possible and that how we think has moral consequences. From him she learned much else, including the idea that to think politically and critically required an “erweiterte Denkungsart,” which Arendt translated as “enlarged mentality.”
Brian Klass – The Garden of Forking Paths
“Be honest: when’s the last time you had a substantive discussion about policymaking rather than politics? About tax policy instead of Trump?
For many of us, it’s been a while. That’s not because we’ve tuned out. It’s because politics—the art of determining “who gets what, when, and how”—has become subsumed by scandals, outrage, discussions of rhetoric, culture wars, and, above all, focusing on who’s winning and losing at politics rather than who’s winning or losing at solving problems.
Increasingly, modern governance is swayed by memes, vibes, feelings forged in ignorance, and an apathy for anything that requires thoughtful, sustained consideration of how to make our lives and our societies substantively better. We’re governed by narcissistic political influencers who trade in the currencies of eyeballs and clicks, rather than measuring their achievements by, say, children lifted out of poverty.
Our political cultures encourage this grotesque state of affairs, rewarding the extremists, the zealots, the spotlight chasers, while leaving the unassuming problem-solvers to languish in Sisyphean obscurity, until they inevitably give up and decide to do something more productive with their talents and their time.”
The Great Struggle for Liberalism
David Brooks – New York Times
“The great liberal societies that Zakaria describes expanded and celebrated individual choice and individual freedom. But when liberalism thrived, that personal freedom lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations that precede choice: our obligations to our families, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.
Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatisation of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom. Americans were less likely to assume that people learn values by living in coherent moral communities. They were more likely to adopt the belief that each person has to come up with his or her own personal sense of right and wrong. As far back as 1955, the columnist Walter Lippmann saw that this was going to lead to trouble: “If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we are outside the traditions of civility,” he wrote.
Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. When there are no shared moral values and norms, then social trust plummets. People feel alienated and under siege, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, lonely societies turn to authoritarianism. People eagerly follow the great leader and protector, the one who will lead the us/them struggle that seems to give life meaning.”
Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation (podcast)
Persuasion
“Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU's Stern School of Business. He is also a member of Persuasion's Board of Advisors. Haidt is the author of The Righteous Mind and, with Greg Lukianoff, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. His new book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt discuss the significant rise in mental illness among teenagers, particularly young girls; why social media has a negative impact on childhood development; and how we can mitigate the damage by cultivating phone-free norms and more childhood independence.”
For BJP, Kejriwal Is An Idea Whose Time Has Come To Be Destroyed
Shekhar Gupta – The Print
“If Kejriwal is today an idea, the ‘idea’ he and his politics grew around was a no-holds-barred fight against corruption. That is the reason the Modi government has now tarred him and his entire party and government with the same brush: corruption.
Over the past decade, the BJP witnessed that idea of Kejriwal gain ground. It won Punjab and got some votes in Goa, but more importantly, won five seats even in Gujarat.
It polled about 13 percent of the vote in the Modi-Shah BJP’s pocket borough, showed some growth in municipal elections and set alarm bells ringing. This BJP may run its politics on the grievances of the past, but it doesn’t fight today’s battles today. Like any true superpower, it fights the day after tomorrow’s battles today, and ideally far from its own territory. The 2022 state elections showed AAP growing in the most valued part of the BJP’s territory, its heartland of heartlands. That is when the die was cast and AAP was marked out as the rival of the day after tomorrow, to be finished now.”
I’ll usually take any sci-fi show or film I can get. I’m keen to know what is going on in the future or out in space. So it only took me a few days to race through 3 Body Problem. Which I thought was great. But it got me thinking about other sci-fi shows worth revisiting, and I thought of Tales From The Loop. A show that somewhat flew under the radar, with just the one season. It was more sad-fi, than sci-fi, which was a welcome shift for the genre. Spaceships shooting at each another is getting boring.
The series also had a beautiful soundtrack by Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan. This song in particular is something special.