The latest from Work Matters
| Writing advice from Lao Tzu and Peggy Noonan |
| I was writing a brief last week and got stuck. I was trying to sound too smart, too artsy, too sophisticated. When I get stuck, I call in the Tao Te Ching and Peggy Noonan. First, the Tao, No. 81: "True words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not true/Experts do not argue, the argumentative are not expert/The knowledgeable are not generalists, generalists are not knowledgeable." That's from "Tao Te Ching: Zen Teachings on the Taoist Classic," by Lao Tzu and Takuan Sōhō, translated by Thomas Cleary. Then Peggy Noonan, a truly first-rate writer, who tells us in her book "Simply Speaking: How to Communicate Your Ideas With Style, Substance, and Clarity" that people need to write " straight and plain and direct, " [emphasis in original], because unadorned expression is always the most powerful. I like to call it hand-to-heart talk. How do people get there? She suggests we read what she considers one of the greatest speeches in the last half of the 20th century; it's from "The Godfather, Part 2." I like to read the speech out loud at home. Hyman Roth and Don Michael Corleone are in Roth's suite in Havana hotel. Roth is furious, his façade cracking, because he knows Corleone had his friend Moe Green killed. Listen to Roth: "There was a kid I grew up with. He was younger than me, sort of looked up to me. . . . As much as anyone, I loved him and trusted him. Later on, he had an idea: to build a city out of a desert stopover for GIs on the way to the coast. That kid's name was Moe Green. And the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque or a signpost or a statue of him in that town." Roth's rage is pouring out, he tells Corleone, "Someone put a bullet through his eye." But Roth says he accepted it, because, "This is the business we've chosen. I didn't ask who gave the order. Because it had nothing to do with business." There is more, but you get the idea. As Noonan writes, we need to use "[g]ood hard simple words with good hard clear meanings." Thanks Hyman. Thanks, Peggy. Now back to the brief. |
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