Revision Precision

Recently, I've been thinking about some of the challenges that professional writing presents, as in the fact that your professional writing should sound conversational, but should not sound like an actual conversation. If we wrote the way we actually speak, our writing would read something like this:

"When I get home, I mean when I get back to--where are we staying? ur..well..the whatever hotel, when we, when I get back, in like maybe five minutes, I mean at like maybe five, then, I can totally..."

It's practically nonsense without the intonation that tells us how all the words connect. What we mean is

"I'll take care of it as soon as I get back to my hotel."

So, our writing needs to be not exactly like our speech, but sound like something we would actually say. There are lots of words in English that we reserve almost entirely for writing. The same message could be written like this:

"I will resolve the matter upon returning to my lodgings."

It means the same thing, but it isn't conversational because I would never say this out loud.

Writing conversationally means walking a fine line between writing formally and informally. Mostly, it means using words precisely to convey your meaning without elevating your speech simply to elevate it.

Recently, my students were working on revising this sample sentence:

As a result an envelope with the paperwork for claims will be left at your hotel so that you can fill it out completely and additionally provide us with a copy of your passport.

As we discussed in class, there are a lot of things wrong with this sentence, and a lot of ways to improve on it. One of the most interesting aspects of their revision, though, had to do with how they conveyed the message about the passport copy. Some students said "please include a copy of your passport"; others left it as "provide us with a copy". Still others used "attach a copy," which reveals their technological background. I reminded them, however, that there is in fact a word that means specifically "to put inside of something else," which brought them almost immediately to "enclose."

"Enclose" is the most precise word in this example because it conveys exactly what should be done with the copy of the passport without additional instruction. "Enclose" is also a word that we could imagine ourselves saying, no one needs to look it up because it is family, even if it's not a word that we actually regularly say.

What I'm getting at is that we tend to have two different vocabularies: the words we access quickly for speech and the words we access very slowly for special circumstances. Professional writing asks us to use an intermediary vocabulary, one that uses the full breadth of precision available to us in the thousands of words in our language while limiting that precision to words that reach only one step beyond our spoken language, not all the way into our let-me-show-you-how-well-I-can-use-a-thesaurus language. It's a fine distinction, but understanding it, and applying it to revision, will help make our professional writing clearer, more concise, and conversational.