Fundraising and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that writing in the fundraising profession is in a bad way.


I didn't really write that sentence.  Except for the words "writing in the fundraising profession," which I stuck in in place of "the English language," the sentence was written by George Orwell.  It's the first clause of his brilliant essay "Politics and the English Language."


I try to re-read this essay every year or so.  It is an incisive analysis of what is wrong with most of the writing one encounters, and a master class in how to do better.


Orwell gets into a lot of esoterica about mid-century ideological battles, which you will find either fascinating or tedious depending on your taste.  But his analysis of writing style is highly applicable to the fundraising profession.


You can find the essay here, or you can buy Orwell's collected essays here.  (I don't know for sure that free link is really kosher -- if you think it isn't tell me and I'll disable it.)


In the meantime, here are a few of his exhortations:

1. Avoid dead metaphors.  Phrases like "toe the line," "ride roughshod over," "grist for the mill," "swan song," "hot bed," etc.  There are two main problems with using them: a) our brains go to sleep when we read them because we're so bored with them; and b) much of the time, we don't even know what we're saying when we use them.  (Do you know what "roughshod" means?  Until a few minutes I didn't -- and I use it all the time.)  If our writing is out of focus, then our ideas are out of focus and our readers don't understand what we're saying.
2. Avoid what Orwell calls "verbal false limbs."  That is, the replacement of simple verbs with wordy phrases.  You don't "break" something, you "render it inoperative"; you don't "stop" it you "bring it to cessation."  Sounds more professional and/or academic, but in fact is just longer and duller.
3. Avoid meaningless words.  Orwell goes into that in fascinating depth.  In our world, a good example of this is "unique."  Of course "unique" does have an actual definition -- it refers to something that is the only example of its kind.  But we rarely use it that way -- we usually use it to mean something blending the ideas of good and special.  And since virtually everything in the nonprofit world is or should be good and special, we're adding nothing by using (or misusing and certainly overusing) the word unique.

Another of his themes, though he doesn't state it in just this way, is to be as concrete as possible.  We have to force ourselves to tie ideas to specific nouns.  Instead of saying "there were a multitude of options for resolving the issues at hand, each of which was problematic in terms of lacking certainty in terms of effectiveness" we ought to say something more like "I saw two or three possible solutions for each problem, and I had no idea which would work."

Our writing will only be vivid, clear and read through to the end when we know what we want to say, when the thing is worth saying, and when we challenge ourselves to say it as clearly and concisely as possible.  For us fundraisers that could mean the difference between being read, understood and funded or, on the other hand, ignored.

Anyway, I encourage you to read the essay.  And let me know what you think.