Monday 3 October 2011

To Peter

I'm not sure what the sentence "Do not put your cleverness in front of the communication" means.
Could you please help me?
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3 comments:

  1. Peter.AUA3 October 2011 at 19:19

    Job,
    It means that stating an idea clearly and precisely, the content, is more important than sounding impressive through such things as a needless use of unusual vocabulary or strange and complex grammar.

    For academic writing, and in most other situations, I would agree with this. And you?

    Of course, in order to state our ideas with precision and clarity, a large vocabulary and breadth of grammar are very useful so that the appropriate tool is at hand when needed. And academic English makes frequent use of both vocabulary and grammar that is not normally used elsewhere.

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  2. Job4 October 2011 at 10:48

    Thank you so much.
    I got it from Paul Arden's book
    The whole contents are

    DO NOT PUT YOUR CLEVERNESS IN FRONT OF THE COMMUNICATION.

    CREATIVE people are paid to be creative.
    So, in order to justify their salaries, they need to be seen to have clever ideas.
    I have no argument with intuitive, clever ideas. These are ften the best. The problem is that good ideas do not always come along, great ideas even less often.
    In their need to prove their worth, creative people often produce work which on the surface appears clever but has little substance.
    Instead of trying to find a quick fix, if they were to spend time finding out what the problem was, they would discover the solution.
    In other words, if you ask the right question, you get the right answer.
    There is a book which was written in the 1950s but is still relevant today. It's called A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb-Young.
    It doesn't give you ideas, but it helps sort out what you want to say and helps you arrive at an original and relevant solution.

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  3. Peter.AUA4 October 2011 at 17:12

    Job,
    Thank you for introducing Arden's book and ideas. I'm not familiar with it, but the bit you've cited sounds sensible.

    ReplyDelete

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