Guest Post: Looking for a Ghost

BY KERRY ZUKUS

This article originally appeared on Publishers Weekly.

I’ve ghosted books on nearly every conceivable subject. The first question every new ghostwriting client asks is, “Are you an expert or do you know anything about [fill in the blank]?” My answer is almost always the same: “No.”

So how do I do what I do? Furthermore, why do these people hire me?

Answer: While it is somewhat helpful to know a little about a subject before ghostwriting about it, it is absolutely unnecessary to be an expert. Why? Because the client is the expert. If I were the expert as well as the professional writer, why would I need the client in the first place?

Every field of interest has that dreaded thing called “jargon.” Experts use jargon endlessly and without pause. It is the language of their field. Fortunately or unfortunately, when people reach out for a ghostwriter, it is often because they are looking for an audience beyond the narrowness of their field and its accepted experts.

Enter the Dejargonizer. This is my superhero name. When my client rambles on about “Invertilizing the DRC of the SMU, we econometrically strafe the LLG, which leaves us in a much better astrometrical situation,” I stand up and scream, “Enough! What the heck does that mean?” As the Dejargonizer, I get to revel in my ignorance. My lack of expertise is my greatest weapon. When a client says, “Wow, you really are stupid,” I respond by saying, “Thank you.”

I take jargon and make it understandable. This is not “dumbing down.” I hate that phrase. It is “universalizing.” You can be a genius expert in one field and totally lost in the jargon of another. This is not a measure of IQ. Writing is communication. I am hired by people who are often relatively poor communicators to those outside their field.

Yes, conveying this at an initial hiring interview is dicey, but since I am a paid communicator, my first job, my proving ground, is to get my potential client to understand all this. If I am successful, I am hired.

It also helps that I am old enough to be referred to as “mature.” Ghostwriting is actually one of the few occupations where, I believe, somewhat older practitioners are at an advantage. When I am asked if I know anything about [fill in the blank], there is a far greater chance that I have at least a nodding knowledge of it simply through life experience. A long life has also taught me humility. I used to be really, really smart, but now I’m dumb as a tree stump. This ingratiates me to people; don’t ask me why. I seem less apt to try to take over someone else’s dream project and make it my own. I don’t feel the need to do such things. In the end, this is the client’s dream, not mine. When I was younger, I doubt I would have understood that.

How should a person go looking for a ghost or editor? Should a would-be author ask a potential ghostwriter or editor if they know much about his or her topic? Sure. But a person should do it more as a way of finding out if the ghost or editor has any interest or feel for the topic at all. If you are an expert on Australian Rules Football, the ghost or editor should at least have a passing knowledge or interest in sports in general. That’s often as good as it gets. Beware the writer who says, “I know nothing about that, and in general I hate sports. But I have lots of bills this month, so I’ll write just about anything.”

You should also see if you personally connect with the writer, since you will be spending a lot of time with him or her. Many friends of yours have no expertise in what you do in life, but you’re still able to bond with them because they take an interest in you and have inquiring minds. The same holds true when hiring a writer.

Look for a writer you connect with, someone who maybe has a tangential knowledge or interest in your topic and really wants to spend weeks or months immersed in it with you. Find that, and you’ve found your ghost.

Kerry Zukus is a full-time professional, published, and agented author and ghostwriter of more than 40 books. His first novel, The Fourth House (Madison Park Press) was a featured selection of the Book of the Month Club.

Guest Post: Malicious Obfuscation

BY ALAN PERLMAN

I advertise myself (accurately) as a “linguistics expert,” so people often ask me questions about language usage. One recent correspondent was wondering whether—given all the usage “errors” people commit these days—the English language isn’t losing its nuance, becoming reduced to the lowest common denominator…generally being “dumbed down.” Maybe, the reasoning goes, if we lose too many important distinctions, we won’t be able to communicate at all.

To those people I say: chill out. (Unless you’re someone who likes to play gotcha games with other people’s speech “errors,” in which case I say: shut up.) Language is a complex system that won’t be severely impaired by a little variation and change. A much more urgent concern, because of its dire economic complications, is the spread of deliberately complex, opaque language.

Yes, paradoxically, although English prose has become simpler over the years (even sentence fragments regularly appear in print), the complexity of grammatically and mechanically perfect legal and financial jargon can create a dialect that’s unintelligible to most native speakers, even educated, literate ones.

Such writing (chief characteristics: specialized jargon, impersonal phraseology, extended sentences, useless repetition) can be merely tedious and opaque, but it can also become a vehicle for vagueness and evasion. Recently, legalese/bureaucratese has been exploited, by devious corporations, accountants, and lawyers, to supply a house-of-cards foundation to the financial machinations that caused the nation’s economy to implode. 

In “The Analogy of Avarice” (a review of James Stewart’s new book Tangled Webs: How False StatementsAre Undermining America), Jennifer Szalai says that the financial industry, unlike Bernie Madoff, never had to lie, because it was so good at creating complex financial instruments and hiding its duplicities under a fog of words.

“Banks structured derivatives and other securities to enable their clients to take on a massive amount of risk that was nevertheless legal; accountants and law firms ensured that those risks would remain hidden from investors, who could be counted on to trust the triple-A rating or to avoid the eye-glazing chore of reading the fine print… [There were] rules about ‘disclosure,’ [but those]… disclosures in a financial report could be buried in the footnotes and, with some clever wording, made sufficiently dull to ensure that they would barely be seen as red flags."

Want an example? Here’s a short selection from page 30, note 3 of Enron’s 2000 annual report, written just one year before the firm imploded:

“Securitization. From time to time, Enron sells interests in certain of its financial assets. Some of the sales are completed in securitization, in which Enron concurrently enters into swaps associated with the underlying assets which limit the risks assumed by the purchaser. Such swaps are adjusted to fair value using quoted market prices, if available, or estimated fair value based on management's best estimate of the present value of future  cash flow. The swaps are included in Price Risk Management activities above as equity investments.”

What does that even mean? Not much, according to Szalai:

“The text was undoubtedly fussed over by a platoon of lawyers in order to achieve just the right balance of disclosure and evasion [all emphasis mine]. The company might have sold some assets, or it might not have sold some assets; those sales, if any, might include securitizations, or they might not have included securitizations; the securitizations might have had a market price, or they might not have had a market price; if they didn't, then Enron's management gave them a price according to ‘management's best estimate’—which is to say, whatever management believed they were worth….

“All this would merit the word ‘monstrous,’ except the adjective implies an element of excitement and drama, whereas this is a system that thrives on obstruction and boredom. According to [its] conventions…the footnotes are more important than the main body of the text. Sentences are crafted so as not to be read. Language should confound rather than communicate.”

All too often, it does confound. And that obscurity—in an account of what companies are doing with the wealth of the people reading the account—is intentional. We don’t have the time or inclination to wade through it all, and it’s doubtful that clarity would emerge even if we did.

The principles of clear communication haven’t changed: shorter sentences, simpler words, less jargon, concrete examples, and clear explanation of technical terms. Disregarding them in order to confuse and deceive is unconscionable. Deliberate obscurity does irreparable damage to the thin bonds of trust that are supposedly encoded in words on a page. It buries—in a steaming pile of verbosity and BS—the premise that the writer is actually trying to tell the reader something.

________________________

Alan Perlman is an executive speechwriter and ghostwriter/editor. He has an AB from Brown University, an MA, and a PhD from the University of Chicago in linguistics. (His doctoral thesis examined variation in Hawaiian pidgin and creole.) He wrote executive speeches and other communications, mainly at GM and Kraft Foods, for twenty years, and he is the author of two books on speechwriting. As an expert witness and consultant, he advises attorneys on matters of language, including plagiarism, anonymous documents, trademark/copyright infringement, and document interpretation. Write to him at alanperlmanphd@gmail.com.

Around the Word

Curb your e-thusiasm: While there has been a lot of doom and gloom about the fate of brick-and-mortar bookstores, the New York Times found that independent bookstores are actually having a booming holiday season this year. While everyone was sure that the economic recession, aggressive Amazon tactics, and the popularity of e-books were destined to put a dent in sales, people seem to be walking into actual bookstores to purchase physical books at a pretty good clip. Are print books on your holiday shopping list?

Indiefficient: Though many book lovers will rejoice at the cheerful holiday outlook for independent bookstores, Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo doesn't think indie bookstores are necessarily worth saving. In a criticism of Richard Russo's NYT op-ed slamming Amazon for killing the bookshop around the corner, Manjoo argues that local bookstores are not all that "local" and are also massively inefficient. Buy two books on Amazon, he suggests, instead of one at a indie bookshop for the same price. Do you agree?

LinkedIn lexicon: You may consider yourself a motivated and efficient professional with dynamic communication skills, but unfortunately so does everyone else on the business networking site LinkedIn. The site recently released its list of the most overused professional buzzwords of 2011, with "creative" and "organizational" topping the list. What's on your personal list of annoying professional jargon?

Talk the talk: "Write like you talk" is a classic piece of writing advice, but would you really want to read something that sounds the way most people talk? Men With Pens blogger Taylor Lindstrom always took issue with this advice, until he reconsidered that maybe the problem wasn't with writing like you talk, but with not talking well enough. His advice: always think about your words, even in casual communication, and get in the habit of expressing yourself well all the time. "Write the way you talk," he writes, as long as "you can speak persuasively, eloquently, and clearly."