Don’t be bashful – you have to advertise yourself to be recognized

One of the best things that I did when I was at Vistaprint was to write some really thoughtful articles on the internal wiki while working on one of my early projects.  I didn’t even necessarily mean for people other than my partner to see it, since it was just a good place to collect notes.  However, other people did see the work I was doing and offered me an opportunity to move to the studio team where the sort of stuff I was thinking about was very important.  This was exactly what I wanted to do, because studio looked like it had some of the most interesting technology at Vistaprint.  If I hadn’t put up public wiki articles, would I have ever had the chance to move to the team I wanted to and on which I would eventually become a leader?  Who knows?

Organization is crucial

That organization is important shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone, but I did get a lot better at it during my time at Vistaprint.  When I first started, I had just come from school and had never led a really large project that required many undefined steps and didn’t necessarily have a clear end date before.  At Vistaprint, I worked on larger and larger projects and eventually had to drive requirements, tech design, etc.  The smoothest projects had plans upfront and I spent enough time to go through the larger architecture before starting.  I’ve gotten much better at driving things to completion on my own – breaking them into manageable pieces, picking where to start, and knowing when they’re complete.  At Vistaprint, I was constantly involved in many projects at one time and wouldn’t have been able to finish all my work without being organized.

To keep track of projects, we used the Jira ticket management system, which was pretty good overall.  However, if you just use it in its default state, tasks can still be too coarse to plan with and follow through on.  I developed lots of tricks for staying on top of the actual individual tasks that needed to be done and recording results.  For an example of recording results, I noticed early on that I’d often want to go back and review the SQL that had been run while finishing a Jira ticket, but since SQL wasn’t tracked in subversion, I couldn’t find it.  Therefore, I made a habit of always pasting any SQL that I executed into comments on the jira ticket.  In order to keep track of individual tasks, I took a lot of tips from GTD and made sure I always knew what my next actions were so that I wouldn’t have to continually spend time deciding what to do.  Finally, I also had to have reminders even for other people’s tasks if I was waiting on them.  Everyone has good intentions, but people don’t realize that they’re holding someone up or that a task is important unless they’re told, so periodic nudges are necessary.

To be a good leader, you have to help your team produce good work

Further into my Vistaprint career, I had to organize a number of coworkers for a few projects.  The first big project I worked on was actually very tough.  I was fine managing my own work, but became a bit overwhelmed when trying to manage other people’s work as well.  I spent a lot of time at the beginning figuring out who should do what and making sure we all had assigned parts, but I didn’t spend enough time after that following up and making sure that the code everyone was writing was really good.  As my manager, Osi, but it, when you’re a leader, you can’t just make sure your work is done well, you need to make sure the team’s work is done well.

I think my trouble came down to two underlying reasons.  The first is that I didn’t offer enough feedback.  I let myself get a bit overwhelmed by my own work and didn’t budget enough time for design reviews, etc.  Another aspect is that even when I did get a chance to go over my coworker’s work with them, I wasn’t strong enough in my feedback.  I can think of two or three pieces of code in particular that I could tell were going to be difficult to maintain and hard to prove correct.  However, it seemed to be working, so I didn’t make the developer clean it up – instead, I said that it could be improved and that I would have done it differently, but that we’d leave it so we could keep moving forward.  I also didn’t take the time to specifically analyze everything that was wrong, so I don’t even know that the feedback I gave would help my coworkers to not make the same mistakes again.

The projects after that one turned out better, but I still need to improve, and helping a team perform really good work as a whole is something I am going to work on a lot while starting Bespoke Row.

No surprises == no problems

That’s not strictly true, but it’s close enough to be a lesson.  Communicating project status with everyone on the team helps everyone know what’s going on and helps adjustments to delays or other problems happen early.  Communication isn’t just telling people what you’re doing, though, it’s also listening to what they say.

I worked on a range of projects at Vistaprint that all had different status update styles.  In some projects, we didn’t really talk much until the show-me right before launch; if there were any problems, they were surprises to management and immediately urgent issues.  In other projects, we had to report status every day and the team constantly adjusted the schedule, moved requirements around, and prioritized in order to make sure we still got as much benefit from our work as possible.  In still other projects, we reported status frequently, but no adjustments were ever made, so we just ran into the same problems knowingly…

It’s possible to go too far and have the process end up taking away more time than it saves, but it’s easy for status updates to be quick and simple so they only take up more time when there’s an issue to be addressed.

This lesson is mostly written from a team perspective, but it’s important individually, too.  Even if your team doesn’t do status updates, etc., it’s important to keep your manager aware of what and how you’re doing.  They can help keep you from doing unnecessary work, and if you’re having problems, they’re much more likely to understand when something isn’t done perfectly or on time than if you just tell them on the due date that your project isn’t done.

Over the this and the next two blog posts, I’ll cover the lessons I learned in three different categories – software development, career and personal development, and lessons that could be applied to a company.

Software Development Lessons

Lots of little bugs waste lots of time

This is similar to Jeff Atwood’s “My Dog Patches” post.  Sometimes it’s tempting to just fix the immediate symptom of a bug because it will be a quick fix.  However, a day or a week later, a similar bug will pop up again.  Even if these bugs only take a few minutes to cover up, if they have the same root cause, it’s probably worth just fixing the root.

I fell into the ‘patch, patch, patch’ trap at least twice at Vistaprint.  The first one was on my first really large project when we were adding hats and dark t-shirts.  After the initial implementation of the system that changed user colors based on their chosen substrate (so text that might be black on a white background would be white on black backgrounds, etc.), we started having a lot of bugs in which a user could do some complicated series of actions and end up with the wrong color text on a given background.  We couldn’t tell if it was because the user had chosen that particular color or if we had an adjustment bug.  Most of the times that the bug came up, we’d change some path through the site to keep track of user colors.  Then, another bug would show up somewhere else.  Eventually, I realized that I was wasting at least a few hours every week and in order to do more work, I needed to stop spending time on substrates.

In the end, I just took a day to think about the problem and came up with a system that split some information in user documents into two parts.  This was a deep change in our model, but it allowed us to look at a document at any stage and prove an invariant – we could see what the original user-chosen colors were and that we were only overriding the non-customized colors with our substrate variants.  Thinking about this problem from an invariant model helped me prove that we would have no more problems in the future and saved me hundreds of hours in the long run.

The second time I can think of was when I was trying to add a lot of new functionality to one of our controls.  I decided to try to just add the new elements on top of the old code and modify that as little as possible.  Afterward, I was going to have a phase two in which I’d merge the old code and the new code completely.  However, the first version kept breaking and I kept patching local fixes to bugs in the old code that were causing bugs in the new code.  Eventually, I had wasted a week and I missed the first release.  At that point, I realized I just had to rewrite the old code from scratch.  I spent three days and rewrote the whole control to use my new components even for the old functionality.  In the process, I fixed a lot of existing bugs and finished the new requirements.  I had wasted a week trying to get something done in a day, then continually seeing each fix as a three-hour event.  Instead, I should have seen the bigger picture that I would have saved time by investing the three days up front and skipping the week of patches.

Code safely the first time

When I first started at Vistaprint, I was fresh out of school and had never worked on such a large application before.  I ended up with a lot of null-pointer exceptions in my code because I kept assuming I would get valid values from other code.  After a month of fixing these (particularly in javascript), I finally figured out that any time I have a question about a value, I should verify it first.  It’s easy code to write and it will save so much debugging time.  I also try to prove that APIs I write will always return valid values or have an explicit failure condition.  This is a much more general problem than null pointers, but that’s what really made me start checking.

Use a third party framework where applicable

Vistaprint has a lot of home-grown javascript code which is really good and well written.  However, many of it duplicates what’s available in open-source javascript frameworks like jQuery.  Every time we had to fix a bug or performance problem in our framework, that was time we may have been able to avoid if we had been using code that has been built and tested by a community.  Luckily, right as I was leaving, Vistaprint was starting to recognize this and move towards replacing some of our common code with jQuery.

Requirements will change and code will live longer than you expect

Make your work maintainable.  If you are working at a large company, one thing you should always try is searching your code base for words like “temp” or “hack”.  you’ll be shocked at how much throwaway code people thought they were writing two years ago that’s still in the code base.

In general, this isn’t terrible; sometimes the most important thing to do is to move forward with new work.  However, when the hack is unmaintainable, it will keep costing you time and effort over and over for the rest of its lifetime.  Vistaprint had a few places in the codebase that I can think of in particular that were written so quickly and haphazardly (large pieces of copy/paste, etc.) that they now suck the time out of anyone that has to modify them.  It’s so hard to understand and to find all the places that have to be modified to make one small change that projects take twice as long as they should.

Retire old code early and often

Part of a project is retiring whatever it is the new project is replacing.  At Vistaprint, I was stuck maining two APIs because we never had any time budgeted for upgrading the rest of the website to no longer use the legacy code.  We constantly had bugs because other teams would still use the old APIs to access new documents, and the old APIs had too many abstraction violations and were no longer being updated with new features that we were adding in the new APIs.  This went on for the entire two years and a half I was there.  Next time I replace some code, I’ll make sure we budget time for proving that the new code works just as well as the old, then I’ll upgrade everything.

Backwards compatibility is a big concern

This is somewhat related to the last point, because even when you have a plan for upgrading, you will have overlap and you can’t break a user’s experience just because they’ve saved something in an old format.  Even if your upgrade breaks some user’s information, you need to know how many and how valuable those items are.  At Vistaprint, we had too many documents to upgrade all of them whenever we made a small change to the storage format, but we made sure that documents were upgraded while they loaded.  We also had other ways to ensure backwards compatibility; it was never something we glossed over.

Large builds waste time

My friend Jim was fond of pointing out how much time we wasted at Vistaprint waiting for code to compile.  With hundreds of projects in our build, any of which might break during the nightly update from SVN, I think he has a valid point.  Even more than that, if we had used a technology that didn’t require a compilation step, we might be able to go through many more iterations of code in the same amount of time, because we could code, check localhost, code again without compile steps in the middle.  My next environment will definitely be one that does not require compilations for all web code.

If you want to unit test, do it from the beginning

Coding for testability requires a different type of architecture than just coding for features.  About a year into my tenure at Vistaprint, I tried to help out in a big push to add unit tests to our code, but I found adding tests required massive amounts of rearchitecture to allow us to mock important components.  I was able to get some unit tests in, but the effort mostly faded out because of the difficulty in creating them.

I’m not entirely convinced of the utility of having comprehensive unit testing coverage, either.  I hear a main benefit of unit tests is that they enable fearless refactoring, because you know the components still fulfill their contracts.  However, most of the time we did any significant refactoring, it involved changing APIs and therefore the unit tests also had to be rewritten.  If we’re rewriting the tests when we change the code, I’m not sure their actually preventing mistakes, since we’ll probably make a similar mistake in the test as we did in the code.  I’ll probably go with a strong set of functional tests in my next project.

Performance counts, and applications should be performance tested

This can make a big difference to user experience, as well as affecting the bottom line of things like CPU usage.  However, this is not to say that you should try to pre-optimize code while you write it.  Some of the most productive days I spent at Vistaprint involved running code with a profiler.  We were always able to significantly increase performance, and the places we made the performance gains were not necessarily where we would have guessed at first.  Moreover, we were able to keep the code readable and maintainable while still increasing the performance.  I read a great quote the other day in ‘Coders at Work’ – “It’s much easier to optimize correct code than it is to correct optimized code.”

When optimizing, know when to stop

This applies to optimizing anything, not just performance.  If you get sucked into making something the ‘best possible’, you can quickly reach diminishing returns and end up paying for it in other ways.  I did this one time when trying to determine the best algorithm for manipulating images to print correctly on hats.  I spend a week trying different parameters and algorithms to make the image perfect, but in the end, my final result was hardly noticeably different than what I had on the second day.  If I’d stopped then, no one would have been less satisfied, and I would have had three days to work on other projects.

http://www.45n5.com/permalink/business-card-rapper-vistaprint-review.html

He’s really bad, but I’m still impressed that we inspired this…

In other news, I signed my first patent application today!  It was actually submitted yesterday, but they said it would be ok if everyone signed it today.  My co-inventors are my manager Jay, and coworker Terence, but the patent is listed as Daugherty et al.  There will be another one in a few weeks, on the second half of the work I did (even though we ended up not using it for our own site).  Patent applications aren’t publicly available for two years, though, so I think I shouldn’t go into too much detail here, in case it’s covered in my NDA.

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Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. “I am not, indeed, sure, whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.” — Professor Harold Laski (essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. “Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.” — Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)
3. “On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?” — Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
4. “All the ‘best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.” — Communist pamphlet.
5. “If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak cancer and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream—as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as `standard English.’ When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!” — Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged:

Dying Metaphors

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a “rift,” for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or Verbal False Limbs

These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formation, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious Diction

Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless Words

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Here it is in modern English:

“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3), above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations—race, battle, bread—dissolve into the vague phrase “success or failure in competitive activities.” This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no one capable of using phrases like “objective consideration of contemporary phenomena”—would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (“time and chance”) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot—it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty-three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning—they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.

Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he “felt impelled” to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: “The Allies have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a cooperative and unified Europe.” You see, he “feels impelled” to write—feels, presumably, that he has something new to say—and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a “standard English” which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outgrown its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a “good prose style.” On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch around and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin where it belongs.

George Orwell: “Politics and the English Language,” first published: Horizon, GB, London. April 1946.

Guy’s number one rule of schmoozing is that you have to realize the goal is to determine what you can do for other people, not what they can do for you. Cast in this light, schmoozing isn’t so bad. Unfortunately, as far as it applies to me, I’m not sure what I can offer most people in a networking situation; I’m still a student, so I don’t have a lot of experience or connections. This is something I may need to think about for a while, and hopefully the trick will just be becoming aware of opportunities to help people out.

The next few rules from Guy remind me very much of the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. For me, the essence of this advice comes down to Dale’s suggestion to “become genuinely interested in other people.” For example, Guy advises asking open-ended questions as the trick to becoming a good conversationalist. I like this advice, but personally I try to take it one step further by remembering the underlying idea. Don’t just ask questions to begin a conversation, listen carefully to other people, then make sure to ask questions that show you have heard what they said and have thought about it. I’ve been working on this in interviews, and though it may sometimes feel like you’re playing dumb by questioning everything, everyone appreciates having someone listen to them and take them seriously.

Finally, Guy offers two more pieces of advice that I found worth mentioning. One is just a reinforcement of something we’ve all heard before: follow up. This allows you to take the step from having an interesting conversation with someone and turn it into a real relationship. I know this is one piece of advice that I will need to remember next week after the career fair.

Last, Guy suggests that after you have done a favor for someone, you ask for the return of the favor. I had never heard this advice before, so it’s worth thinking about for a little while. Guy’s reasoning is that it’s better to be on equal footing because “keeping someone indebted to you puts undue pressure on your relationship.” Another reason to continue exchanging favors is that it continues your relationship with the person you have just met.

All in all, an interesting column from an interesting guy. I’d suggest reading it to anyone who, like me, is trying to become more outgoing or needs to prepare for a networking event like a career fair.