This sentence is so complicated that the
writer has tied himself in knots and said the opposite of what he means. It’s
bad enough that you hide your meaning from your reader, but so much worse when
you manage to hide it from yourself:
“Compared to the loss-making average east-west container freight rate of $1,110 per unit in full-year 2009, the 1Q10 rate of $1,295 is still low by historical standards and must be below the breakeven point for carriers, even allowing for their recent cost cuts.”
Look at “compared to” (it should be
“compared with”, but we’ll let that go for now). Strip out the extraneous words
and the sentence actually reads, “$1,295 is low compared with $1,110,” which is
nonsense.
This is the danger of the “compared
to/with” construction so beloved of business writers: it declares a relationship
between two things while excusing the writer from saying – and sometimes even
thinking – what that relationship really is. It is harder to fall into this
trap if we have the courage to use that beautiful, simple, neglected word
“than”.
So we should write “x is lower than y” instead of “Compared to … [followed
by 10 words]… $1,110, … [then another 10 words] … $1,295 is still low.” All
those extra words only serve to sever the logical link between the key parts of
the sentence, such that before he is half way through the sentence the writer
has forgotten what he is comparing with what. This is how I talk when I’m
drunk. My friends forgive me because I’m happy to buy a round and sometimes
fall over amusingly. Our readers are less tolerant.
The following has almost the same word
count but is much easier to understand:
“The east-west rate of $1,295 in the first quarter is a big improvement on the $1,110 average for 2009. But it is still low by historical standards and must be below the breakeven point for carriers, even after their recent cost cuts.”
Mostly this is because the words are in a
natural order: “x is a big improvement on y” is better than “compared to y, x is
low”. I have also replaced "1Q10" with "the first quarter", because words are easier to understand than numbers, and I have deleted "full-year" because it's redundant.
Moral: Keep sentences simple, especially when making comparisons, and use comparatives followed by 'than'.
Keep it simple, got it :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the example!
Sometimes you get too close to the text though, and just can't see it. I write fiction, and have to apply Orwell's 10 rules all the time.(Especially Rule 10!).
ReplyDeleteMy copy of Politics and the English Language only goes up to six, although Orwell did publish 11 rules for making tea. Rule 10 is: "Pour the tea into the cup first."
DeleteBusiness writers' constant use of "compared with" in sentences such as "The firm posted its fourth consecutive quarter of net profit, at US$40.6 million, compared with a net loss of US$42.8 million a year earlier" really makes me want to slap them and say "don't use 'compared with' in that sentence, you fakhwit, you're not stating any sort of comparison."
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ReplyDeleteProper punctuation holds a very significant place in the English language, so much so that a holiday was founded in 2004 to honor it. Ever heard about the National Day of Punctuation? Every 24th of September, businesses, media organizations, and schools across the United States celebrate the event to remind people of the importance of using punctuation marks properly. See more punctuation corrector
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