The BBC's syntactical shiv

Steven Bannon is Trump’s chief strategist, and by all accounts he’s taking full advantage of the job the President’s given him. But many think he’s taking advantage of the President too. Time certainly thinks so, and recently ran a cover story on Bannon, labelling him ‘The Great Manipulator’. Bannon has even admitted his exploitative intentions. Trump is a ‘blunt instrument for us’, he told Vanity Fair last year, ‘I don’t know whether he really gets it or not’.

An eye on you, and an eye on something else

So influential is Bannon in the White House that ‘President Bannon’ has become a meme. ‘Impeach President Bannon’ signs have been sprouting up around America. In a recent Saturday Night Live skit, SNL’s grim-reaper version of Bannon asks Alec Baldwin’s Trump to give the Oval Office desk back. Baldwin gets up from the desk with a deferential, ‘Yes of course, Mr President’.

And now even the BBC seems unsure about who’s in charge. At the head of an article yesterday, they wrote:

The chief strategist to President Donald Trump has said that his election victory has ushered in a “new political order”.

Wait, whose election victory was the chief strategist referring to? Does the ‘his’ mean Trump or Bannon?

This linguistic fiddle is caused by a ‘dangling modifier’. A modifier (e.g. ‘his election victory’) dangles when it’s not clear what it refers to (‘the chief strategist’ or ‘President Donald Trump’?) If I said, ‘Walking down Main Street, the trees were beautiful’, you might wonder whether I was taking a springtime walk, or whether some Ents were migrating. Or take the sentence, ‘I saw the truck peeking through the window.’ Who was peeking, me or the truck? (Thanks to Wikipedia for these examples.)

Answer: the truck was peeking

In most cases, dangling modifiers are accidental and can be resolved from the general context. But in the BBC’s case, the dangling might be deliberate and its uncertainty might resist resolution. After all, by referring to Bannon as a ‘chief strategist’, the BBC is emphasising his cunning. Maybe it was the chief strategist’s election victory. Maybe he can co-opt the president. Maybe it’s his ‘new political order’ too. Maybe. The dangling modifier seems to be intentionally ambiguous, a syntactical question mark over Bannon’s influence.

If it is, I think the BBC’s right to worry. He’s paranoid and fiery, so Trump listens to Bannon. The world may well suffer for it.

The art of Attenborough's ambush

Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries have been staggeringly well-received. Planet Earth 

II is the best-rated TV show on IMDB, topping Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Band of 

Brothers—and every other TV show, ever. The original Planet Earth sits at #3. And if it had 

enough votes to make the list, his 2015 documentary The Hunt would sit at #6. Their 

popularity is without parallel.

Some of the reasons for this popularity are familiar to us. There’s their subject matter, ‘the 

sheer grandeur and splendour and power of the natural world’, as Attenborough puts it. 

There’s the intimacy and clarity of the photography. And there’s Attenborough’s venerable 

voice, the enrapt voice of a master naturalist whose wonder enraptures us in turn.

But that voice does more than murmur richly. It uses words. Like magic tricks, however, 

Attenborough’s words rely most strongly on one element: the element of surprise. And 

there’s nowhere that Attenborough surprises us more regularly than at the start of episodes.

In his element

Shock and awe

Take a look at these opening words from Planet Earth II’s episode, Deserts:

Imagine a world where temperatures rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Where there's no escape 

from sun, wind and dust. Imagine a world with almost no food or water. These are the 

conditions in one third of the lands of our planet. To live here demands the most 

extraordinary survival strategies.

The setup is perfect. He tells us how inhospitable deserts are—a shock if (like most people) 

you don’t think about them much. But there’s a second shock: in a cunning twist he tells us 

that this is what one third of our planet is like. One third? ‘So shocking,’ we profess.

The key is that this second surprise is nearly gratuitous. The first surprise is relevant because 

the inhospitality of deserts provides the episode’s chief tension. But Attenborough mentions 

the scale of deserts because he just wants to astound us—because astounding us stimulates 

our curiosity. Surprises intrigue. They keep us engrossed.

Here’s an even denser salvo of wonders, from Planet Earth II’s Grasslands episode. 

Attenborough’s crafted the first two thirds of the paragraph such that every phrase is a 

moment of awe and novelty. But this time, he amps up the novelty by taking something we 

think we know well, and showing us how little we really do.

One quarter of all the land on Earth is covered by a single, remarkable type of plant. Almost 

indestructible, it can grow two feet in a day. And be tall enough to hide a giant. That plant is 

grass, and the world it creates is truly unique. The grass in northern India is the tallest on the 

planet, home to some of the most impressive creatures to tread the Earth. These are the good 

times, but in just a few months, all this fresh growth will be gone, and the animals will be 

forced to move on. That is the way things are on grasslands across the planet. A cycle of 

abundance, destruction and rebirth that affects every creature that lives here.

Our curiosity isn't piqued by any old novelty. Tell me an obscure property of bacterial 

collections around hydrothermal vents and I’ll politely pick my nose. So Attenborough lures 

in us by contradicting and developing what we already know. Think grass is boring? Not so 

fast. It’s crazy! And sure, you know about dolphins and jungles, but did you know about the 

type of almost-blind dolphin that lives in the murky waters of a mostly-submerged Brazilian 

jungle?

Moody tiger for scale

This pattern also obtains in the way Attenborough structures episodes. Start with the 

familiar; surprise with the strange. Only when we’ve spent time in the company of familiar 

animals—lions, sloths, Madagascar’s lemurs—will we appreciate the charms and 

idiosyncrasies of the creatures we meet later—like headlight beetle larvae.

When the magic meets the message

There is one way that the Grasslands introduction could prime us for the episode even 

better. It starts by shocking us with how little we know about grass, but the episode’s actual 

theme is the grass’s cycle of abundance, destruction and rebirth. The surprise still compels 

us, but it emphasises the wrong thing. Unfortunately, this mismatch is often unavoidable. It 

can be difficult to find a twist that instantly grips the audience and illustrates the theme. 

Often, it’s just a matter of luck. 

Intriguing, but unthematic

And sometimes you get lucky. Here’s one example where Attenborough perfectly aligned his 

twist and his theme. It’s the opening episode of The Hunt. The introduction starts with the 

usual moments of ‘yeah, wow, of course’ before moving into the twist (italicised).

The duels between hunters and hunted are as dramatic as any event in the natural world. The 

stakes could not be higher. For both, it's a matter of life and death. Yet, surprisingly, it's the 

hunters that usually fail. To have any chance of survival, predators must be perfectly tuned to 

their own hunting arenas. Every habitat brings a different challenge. This series will reveal, as 

never before, the extraordinary range of strategies predators use to catch their prey. But even 

for the most skillful, success is never guaranteed.

The twist counters our intuitions. Lions and tigers and polar bears can fail? Even with all 

their fearsome teeth? As soon as we concede that they might fail sometimes, we’re trotting 

after this idea throughout the whole series just to see how it works. All because, like a sneaky 

predator, the theme lured us on.

So if you want to capture the interest of your audience, start with surprise. Especially 

surprise the audience with contradictions or developments of what they think they know. 

And, if you can, make sure your biggest surprise is the theme of what you’re going to talk 

about (or at least illustrates that theme). It works. It can animate academic writing, speeches, 

and even blogs. In fact, though you may not have realised it, you’ve already endorsed the 

technique by reading this far. It was Attenborough’s method that brought this article’s 

opening paragraphs to life.

A publisher in a palaver

‘Our business is publishing’, Springer boasts on their homepage, a claim that’s short, direct and smashingly assertive. They’re not just saying that they have a business-like dedication to publishing: they’re also saying that the business of publishing is dedicated to them. Springer’s the boss and other publishers should budge over.

If only the rest of their writing was so sharp. Some is nonsense, like this line from their Company Information page:

The world is full of publishers. Some move forward, some go backward, and some even seem to go nowhere at all. But at Springer we move in our own unique way.

I would love to know more about how uniquely Springer moves. Do they drift up into the blue yonder? Do they scuttle sideways like corporate crabs? It is, I have to say, a brave company that admits it doesn’t go forward.

Corporate crabs in the paper industry

But there’s a more recurring fault with their writing than silliness. You can already see the fault in the sentence above. It’s that they carpet-bomb the reader with information, giving every angle and perspective and fact that they can think of. Here’s another example from their Mission Statement. Gird your loins: it’s a slog.

Throughout the world, we provide scientific and professional communities with superior specialist information – produced by authors and colleagues across cultures in a nurtured collegial atmosphere of which we are justifiably proud. [...]

We think ahead, move fast and promote change: creative business models, inventive products, and mutually beneficial international partnerships have established us as a trusted supplier and pioneer in the information age.

I know that this is a buffet of blunders, not the least of which is that their mission statement isn’t a statement of mission. But, for the purposes of this post, let’s focus on the carpet-bombing. The first sentence alone talks about their global reach, their collegial production environment, and the superiority of their information. Why are they doing this, and does it help?

I think they’re doing it because it’s the only way they know to differentiate themselves from other publishers. Loads of publishers provide universities with specialist information, so Springer has to provide scientific and professional communities with superior specialist information. Theirs is a simplistic more-is-more philosophy.

It’s the same problem I’ve had when writing Covering Letters for job applications. They’re bad pieces of writing almost by definition. To distinguish yourself from other applicants you have to have to cram in every fact and facet of your excellence. You can either mention your Cycling Proficiency Level 2 certificate, or you can write elegantly. More often than not, I end up writing like Springer, locked in an arms race of verbiage.

Now, in military arms races countries need to compete to make more sticks and sharper sticks (or Dreadnoughts or atomic bombs). But the thing is that if you’re writing copy for websites, only sharpness helps. When Springer stuffs more adjectives and ideas into sentences, it doesn’t make them more effective. It just makes their ideas more confused. It’s like trying to make your meal more tasty by adding every spice in your rack. You just end up bewildering the flavour.

A visual representation of Springer's style

And then there’s the speed at which they flick through their ideas. No reader can take in that many things at that rate. It’s like doing hyper-speed dating with concepts: you get half a second to say hi to each concept and then never see it again. Concepts need longer to ingratiate themselves with readers, to smile warmly and pat the reader’s hand.

So how might Springer go about writing more sharply? Well, fewer and slower. They could work out which are the best of their ideas, and make sure that each of those ideas gets a paragraph to itself. Everything else, however nice it might be, should get the chop. It would help to sharpen things too if, in addition to each paragraph being a unity, all the paragraphs together had a unity of focus. The focus was meant to be the company’s Mission Statement, but that got lost somewhere, and the Statement ended up just being a flea market of thoughts. In the end, they just need to follow the basic rule of writing: figure out what you want to say, and say it.