Use fewer words

Never mind the famous quote, Campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small.

Right now—for all of higher education—the stakes could not be higher. And politics effect our every move.

As both creator and a consumer of messages to college students and families, I pore over every word in every memo. The barrage of information is overwhelming, and from week to week the strategy changes as we react to new cases, new science, and new expectations.

We try the sticky carrot. And then the carroty stick. Our messages get longer and muddier. Increasingly, we speak in code.

It’s an unprecedented moment. In an uncertain time. So we need to do the work.

COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon. And the scariest election of our lifetimes is two months away. But if we keep this up, our words—my words—will fall on deaf ears. And we won’t even notice when public sentiment is shifting away.

So, what’s to be done? Especially now, when we have so little time to get through to people. And the stakes are so high.

Know our audience. College students don’t want to be far from their friends. But WHY? Do they simply lack the discipline, or do they come from anti-vaxxer households? Do they drink too much and get sloppy, or do they believe the coronavirus death count is being inflated? Diversity of thought on our campuses means everyone won’t agree with what the grownups think is best, or safe, or just. We can only know our audience if we stop talking and listen for a while.

Be super clear. Whether talking to college students, voters, or a relationship partner, specificity matters. What do I mean if I ask a new beau friend if he has my back? Do I need a ride to the airport once in a while? Or someone to take care of me if I get cancer? Job number one is to know what we need from others. Job number two is to express it in plain language.

Read the room. We think that the more often we deliver a message, the more likely people are to believe it and prefer it. But there’s a limit! The more dogmatic we become, the less likely we are to notice disagreement. And the less likely people are to tell us the truth. If “shy Trumpers” could hide their preference from pollsters in 2016 and change the course of history, imagine what they might be concealing from us now.

The average adult English speaker has 20,000 words in her active vocabulary, and another 20,000 on a back burner somewhere. In academia we use as many words as we can.

But perhaps, in service of clarity, we should use fewer rather than more. We should slow down—lock the urgency monster out of the room—in order to string them together in fresher ways.

I hope you’re still reading. I probably should have written less.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, I didn’t have time to write a short blog post, so I wrote a long one instead.