The Importance Of Choosing Words Carefully – Your Audience’s Interpretation Matters

Creative writers care about their audience’s interpretation. And language is their raw material. How they craft it is all-important. To demonstrate this, take the extreme opposite case of another user of language: a spokesman for a corrupt politician. Recently in my favourite radio news programme, I heard one of our senior current affairs journalists interview a spokesman for an African politician who was refusing to step down from power in a disputed election which took place 5 months before.
You would think that of all people, spokesmen for political leaders would be expert at choosing their words carefully, with their audience’s interpretation in mind. But no. They have another objective entirely.
The format was predictable. The journalist asked him how he could insist that his boss had legitimately been voted back into power, when the consensus of all the most highly respected international organisations was that he hadn’t. Meanwhile, thousands of people were dying, as this particular politician used brute force to stay in power. A very stark ethical question, you may say.The spokesman then ignored that ethical question and stuck to his narrow line instead. He mentioned an internal committee, their constitutional council, according to whose elaborate systems and procedures, he claimed his boss had won.
The journalist then said, “Forgive me but this is going to be very confusing for many people listening who are not intimately familiar with the way your constitution works.” What he meant, of course, was: I suggest you are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
But what did the spokesman reply? “Precisely!” he said. “You don’t understand the complexities. And that’s why I regard this as an international conspiracy.” And what he meant was: I am going to ignore the ethical issues and pretend they don’t exist, because my boss is a dangerous man who will stop at nothing to hold onto power.
Nevertheless, despite the actual words used by the spokesman, I think it likely that all reasonable listeners would have understood the subscript instead.
It is indeed true that there are situations in the world that are too complex for us to make simplistic moral judgments on. But the aforementioned reasonable-minded listener would have been left with the conviction that the fact didn’t apply to this situation.
When George Orwell created his concept of “NewSpeak” he touched upon something that is at the heart of human conflict. The language you use, and your awareness of how your audience will hear it, is all-important. The spokesman for the tyrant doesn’t care how the audience will interpret. Power enforced with brutality has its own language.
However, creative writers do care how the audience will interpret. The power story-tellers wield is a much more subtle one; rather than persuade with gun or terror, this power appeals to hearts and minds; and the interpretation and response is won freely.